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Adding iodine to salt played a role in cognitive improvements: research (2013)
New research finds that iodine played a substantial role in cognitive improvements in 20th century Americans.
Iodine is a critical micronutrient in the human diet — that is, something our bodies can’t synthesize that we have to rely on food to obtain — and it’s been added to salt (in the form of potassium iodide) since 1924. It’s estimated that nearly one-third of the world’s population has a diet with too little iodine in it, and the problem isn’t limited to developing countries — perhaps one-fifth of those cases are in Europe(pdf), where iodized salt is still not the norm. James Freyer, David Weil and Dimitra Politi used military data from the early 1900s 1920s, when World War II drove millions of men and women to enlist.
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