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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

No I mean Potassium. Very few people eat foods rich in Potassium and certainly very few people come close to the 4.7 grams RDA. Excess Potassium is excreted by the kidneys assuming one does not have stage 4 renal failure. Potassium is extremely hard to measure in the serum because the body always tries to keep the levels high enough but the cellular levels can be deficient even when serum levels appear fine. Chronic low potassium intake can lead to idiopathic hypertension. I learned this the hard way.

If a person is consuming the RDA and having arrhythmia I would suggest they see a doctor and require extended lab work and multiple EKG's done to find out what is going on. There could be a more serious issue that needs to be addressed sooner than later. One could even get their own consumer grade 6-lead EKG to get prolonged measurements that the doctors office will not have time for.

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As I mentioned in a sibling comment, 68% of US people are Mg deficient, 3% are K deficient. And considering how many are hypertensive, K supplementation, which is already tricky, needs an even bigger caveat, as many hypertensive medications are potassium sparing, thus supplementation should _not_ be done without medical supervision. I agree that it's tricky to test, and the science around potassium metabolism with HTN medication is confusing and contradicting: you can find studies for the same medication that say it's potassium sparing and another that says that hypokalemia is a common side effect.

You can have vegetables containing potassium, sure, but it's a bit of a stretch to say that potassium deficiency is widespread, in general and supplementation of it is discouraged.

> 68% of US people are Mg deficient, 3% are K deficient

My comment said that "only 3% of people in the U.S. consume adequate levels of potassium in their diet according to the most recent NHANES survey", which means that 97% of U.S. people (100% - 3%) have diets that are deficient in potassium (K).

> And considering how many are hypertensive

Excess sodium and insufficient potassium in the diet contribute to hypertension, not the other way around.[1][2] In contrast to potassium, 89% of U.S. adults and 90% of U.S. children exceeded maximum recommended sodium intake levels in the 2009–2012 NHANES survey.[3] With almost everyone in the U.S. consuming too much sodium and too little potassium, the high prevalence of hypertension (29% of U.S. adults as of 2011–2012) is not surprising![3]

[1] http://cardiacos.net/wp-content/uploads/ArticulosMedicos/200... (PDF)

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4224208/

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6452a1.htm

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