Low Potassium Diet

Question
Is there such a topic as low potassium diet? My mother has been advised to use a low potassium diet. I have tried to look up the topic without success. I did find a list of foods low in potassium. I need to provide my brother and niece with this information since they are the Caregivers for my mother. From what I found there are NO meats on the low potassium platform. Is that true???

Answer
Dear Annette,

I am not sure where to direct you for a "topic" on low potassium diet, but generally this diet is required for kidney patients, so I tend to refer Questioners to the excellent National Kidney Foundation site :/www.kidney.org and then you might like to go specifically to the topic on nutrition, which also has a page specifically on potassium levels (www.kidney.org/atoz/content/potassium.cfm).

For the rest, I probably cannot give you much more information than you have already found, sourcing such very technical bio-chemical details from similar sites as you have, I guess. I can only really look at diets from a holistic perspective. In this light I can say it will depend on the illness how extremely strict you must be with such a diet. In the beginning the advice to go on a low potassium diet can make some patients neurotic, precisely because it is almost impossible to realise by simply cutting out food groups.

Meats are not known to be high in potassium, fresh vegetables and fruits are especially, and of this group only some are really to be avoided. Others you can reduce the potassium of by a method of preparation (leeching: see the page I referred you to). You must realise most foods contain some potassium (it is a salt, which is the body for all life).

It would be unwise for the rest of your health to cut out all leafy vegetables and fruits, for example, but you can limit the intake to once a week, and leech where possible, and avoid soups, sauces or juices where the quantity will be extra high.  You could make sure to eat an apple rather than a handful of raisins, or chose a vanilla pod to flavour your cake rather than banana. So it is more a (complicated) case of striking off a few high-potassium choices, and replacing the highest in the fairly high groups with the lowest options; it means being sensible and remaining in love with your food as a joyous health-bringing aspect of life. Be severe on some notes, to send that message to yourself, like, don't have any avocados and try to eliminate potatoes as a staple (or snack!) choose pineapple juice instead of orange juice etc.

If you do some homework now and design a few weeks of meal options with preferable options to what your mother might be having now it will become a new, positive (and delicious) diet for her, rather than a stingent list of no-nos. For example, a breakfast with wholewheat bread and some berries rather than granola with nuts and milk. Such an approach also tends to support the deeper work of restoring the dynamic which have become impaired and lead to the disease which now requires a special diet. That is the point of diet, after all: to give a new impulse. Modern medicine tends to think only about cutting out the "toxifying" elements.

I wish you lots of luck and support in your loving mission to help your brother and niece with your mother. Wish them all the best from me, and may they all derive much life-force from their meals.

Love, Evelyn.  

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