Tracking potassium?

I think it's because lots of food have potassium, but in relatively low quantities. Sweet potato, bananas, fish, tomatoes and beans are all decent, but I believe, gram for gram, something like blackstrap molasses is one of the best things for a big hit of potassium for a (relatively) low calorie intake. 50 calories per tablespoon, and 500mg potassium. Bananas are the classic potassium rich food, I guess, but it's 400mg for about 100 calories (medium banana). But that's like, 8-10 bananas per day equivalent to reach your recommended level!

So, yeah, it's damn hard to get to the magic RDA number. HOWEVER, the reason the potassium RDA is so high is because it's designed to specifically offset the amount of sodium in the average Western diet. If you have a low sodium diet - and I've found my calorie reduction, combined with healthy food choices naturally does this anyway - then the amount of potassium required to counteract the damage sodium is doing to your various body systems is lower. It's just that the USDA or the UK NHS aren't going to give a list of caveats why you don't need to reach the guideline amount of potassium! But that's one way you can get less than 50% of RDA and still be in a 'healthy' range.

dizzieblondeuk wrote: »

I think it's because lots of food have potassium, but in relatively low quantities. Sweet potato, bananas, fish, tomatoes and beans are all decent, but I believe, gram for gram, something like blackstrap molasses is one of the best things for a big hit of potassium for a (relatively) low calorie intake. 50 calories per tablespoon, and 500mg potassium. Bananas are the classic potassium rich food, I guess, but it's 400mg for about 100 calories (medium banana). But that's like, 8-10 bananas per day equivalent to reach your recommended level!

So, yeah, it's damn hard to get to the magic RDA number. HOWEVER, the reason the potassium RDA is so high is because it's designed to specifically offset the amount of sodium in the average Western diet. If you have a low sodium diet - and I've found my calorie reduction, combined with healthy food choices naturally does this anyway - then the amount of potassium required to counteract the damage sodium is doing to your various body systems is lower. It's just that the USDA or the UK NHS aren't going to give a list of caveats why you don't need to reach the guideline amount of potassium! But that's one way you can get less than 50% of RDA and still be in a 'healthy' range.

This is an EXCELLENT point.

If you're going by food labels, you may be getting more than you think because many companies won't tell us everything and list only what they're required to list. Very frustrating. If you want a better total, see if you can find the food on the USDA site and enter that info.

But most Americans are not getting enough potassium. You have to work at it. Since too much is a bad thing, the makers of multivitamins don't put a ton in there, so you have to watch your food...if you care about potassium, which I'm sure you do, since you posted this.

From finding potassium hard to come by, I now am able to build it up quite nicely. Kale and spinach are both very good sources. Beans too. I have either banana or an orange for breakfast, and that's a nice boost of potassium right there. In addition, though the macro for me is 3500, I usually get between 1200 and 2000 a day; when I had my last blood test, my potassium levels, which had been awful in December, were just right. So that less-than-macro amount is actually fine for me. And I also do try hard to balance it against the sodium and be as sure as possible that there's more potassium during the day than sodium.

Actually now I think about it, if the reason for potassium is to counter sodium, I probably shouldn't be drinking the v8 juice at all, as it has stacks of salt in it and previously I was registering almost no sodium in a day at all!