As of 2005 the RDA for potassium is 4.7 grams and less than 2% of Americans hit those numbers
less than 2% I think it's safe to say that in America, in the U S for sure, we definitely
have a problem with a lack of dietary intake of potassium. For those of you who don't know
me, my name is Dustin Williams, and for the best health, nutrition and fitness advice,
make sure to subscribe to my channel and hit that little notification bell so that you're
notified when I post a new video every week. Low potassium can be really hard to test for.
The reason being is that 98% of potassium lives in the cells in our body and not in
our blood. So whenever we're pulling blood levels of potassium, we're only seeing around
2% of the actual potassium that's in our body. Potassium is very tightly regulated. Your
blood potassium will typically only show low whenever your entire body is deficient in
potassium, and we definitely don't want to get to that point.
So knowing this, it makes it really important for two different factors. One to pay attention
to the symptoms and signs of potential low potassium and two to make sure that you're
actually getting enough potassium in your diet. Potassium as a mineral is an electrolyte
and many people are familiar with electrolytes and there are about seven electrolytes in
total, but there are three main electrolytes that most people are the most familiar with.
This is potassium, sodium and chloride, and to make things easier, when I talk about sodium
and chloride, I'll just say salt because sodium and chloride together is what makes salt low
levels of potassium and can definitely cause some problems. One of the first things that
can lead to is high blood pressure. A lot of times whenever people have high blood pressure,
one of the first things that they look towards is their salt.
Here's the thing about salt is salt is typically only going to be a problem if you do not get
enough potassium when you are low on potassium and high and salt, it can lead to high blood
pressure. Making sure that you're getting enough potassium can definitely help potentially
eliminate any high blood pressure issues. The second thing that it can lead to is less
insulin secretion. So potassium specifically plays into the secretion of insulin and if
you don't get enough potassium, it could potentially lead into higher levels of blood sugar. The
third thing is swelling or edema. If you ever went out and you've had some cheat meals or
things that were really high in sodium and you end up swelling like your fingers swell,
part of the issue is due to sodium. Yes, but mostly it's due to the sodium potassium ratio.
If you find that you have enough potassium in your diet, in relationship to the sodium,
you will find that you will not swell as much or at all.
So being able to get enough potassium can definitely play into swelling and edema before
thing is a potentially increased acid load in the body. Having too much acid from this
could potentially lead into things like osteoporosis as well as kidney stones. The fifth thing
is that it will affect bowel movements. The main one being constipation, not enough potassium
can lead to constipation. Number six is headaches. If you've ever of taking cream of tartar for
headaches, um, the reason being is cream of tartar is loaded down with potassium and if
you have a deficiency in potassium it can lead to headaches, so making sure that you're
getting enough potassium on the regular can help eliminate potential headaches. The next
one is the one that most people are familiar with this is muscle spasms and cramps. Lack
of potassium can lead to that. I'm sure that you've heard if you've been having cramps
that eat a banana, there can be some truth in that.
Now getting enough potassium can have an effect on that. You can find that low levels of potassium
can also lead to a slower heart rate and then there are also some more serious conditions
that can definitely warrant some immediate medical attention. Now knowing that all of
these symptoms could be potentially signs of low potassium, the other question could
be what might cause you to have a low potassium? Of course not getting enough potassium in your
diet is a big one and I will discuss some of the things that we can do on that here
in just a minute. The other things that we need to pay attention to are diuretics, if
you're on any type of diuretic, which is also really common if you're on blood pressure
medication, you can have a diuretic. This could lead to lower levels of potassium in
the blood. I know the thing is drinking too much water.
People are so focused on dehydration, which is something we definitely need to pay attention
to that we completely tend to overlook over hydration and whenever we drink too much water
it tends to flush out some of the electrolytes in our system and whenever getting enough
potassium is already potentially a problem. We definitely don't want to flush out any
of the potassium that we have and we want to hang onto what we've got so make sure that
you are not over hydrating and drinking too much water. Also vomiting and diarrhea. So
at any point in time if you are sick or if you're bulimic, these things can lead to
an immediate loss of potassium as well. So knowing these things, it starts to lead into
how can we fix the problem? How can we make sure that we are getting enough potassium
from our diet? And the first thing of course, is making sure that you're getting enough
from your food. This is always the first step that I have
people take. And the easiest way to do that is to track your food and use an app that
uses and tracks micronutrients for you so that you don't have to do all the work. I've
already done a video on this. I will link to the description below. If you click the
link, it'll take you to the video and it'll explain exactly how to use an app that does
everything for you to track your entire vitamin and mineral intake so that you can start seeing
on a day to day basis based on your current diet, how much potassium you're actually getting
when you're looking at your diet. One of the easiest ways to get more potassium is to increase
fruits and vegetables. These are typically loaded down with potassium. Now I'm sure most
of you are familiar with bananas. It's kind of the staple food whenever it comes
to increasing potassium, but there are a lot of other foods that have just as much, if
not more potassium than what's contained in a banana. You have things like sweet potatoes
and white potatoes, which are loaded down. You've got orange juice, you've got coconut
water, spinach, just to name a few things that are really high in potassium. Also, another
thing to pay attention to is when you are cooking your vegetables, the juice that comes
from the vegetables is where a lot of the potassium ends up going. So every time that
you cook veggies, if you end up discarding the juice, you're discarding a decent portion
of the potassium. So using this to create some sort of a broth or a soup can also be
very beneficial whenever you're looking to increase levels of potassium from your diet.
Another thing to pay attention to are the lean portions of meat, eggs, and dairy. And
I put the emphasis on the lean and not to say that you need to avoid fat, but the leaner
these are the meat, eggs and dairy, the more potassium they are typically going to have,
so let me give you an example. If we take milk, we take skim milk and full fat milk
and we compare the two and if we match them calorie for calorie, we take 200 calories
worth of skim and 200 calories worth of full fat and we look at the potassium levels within
each one. The skim milk has about 915 milligrams of potassium and the full fat milk has about
430 milligrams of potassium, so that's over a 50% drop for the exact same amount of calories
and of the potassium that you're getting by choosing the leaner portion of the dairy,
there's also a great nutrient search tool online is completely free.
It's a nutrition data.com and I will link below in the description so that you can click
and go directly to that website. As I said, it's completely free. It's great. You can
go in there and if there's a certain mineral you're looking for, so if it's potassium or
calcium or magnesium, whatever it is that you're wanting to try and get more of, you
can put that mineral in there and then you can have it display what foods have the most
of that. And what's even better about this website is you can go in and start to break
down. Specifically if you are trying to do a low fat diet, you know what are the things
that are higher in carbs and lower in fat that contain potassium or vice versa. What's
something that's higher in fat and lower in carbohydrates that also contains potassium.
So you can really break it down for your specific needs and it'll list out everything that you
would need. It's going gonna have those minerals in it,
so it's a great resource and completely free. And of course you can supplement with potassium.
Here's the thing about supplementing with potassium. It's a little bit tricky and I
typically recommend this as a last resort whenever it comes to getting more potassium.
I recommend that you focus first on the food aspects. Look into the medications that we
talked about. That's where I would put my focus first and then from there if you
wanted to add in a supplement, you could go that direction. The FDA has actually regulated
it where only one serving is allowed 99 milligrams of potassium. Now, if we're looking at 4,700
milligrams in a day, 99 milligrams doesn't make up much. There is a small portion of
the population that cannot properly excrete any excess potassium and this is the reason
why they have put a limit on it. The majority of people can handle more potassium
than that, but this is one of those things that you want to gauge. If you do want a supplement,
I would recommend that you use a powder instead of a pill and that you actually sprinkle it
on your food and take it with your food so that it's more evenly applied whenever you're
taking the potassium. If you want to supplement with it. Again, I would recommend that you
look to your food sources first, but if you do want to supplement with it, I'll put a
link in the description below to the one that I would recommend. So as you can see, potassium
is a very important mineral that we need to make sure that we're getting enough of it.
in your diet. I hope this video helps you out if you are looking to join a community
of people that are looking to get healthier and understand health and fitness and nutrition
a little bit better because it can definitely be a tricky space. I've created a free Facebook
group that I would love it if you guys join. All you gotta do is click the link below in
the description asked to join and we're posting stuff, answering questions, doing anything
that we can to help you out to get you pushed in the right direction whenever it comes to
being healthier. And of course, if you liked this video, I would appreciate it if you would
smash that like button and subscribe to the channel and I will see you guys in the next
video.