Here are three ways to get enough
potassium in your diet.
Hi. I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com, and this is
Chris Masterjohn Lite, where the
name of the game is
"Details? Shmeetails. Just tell me what works!"
And today we're going to talk
about three ways to get enough potassium.
In Testing Nutritional Status: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet,
I outlined three different dietary
approaches that are shown on the screen.
The first is a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.
The second is a diet that's low in fat,
moderate in grains, and free of refined carbohydrates.
The third is a diet for the context of a
low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet where you
choose specific vegetables to emphasize
that have a high ratio of potassium to net carbs.
Net carbs is total carbohydrate minus
fiber, which is the way you typically count
carbs on a low-carbohydrate diet.
Each of these approaches consists of
general rules of thumb. The only way to
know you're getting enough potassium is to track
your diet for at least a few days that
are representative of what you usually
eat and to look at the potassium content
that's coming up. I'll talk more about
how to do that in the next episode.
In this episode we're going to focus on
the simple rules of thumb.
So, the first approach is a diet rich
in fruits and vegetables.
This is in many ways the optimal
approach because in this case,
you're eating fruits and vegetables that
provide a lot of potassium with very few
calories, and that gives you a lot of
freedom of what to do with the rest of
your diet. If you aim to hit the official
recommendations of five to nine servings
of fruits and vegetables per day, you are
very likely to get enough potassium.
In that case, generically speaking, a
serving is 100 grams or about 3 1/2 ounces,
or you can look up what is considered a
a serving for individual foods.
The second approach is a diet that's
low in fat, moderate in grains, and
free of refined carbohydrates. In this
case we're assuming that you're not able
to hit the five to nine servings of
fruits and vegetables target in the
first approach, and that means that you
have less freedom of what to do
with the rest of your diet.
Let's talk about these principles in order.
So first, why low in fat? Because fat
doesn't contain any potassium. If you
look at something like butter, there's
only 10 milligrams of potassium for
every 300 calories. That's negligible.
If you look at whole foods, in milk or in
eggs, the potassium is mainly in the
water-soluble portion. If you take equal
caloric loads of skim milk and full-fat
milk, the skim milk is going to give you
twice as much potassium as the full-fat
milk, simply because by removing the fat,
you're eating more of the potassium-rich fraction.
Although I usually recommend eating
whole eggs, nevertheless, if you're looking
at potassium, 300 calories of egg whites
gives you over a gram of potassium.
The same amount of calories from
whole eggs gives you less than 300 milligrams.
That's less than a third, when the same
amount of calories from egg yolks
gives you only about 100 milligrams,
which is less than a tenth of what you
get in egg whites.
Now, the second principle is moderate in grains.
The reason I say moderate in grains is
because when you compare whole grains,
which do have some potassium, to other
starchy foods, like legumes, such as
lentils, peas, and beans, or starchy tubers,
such as potatoes, you're getting a lot
more potassium from the legumes and
starchy tubers than you're getting from
the whole grains. So if you rely more on
starchy tubers and legumes and less on
whole grains, you'll get more potassium.
The third principle is free of refined
carbohydrate. That's because when you
refine carbohydrates, you get rid of the
potassium. So white bread, for example,
has very little potassium compared to
whole-wheat bread. If you just get rid of
the refined carbohydrates, then that
in and of itself helps you eat more
potassium-rich foods that those refined
carbohydrates that you would have eaten
would have displaced.
Now, you have some freedom to choose
between the emphasis
you put on these principles. For example,
if you eat more legumes and starchy
tubers, you don't need to be as rigorous
about restricting the fat in your diet.
But if you aren't able to eat fruits
and vegetables, and you aren't able to
eat legumes and starchy tubers, then you
may need to be very rigorous about
restricting the fat in your diet in
order to get enough potassium.
In the case where you are eating egg whites,
I recommend taking a biotin supplement
because egg whites on their own can
induce a biotin deficiency.
The third approach is for diets that are basically
in some ways the opposite of the second.
So in low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets,
you have a lot of fat that's not giving
you hardly any potassium. So you need to
be very selective about the other
portions of your diet to get enough.
What I did in the Cheat Sheet was I took out
the foods from nutritiondata.com that
had the highest potassium intake
relative to net carbs, and I listed them
out in declining order from highest
potassium to lowest: watercress, spinach,
purslane, mustard greens, bamboo shoots,
arugula, red leaf lettuce, celery, white
mushrooms, green leaf lettuce,
zucchini, Chinese cabbage, asparagus,
common cabbage, iceberg lettuce, and tomatoes.
Now, watercress at 431 milligrams
has a lot more than tomatoes at 66.
So choosing within these foods can give
you a lot of freedom of—can give you a lot
of different ways to get your potassium in
that may require more or less volume of food.
But if you're trying to eat a diversity of
these foods, clearly you have to eat a
lot of them. So what I wrote in the
Cheat Sheet was if you were to eat 100 grams
of each of these vegetables every
day, you'd get just under 5 grams of
potassium and less than 32 grams of net carbs.
So you're looking really good in
terms of net carbs and potassium, but
you're eating a lot of these foods.
I went on to say that the lean portion of
the protein that you're eating would
bring the total potassium up to
somewhere between 5.6 and 6.9 grams
of potassium, and that leaves you a
lot of freedom to have the
rest of your diet be fat and still get
the potassium you need.
Now, I picked these out of
nutritiondata.com. I recommend that you,
if you're going to follow this approach, you
should look at nutritiondata.com to
develop your own list because there
might be differences in what's available
to you or what you like. And so briefly,
I'll show you how I made the list.
On nutritiondata.com you go to "Tools" and
then "Nutrient Search Tool." You choose
"Foods that are highest in," and you start
typing out potassium, and when you see it
come in the menu, you select it. Choose
"Foods that are lowest in," and you don't
even need to start typing because the
second item in the list is total
carbohydrate. They don't give you the
option for net carbs, so that's a
disadvantage because it's somewhat
labor-intensive to go into each food and
figure out the net carbs, but that's what
you have to do if net carbs is what
you're after. You can then choose the
type of serving that you want. I would
leave it at 100-gram serving for
myself, but you can choose.
And then you just go through the list.
Again, this is not showing you net carbs, so you'll have
to go in to each item and figure out the
net carbs if that's what you want.
You simply take the total carbohydrate
and subtract the fiber.
So, this was a few rules of thumb for a
few different dietary approaches.
In the next episode, we'll talk about
how to track potassium.
Signing off, this is Chris Masterjohn of
chrismasterjohnphd.com.
This has been Chris Masterjohn Lite,
and I will see you in the next episode.