Hello and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagle.

There's a lot of conflicting information online about the best ways to clean fresh fruits and vegetables.

And today we're going to sort through the research and the recommendations.

But first, I got a great question from Carrie in response to my recent episode on sodium intake.

In that episode, researcher Yani Papineckelau pointed out that a potassium-rich diet can blunt many of the negative health effects of sodium

and that canned beans, which are often demonized for being high in sodium, are also high in

potassium and they could actually help improve the potassium to

sodium ratio of our diets. But Carrie wondered how rinsing canned beans would

affect the potassium content.

Would rinsing reduce the sodium without reducing the potassium,

she wants to know, or has the potassium leached out into the liquid? And you know what? This is a really smart question.

The first thing you want to understand is that the amount of sodium that's shown on the

nutrition facts label on a can of beans includes the

sodium that's in the liquid which most people don't use. When you drain your

beans, more than a third of that sodium goes down the drain and if you also rinse

them you're reducing the sodium by more than 40 percent but how much potassium

might you be losing in the process on the one hand the sodium is being added to the

liquid that the beans are processed in while the potassium starts out inside the

bean. On the other hand we do have the principle of diffusion,

which says that solutes, like sodium and potassium,

will move from areas of high concentration

to low concentration,

...