How to Get Enough Potassium on the Carnivore Diet

Dr. Berg’s Healthy Keto and Intermittent Fasting Podcast

Dr. Eric Berg

Health & Fitness

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this podcast, we’re going to talk about potassium on the carnivore diet. You need 4700 mg of potassium each day, more than any other mineral.

Potassium is important for the sodium-potassium pump present in all of your cells, which allows the contraction and relaxation of your nerves.

Too much potassium is known as hyperkalemia, and too little is known as hypokalemia. Symptoms of high potassium include diarrhea, muscle pain, and muscle numbness. Symptoms of low potassium include constipation, muscle cramps, and fatigue.

Potassium is vital for exercise performance. If you don’t have enough, you’ll probably feel weak or tired. One of the causes of low potassium is low magnesium.

Kidney disease can cause high potassium. If the kidney is not functioning properly, it won’t be able to get rid of potassium. It’s very rare to develop too much potassium in the blood from dietary intake.

Blood pressure medications or side effects of an adrenal condition known as Addison's can also cause high potassium.

Diuretics and steroids can cause low potassium. Surgeries and injuries can also cause low potassium.

The following vegetables are some of the best sources of potassium:

•1 cup of beet leaves 1300 mg

•1 cup of Swiss chard 900 mg

•1 cup spinach 840 mg

•1 avocado 500-700 mg

•1 cup of beets 520 mg

•1 cup of salad 350-500 mg

Bananas contain around 300 mg of potassium but have too much sugar.

Here are some of the best sources of potassium on the carnivore diet:

•1 cup of bone broth 500 mg

•3 ½ oz beef 350 mg

•3 ½ oz octopus 650 mg

•3 oz salmon 300 mg

•1 large egg 63 mg

•3 oz beef liver 125 mg

•3 oz chicken 300 mg

Transcript

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0:00.0	Can you really get enough potassium if you're doing carnivore?
0:02.8	Well, let's go into it.
0:04.4	First, I want to explain a little bit about how potassium works.
0:07.1	Potassium is not the most abundant mineral in the body.
0:10.4	Calcium is, because calcium is stored, but potassium is the mineral that you need the most out of any
0:18.0	nutrient as far as a daily amount. You need like 4,700 milligrams a day. That's a lot. So why do you need that much?
0:24.8	Because potassium is involved in something called the sodium potassium pump,
0:28.8	and that's in all of your cells. It's a pump that allows the contraction and relaxation of your nerves.
0:35.0	Not to mention the fluid inside and outside the cells.
0:40.0	Let's talk about if you have too much potassium or too little potassium.
0:45.6	Okay, so too much potassium, the word for that is called hypercalemia.
0:52.1	It's too much potassium. Not enough potassium, that's called hypocalemia.
0:57.7	So what you need to know about both is that it's very rare to have any symptoms even if you have low or high unless it's like extreme.
1:06.5	Most of the potassium like 98% of it is inside the cell.
1:10.0	There's a lot of factors that can make it even lower in the blood, even though they're measuring only 2% of it.
1:16.2	What are the symptoms for low potassium versus high? If you have high potassium, you can have diarrhea,
1:22.1	low potassium, constipation. So with high potassium you have
1:26.1	more muscle pain or muscle numbness. But with low potassium you have more muscle cramps and just an overall tiredness.
1:36.0	So you can imagine like especially if you exercise like you need potassium to allow things to work.
1:40.8	It's going to help your performance and if you don't have enough you can feel
1:44.2	kind of weak and kind of tired. And just as a side note, one of the causes of low potassium
1:50.9	is low magnesium because they work so closely together.
	...

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