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My dad is also on diuretics due to his congestive heart failure. He is on a “monster” potassium pill every day. We also have him on magnesium & Dr. Zelenko’s prophylactic protocol.

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Chris Kresser did an interview with Robb Wolf recently - here are some parts of the transcript you might be interested in:

Chris: And so the Linus Pauling Institute has a good article on their site where they quantify nutrient inadequacies. We talked about how that’s a better measure for most people because we’re interested in optimal health and longevity, not just not dying from nutrient deficiency. So I’ll give you some stats from there. 94% of people don’t get enough Vitamin D, so that’s not that surprise… Oh, I forgot about potassium. So 100% don’t get enough potassium.

That’s a pretty shocker, huh? I mean, in a way it is, in a way it isn’t, but our potassium intake in ancestral cultures was sometimes as high as 10 milligrams a day or… 10 grams, excuse me. Now, it’s below a gram for some people, so it’s like dramatically less. And of course, sodium intake has gone up. And I’m not a sodium-aphobe. I think a lot of people are unnecessarily scared of salt. And a lot of that early research on salt was…

Of salt. And a lot of that early research on salt was bogus, but the potassium sodium ratio is still important. And if you get way more sodium than potassium, that’s not going to work out well. And that is true for a lot of people. Next is vitamin D. That’s 94% don’t get enough. 92% don’t get enough choline. I think magnesium is probably in between 90 and 100%. Don’t get enough. I’ll come back to that because it’s a special case. 89% don’t get enough vitamin E. 67% don’t get enough vitamin K. 52% don’t get enough magnesium according to this. I think that’s wrong. And I’m going to explain why in a second. Selenium, it’s below that. It’s one of the few nutrients that the majority of Americans are getting enough of according to the research.

But another big one is body weight. Makes sense. The higher your weight is, the more of a nutrient that you’re going to need to support all of the metabolic processes. The RDA for magnesium was last published in 1997, and at that time the average body weight was 133 pounds for an adult woman and 166 pounds for an adult male. Well, in 2021 last year, a group of researchers were like, Wait a sec, weights are a lot higher now. Maybe we should go back and look at the RDA for magnesium and update it to reflect the increased average body weight in the US population. They did that and they recalculated the RDA according to the current average weights of male and female adults, which are, again, in 1997 it was 133 pounds for adult women. Today, it’s 169 pounds average for an adult female. There’s been a 30 plus pound increase in average body weight for adult women during that period. And for men, it was 166 pounds in 1997, and now the average weight is 196 pounds.

That’s a whole nother conversation. The RDA back in 1997 for women was 320 milligrams. And for men it was 420. When they updated the RDA based on these new body weights for women, it went from 320 to as high as 530 milligrams per day. And for men it went from 420 to as high as 650. That’s a massive increase in the amount of magnesium that we now understand is required for optimal health. And if we look at the average intake for US adults today is 340 milligrams for men and 255 milligrams for women. This means that the average American is now consuming between 200 and 300 milligrams per day less magnesium than they need according to these updated values. That’s not just true for magnesium. That’s true for a lot of other nutrients across the board, like selenium, et cetera.

Link: https://robbwolf.com/2022/09/09/all-things-nutrient-density-with-chris-kresser-salty-talk-044-thrr/

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Being very low carb/Keto, I need a lot of electrolytes. I drink about a quart of electrolytes daily - I make up my own. I also add 1/8 tsp salt to my first cup of coffee and 1/8 tsp potassium to my second cup. I salt my food to taste.