I love potassium. I think it’s one of the most unheralded and overlooked minerals, especially for treating high blood pressure.
I’ve seen a potassium supplement lower blood pressure in just a couple of days. I’ve also seen it relieve muscle weakness and cramps, settle a heart arrythmia, reverse back pain and sciatica, and even prevent kidney stones.
That’s why I recommend it to just about everyone.
But a new study suggests you might want to be careful when taking certain potassium supplements.
Here’s what you need to know about this study and whether you should take potassium supplements for high blood pressure or any other health problem….
The Distinction Is Worth Making: Hills Are Not Mountains
The title of the study is “Be Careful with Potassium Supplements! Problems Found.” It sounds like there’s a problem with all potassium supplements. But that’s misleading. Let me explain.
The study comes from ConsumerLab.com, a highly respected independent lab that tests all sorts of supplements and natural products. The researchers are not “anti-supplement.” In fact, they offer their top picks as part of their conclusion.
The researchers in this study wanted to test the quality of popular potassium supplements. The researchers focused on three tests:
- Did the product contain the amount of potassium listed on the label?
- Did the product contain excess heavy metals (lead, cadmium, arsenic)?
- Did the product disintegrate properly?
Here’s What They Found
The good news is that none of the tested products contained excess heavy metals. The shows that the quality of supplements across the board continues to go up. But that’s not to say that there weren’t problems.
However, they found problems with just two products. If you reread the title of their report, it sounds like ALL potassium supplements have problems. And that you should be careful with ALL potassium supplements. The anti-supplement media will pick up on that. It unnecessarily puts potassium in a bad light.
What’s more, the problems they found are not significant. Here’s what they found:
One of the products didn’t disintegrate properly. According to ConsumerLab.com, “Nature’s Way Krebs Magnesium Potassium Complex would not fully break apart within the allotted 30 minutes of disintegration testing.”
This suggests that the ingredients in this product are less available for absorption. However, the study did not answer whether this product is effective or not. It just questioned whether it would be absorbed or not. I’ll show you why this is important in a moment.
The other product that had a problem seemed to have misleading dosage information. ConsumerLab.com said, “BulkSupplements.com Potassium Chloride powder had incorrect ‘Suggested Use’ information on its label that could cause you to take two-and-a-half times as much potassium as expected from the label.”
The researchers go on to say that the label indicates that taking 1/10th of a teaspoon is 200 mg of potassium. But the researchers found that a full teaspoon of the powder weighs 5,200 mg. “So 1/10th of a teaspoon would provide 520 mg of potassium chloride, not 200 mg.”
But that’s not 2.5 times the recommended dosage. So why would ConsumerLab.com say it is?
Well, it’s a bit complicated. But the researchers are correct. Here’s how it works:
Potassium chloride is only 52% potassium. So if you take 1/10th of a teaspoon of potassium chloride, you’re getting about 270 mg of potassium. The label’s “Supplement Facts” say you’re getting 105 mg. That means you’re actually getting 2.57 times as much as the label says you are.
While the product appears to be mislabeled, how big of a problem is it? In most cases, this isn’t going to cause any problems. For most people, 200-300 mg daily is a good maintenance dose. Yes, you can take too much potassium, so this discrepancy is definitely worth pointing out. And the company needs to get their label correct. But there’s nothing wrong with the potassium in the bottle.
How to Know Which Products to Buy
Fortunately, all of the other products ConsumerLab.com evaluated all passed their quality tests. But here are their top picks:
Potassium Pills: (1) Member’s Mark Potassium and (2) Swanson Potassium Citrate
Potassium Powders: NOW Potassium Chloride Powder
Potassium With Magnesium: Vitacost Potassium & Magnesium
ConsumerLab.com makes its top picks largely based on price. Once a product passes the quality tests, the authors of the study don’t make any further distinctions in effectiveness. But you can.
Go a Step Further
When you’re looking for supplements that have only one or two primary ingredients, there are a lot of good brands on the market. And they’re available at every grocery store, health food store, and online. So how can you know how good they are?
It’s quite simple: Read the reviews. Don’t just go by the number of stars a product gets. Actually read the reviews.
Thousands, sometimes millions of people have used most of the top brands. Many of them will write reviews based on the size of the bottle, price, quantity of pills in the bottle, how fast they got the product, etc. Ignore those reviews.
Here’s what to look for: A few people will take the time to explain how the product helped them. Find their reviews. These reviews quickly tell you how effective the product is in a real-use setting. And when you see a product working time and time again for people across various walks of life, you know the product is effective. But don’t stop there.
Make It Personal
Go a little deeper. Find testimonials that show how that product helped an issue that you have. Once you find those, then you have a pretty good idea that the product will work for you too. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s the best way to determine how a product will work for your particular challenge.
For instance, if you suffer from leg cramps, reading the reviews of a few products will quickly show you whether a particular product can help or not. If you don’t find any reviews on that particular problem, move on to the next product.
By the way, the Nature’s Way Krebs Magnesium Potassium Complex has some good reviews for leg cramps. That indicates that it does get absorbed. So despite the study suggesting it might not digest well, it still appears to work.
What About High Blood Pressure?
There was nothing in this study that suggests you should avoid potassium. This is particularly true if you have high blood pressure. High blood pressure is a common symptom of a potassium deficiency. If that’s the case, then you NEED to take potassium to solve the problem.
A friend of mine has high blood pressure and wanted to take a magnesium/potassium product. We looked online and quickly found multiple reviews like this one: “This has had a very positive effect on my blood pressure, it works and its effective….”
He bought the product and had an almost identical experience with it.
If you find numerous products with great reviews, then feel free to buy the cheapest one. You’ll get a great product at a low price.