Edit: i confused numbers. Google says a medium banana has 422mg but the recommended amount is anywhere between 2000mg and 4700mg
In: 0
It really comes down to the death issue. In the US, a supplement can only contain 100 mg of potassium because it can cause heart arrhythmia and heart attack among other issues. Without blood work, people do not usually know their potassium is high. This is an issue because medications from pain killers to blood pressure meds (not all) can raise blood potassium levels.
You need ten of those 420 mg bananas to get your daily recommended potassium, and your body isn’t going to absorb it all and certainly not in a short time. You can get prescriptions for higher doses of potassium, those tend to be extended release (maybe all are) to minimize risks of a large amount of potassium in a short time.
There is an example of a man who OD’ed on potassium by drinking large amounts of coconut water. When I realized how much potassium coconut water has, I googled it out of curiosity. What many don’t realize is that salt substitutes are typically (maybe always) potassium. They can be dangerous.
You can regulate potassium levels in supplements, you can’t regulate the levels in a banana.
My potassium drops sometimes and you can’t even get supplements here. I drink a lot of oj and eat leafy greens everyday or else I can’t even walk and end up in the hospital. Too much of it is really bad, but too little is also terrible and can cause organ failure. I just went thru this a couple weeks ago and ended up in a coma for 5 days. My multi vitamins have 0 potassium for whatever reason, but I can tell when I getting low and just eating usually fixes it for a while
There are much stronger prescription strength potassium supplements out there though. They go in increments of 20 mEq (780 mg). Either tablets or liquid. At one point I was up to 100 mEq (3900 mg) of liquid daily.
Banana has 420 mg not 4,200 mg. Supplements usually about 100 mg potassium. Prescription strength is about 750 mg. Too much potassium, especially if you have kidney function decrease can be heart deadly.
A banana has only about a 10th of what you wrote, 450mg of potassium each. That also seems to be roughly the content of one supplement pill. So the answer is: they are not that low.
read this elsewhere, but potassium apparently can have disasterous effects on your heart if you absorb too much, too quickly.
a banana has it locked up in a bunch of other things, so your body slowly absorbs it as it digests.
A quick search popped that banana has 358mg approximately and found a strong supplement that has 595 mg so not really sure what u are talking about and some medical websites says u should consume around 3.000mg per day of potassium.
Latest Answers