How Potassium Can help Control High Blood Pressure
For many people who suffer from high blood pressure and especially after the release of the new guidelines reducing the levels for high blood pressure to 130mmHg (1). More people will now fall into the High blood pressure category, now I hate to be cynical, but I suspect this is so big Pharma can profit from not only increased sales in blood pressure medications, but also for those statin manufacturers so much so that an additional 25% of the US population will now require some sort of blood pressure despite them being asymptomatic.
Why is it Physicians are trigger happy and want you to reach for the medicine bottle without giving you some simple healthy lifestyle modifications first??
I am often baffled by this and even more surprised that people are happy to go along with this and are happy to pop pills without looking for alternative ways to treat these medical conditions.
One very easy and simple to treat High blood pressure is by ensuring that your salt levels are adequate, and before you say wait doesn't salt increase your blood pressure, or my doctor has put me on a low salt diet to treat my high blood pressure. The "salt" you are talking about is Sodium Chloride or NaCl, I am not talking about that salt I am talking about Potassium, with the optimum forms being Potassium Bicarbonate or Potassium Citrate.
The recommended daily allowance for Potassium is 4700mg a day, and sadly we are not getting enough potassium in our daily diets. a Banana for example has about 358mg of potassium and a potato has about 421mg and avocados have 485mg. So, in order to meet your daily allowance you would need to eat the equivalence of 1kg of potatoes a day just to meet your daily requirement.
if you are wanting to know how much potassium is inside an ingredient I recommend check with one of the nutritional databases such as Nutrition Data
So what does this mean for me..... well for one thing people tend to neglect the amount of potassium they are eating on a daily basis the ration of Potassium to Sodium chloride should be 4:1 so if you are having 4g of Potassium a day you should be limiting your Sodium Chloride to 1g and so forth. When you consume optimal amounts of Potassium it helps you to lose additional sodium through your urine, Potassium also helps the blood vessels relax and lowering blood pressure.
Now I must mention that if you are interested in taking Potassium at optimal levels, but currently on Antihypertensive medications or have Chronic Kidney disease, it certainly is advisable to speak to your physician to make sure you are not going to be at risk of developing hyper (too much) or Hypo (too little)kalemia (potassium in the blood)
Now that being said if you are healthy with no significant health issues it is pretty safe to take, and I take 3 to 4 teaspoons daily spread throughout the day. If you have any questions about this or are unsure about how to start taking supplemental potassium please feel free to contact me. either here or on discord 