This Desert Salt Could Be the Secret to Better Sleep & Energy | Samantha Skyring | Ep. 91

Introduction to Salt and the Guest 0:00

Table salt came around about 1910s at the beginning of the food convenience era. It was convenient that salt didn't clump, but salt's intrinsic value to the body is that it helps it stay hydrated. How did you get into salt? Samantha Skyring, the energetic founder and CEO of Oryx Desert Salt. This passionate advocate, speaker, and entrepreneur brings mineral-rich salt from the Kalahari Desert to The World. If you are hydrated and have enough salt in your body, you get a 20% more output of performance, which is incredible.

So why does the quality of salt matter? So I think we've been so indoctrinated and told that salt is bad for us. And yet I don't think anything could be as far from the truth. Salt is on every continent. It's the oldest traded commodity in the world. As we know, if you don' put salt into your recipe, there's something very bland. I agree, there's a lot of foods that if you don't put salt on it, it will taste like cardboard. There are many researchers now that believe that it's because we're not having enough salt that is causing a lots of the issues with health.

So what do you say, is that a myth when they're saying that having too much salt is bad for you? Welcome to another episode of a Healthy Point of View podcast. I'm your host, Sam Tahata. And as usual, we're bringing experts from all over the world to talk about health, wellness, beauty, and mindset. Today, our guest comes all the way from South Africa. Why? Because we're going to talk about the things that you put into your body. One in particular. We're gonna talk salt. we hear about salt all the time, right?

We know about table ionized salt, we know sea salt we about Celtic salt We about this Himalayan pink salt but do you know oryx desert salt? I don't know much, but today we're gonna learn. And today, we have the expert, the CEO, and the founder of Oryx Dexter's Assault, Samantha Skyring. Samantha, welcome. All right, yeah. Listen, pleasure to have you here on a Healthy Point of View podcast. This is gonna be exciting because, you know, salt is something that's very important, right? Salt is in everything.

It's even in the IV bags. When we get an IV drip, there's sodium chloride in there. And we're so, you know, since I was a kid, I only knew one type of salt and it was the thin table salt, the ionized salt. And when I started talking to you and really understanding more about salt then I really started realizing what are we putting into our bodies? So I wanna start off with people getting to know who Samantha is. We got two Sams here, by the way. So, I want people to get to who is Samantha, and how the heck did you even get into salt?

Awesome. Well, it's been a pleasure traveling all the from South Africa to be with you. we've been planning this for a while, so thank you for the invitation. Absolutely. And the invitation to share, because I absolutely agree with you, salt goes into every single recipe, every meal, and yet we don't think about the sauce, the quality. We actually just don' t think of it at all. And I would say it's almost third most important to the body after oxygen and water. We can't survive, we can thrive, and we cannot function without salt.

So surely we should be delving a little bit deeper into where it's come from, how it has changed, where we are at now, what the situation is. Thank you. Absolutely. So how did you get into salt? I'll tell you what, I can always tell people how I got into what I do today, but salt. Exactly. Let's talk about that. My life has been very vast and varied, actually. I once did interior refurbishing of private jets. my life before assault I had a beautiful NGO called 20,000 drums transformation to celebration I'd a dream and a vision to have 20 thousand children from rural communities in a stadium all drumming together oh wow Unfortunately, the event didn't happen, but we workshopped 30,000 children across the country.

I guess I've always had an element of making a difference and yeah, doing something for good. Um, I was eight and a half months pregnant when I introduced a friend colleague to the father of my child. And I wasn't thinking about new businesses, And so I supported him to export the salt to another country.

Samantha Skyring's Journey Into Oryx Desert Salt 5:00

And then I left him behind, came back to South Africa as a new single mum with a three-year-old, and I needed to get my life together. I'd already created the brand, this beautiful Oryx, as you see here. This is a gazelle that is endemic to the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. is actually a different Oryx, the Scimitar Orex which is in North Africa, so in the Middle East actually. So Qatar Airlines, they have the Orix on their plane, that's their logo. And I had a beautiful five month journey in a desert and I walked 75 miles, seven days through the Namib and had close encounters with the Orex.

Some years later when I have opportunity to create a brand, of this beautiful salt that comes from the Kalahari, which I'm excited to share where it comes form and what makes it different. The Oryx was what came to mind as the logo. Amazing, amazing. So how long ago was that when you actually started in the salt business? Yeah, 15 years ago, started packing grinders on my dining room table. And now we export to about 20 countries, and we're nationally in Whole Foods, World Market, Amazon, Shopify.

Amazing. And yeah, I have the vision and the mission because salt is so important. And because of the quality of salt for everyone, it needs to be the next global household brand. That's my mission. Absolutely. So why does the Quality of Salt matter? Thank you. Salt needs the minerals and trace elements that nature creates and creates in balance. our oceans are sea salt, or sea water, and so we have predominantly created salt from the oceans. But have we thought about what we've done to the ocean and how clean they are?

And the truth is, we haven't been taking care of our planet at all, not only the Oceans, the rivers, you know, We've been stripping the earth of its minerals. So table salt came around about 1910 at the beginning of the food convenience era. So it was convenient that salt didn't clump. But salt's intrinsic value to the body is that it helps it stay hydrated. And if you were to put a plate of iodized processed salt that's got chemicals in it. It stops it from absorbing moisture. Those would be the free-flow chemicals and anti-caking agents.

Versus if you had a plate with Oryx desert salt on it, Oyrx would absorb moisture, but the processed table salt wouldn't. Is that why they put like rice inside of it sometimes? Also as well. That helps. Yes. So that helps absorb the moisture So it was convenient that it didn't clump but were we really thinking about what the body needs as opposed to just it being convenient? It seems that that's been a thread in Western society to make life convenient but it has also been at the expense of our health.

So what's in that salt that so bad? There's about 20 different aluminum, silicate, potassium, carbonate, various chemicals that allow the salt to repel water or not absorb. And yet the minerals in the trace elements in salt together with the sodium chloride is like this beautiful special alchemical bond that nature has created. In fact, it's in a similar proportion to our own bodies and with minerals in the trace elements in sodium and chloride it creates positive and negative charges. and it allows the cells and our hydration, if it's mineral rich, to cross the barrier of our cells into cellular fluid to help us stay hydrated.

So if we're actually drinking water that has been stripped of its minerals, it actually really hard for the body to hydrate. And there's lots of research now that you can flush your kidneys and drinking more water without minerals can actually dehydrate you and cause problems. As Dave Asprey, who we met in person first at the Biohacking Conference, he says, the smallest biohack is just put a grind of good quality salt into your water. That creates it into an electrolyte, into mineral rich water, and then your body can hydrate.

We've got a blog, an article on our website that says drink less water and eat more salt. But on this point, I also want to just reiterate I'm not a doctor and yet 15 years now of working with salt and having testimonials from people who have switched from the salt that doesn't feed and nourish their bodies. to a good quality salt has been quite profound. So for so many things, I'm an endurance athlete, started having more Rx salt and she had been struggling with breastfeeding. Suddenly she could breastfeed.

I had somebody who was also an insurance athlete. He just cramping and struggling, you know, cramps. um was par for the course for him and yet when he he switched over to Oryx he stopped cramping um and had somebody else who had been an insomniac for most of his life and he now takes a teaspoon of salt with some honey every night before bed oh with honey with honey. And yeah, there's something around the glucose and sodium chloride. So it stops the body from spiking and waking up in the middle of the night.

But with the salt, and he has a teaspoon in a morning, actually something called soleil, which is where you put enough salt in glass jar, that the jar is over saturated and you always have crystals at the bottom. He takes a tablespoon of that in morning with lemon water, as I do as well. And once you started that within a couple of weeks, he was sleeping the night through and he never had four years. So I think it's, you know, it is for everyone. Each of us is unique. We obviously this American or health a stipulation that you need only five grams of salt or whatever the recommended daily allowance.

How can that be? We're different weights. Our muscle fat ratio is different. Output and exercise is very different, I can tell you do a lot more than what I do. And so our hydration and replenishment of minerals and trace elements is obviously going to be different Absolutely. So with some of those testimonials that you're talking about, have you had any testimonial of like adrenal function, how salt has helped with the adrenal glands? Absolutely, because it's essential for the kidneys. If we're not having enough salt, and especially mineral rich water, when we are hydrating, it puts stress on the kidney.

So there's a, It's been an amazing experience actually, especially Dave Asprey's Biohacking Conference, cause so many of the people there have done a lot of research. They're very embodied, they're really taking care of and making conscious choices of the products that they're choosing to consume. And I've had so many people come up who've seen RX on shelf, chosen to purchase it and start using it. They come and they tell me, I feel so different. So people are experiencing the differences without even understanding the quality of RX-DES itself.

Absolutely. You know, so I have some friends that are professional athletes and for years they've always been given a lot of these these type of power energy drinks, you know the Gatorade and Powerade. You know, they've become very health conscientious individuals where they don't want the coloring that's in there. They don' want all the sugar that' in their and they're trying to find other alternatives. Would this be a good supplement for the electrolytes if they put it in water to give them more energy and hydration?

Absolutely. Apparently, if you are hydrated and have enough salt in your body, you get a 20% more output of performance, which is incredible. So when we're born, we are about 75% water and salt. As we get older, that diminishes to around 60-65%. Okay. And I wonder if that is because we're not hydrating and having enough salt, because I think we've been so indoctrinated and told that salt is bad for us. And yet I don't think anything could be as far from the truth. Salt is on every continent. It's the oldest traded commodity in the world.

Um, and as we know, if you don't put salt into your recipe, um, there's something very bland and it's like, it, its essential and that's the smallest ingredient

Why Salt Quality Matters 15:00

in your meal. And it says smallest ingredients that we consume, but it actually has the biggest impact. I agree, there's a lot of foods that if you don't put salt on it, it will taste like cardboard. I'm just saying it how it is. There's one thing that you mentioned that there has always been this talk about how salt is bad for you, oh it causes high blood pressure, causes cardiovascular issues. And this topic was actually brought up in front of a couple of our doctors last week when we were in Orlando doing a wellness retreat with Noriega.

And Dr. Davis, who's my business partner, he's an interventional cardiologist. He specifically said that that's not true. What happens is people that have certain genetics might not be able to process certain things properly. And then, yes, you might have some fluid retention, and there's other things that need to be addressed. But it's that salt is bad for you. You need salt. So, in fact, it's interesting that so many of the doctors around patients that are struggling with their heart tell them to lower their sodium, and yet sodium is the most important mineral for the heart.

So... Yeah, there's an incredible researcher, also a cardiac researcher Dr. James de Nicolantonio, and he's read a book called The Salt Fix, an absolutely fascinating read. And one comment that he made is that, The wrong white crystal got the bad rap. So it's actually sugar that is causing a lot of health problems. And the attention was put on to salt, but it actually isn't the salt. There are many researchers now that believe that it is because we are not having enough salt that's causing issues with health.

Is that a myth when they are saying that having too much salt is bad for you? Well, we would pee out if we had excess salt. I think it's very hard to eat excess. Salt. Um, I would say we probably mostly walking around dehydrated and I. Think we all need to experiment for ourselves. If we craving salt, is to eat more salt. So the doctors also, I'm sure your colleague would attest to this, but doctors do very few hours of nutrition training in their whole medical university degree. So there seems to have somehow been a disconnect between food as medicine and understanding that it either is medicine or poison.

And somehow doctors have split the body up into, you know, the brain and the heart and our nervous system. Aren't looking at us as holistic beings that all everything plays into into it our cortisol levels our stress Our relationships, you know that either is going to you. No pick up our immune system or drop it. Um But I think because of the somehow Misnomer and myth that salt is bad for us. We have cut back on salt and We are electromagnetic beings. We thrive on... Our brain function is a neurochemical that happens and requires the conductor of salt.

Salt is the conductors. In fact, I saw an excellent little clip the other day where they had a container of water and a gong and they knocked the gongs and put it in the water, and it had, a little bit of a reverb. And then they put a bunch of salt into the, water. and knock the GONG again and, put directly into, the container. The reverberation lasted and was much clearer. It was the first time I've actually seen it visually how the salt is a conductor for us, you know, in our digestion, every part of us is actually electric.

I think if you've been to a supermarket and you'd been pushing a trolley, and if knocked someone, then you got that little charge. or even this morning I was opening my hotel room and I got a charge as I opened the door. So that's static, that electricity, if we rub our hair, shows that we are electric beings. I mean, there's a lot now around the, you know, seeing this field, this magnetic field that, we, are and salt is important for our vitality, our vibration, Absolutely. I've learned that salt, actually, you can infuse frequencies into salt and that it carries.

It's a good carrier for frequencies. I mean, I think everything actually holds frequencies. Right. Our thoughts are even frequencies, absolutely. And there's a Japanese scientist, he passed, think in 2014, Dr. Masaru Imoto, and he did some tests on some water. He had, let's say, five bottles. that he put positive words and positive intentions in, faith, trust, hope, love, joy. And then he had five other bottles that you put negative words, and intentions into hate, jealousy, anger, guilt, shame.

When he took a drop and froze it and took it a photograph, which is called crystallography, he could see that all the positive word have beautiful, unique, very symmetrical, almost like snowflakes. And then when he did it on the negative water, there was no shape, no form. And his message to the world was that there are hidden messages in water. It's a little bit like us saying grace or a blessing over our food and that our thoughts are changing the structure of our bodies. Because Oryx Desert Salt is from a very beautiful place.

Plus it is sun dried. It still has 1% of moisture in it. Whereas table salt is oven dried to very high degrees. And it's stripped of all its minerals and trace elements. and it has no moisture left in. So Oryx comes from this magnificent place in the Kalahari Desert of Southern Africa. And they discovered a 55 million ton underground Salt Lake. Have you been there? I have a very special if you can maybe come to visit us in South Africa, maybe we can arrange trip. I gotta be able to come back though.

So it's northern South Africa, south of the Botswana border. And it is a 5,000 hectare salt pan, which is about 7 miles by 35 miles. So you wouldn't see somebody standing on the other side. In this underground aquifer, they actually discovered subterranean rivers that replenish and sustain this under ground lake. those rivers flow through rock strata that have been tested at 280 million years old. And there's two almost miracles, phenomenons. One is that when we draw up that salt water onto the salt pan, it has not been touched by human hands.

This pan is 175 miles away from any town and the region is one and a half times the size of Texas to give you a sense of scale. So it's a two and half hour drive from the town. And then the other miracle is that the brine saltwater is oversaturated. And so in summer at 120 degrees Fahrenheit, it crystallizes in only four weeks. So in one lunar cycle, goes through a dark moon, a full moon under the stars, the desert wind, and it crystalizes. So because it's got the moisture that that those beautiful elements in the in that is that the spaciousness, the remoteness is actually captured in assault.

So do people like go out there and you see a bunch of people when it all dried up collecting it or? No. So the salt pan is on a private farm, so it's not accessible to the public. OK. And so we need to arrange. Because of where it situated from the main road, they had to build a seven mile road through five farms. But I went up a couple of years ago for to do a documentary. I really wanted to capture the beauty and how spacious it is and the fact that it doesn't come from And while I was there, well, there were five of us, we were gifted a Kalahari thunderstorm, which was just epic proportions of lightning and the most incredible rainfall that came down.

And it lasted 20 minutes. Once it passed, I went outside. It's always beautiful to be in nature after a thunderstorm. The earth smelt. it was, you know, fresh and damp. And then I walked around to the back of the chalet and there were double rainbows and that was where the salt pans were. I couldn't see them because they were behind the sand dunes. But I kind of in my mind witnessed these double rainbow sitting over the Salt Pan. And that was where I really had the almost an experience of how and feeling and seeing the salt lying in this beautiful place, absorbing the the magic of nature.

That's amazing.

Hydration, Performance, and Health Myths 25:00

I kind of want to get on an airplane and go check that thing out. That sounds really amazing. Have you ever seen, now in today's day and age, there's a lot of these spas that have salt rooms. What kind of salt are they using in these saltrooms? Because there are a lots of benefits and relaxation, detoxification, all of that stuff that people get from being inside of the salt room. Would this be a type of a salt for that? It would, except because it comes from this underground lake, it's actually this living aquifer.

So it is alive. It's moving through, you know, under the earth. Whereas the salt spas and the Salt Rooms, they're using Himalayan salt. And so Himalayan is, I think, has been such an incredible, important part of humanity waking up to the importance of salt, because it's pink. I think all of us ladies loved it. Oh, look at that. That's so pretty. Let's have that on the table. And what's fascinating is that it almost went viral pre the internet. It was, you know, it is a mineral rich salt and that was its marketing, caption.

And I believe that it came around for us to switch off from table salt. Now is there a difference between Himalayan pink salt versus the white sea salt? So Himalayan salt comes from, not from the Himalayas, it's about 200 kilometers, I think, east of the himalayans in Pakistan. And it was discovered because in the treks, you know, through the desert, probably transporting salt, the horses started licking the rocks. This is many years ago, and then they realized that these rocks were salty, were salt rocks.

And then, they started chopping it out and discovered this beautiful ancient solidified ocean that is pink. It has that pink hue. But because of the global demand, it's now dynamited out. And it's not a renewable sustainable source at some point could be fifty hundred five hundred I don't know how many years but at Some point it it won't if we're still on the planet in a hundred and five-hundred years The rate we going probably not seeing as are we damaging our environment? But some people say we might live until we were like 200 Possibly, if we take care of ourselves and choose the right quality salt.

And then of course, because the oceans are made up of seawater, it's always been so accessible for us to create salt from the ocean. But now the Oceans are polluted with plastic. The cruise liners alone dump a billion tons of sewage into the Ocean's every single year. There's pharmaceutical contamination, you think of 360 million Americans, how many of them are not on a prescription drug, some of which we pee out, ends up in the oceans. In fact, a marine biologist that I met at Dave's biohacking conference tasted some oysters and discovered opioids and contraceptives.

The oysters in mussels are the filters of the ocean. I still enjoy oysters occasionally. Eat them with a slightly different view. Yeah, we've really done damage. They're now these big islands of plastic, and all of the plastic in the ocean breaks down into these microbeads. And so when you're drawing up ocean water to make sea salt, whatever's in that water, depending on Icelandic, the oceans in Iceland would be much cleaner than oceans around Europe. Even though the ocean are a moving body of water, nothing stays and is isolated.

But obviously, bodies of waters that have a lot of movement and cruise liners and so on would more polluted. So to just really understand and, I think the important thing is to do our research. look at what salt has been your preference or what is in the oceans and where it comes from. And to just dive a little bit deeper. Now we talked about the pink Himalayan salt. We talked sea salt and we talk about table salt, Celtic salt Where does Celtics salt come from and how does it compare to your salt?

So the Celtic brand was started in about 1970 by a naturopath, Jacques Delorange, and he totally understood how important salt is for the body and salt with minerals in it. So he created a movement around switching people off table salt onto sea salt. And they did an amazing, it became a passion. So they were sourcing salt from various places, always ensuring that the source is clean. Well, ensuring these different sources. My understanding is that Celtic comes from Brittany in France, and it is ocean water.

So I think there needs to be more research done into the quality of Celtica or Celtics. I'm not quite sure the exact pronunciation. So yeah, it's Celtic has been around for 50 years and there are different sources. I think it is just again important to check where it coming from and what is the source. Absolutely. So we were talking about the Kalahari Desert, right? I've never been. Right. Now, what makes the kalaharis desert so so special? You know, What else is in this desert? Um, so I think the fact that it's, there's no fresh water.

So at the chalet that I stay at when I, when, I visit the salt pan, um, they track their freshwater 175 miles. so the areas are uninhabited or, you know, fairly uninhibitable unless you go track your water in. And so there isn't even it. air pollution. And the two and a half hour, in fact, from Cape Town to the Salt Pan is around 17, 18 hour drive. From the closest town, it's two-and-a-half hours. There's nothing but this most beautiful red sand and sky. So there's something just about the purity, the untouchedness of it.

Humans haven't got in there and, you know, done damage or tainted it or because obviously most towns are surrounding freshwater, there has to be access to freshwater. And this whole region is actually quite salt dense. There are places where there's lots of gold or there is silver or this platinum. This particular area has a lot of salt. And yet what I find fascinating is that salt is available in every country on every continent around the world. So we're in a similar proportion to the oceans. And it's so essential for our health, nature, God, however the planet and we came about, it was essential that thought was available.

I guess the place is that it wasn't. It was traded. In fact, a thousand years ago, salt was worth its weight in gold. So they understood then how important it was as a preservative. I mean, people laugh that salt has an expiry date and because of food safety, we need to put that on. And yet salt definitely doesn't have an expire date. But a thousand years ago that little 50 grams of salt in that bottle would have been worth 50 g of gold. And so it's curious actually that why salt is so cheap nowadays?

Why is table salt so inexpensive? And I think it is because it has no value to the body. Otherwise, the Himalayan salt, I should think, should be 10 times the price that it. Or it should 10 be times a price. It's from this one unique source. But because is created in such a vast volume, so table salt is actually industrial salt. They use it for paint and plastic, textiles, paper. and that's why they need to put the anti-tanking. What kind of salt do they use when the roads get icy, you know, and the trucks come and they put salt on the road?

So I guess that would be a sea salt. They have a different variations of quality, but salt is created in such incredible volumes. I don't know where that source would They bring a lot of it up north. I'm sure they do. It destroys our cars too and they get all rusty and stuff because of that salt. Okay, interesting. So, you know, one of the things that we're very big on at Liquovita and also a healthy point of view is being able to support all of our different communities that are out here, right?

And there's a underserved community in different pockets here in the United States that also need healthy living, right?

The Kalahari Source and Desert Salt Production 35:00

Especially when we're talking about making America healthy again. One of the things that you said earlier is that the salt is sold at Whole Foods, I have friends that, because I shop at whole foods that they'll make fun of me and says, oh, you're shopping out whole paycheck. So let's talk about how the price of the salt compares to table salt. So in Whole Foods, our salt is priced similar to a Himalayan salt, for example. It is more expensive than the sea salt. So Whole Food has been the one supermarket that has the buyer that I contacted four years ago, four and a half years, ago understood that Wholefoods They have been forerunners in good quality organic natural products and understood the importance of offering their conscious consumers a new category of salt, which is desert salt.

It's expensive to get into retailers in the USA. There's free fill, there's listing fees, it's promotion. We're still a small company and a smaller brand in South Africa. And just you mentioned, you know, supporting communities. Oryx started with me packing grinders on my dining room table. I now have a team of 50, and they come from very disadvantaged, very dysfunctional, no income to low income communities, I would say each person that gets employed by Rx feeds between five and ten people And I love really making a difference in their lives.

So last year they did a parenting course. Oh nice this year. They did the self-defense course Because the communities aren't safe and so just to give them a little bit more awareness and a few tactics and karate It was a mixed martial artist, a woman who had been physically abused that came in and did a six week program with the team. And somebody actually had a moment where they used one of the tools and that they had learned. So that was pretty amazing. Plus we give a percentage back to the first people of the Kalahari Desert.

So donation of sales goes to Kalihari as well as to another project called Project Biome in South Africa, Regenerative Farms. All the sales in America make a difference in south Africa which I believe is essential because they're the custodians. South African is the steward of this beautiful salt. But the salt is also available on Amazon. And I understand some people don't want to shop at Amazon because they definitely make a whole lot more money than we make off our products. We do have it wholesale on a Shopify site on our website.

So a community could, you know, some families could get together, buy a box of six salt grinders and six refills, get it for wholesale and then share it. It's almost like a mini co-op. And that's an amazing thing that you have as well, too. It's you don't have to buy it with the grinder every single time You could buy what you buy once and then you get the refill which is less expensive And then refill it exactly you really don' find that with many of these other salt companies So we've been trailblazing.

So our grinder has a ceramic mechanism. And so you can buy this grinder once and refill it. I had a chef reach out to me the other day and say that she was throwing her grinders away after seven years of use. Oh, wow. So imagine buying something for 699 and it lasting you to even two years three years five years. That's really good value for money And yes, then the large grinders the larger refills refill the grinder two and a half times We are actually on promotion in Whole Foods for the next two-and-a-half weeks, but I'm not sure when This is going to be published, so that might not be relevant.

And then we have these beautiful little travel shakers, which are available in all world market stores, Cost Plus World Market. I've become a complete salt snob, obviously. So I take myself everywhere that I go. And I'm happy that your tea yourself and your team get these as well. Because if I am on a plane and I decide to have a meal or if i'm at a restaurant and they've got sea salt, I like to know that i am putting the best quality salt on my food every time. So, you know, right now we have the Make America Healthy Again movement, the MAHA movement.

Have you been following it? I have. It's from South America. I think it's very exciting. So people worldwide are seeing what's happening with RFK Jr. making a lot of these changes. What do you think about it. Its essential. We've so got away from being healthy, making conscious choices. You know, the fact that probably five, 10% of food in the supermarket is actually real food. The rest of it's a bunch of chemicals. So the movement, I think, is is also a time for just creating more awareness. We've got so many incredible people like yourself.

Thank you. Sharing with people around quality products. I think COVID was a blessing. If we can have a look at the positive of everything that happens. People are making choices now not to get sick. and to stay healthy. And in order to do that, we need to be label checking. We need be seeing what ingredients are in every product. So this movement is just this beautiful collective of people who've done the research, who understand the body from a different perspective of, let's say, how the doctors have been looking at us.

Interestingly, in ancient Chinese times, you would pay your Chinese doctor to keep you healthy. But when you got sick, you stopped paying them. So we need to get to a place where we are well and occasionally get sick as opposed to getting to place we're you know at the the high percentage of comorbidity and diabetes and the you Know we're in a place now that we've never been on the planet right of not being well healthy optimum and and You know, yeah healthy. That's a lot of sick people people that just too many and The unfortunate thing and I say how it is.

It's you. Know some of the bigger bodies that are out there Wants to keep people sick as well, too So it's very important for us to become aware and educate ourselves, not be dependent on someone else educating us, so we can kind of break that chain effect that's happening where they just want to keep people sick. So there's a lot of things that we could do personally to avoid ourselves from going into these chronic illnesses. And obviously having good quality product is part of it. When it comes to health and wellness, daily habits, what is a few that are non-negotiable for you that you have to do every single day?

So meditation and breath work. In fact, I started on a supplement, an expensive supplement a year ago, and then I needed to replace it. And I had a good, strong talk to myself. I was like, no, you're not going to go and spend money on an expense of supplement if you are not doing the basics. You're spending half an hour in the morning, rightly in stillness, connecting with my heart, connected with myself, um and if um you know until I'm doing that until i'm using my breath which is a free tool which, is what we use every single day every moment every three seconds probably um I don't know what how many breaths we have in a in 24 hour period but most of us are shallow breathing because because we stressed out so I've really learned to use my breath as a tool.

You know, business is stressful, having 50 staff members, growing my business, the cash flow, getting into new supermarkets, going into different countries, there's a lot of stress. And I need to take the time to breathe properly. I'm sure you're aware that your longer out-breath gives your nervous system the message that everything is okay. So just remembering to come back to the body, come to my heart. And then first thing in the morning, I have a drink with lemon water, half squeezed lemon, and then the soleil that I mentioned, this fully saturated, very mineralized water.

A tablespoon of that with a little dash of apple cider vinegar, and then that feels like that sets me up for the day. I should actually be having that more often, but of course, once I leave the house, then it's the coffee, you know, on the run. Try and just be mindful again of choosing a salad as opposed to choosing gluten. Definitely need to do more exercise and more training. Although we have beautiful mountains in Cape Town that are right next to the ocean.

Comparing Salt Types and Business Growth 45:00

So every Friday morning I do a hike it's about 200 meters elevation With a group of beautiful people. It's a networking group and we meet that five to six in the morning Whether it's sunshine cold dark or rainy It is about a very good hour and a half up and an hour down and have coffee at the top and lovely time to meet new people and chat. I love that So, Samantha, this question here, try not to answer it in a biased way, right? Which it might be easy for you to be a little biased on this one, but one salt habit that consumers should change.

A salt habits that customers should to change? I would say ditch the table salt. Ditch the Table Salt. It is demineralized, it has chemicals in it. In fact, It has even sugar in its to mask the flavor and the bitterness of anti caking agents. So using a mineral rich salt, whether you choose RX or you chose a quality sea salt that you've done some research on, having that versus a refined processed salt. is already going to make a difference. And to not be scared of salt. I think often we have a craving for salty things.

That doesn't mean go grab that packet of heavily salted crisps. Have water, put some salt in it. Often when we feel that we're hungry, we are usually thirsty. Usually dehydrated so just not to be scared of the salt though. I'm not scared. Are we gonna try this thing or what? Everybody's right even the guys behind the scenes are gonna. Try it today Okay, so I want to ask you for a tequila first because we did shake hands earlier and just that's a cleaner part of hand and What do I do? I just look at it.

Just like you do. Come on. I want the other guys to try this thing here, too. You know, I can't be the only one with the taking the salt. Yeah, it's going to be very, very interesting. All right. Look at a little bit of that. OK, so then I'm going ask you to put your hand next to the mic that you can hear the smooth ceramic grinder. It's not. We're going a bit. There we go. And then just eat it and just have a lick. Wow. Salty, right? Now you guys have a pepper too. We do have peppers from small scale farmers in Madagascar.

Okay, so brush it off for me. You can put it on my skirt. I'll dump it outside. Okay. But now I'm going to give you sea salt. That's not Jamaican jerk. We're not finished with the experiment yet. So what is that one? This is sea salts. All right, I am not going too. i'm Going to hide the bottle because I don't want to show the brand but you can do this with any sea-salt. There we go, and I'm gonna do it in front of the mic and hear that cranky grinder, which is grinding. Yeah, it definitely tastes significantly different.

Isn't that interesting? I think I just ate plastic. Sorry, I have an apology about that. So, Oryx. Grab the mike. There you go. Oryx opens up all of the taste buds. It's like a flavor enhancer. Seems to open up the palate. And that's actually why they put salt into chocolate because it does open the palette. But there seems there is this difference as three out of three of you attested. Sea salt seems to be quite bitter and sharp. It opens salt, bitter and sharp in the taste buds, whereas Rx seems to open the full palette.

So it actually makes your food taste more flavorful. That was really good. I can't wait to actually cook with it. Awesome. Samantha, so I want to do something here. So I watch and I follow and watch a very popular podcast called The Diary of a CEO by Stephen Barlet. And he just came out with these cool conversation cards. I'm going to have you open it up and then you're going grab two cards and you going answer the questions on the cards shuffle shuffle it up. All right. Yeah, a couple that might want to jump out.

Take that one. Okay. So the first question is, what is your biggest regret? And if you could go back, What would you do differently? Talked Okay, so in some way, it's a hard question, because I love where I am now in my life. And if I hadn't have been through the things, one of which was a very, very unhealthy, Very unsafe marriage and relationship for many years. If that didn't happen, if that was safe and financially secure, Oryx wouldn't be on Whole Foods shelves, I wouldn't be as passionate.

I would be doing what I am today. So I did kayaking adventures on this most incredible island. And the way I handled it then at 22, essentially not standing up for myself and digging my heels in the sand and saying, bugger you, if you want me out, you leave. Um, because it was absolutely the most beautiful place on Lake Malawi, but 20 years later when, um, when I, the first person that I was buying the salt from wanted to give the rights to somebody else. I suddenly found that conviction where I.

Was like, I am going to sell the salts. This is. I'm born for this. I want to do this, I believe in this and I am going to this let's find a new way and that was when he actually told me to find new brand I was selling it under the Kalahari Salt Brand and then I created the Oryx Desert Salt brand So a regret that I lost this beautiful island and actually my partner then,

Daily Habits, Audience Questions, and Closing Thoughts 52:30

because we didn't survive losing this magical place we were living in together. We were in paradise and we lost paradise. But sometimes these things happen for our soul to have a different journey. So I think as a mum, I think all of us parents could have regrets of potentially not being more present, doing things slightly differently, definitely not going to have another child, but I know I would do it differently. Okay, second question. What is the one belief or behavior that has positively impacted your life in the past 12 months?

Amazing. Jim, quick. Hello, Jim. So the same answer in two different ways. Trust my soul. and trust the soul of my child. My son is nearly 18. He is institutionally adverse. I managed to find the courage four years ago to tell him that he didn't need to do school because he was making himself sick. And I'd heard somebody, I went to a talk when he were seven and the only thing that landed was trust us all of your child And my son didn't want to be spending time with kids who were vaping and smoking weed and drinking.

And I actually had to honor him for having such strong conviction at 15, but it was hard. But having that voice, trust the soul of your child, he's come in here, his soul is much bigger than me as a parent. And then the last 12 months has also been an interesting journey of valuing me and my own business. I have shareholders as well and understanding my value. And I've had to really step up and show up, and value and speak my truth. Right. It's been really challenging. And, and I, but I trust the soul of Oryx.

I trusted the sole of my soul. You know, when I had the first encounter with these beautiful Orix gazelle, I was sitting on a sand dune and two Orux ran up the sand dunes and skidded to a stop. It was like three million hectares of land, and yet I was sitting in their path. So choosing the Oryx for the salt really has become like an omen in a kind of, for me, it does feel like my soul path, sharing this beautiful product with the world. Amazing. So even when things get really challenging, kind of I drop into my heart, I connect and I trust that my soul is curating whatever I need.

Can't do this on my own. I feel like there's so much more support. There definitely is. Absolutely. I appreciate that. Samantha, as we wrap up here, if there is one listener or viewer on this podcast that really resonates with today's message, what is the one thing you can leave them off with? Well, thank you, Jim. I think, yeah, trust your soul. Like the entrepreneurs and the founders, it's hard. It takes so much courage. Value your courage, value your bravery for stepping out and doing something that's unfamiliar, but also know that you chose that and so did your sole.

So surrender more into the trust and into faith. I love that. Samantha, if people want to find you, where can they find LinkedIn, Samantha Skyring, S-K-Y-R-I-N-G. I love sharing my journey. Supporting founders, empowering founders. Just sharing, my, journey along the way. Obviously on Instagram, and if you want the product, Whole Foods, Shopify, our website and on Amazon. Amazing. Samantha, it was a pleasure having you here on a healthy point of view podcast. Thank you. Appreciate it. I appreciate it, too.

Guys, you heard it from Samantha. You got to understand what you're putting in your body. It might taste good, but you could be putting poison inside of your Who knows what some of these table salts have? Make sure you're taking the right salt. Understand the power of salt, what salt can do for your body, the electrolytes, energy, mental focus, clarity, sleep, all of those things come from having good hydration, which having a good hydratation is related to making sure that you have good mineral content.

Alright guys, so make sure you share this podcast, subscribe, like, do all that fun stuff and we'll see you for the next one.