RE: How Potassium Can help control High blood pressure
That opens a bunch of questions for me.
First, do we need that amount of potassium because of other factors, such as overeating other nutrients or other modern stressors? If we reduce those, do we need less potassium?
If we have always needed that much potassium, how did healthy traditional tribes get that amount of K without being able to supplement?
My family has a tendency to restless leg, and I manage that by taking magnesium every day, The form I take, which is supposed to be best for RLS, is a Mg / K complex, which gives me 180 mg K per day. That's nowhere near the amount you recommend, but I wonder now if it's the K that helps me more than the Mg.
Oh, one more Q - is that the recommended amount of K for everybody, or only if you have high blood pressure?
If we reduce the stress on our body that will obviously help as far as cortisol, and the other stress hormones are concerned and may reduce some of the factors associated with stress. However these Potassium recommendations are for the best part are a recommended daily allowance which should be required for proper biological and physiological processes to occur unhindered so even if we do reduce our stressors we should maintain this level of potassium. Sadly the vast majority are eating a rather potassium deplete diet, and over compensating with sodium chloride, because when people think of salt, sadly they don't think of salts such as potassium or magnesium they only really consider sodium.
Excellent question and I had to do a bit of research on what the Maori used to eat, I believe they had some excellent agricultural skill and able to grow yams and vines and palms, along with fungi, and they had sources of meat from fish, and birds and not to forget the kiore, and the Kuri 1 So all of these foods undoubtedly were high in potassium, in those days people would tend to eat everything from the snout to the tail of an animal, now people are far more selective about what they eat.
Potassium is one of the most important electrolytes for muscle health and quality of contractions hence why cardiac arrhythmias are highly influenced by this. but the same is true for all our muscles insufficient levels can affect the nerve potentials and may lead to RLS, that said I know many people who swear by Magnesium rubs and the like. I prefer Magnesium Malate, A lot of people take the wrong form of magnesium and end up spending most of the time running to the bathroom :)
Yes The Recommended daily allowance of potassium is not set in stone to be honest but its certainly a minimum that you should be trying to achieve sometimes depending on what I am eating I can get up to 8g per day but thats not always. I would suggest trying to optimize the amount from foods, and topping up with the potassium citrate or bicarbonate, I just have the potassium in my glass of water morning afternoon and evening. seems to do the job.
I hope this helped you out.