<story><title>In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt (2006)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acdanger</author><text>&amp;gt; In many places, like Japan, people get iodine from seafood, seaweed, vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil or animals that eat grass grown in that soil. But even wealthy nations, including the United States and in Europe, still need to supplement that by iodizing salt.&lt;p&gt;Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt? Has our soil been so depleted that iodine is no longer present in the vegetables grown in it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dragonwriter</author><text>&amp;gt; Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt?&lt;p&gt;Some lived near the sea and had high seafood diets, but most were just iodine deficient, which doesn&amp;#x27;t stop a population from surviving, though it leads to suboptimal outcomes in a number of dimensions.&lt;p&gt;There is this wierd pervasive mythology that before modern times people lived in an ideal state (at least in terms of nutrition), so any present deficiency from the ideal must reflect a difference between modern and premodern society. Past conditions were at least minimally adequate for survival and reproduction, or we wouldn&amp;#x27;t be here, but there&amp;#x27;s no real basis for assuming that they were in any way ideal.</text></comment>
<story><title>In Raising the World’s I.Q., the Secret’s in the Salt (2006)</title><url>http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/health/16iodine.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>acdanger</author><text>&amp;gt; In many places, like Japan, people get iodine from seafood, seaweed, vegetables grown in iodine-rich soil or animals that eat grass grown in that soil. But even wealthy nations, including the United States and in Europe, still need to supplement that by iodizing salt.&lt;p&gt;Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt? Has our soil been so depleted that iodine is no longer present in the vegetables grown in it?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Turing_Machine</author><text>&amp;gt; Where did Western people get iodine before it was necessary to add it to salt?&lt;p&gt;Iodine is so soluble that it&amp;#x27;s quite scarce other than in the ocean. And yep, people who lived inland (and thus didn&amp;#x27;t eat seafood) in premodern times were often iodine deficient.</text></comment>