If salt is no longer a supplier of iodide, but there is no longer outbreaks of iodine deficiency like goitre, how are we all getting enough iodide in our diets?
In: Biology
Natural sources of iodine are meats and seafood. Also any animal products like dairy. For much of human history, meat was very expensive. You wouldn’t have any more than a single pound of meat a week if you were poor, let alone dairy products. So the poorest Europeans in places without inexpensive seafood would occasionally have iodine deficiency problems. Even then goiters among the rich who refused to eat the peasant dish of seafood weren’t uncommon. When we identified iodine as the culprit we added it to the food that everyone adds to their foods, salt. This meant even the poorest could get enough iodine, even if they didn’t get much meat.
These days, thanks to several factors, meat and dairy are relatively inexpensive. So even poor people can afford to have enough iodine rich food in their diet without it being added to salt. In fact the American diet is so rich in iodine that uniodized salt provides little to no risk of iodine deficiency, except among the poorest of the poor.
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