Vitamin C Forum

ofonorow wrote:If a banana contains 422 mg, then to get adequate potassium in the diet, we'd have to eat 10 bananas per day or the equivalent? It is hard to imagine we generally get that much potassium from the diet.

We don't, that's why we're so deficient. I saw an estimate of 1800mg/day deficiency. Assuming the RDA numbers are for amounts of elemental potassium, and not for a potassium compound, you could do the following:

1kg of chelated potassium (gluconate) from purebulk.com: $28.00+shipping
That price is double what it was a few months ago, not sure why.

Approximately 84 servings per kilo at a cost of approximately $0.33/day. That's 11,900mg of potassium gluconate to get 1800mg elemental potassium.

Naturally they have a "potassium may be toxic" warning, despite the label showing a tiny "serving size" of 435mg p-g/66mg k (2% RDA). Yeah, horribly dangerous.

Horrible tasting most likely, but efficient and not too expensive. A lot cheaper than cans of V-8.

Potassium chloride is pretty cheap, about $4.50 for 8 ounces. There's about 118 g of potassium in that amount, so that works out to about $.08 per day for 2g. The flavor in cooking (soups, stews, chili, etc) as a salt substitute is pretty good, but as a sprinkle on salt substitute is pretty bad. Another disadvantage of the low sodium V8 beside the price is getting tired of the taste. I loved it at first but now don't. Adding pepper helps.