Healthy Eating: Sodium & Potassium

Video Transcript

"I'd like to talk to you about sodium and potassium. This is a very important aspect of a healthy diet. We have a real problem right now with our modern diet in that it contains far too much sodium and not enough potassium. Just the opposite of what our ancestors ate. And you might think well I don't have high blood pressure, I'm not salt sensitive, I don't need to watch my salt. Not so. Too much salt in the diet has many implications for our health. Everyone should be watching their sodium intake. High sodium intake has been linked to osteoporosis, stomach cancer, all sorts of diseases. So this is very important. The sodium potassium ratio effects how nutrients move back and forth across cell membranes. That's why it's so important. And believe it or not most of the salt in our diet doesn't come from the salt shaker, it comes from fast foods. Fast foods are notorious for high sodium. Packaged and processed foods. If you're not eating fresh foods you have to compensate in these products by adding a lot of salt and sugar. For example I was looking at one frozen dinner and it had about five thousand milligrams of sodium in this large frozen dinner. Which is about twice our recommended intake of sodium. Recommendation is about 2400 milligrams of sodium per day. What you would find in about a teaspoon of salt. So it's not coming so much from the salt shaker but coming from fast foods. Coming from canned foods. Canned soups. Canned vegetables you've got to be careful about. A lot of condiments, too. And a lot of times it's not so much, not just the sodium quantity but the lack of potassium. There's sort of a seesaw balance between these two minerals. And if you keep your potassium level high that's going to bring down, help to bring down the sodium level. And where do we get the potassium? Well again, that's the vegetables and fruits. If you're getting your quota of at least two fruit, at least three vegetable a day that's where you're getting the potassium. But I would shoot for the higher amount. I would try and go for four servings of fruit and five of the vegetable. Sometimes people ask me, well can I take a potassium supplement. Sure you can but the best potassium supplement would be a glass of tomato juice or vegetable juice. Which would give you about 400 milligrams of potassium versus maybe 99 milligrams in a potassium supplement. Bananas also. Very high in potassium. Several hundred milligrams. But all the vegetables and fruits. Good sources of potassium. And if you do that there is room for some salt in your diet. Hopefully a healthy salt. And this is a good choice here. This is called Celtic or sometimes called Celtic sea salt. And you can tell that it's very nutritious by this gray color versus the white salt. It's like the difference between whole grain bread and white refined bread. This has minerals in here that account for that gray color. So a little bit of healthy salt in your diet is fine if you're getting lots of vegetables and fruits. Here's another one. This is called Pink salt. This is Himalayan salt. And the pink color is from the iron and other minerals in there. So that's the deal on sodium potassium. Make sure you're getting your quota for vegetables and fruits every day. Hold down the fast foods and the convenient foods to avoid sodium."