Apple Salt

Man, like all animals, needs salt (sodium chloride) physiologically. But his taste for salt is an acquired habit. Cannibals, Eskimos and other carnivorous peoples, use no salt. Like dogs, cats, jackals, lions, they get their requisite sodium chloride from the flesh they eat raw, or roasted. (Boiled flesh loses its salt.) Most men, however, are omnivorous. The salt they get from fish, fowl and beast is too little for bodily needs.

Necessary and desired as salt is, it is forbidden those suffering from high blood pressure, Bright's disease, dropsy. Victims can forego the ingestion of salt. But its taste they crave. Chemists and pharmacists have long sought to compound a substance that tastes like salt but is harmless in these diseases.

Last week. Dr. John Christian Krantz Jr., chemist and pharmacist at Johns Hopkins, announced that that laboratory of many a beneficient drug* had created a salt substitute, which has proved palatable during a year's tests. It is called Eka salt, is made from malic acid, apple juice.

*e. g., mercurochrome, epinephrine, hexyl-resor-cinol.