What Anna has in that bag is himalayan pink salt. It's 98%+ of just sodium (regardless of how many people claim it has a "shit ton" of trace minerals). Eating an excess of salt like that bag can be harmful for any person. At the very least, you're talking about dehydration, increased body fluids and hypertension. But what else can develop if someone eats an butt load of salt is hypernatremia (high sodium levels), fluid overload to cells which causes damage, and even seizures when it starts affecting brain cells. Hypernatremia can also go hand in hand with azotemia (elevated nitrogen compounds in blood) which is kidney related and can cause damage. Nausea and vomiting can also occur. There are recorded cases of people chugging soy sauce and getting extremely sick on an overload of sodium.
Anna is probably doing this to dehydrate herself and to purge, since it is a simple and effective way of doing so. CFers need extra salt, but not an entire bags worth a day.
Well, we don't have to guess why Anna is so keen on all the salt; she's told us in her own words. In her "
Tips for Smoother Digestion," Anna explicitly endorses the consumption of salt for its laxative effect.
And to summarize a
now-deleted video on her Youtube channel, Anna claimed that the REAL MEDICAL DOCTORS who really actually diagnosed her with CF urged her to consume table salt by the tablespoonful. As a Certified Regenerative Detoxification Specialist, she knew that table salt was a bleached, ruined, chemicalized, manmade toxin and chose to drink celery juice instead. (In real life, celery is one of the few vegetables that contains appreciable levels of sodium. It is also a laxative.) But then she read the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus praises the salt of the earth and recommends casting aside salt that has lost its savor. Being a theologian and a Bible scholar, Anna realized that "the salt that has lost its savor" was literal table salt, but Himalayan pink salt and Celtic sea salt were literally the salt of the earth, and because they were natural and came from God, she could consume them in any quantity without harmful effects. (Because there were many uses for salt in the ancient world, this Bible verse is open to a variety of interpretations, but most scholars and theologians agree that Jesus was not literally talking about table salt.)
Anna says it "WOULD we [
sic] wise to sprinkle a bit" of salt "on your steamed veggies," which is a normal thing normal people would do. But when pressed on her actual habit of consuming salt to excess for its laxative effect, she invokes the naturalistic fallacy and appeals to no less an authority than God Himself to defend her disordered behavior.
This is a clear instance of Anna's manipulative practices of lying by omission and shifting goalposts. She must be absolutely exhausting to deal with in real life.
I'll also note that virtually all pink "Himalayan" salt comes from
a single mine owned by the government of Pakistan. The fact that "Pink Salt is mined by hand by skilled workers keeping traditional methods alive" is often featured on packaging and in promotional materials to justify the relatively high retail price of this salt.
However, "traditional methods" here refer to those instituted under British colonial rule over a century ago. Prior to the 1870s, local women living in the "Salt Range" south of the Himalayas would contribute to their household income by digging salt from small pits and tunnels, washing the "efflorescent earth" to purify the salt, and selling it at markets or to traders. Sometimes the product was taxed in a system similar to other land-taxes, and at other times, taxes on salt were lifted to encourage peasants to go make more salt. As far as mining goes, salt mining is relatively safe, but this seems like it was always a pretty brutal way to make a living.
British land laws tended to exacerbate rather than mitigate the economic insecurity of peasant laborers in India and Pakistan. The British expanded the Mayo (now Khewra) Salt Mine operation into a monopoly, rounded up and forcibly relocated families, compelled them to work in the salt mine under slave-like conditions, and stamped out competition by subjecting traditional salt producers to harsh penalties for "smuggling." Today, the miners who work by hand to drill, blast, and excavate the salt with few safety protections are all descendants of the original forced laborers. They are paid around $2.25 per ton. (That number comes from
this 2018 article, where salt miners are quoted as saying mining is a good job because they earn enough money to send their children to school, so the next generation will not have to labor in the mines.)
Whoever is getting rich off the extreme markup of Himalayan pink salt, it sure isn't the "skilled workers keeping traditional methods alive."
Not everyone has the time and resources to figure out where their food comes from and the conditions under which it is produced, not everyone who cares about this stuff has enough money to put where their mouth is, and becoming concerned to the point of obsession with the "purity" of one's diet is not healthy for anyone.
But Anna has nothing but time on her hands, very few living expenses, and pink salt is a relatively pricey product that nobody actually needs to eat. This is just another example of how Anna only cares about her eating disorder.
