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By Matthew Rees

Food and Health Fact #163: Drowning in sodium; starved of potassium

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“There remains no single more effective public health action related to nutrition than the reduction of sodium in the diet.”

Scott Gottlieb, MD, delivered that message while Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration in 2018. It’s difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the sodium problem: the most recent federal data showed an estimated 99.4 percent of American adults were consuming more sodium every day than what the American Heart Association recommends. (While the data is more than a decade old, obesity has only increased since then, suggesting that there’s been no meaningful reduction in sodium consumption.)

With excessive sodium consumption contributing to hypertension (high blood pressure), it’s easy to understand why U.S. health indicators are so poor. As the CDC points out, 47 percent of adults in the United States have hypertension or are taking medication for it. And in 2019, nearly 517,000 deaths in the United States had hypertension as a primary or contributing factor.

And it’s not just a U.S. problem: high sodium consumption is the leading cause of death throughout the world, according to the authoritative Global Burden of Disease study.

The best way to reduce sodium consumption? Avoid restaurant food and processed food. Together, they account for 71 percent of the sodium Americans consume – with restaurant fare a hidden threat, given that there’s rarely nutrition information available for individual meal items. (When buying packaged food, a general rule of thumb is to look for products where the number of milligrams of sodium per serving is lower than the number of calories.)

Magnifying the U.S. dietary challenge is that 98 percent of the population under-consumes a mineral that helps reduce blood pressure: potassium. Foods high in potassium? Cooked vegetables such as beet greens, lima beans, Swiss chard, baked potatoes, and yams (see a complete list here). All of them of have more than 900 mgs of potassium in one serving, while the supposed potassium superfood – the banana – has just 451.

Fun fact: potassium and vitamin K are not, as commonly believed, the same thing. The confusion is attributed to potassium’s symbol on the periodic table: K