Topic: Potassium

Potassium is the half of the blood-pressure story that gets no press. Sodium is where the damage happens; potassium is where the correction happens. The two numbers sit in separate columns across this site for that reason — a food almost never does well or badly on both at once.

The scale of the gap is easy to state. The DASH pattern aims at roughly 3,400–4,800 mg of potassium a day, and the food supply most people actually eat lands a long way short of it. Our own database makes the asymmetry visible in single lines: white beans, dry, carry 3,625.9 mg of potassium in a cup against 32.3 mg of sodium. Soybeans run 3,342.4 mg against 3.7 mg. A cup of dried apricot halves holds 1,394.4 mg against 12.0 mg. One sweet orange gives 325.8 mg of potassium and no measurable sodium at all.

What that turns into inside a body is not a small effect. Trial data puts the payoff at roughly five points of systolic pressure for every additional 2,300 mg of daily potassium in people who already have hypertension, which is why we treat the potassium column as a target to chase rather than a footnote to the sodium story.

Two honest limits. The numbers above are per listed serving, and cooking water takes some potassium with it, so boiled and drained vegetables deliver less than the raw figures suggest. More important: food is not a supplement. Potassium chloride pills, and even salt substitutes stacked on top of an already potassium-rich diet, can push blood potassium into a dangerous range in people with reduced kidney function or on ACE inhibitors, ARBs or potassium-sparing diuretics. Moving the potassium column is a conversation with a clinician, not a solo project.

Every article below reads the column from a different angle — individual foods scored on both numbers, swaps that trade sodium for potassium, and the cases where a potassium-rich food arrives attached to a problem.

16 articles in this topic