we're going to talk about high levels of potassium in your blood okay first thing you need to know
is the name of that is hyperkalemia when you have a deficiency of potassium in the blood
that's called hypokalemia the other thing to know which is very important is that 98
of all your potassium in your body is inside your cell not outside the cell and not in your blood
so when we're evaluating hyperkalemia we're really looking at this two percent so we don't really
see the whole picture of what's going on it's very rare there are very little symptoms that
are associated with this if it's severe you can get palpitations you can be very tired and have
muscle pain and weakness there's a condition called pseudo hyperkalemia in this situation
when they're drawing your blood to do get the sample to do the testing
if they damage your blood cells as they're drawing it out there's some type of trauma involved
what happens is it cracks open these cells and leaks out more potassium giving this pseudo or
false impression that you have high levels of potassium so i just want to bring this point up
right here now there's a couple reasons why you might have high levels of potassium in the blood
advanced kidney disease is probably the number one because when the kidney is damaged
you don't release certain minerals especially potassium addison's disease is another reason
this is an autoimmune condition of your adrenal glands in which you're losing a ton of sodium
and when you're losing all the sodium you're also retaining potassium so you would not necessarily
ever want to give someone potassium if they had advanced kidney disease or addison's disease
there's a couple medications that can also raise your potassium in the blood nsaids for pain and
certain high blood pressure medications now the other thing to know is excessive intake of
potassium is not a primary cause of hyperkalemia why because your body has certain mechanisms to
get rid of excessive potassium and this is very different from sodium we tend to retain sodium
so if we take too much potassium our bodies can get rid of it very easily through the
urine now what's interesting is the treatment for hyperkalemia is taking certain types of calcium or
injecting the person with insulin and i'm talking medical treatment or dextrose which is a sugar
or sodium bicarbonate which is baking soda now what i find interesting is these two things
right here insulin and dextrose so if you're in a high carb diet and you're raising insulin
or you're going to elevate sugar you're going to create more of a problem with this right here not
this right here now it's also important to talk about the opposite of hyperkalemia hypokalemia
which is way more common it's the most common form of electrolyte imbalance when someone's
hospitalized and here are a few symptoms leg cramps weakness constipation abnormal heart rhythm
issues arrhythmias etc and the main point i want to bring up which is the last point is you have
to realize that the majority the vast majority of potassium is inside the cell and so measuring it
based on the blood is not a good way to determine if you have too much or too little potassium
there is another test it's an intracellular potassium test which is much more valuable and i'm
going to put a link down below if you want to know more information about that i would highly suggest
to get this test if you're interested in knowing your intracellular potassium and intracellular
magnesium it gives you a lot of great data and it can also tell you if you're at risk for getting
arrhythmias because that would be one of the big symptoms of that or even high blood pressure
all right thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video before you go if you have a
question about a product or you're new to keto and you want to know how to begin keto or you're
on keto and you need a debug because it's not going as smooth i have a keto consultant standing
by to help you this is just for the people in the us hopefully in the future we'll be able
to answer everyone's call but i put the number down below so you can call and get some help