The first time I went to visit my Thai friend [1], she sprinkled salt in the water she was using to rinse her vegetables. I asked 'why': she said something abou

The first time I went to visit my Thai friend [1], she sprinkled salt in the water she was using to rinse her vegetables. I asked 'why': she said something about the iodine disinfecting the vegetables. I pointed out that her salt did not actually have iodine in it... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14140086 (my previous comment about this passenger) I looked into the matter a little bit. The Thai king had instituted an iodized salt program. Public relations campaigns helped the Thai people appreciate all the different roles of iodine. Iodine is a good antiseptic (it shreds most single-celled organisms by combining with a protein that's not on the cell membranes of multi-celled organisms, iirc), but my friend's strategy to 'disinfect' her vegetables with slightly-salted water was probably an exercise in futility, even if her salt had iodine... > I just looked it up and found out that Morton Kosher salt is not iodized, which is what I've been using for a few years now. I remember some research that found Thai women of reproductive age had much better iodine levels if they ate seafood, than if they got their iodine from salt. Additionally, foods that are grown near the ocean [2] have much better iodine levels than foods grown in regions where almost all the iodine has washed out of the soil (Michigan, etc). Ocean spray 'mists' iodine back onto the land, which increases the iodine content of the food grown thereon. [2] http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/an-iodine-road-trip.html http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/an-iodine-road-tri... There's another interesting post on this blog about old fear-mongering about "too much iodine", because patient's thyroids weren't taking up the radioactive iodine that doctors were giving them for 'diagnostic' purposes: http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-was-right.html http://iodinehistory.blogspot.com/2015/02/i-was-right.html Too much iodine seems to suppresses the thyroid activity, so it is a concern. But this is mostly a problem for people who use supplements. I think one should consume 'enough' iodine to fully saturate their thyroid... A little more than it takes to prevent goitre [3] (when the thyroid swells to try to increase the amount of iodine it pulls out of the blood), but not too much... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goitre