During the last years, the use of natural or ‘‘organic’’
rock salt for nutrition purposes has become more and
more popular in Central Europe. Therefore, rock salt
from various more or less exotic regions of the world
can be obtained almost everywhere in Europe. In many
cases, a high content of trace elements – which has a
highly positive connotation in everyday language – is
advertised, reasoning positive effects on human (and
animal) health. Only in exceptional cases, a detailed
declaration of the respective trace elements and their
concentrations can be found for the respective salt.
In 2002, Javor [1] lamented the lack of routinely
published trace element analyses of rock salt. Detailed
reports on major element impurities like e.g., Ca2+,
Mg2+, K+, and SO4 2 in salt can often be found [2,3].
Therefore the aim of this study was to apply instrumental
neutron activation analysis (INAA) to the
determination of trace elements in rock salt samples
from different countries. Although INAA is a wellproven
analytical tool for bulk analyses of geological
samples [4], it has been used for the investigation
of rock salt only in a few cases before [5–9]. Other
methods for the determination of trace elements in rock
salt or sodium chloride brine, respectively, like inductively
coupled plasma-atomic emission spectroscopy