Most people do not consume enough potassium. The RDA for potassium is high, and potassium deficiency seems to cause bad things like strokes. You’d need to eat ~8 bananas a day to satisfy your RDA (which isn’t that surprising—the dastardly banana lobby has tried to cast bananas as high-potassium, but e.g. tomatoes have more). And excess potassium probably isn’t very dangerous. Also, someone on LW (Kevin?) reported a nootropic effect from supplementing potassium.
Most people consume too much sodium. (There’s been some uncertainty around whether excess sodium is actually bad, but it still seems clear that we consume more sodium than we need.)
Potassium and sodium can both be eaten in salts, which will taste pretty similar. Therefore, perhaps we could make health gains by replacing much of our table salt with potassium! Indeed, some people have to do this for health reasons, so the great machinery of capitalism has already done lots of work for us here. For instance, here you can buy 12x3oz of potassium salt (enough to last more than a year) in shakers for $15. I’ve been trying this out for a while and it tastes almost like normal salt.
I don’t know much detail about nutrition, though, so this may be stupid for reasons I haven’t thought of. Could someone who knows more about the relevant science please weigh in?
I find this claim a bit weird considering that only a very small minority of my patients (geriatric, often poor nutrition) are hypokalemic while not receiving any supplements.
Who’s RDA is that and how was it determined? How strong is the evidence for it?
The fact that you have patients means you might know more about this than me.
That said, Wikipedia seems pretty confident that we’re not meeting the DRI, states that increased potassium intake improves health, and says only that the correct intake is “debated”. It’s important to distinguish between inadequate intake and suboptimal intake. I’d wager the medical establishment only refers to the former as hypokalemia.
There’s also a good argumentum ad savannam africanus that can be made here. Plants contain lots of potassium and little sodium. (If you put plant matter in a pot and burn it, you’ll be left with a white layer of “pot ash”, hence “potassium”.) Nowadays, people don’t eat many plants, and we pour sodium on everything.
It’s important to distinguish between inadequate intake and suboptimal intake. I’d wager the medical establishment only refers to the former as hypokalemia.
Yes. It could also be that the potassium and sodium concentrations don’t vary much no matter what your consumption, but your kidneys have to work harder to maintain the balance which could have health effects. I don’t see much hypernatremia either although sodium is way overconsumed. I think this is because water follows sodium and therefore as you retain sodium you retain water in the extracellular volume. Therefore the measurable concentrations don’t change although you have excess sodium in your system. I think potassium and water don’t interact the same way because potassium is mostly intracellular and cells can’t stretch arbitrarily whereass the extracellular volumes can.
Optimal potassium intake probably varies hugely depending on your sodium intake since they interact inseparably in the human body.
africanam, surely? (I’m assuming savanna is feminine, as 1st declension Latin nouns generally are. Actually it appears that in the 16th century there was a Latin word zauana with that meaning, but sticking with a more recognizable form is probably better.)
There is a serious inconsistency in the literature on potassium. The original RDA was set to be the average consumption about 30 years ago. But people trying to reach it today find it very difficult. This might be because diets have changed, but is probably because people reassessed how much potassium food contains and failed to update numbers like the RDA that are based on the erroneous measurement.
Not really unless you actually chart your foods for a bit. Which can be laborious. Worth it though to get it through to system 1 how bad your current diet is (if it is about as bad as average).
I’m no sure how bad my system 1 happens to be on the salt question. On some days my system 1 feels like more salt is warranted and I follow that intuition. I’m also not sure that the RDA is +/- 25% accurate for myself given that I sometimes drink 4 liter of water per day and probably need more salt consumption than the average person on those days.
Charting my food doesn’t easily tell me how much of the salt I put into the water to cook pasta makes it into my pasta.
Anecdotally, some people seem a lot more able to taste the difference than others. So-called “lite salt” (50/50 sodium chloride and potassium chloride) tastes almost identical to commodity table salt to me, although it doesn’t have the complexity of unrefined sea salt; but that isn’t true for everyone.
An option for those who don’t want to replace table salt in their diets might be to supplement with potassium chloride in pill form. Capsules and capsule fillers are fairly cheap on Amazon. Oddly, this doesn’t seem well covered by the existing supplement market; potassium supplements do exist but the doses they provide are ridiculously small (single-digit percentages of FDA allowances, if you’re lucky).
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/22/4/464.abstract is a Western source that also comes to the conlusion that potassium salt is good. Both sources recommend substitution with a miss of both salts.
Given that nutrition is always about being in balance the idea of mixing seems good. That especially true as from what I can see potassium consumptions leads to increased sodium secretion so if you supplement potassium you might need more sodium than the average person.
However some people with renal failure to get problems through increased potassium consumption http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124926/. Potassium also does seem to interfere with some blood pressure medications so someone who’s on medication for high blood pressure shouldn’t do this without speaking with his doctor.
I’m not 100% sure but I remember faintly that someone on LW got into problems by taking potassium as a nootropic.
Kind of weird given how people generally seem to regard both potassium and magnesium as good to supplement. Someone mentioned that it might be important to keep the ratio of potassium:magnesium constant (so separate testing is not good) but I dunno how plausible that is.
I almost ordered the potassium salt (kalium chloride) from amazon.com but then I discovered Raab LowNat on the local Amazon (DE) which I think provides a better balance of potassium and sodium salt and other sea mineral salts too.
Sure, but by default we suffer from mild hypokalemia and mild hypernatremia, not the other way round. Obviously you shouldn’t cut out all sodium, and unless you do something stupid you’re not really at risk of that.
Most people do not consume enough potassium. The RDA for potassium is high, and potassium deficiency seems to cause bad things like strokes. You’d need to eat ~8 bananas a day to satisfy your RDA (which isn’t that surprising—the dastardly banana lobby has tried to cast bananas as high-potassium, but e.g. tomatoes have more). And excess potassium probably isn’t very dangerous. Also, someone on LW (Kevin?) reported a nootropic effect from supplementing potassium.
Most people consume too much sodium. (There’s been some uncertainty around whether excess sodium is actually bad, but it still seems clear that we consume more sodium than we need.)
Potassium and sodium can both be eaten in salts, which will taste pretty similar. Therefore, perhaps we could make health gains by replacing much of our table salt with potassium! Indeed, some people have to do this for health reasons, so the great machinery of capitalism has already done lots of work for us here. For instance, here you can buy 12x3oz of potassium salt (enough to last more than a year) in shakers for $15. I’ve been trying this out for a while and it tastes almost like normal salt.
I don’t know much detail about nutrition, though, so this may be stupid for reasons I haven’t thought of. Could someone who knows more about the relevant science please weigh in?
I find this claim a bit weird considering that only a very small minority of my patients (geriatric, often poor nutrition) are hypokalemic while not receiving any supplements.
Who’s RDA is that and how was it determined? How strong is the evidence for it?
The fact that you have patients means you might know more about this than me.
That said, Wikipedia seems pretty confident that we’re not meeting the DRI, states that increased potassium intake improves health, and says only that the correct intake is “debated”. It’s important to distinguish between inadequate intake and suboptimal intake. I’d wager the medical establishment only refers to the former as hypokalemia.
There’s also a good argumentum ad savannam africanus that can be made here. Plants contain lots of potassium and little sodium. (If you put plant matter in a pot and burn it, you’ll be left with a white layer of “pot ash”, hence “potassium”.) Nowadays, people don’t eat many plants, and we pour sodium on everything.
Yes. It could also be that the potassium and sodium concentrations don’t vary much no matter what your consumption, but your kidneys have to work harder to maintain the balance which could have health effects. I don’t see much hypernatremia either although sodium is way overconsumed. I think this is because water follows sodium and therefore as you retain sodium you retain water in the extracellular volume. Therefore the measurable concentrations don’t change although you have excess sodium in your system. I think potassium and water don’t interact the same way because potassium is mostly intracellular and cells can’t stretch arbitrarily whereass the extracellular volumes can.
Optimal potassium intake probably varies hugely depending on your sodium intake since they interact inseparably in the human body.
africanam, surely? (I’m assuming savanna is feminine, as 1st declension Latin nouns generally are. Actually it appears that in the 16th century there was a Latin word zauana with that meaning, but sticking with a more recognizable form is probably better.)
I stole that phrase from here, which has some discussion of the grammar. I don’t know any Latin.
Looks to me like the conclusion of that discussion, in so far as it had one, was that “africanam” is right.
There is a serious inconsistency in the literature on potassium. The original RDA was set to be the average consumption about 30 years ago. But people trying to reach it today find it very difficult. This might be because diets have changed, but is probably because people reassessed how much potassium food contains and failed to update numbers like the RDA that are based on the erroneous measurement.
average intake in the US: 3.4g/day optimal intake for health according to the Cochrane review on sodium consumption: 3g/day
not excessively bad. Negative health effects start cropping up above the 4g and below the 2g range.
Is there a straightforward way to know your average sodium intake?
Not really unless you actually chart your foods for a bit. Which can be laborious. Worth it though to get it through to system 1 how bad your current diet is (if it is about as bad as average).
I’m no sure how bad my system 1 happens to be on the salt question. On some days my system 1 feels like more salt is warranted and I follow that intuition. I’m also not sure that the RDA is +/- 25% accurate for myself given that I sometimes drink 4 liter of water per day and probably need more salt consumption than the average person on those days.
Charting my food doesn’t easily tell me how much of the salt I put into the water to cook pasta makes it into my pasta.
Anecdotally, some people seem a lot more able to taste the difference than others. So-called “lite salt” (50/50 sodium chloride and potassium chloride) tastes almost identical to commodity table salt to me, although it doesn’t have the complexity of unrefined sea salt; but that isn’t true for everyone.
An option for those who don’t want to replace table salt in their diets might be to supplement with potassium chloride in pill form. Capsules and capsule fillers are fairly cheap on Amazon. Oddly, this doesn’t seem well covered by the existing supplement market; potassium supplements do exist but the doses they provide are ridiculously small (single-digit percentages of FDA allowances, if you’re lucky).
they taste pretty different.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18710605 seems to be published article in support of your claim. It’s from a Chinese source so results can be interpreted with a grain of salt ;)
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/22/4/464.abstract is a Western source that also comes to the conlusion that potassium salt is good. Both sources recommend substitution with a miss of both salts. Given that nutrition is always about being in balance the idea of mixing seems good. That especially true as from what I can see potassium consumptions leads to increased sodium secretion so if you supplement potassium you might need more sodium than the average person.
However some people with renal failure to get problems through increased potassium consumption http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1124926/. Potassium also does seem to interfere with some blood pressure medications so someone who’s on medication for high blood pressure shouldn’t do this without speaking with his doctor.
I’m not 100% sure but I remember faintly that someone on LW got into problems by taking potassium as a nootropic.
I remember this too.
You’re not thinking of gwern and magnesium?
Potassium didn’t work out too well for me earlier either: http://www.gwern.net/Zeo#potassium
Kind of weird given how people generally seem to regard both potassium and magnesium as good to supplement. Someone mentioned that it might be important to keep the ratio of potassium:magnesium constant (so separate testing is not good) but I dunno how plausible that is.
I almost ordered the potassium salt (kalium chloride) from amazon.com but then I discovered Raab LowNat on the local Amazon (DE) which I think provides a better balance of potassium and sodium salt and other sea mineral salts too.
Everything in balance.
Sure, but by default we suffer from mild hypokalemia and mild hypernatremia, not the other way round. Obviously you shouldn’t cut out all sodium, and unless you do something stupid you’re not really at risk of that.
Healthy kidneys will simply remove the excess potassium unless the intake is ridiculously high.
However the RDA could quickly get dangerous if you get kidney failure for any reason.
The fact that it’s possible to have too much and it’s possible to have too little does not tell you how much you need.