Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast on your host Monica Rinegal.

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 Papeniclau 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.

Canned rinsing reduced 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.

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