even before i read it and oftenly after i read it i thought a lot about that post imagining you find out one day you lacked a vitamin without knowing it and once you're given the vitamin all your problems go away
anyway e535 caught my interest recently
e535 is sodium ferrocyanide and is used as an anti caking agent in every bit of salt i own. and probably in your salt too. as the name implies it is 'mildly' toxic. i put mildly in quotes because according to a quick search it has a lower recommended dose than actual hydrogen cyanide. which kinda seems to me like it means this stuff is more toxic than literal hydrogen cyanide. but what do i know.
(interestingly, it has a recommended dose that's 6 times lower than cyanide while also holding 6 cyano ligands. and chemistry doesn't really work like that just putting 6 of a toxin on something doesn't make it 6 times more toxic by weight but i find it odd that it's the same number here)
now, the amount of it that you're allowed to put in salt is very low. low enough that you would never even approach a dangerous dose. which is really good cuz 0.5% of my salt is anti caking agents, and if all of that was sodium ferrocyanide i'd be way over the recommended dose already and put suffering from kidney damage. i mean i didn't go to a doctor to check or anything and my body is normally dysfunctional in all sorts of ways so there's no way to be sure it's the anti caking agents in my salt of all things that's causing it, but i do sometimes feel intense pinpoint pain in my lower back for a few seconds and my urine might be a bit cloudy so maybe i should check that out.
the amount of sodium ferrocyanide allowed in salt is so low i don't think it does anything. the maximum allowed is something like 20 parts per million. and it's also not the only anti caking agent used. and some salts don't use any anti caking agents so i really wonder why put this toxic stuff in people's food when you literally don't even seem to need to.
i have three theories:
1) i think by far the most likely explanation is that it doesn't do anything (in the amount you find in salt) and its added for some stupid reason like bureaucracy or taxes or shareholders or that's how we've always done it why stop now. i like this theory cuz it means my salt is safe.
2) unlikely i think but still possible. it does actually function as an effective anti caking agent somehow even at such low concentrations. some chemicals can do their magic even in absurdly small quantities.
3) the most sinister. this one's also possible. there's way more sodium ferrocyanide in salt than what's legally allowed. my salt doesn't actually say how much of it is sodium ferrocyanide. it just says how much anti caking agents it has, and that one of those agents is sodium ferrocyanide. i'm hoping it's the legal amount. it may not be.
i will try to get salt that doesn't have this stuff and see if that fixes any of my problems. i'm not an expert on e535 so even though i strongly eluded that i think it's poisoning me i really dont actually know. you might wanna test it yourself but don't just throw out your salt in a panic it genuinely could just be that my body is a piece of shit even when normal salt is given to it.