Hey, guys, Dr. Berg here.
I want to do a video on the most important electrolyte.
Let me explain what electrolyte is.
If you ever take salt and put it in water and dissolve it, it disassociates.
The sodium and chloride disconnect and they become two separate minerals.
That fluid is very electrically conductive.
Basically, electrolytes have to do with minerals that help conduct electricity in the body.
They help with a lot of different things.
As far as electrolytes, it would be potassium, sodium, magnesium, calcium, chlorides, all
those minerals.
Potassium, out of all of the electrolytes, is the one that we need in very large quantities.
I was curious, why is that?
Why do we need the potassium in such large amounts?
I'm talking 4,700 milligrams to 6,000 milligrams every single day.
That's equivalent to 7-10+ cups of salad or vegetable every single day.
That's a lot.
That's odd to me.
No one consumes that much.
Let's go dig further on exactly why we need potassium.
There's something in the body called the sodium-potassium pump.
It's built in a little protein connected to an enzyme.
It forms a whole enzyme on the surface of your cells.
You have between 800,000 to 30 million of these little, tiny pumps.
They're little generators that generate electricity to allow things to go through the cell.
They take a lot of energy to work.
In fact, 1/3 of all the food that you eat, the energy of 1/3 of your diet, goes to running
those pumps.
You also have another pump in the stomach called the hydrogen potassium ATPase.
Don't worry about the name, but it's basically another pump that's build with potassium that
allows you to create stomach acid to help you digest.
These pumps also are in the muscles, they're in the nervous system, and the pumps in the
nervous system use about 60% of your body's caloric intake of energy.
In other words, these pumps are really critically important in exchanging nutrition, glucose,
amino acids, and other minerals to allow them to transport in and out of the cell.
Potassium is essential for building the pumps to allow these functions right here.
They charge the cell electrically.
Your cells have certain voltage that allows things to work and go in and out of the cell
and create different energy.
In fact, your energy that you have that controls your metabolism is controlled partly by this
little pump.
It charges the cell electrically.
It gives you energy.
It helps the muscles contract to relax because it allows calcium to go into the cell, as
well.
It controls the transport of calcium.
Wow, interesting.
If you're low on something in this pump and these pumps aren't working, your calcium is
not going to relax the muscle, so you'll get muscle cramps from potassium, but it's really
calcium, but we can't fix it by giving you calcium.
We have to give you potassium.
I'll get more into that.
The muscle needs this pump.
The nerves to conduct electricity need this pump desperately.
Fluid, the transport of fluid, the hydration of your body is controlled by this pump and
your overall physical energy.
Since potassium is so hard to get in the diet because people don't realize how much need
and they're not eating enough vegetables, you can experience a set of symptoms that
I'm going to describe to you and you might have some of these.
Number one, fatigue.
Fatigue can come from a potassium deficiency because if you don't have enough potassium,
your cells, electrically, are going to be way, way, way down there.
You can't pump anymore.
That's why when people start eating more potassium foods, they have some more energy.
The problem is if you try to take a potassium pill, it only is comprising about 40 milligrams,
maybe 90 milligrams.
You need 4,700 milligrams.
You'd have to have a whole bottle.
The pills are not going to work.
Plus, if you took that much potassium without the other minerals, you can throw it out of
balance.
You want to get your potassium from food or food concentrates.
Then we have energy fatigue.
We have muscle fatigue.
If you go up a flight of stairs and you feel like your legs are really heavy or you don't
have the endurance, that is a potassium deficiency.
Nerve, if the nerve is tired, your electrical impulses won't work, so you have arrhythmias,
you'll have an alteration in heartbeat problems, skip beats, atrial fib, [inaudible 00:05:16]
electrolyte deficiency.
Fluid, fluid retention, swollen ankles.
That's a potassium deficiency.
What do doctors do?
They tell you to avoid salt.
Big mistake.
You should increase potassium.
Then overall, just energy in the cell to work correctly.
In the stomach, if you don't have enough potassium, you can't create the acid that you need to
help digest protein and absorb other minerals.
Again, the potassium is needed for the stomach, the nerves, the muscles, for energy, for fluid,
for hydration, all of these things.
Now that you know that, let's talk about how you become deficient.
Number one reason is you don't have enough potassium in the diet.
You need to consume 7-10 cups of vegetable or salad a day to achieve this.
I enhance this with food concentrates a lot of times if I can't get the quantity, and
I use my wheat grass juice powder.
I take a teaspoon of that, and that will give me a blend of a lot of potassium and magnesium
and a lot of other things to be able to spike that sodium-potassium pump, to boost my energy,
as well.
Vomiting, diarrhea will also create a deficiency.
Surgery, when you get a surgery, what happens is your potassium just dumps because of the
stress.
That's why they always give you a potassium IV because to replenish that potassium.
Stress will also decrease potassium.
Let me just grab this book right here, my favorite CIBA Encyclopedia for Endocrinology.
We got right here, adrenal stress.
Right here, it creates potassium loss.
It's stress create a loss of potassium through the urine.
Sugar creates a deficiency of potassium.
Why?
Because insulin is the hormone that helps you absorb nutrients.
It also causes everything to go into fat.
If you have a problem with insulin, like insulin resistance, you can't pull glucose into the
cell, and that's why your craving sweets, by the way, but, see, what insulin does, it
only acts as a trigger for the sodium-potassium pump to trigger the absorption of nutrients.
That doesn't get triggered, so you can't absorb things.
By taking more potassium, you can actually decrease the need for insulin, and that's
what I recommend for my diabetics.
It's very difficult to fix diabetes without enough potassium, without enough vegetable.
If you have a lot of sugar, that'll deplete potassium.
If you take potassium, it'll help with cravings and decrease your need for insulin.
Diuretics, blood pressure, if you're low in potassium, your blood pressure will go up,
and you also have problems with calcium not moving in the correct places.
That's why the doctors give you a diuretic to get rid of fluid, and they give you a calcium
channel blocker for high blood pressure, but they don't recommend enough potassium.
There's so many people that consume enough potassium and their blood pressure comes down.
Diuretics will deplete your potassium.
They get rid of electrolytes, your blood pressure stays high.
Salt, sodium-potassium, they always work in a balance.
The reason I'm not talking about salt is that your body will tend to conserve salt more
than potassium and also people have a lot of extra salt in their diet, naturally just
eat more salt than potassium, so they're rarely deficient in salt.
Too much salt can deplete potassium.
Alcohol will deplete potassium.
The last one is ketogenic diets, which is interesting.
You go on a higher fat, low carb diet, what happens, you will deplete potassium.
Thus, the reason why I tell you to consume more vegetable when you do a high fat diet,
so you can replenish the potassium and feel fine because a lot of times you'll dump a
lot of water from losing a lot of fat, as well, when you're burning fat or you might
feel fatigued or you might feel constipated.
By adding more potassium from the vegetable ... It's not the fiber.
It's potassium in that food that will help flush you out and you keep the liver clean
and help these pumps work a lot better.
I just wanted to give you an idea of the most important electrolyte, what it does in your
body.
That's what electrolytes do.
Then also how you become deficient and what you need to do to correct this.
Hope this helped.
I will see you in the next video.