POTASSIUM OVERDOSE?

“A question popped up the other day about potassium intake. With some folks relying heavily on bananas for the bulk of calories, i.e. eating 10+ a day, is there any risk of potassium overdose? I did a little bit of research on the web, but could come up with nothing definitive.”

ANSWER: There's really no point to fear any potassium “overdose” even when eating a fair number of bananas. Research done on wild monkeys showed that they eat over 6500 milligrams of potassium per day, which would take you over 15 bananas to eat as much potassium as they do. Plus wild monkeys are smaller in size than we are, so we could eat even more bananas and not even reach the potassium intake a monkey has on a daily basis.

The last article published in my e-zine showed that early humans consumed 40 times as much potassium as sodium. It makes sense because we lose potassium a lot faster than sodium.

Even standard nutritionists agree that most people do not eat enough potassium and that ideally they should consume close to 5000 milligrams per day, and even more for active people.