How to Treat Low Potassium Blood Levels

Series Summary

Everyone wants to live a fit and healthy life, but sometimes beginning a new low-fat diet can be daunting and even challenging. Changing eating habits and learning to prepare low-calorie, low-fat food can be difficult to become acclimated to. However, having a solid knowledge base about the types of foods that can be enjoyed without guilt, and some inspiration towards creating a delicious menu full of diet-friendly meals is a great start. Healthy snacks, exercise, and a refrigerator makeover are great steps for diet beginners, and this series will help jump-start a diet easily. In this free video series, a licensed dietitian provides nutrition tips for promoting general health and for losing weight. Discover how to use Weight Watchers, how to stop smoking without gaining weight and how to do the South Beach diet while breastfeeding. Find information about weight loss camps and weight loss surgeries as well. With these dieting and nutrition tips, anyone can start eating healthy and eating well.

Video Transcript

"My name's Christine Marquette and I'm a registered dietitian with the Austin Regional Clinic and I'm going to talk to you about how to treat low potassium blood levels. Typically, the first line of treatment, your doctor will ask you to increase your consumption of high potassium foods. Often times, the first thing that comes to peoples mind is bananas but bananas are not, actually, the highest potassium food, there are several other foods that have an even more potassium. For example, cantaloupe. A cup of cantaloupe actually has more potassium in it than a whole banana. Tomatoes are another very good source of potassium, particularly, cooked tomatoes, like tomato sauce or sun dried tomatoes, they actually have more potassium as well. Dried apricots are another good source, avocados are another good source, baked potatoes actually have a very substantial amount of potassium, whether it's a baked russet potato or a baked sweet potato. Any of these particular items can be used to help increase your potassium levels. If your potassium is extremely low, your doctor may actually prescribe you a prescription strength potassium supplement and, again, this will be much higher than what you could get over the counter, and will basically have you take this for a period of time, do another round of blood tests to see if your potassium is back to normal, and if not, may increase the dosage even more. Often times your potassium will be back to normal and your doctor may slowly start to wing you off the medication, provided that you can actually maintain a diet that is very high in foods that contain a lot of potassium. So, those are the main ways of treating low levels of potassium."