Hard to keep up with your regular exercise complex? Feel out of power? Perhaps your body is short in potassium. This substance is an important dietary mineral as well as a key electrolyte in our body. Potassium is of high importance for normal brain, nerve, as well as muscle function. While it is often hard to detect apparent symptoms of low potassium levels in the body (hypokalemia), some symptoms include muscle spasms and pain, decreased muscle power, lethargy, constipation, decreased tendon reflexes, and fluid retention.
You can suspect yourself having hypokalemia if you can not make through regular long cardio sessions, or can not do as many reps as you usually do, or even if you feel weaker and more fatigue. Furthermore, in some profound cases people can actually experience muscle pain.
If not treated, low potassium level can cause kidney damage and even trigger life-threatening paralysis, or bring lethal outcomes. Usually, poor diet is the major reason behind hypokalemia. Some other causes of low potassium levels include large consumption of laxatives and diuretics, dehydration, eating disorders, severe and/or chronic vomiting and diarrhea.
Make sure you do not fall behind in providing your body with sufficient amounts of this nutrient. You need to eat a lot of veggies and fruits if you want to reach the daily requirement of potassium (4,700 mg per day). The potassium-rich product list includes whole baked potato (146g), tomato paste (1/4 cup), canned white beans (1/2 cup), baked sweet potato (146 g), cooked beet greens (1/2 cup). It is recommended to include those products in your daily diet.
You can also enjoy other potassium supplements such as spinach, fruit juice (carrot, orange, prune), yoghurt, fish (cod, halibut, tuna), legumes (soybeans, lentils, lima beans), fruits (peaches, melons, apricots). Banana is a typical potassium-snack as well.
