i know it’s kind of a Thing at this point, but seriously please donate to wikipedia. because i just googled “essential salts for the human body”, and from the first 5 results i got 2 kinda decent pages confirming that people do in fact need salt to live and giving a partial list of essential minerals, a slightly more comprehensive page with more essential minerals but less explanation, an amazon page for a book about essential salts, and the website for a company that sells salty soap (btw those last 3 words are a new tongue twister)
and then in comes wikipedia with 4000 words and 56 sources on every essential salt, the daily recommended intake, their role in the body, foods that contain them, their expected concentrations in the bloodstream, elements that MIGHT be essential but that they’re uncertain about, and a brief aside about the flow of minerals through the ecosystem
if i tried, i could not think of a more starkly apparent demonstration of how wikipedia provides access to vast amounts of information that would otherwise be inaccessible. i’ve read scientific papers that are less comprehensive than this. it’s such a huge amount of information, concisely written, and displayed in such a way as to immediately applicable to those reading it. i’ve read way more goddamn textbooks and research papers than i’d like to, and tbh i can’t think of very many that approach this level of information analysis and pedagogical skill. nothing short of incredible, and that’s not even accounting for the fact that it’s a) FREE and b) one of thousands of pages with an equal, possibly greater level of analysis
like yeah, there are some problems, but you could ostensibly say that about literally every human undertaking throughout history. i understand that i’m now contributing to what must be a chorus of voices chanting the same thing but uh. hey. please donate