I have been taking steam regularly for a while now to keep my nasal passages and lungs clear and ever since I started doing this a bunch of my friends keep asking me about it whenever they get sick and somewhere in the conversation they always ask whether they should put salt in the water for the steam and every time I hear this I am caught somewhere between shocked and confused because I cannot figure out how so many people have reached the same wrong conclusion. So I started asking them a question back which is do you know how salt is made and every single one of them has given me the same answer which is that salt is made by evaporating water from salt water and collecting what is left behind. And then I ask them if you put salt in the steaming pot and the water turns to steam and leaves the pot behind do you think the salt goes with the steam and they go quiet because it does not and that is the entire point of how salt is manufactured because salt does not evaporate with water and it never has and it never will.

So if salt does not evaporate with the water then putting salt in the water that you are boiling for steam does absolutely nothing for your nose or your lungs because the salt stays in the pot and the steam that reaches your face is pure water vapor with no salt in it at all and you have just wasted salt and learned nothing from the process of making it. I do not know where this salt in steam thing started or why so many people believe it but I am writing this down so the next time someone asks me I can just send them this post and save us both the conversation.

If you have been putting salt in your steam stop doing it and if you know someone who does send them this. I am @troysk704.