The modern medical and food industry has demonized salt as the thing that is going to destroy your kidneys and raise your blood pressure as well as other health issues. But the reality is we absolutely need sodium as part of our diet to keep us healthy and strong, especially for those who are physically active. In this episode, Dr. Beth Bagley and Dr. Frederick Schurger reveal the importance of electrolytes for your health and how potassium and sodium intake help your body. Understanding how to add electrolytes to your day may be the missing part of your health paradigm to improve your health. It may actually be you’re not getting enough potassium in your diet for proper muscle health. Tune in to this conversation and appreciate the value of adding electrolytes to your body.
—
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Electrolytes For Your Health Part 1 – Sodium And Potassium
We’re glad to be back for another episode. In this episode, we’re going to talk about electrolytes and some family stuff. For those of you who are old enough to remember the movie Idiocracy, and if you haven’t watched it, it holds up.
It’s coming true.
It might have happened faster than we thought, but electrolytes, as the joke goes are what they put on everything because for whatever reason Powerade, Gatorade or something like that decided to continue advertising they put electrolytes on everything, including their crops. For some reason, they couldn’t figure out why their crops would not grow. If you’ve ever heard the term, “Salt the Earth,” because a little bit of salt’s not bad for crops. A lot of salt is bad for crops. Some of these minerals are good. In certain quantities, it will kill stuff off.
A little salt is not bad for crops, but a lot of salt is bad. Some of these minerals are good, but in certain quantities, they will kill stuff. Click To Tweet
I thought flashed. Something that’s also will kill plants is a very high dose of vinegar. instead of having Roundup, which is very toxic and awful in your garage, or shed, you can buy at the hardware store 20% vinegar solution. It doesn’t smell good when you spray it. It smells very much like vinegar. Two days later, all of those plants in the cracks are dead.
I will have to see about getting a higher dose of vinegar. In any case, we’re going to talk about electrolytes because it’s a popular thing. You’re seeing things like the LMNT and other products out there on the market. I hope that this is a cost savings. Dr. Bagley has spent the high dollars and got her LMNT.
I got this one for free.
Honestly, I like the product. I’m not going to say it’s a bad product. It’s a great product
It’s quick.
It’s on the go.
It’s tasty.
You can take it with you. The mint chocolate, I’ve got one left. In fact, I might turn it into a hot chocolate tonight. Apparently, it works well in hot water. Why are electrolytes important? It’s because your body needs these minerals. The main electrolytes are going to be some sodium, potassium and certainly magnesium and zinc will fall in there to lesser degrees. Your big three are going to be your sodium, potassium and magnesium.
Does calcium come in as an electrolyte in your opinion?
I don’t think so. I mean, yes.
It does. There’s calcium channels and calcium channel blockers and all sorts of stuff. You don’t see it in electrolytes.
You don’t need it in electrolytes because you’re going to get it in other sources of food. Calcium will show up in other places. You don’t turn over your calcium nearly as fast as you’re going to be turning over your sodium and potassium on a daily basis because you also have a giant bank of calcium that is your skeletal system. if you think about it, we are a big old bank of calcium we can draw from when we need it. We don’t need a lot in the bloodstream it’s very tightly controlled. It’s a strict electrolyte. It has some functions that are similar, but the big ones are going to be your sodium and your potassium. A lot of people aren’t feeling good about this. I had a patient. She’s taking a couple of small potassium supplements and she’s loving her avocados. Her energy and brain, especially when her brain gets into this sort of dark and depressed place, she goes for an avocado.
That’s high in potassium. Everybody will say bananas. That’s not so true.
It is, but the problem with bananas is it’s high in sugar. It’s either an avocado or a guacamole, which is technically a fruit salad.
I like it. The problem is when you go for guac, typically people are going for tortilla chips, and that’s not such a good choice.
The problem when you go for guacamole is when you choose tortilla chips. That's not a good choice. Click To TweetBe careful with your chips. I started figuring out that my potassium levels were in the tank when I was craving guacamole. I was in a bad emotional place. I made a bunch of guacamole. I ate it almost immediately. I felt so much better. I’m like, “What’s in this that makes me feel much better?” I realized it was the potassium.
There’s always love in guacamole.
Especially the guacamole that I make. That’s Alton Brown’s recipe. You can go find that on the Food Network Channel. That’s a different story. I had already started going into the keto carnivore, probably more keto, at that point in time, where I was having a hard time maintaining my electrolyte balance internally. When you start going on one of these elimination diets, like keto, carnivore or even vegan diets to a lesser degree because it’s in the vegetables that they’re supposed to be eating. I say that because many vegans don’t eat vegetables because Oreos are vegetarian. Oreos are technically vegan and apparently can now bring your cholesterol down. We’re not going there.
Oreos are good for us. That’s great. I’m going to go pick me some up.
A serving size is one whole box or sleeve. Potassium is probably the one that we need even more because we are salting our food already. We’re going to talk a little bit about why sodium is important and why it’s important for heart health in a second. I want to hit on potassium because most people aren’t getting enough potassium in their diet. A patient comes down from Chicago. She’s telling me about the supplement she’s taking.
Most of the supplements in pill form is only going to be about 99 milligrams. The reason being is dry potassium chloride when it hits your stomach will burn a hole through your stomach. 99 milligrams is not too bad. Anything over that, you’re going to have a problem. What I have found to be the best ratio is that I like a 1:2 of sodium to potassium. Some sea salt to a potassium chloride. I’ve shown this in the past. This is the new salt that I have. You don’t have to get new salt that happens to be available in almost every grocery store. I will take a 2:1 ratio, of 2.5 teaspoons of sodium chloride to 1/2 teaspoon of potassium chloride, and I will put it in a water bottle.
Do you have the new salt in front of you? What are the ingredients of new salt?
The new salt is potassium chloride. That’s it.
What I wanted to point out is I’ve got a different one that I don’t recommend, but I bought it accidentally called Morton Salt Substitute. I don’t recommend it because potassium chloride is the number one in there, but then you’ve got uric acid, mono-calcium phosphate, and silicon dioxide. I probably keep it, but I’ve heard good things about fumaric acid.
Fumaric acid is a good binder and that’s probably why it’s in there. It’ll bind to other junk through your system, but you don’t need all the other stuff because quite honestly, the Redmond’s Real Salt sometimes clumps. They’re small clumps. They’ll break apart immediately. I’ve not had potassium chloride ever clump up on me. It stays pretty thin.
The other place that I have bought it is through bulk supplements on Amazon. It’s pure potassium chloride. I like to make a big batch of electrolytes.
I get mine from bulk supplements as well for that.
I put it in a shaker and I shake it into nice stuff. We do the same thing.
I’ve got a little bottle. I’ll use a little bit of a light half tablespoon into a bottle of water like this. This is probably 24 or 25 ounces, and I don’t notice it. At a teaspoon, you won’t notice it. At a half tablespoon, it comes back and forth. A half tablespoon is a three-half teaspoon. That will give you 1.5 grams of elemental potassium. You need five a day if you’re active and you’re working out. This is where it gets tricky because if you buy it in a capsule, it’s only 99 milligrams. In order to get that, you would have to take fifteen of those. Nobody is taking fifteen of those. That’s too much work.
Do you feel like most people then are potassium deficient?
Absolutely. This is why I am militant about making sure you take your electrolytes on a regular basis because once you start adding potassium, a lot of things start getting better. Why are sodium and potassium, the two things that I don’t live without? I have it near me at all times. If I’m traveling, I have it handy. Sodium chloride is the salt water in your blood. Potassium chloride is the saltwater in your cells. If you’re dehydrated, the question is are you dehydrated in your blood or in your cells? Both of those are bad things. We want to make sure both are fully hydrated so that when you do things, when you want to be active, you can do things.
Once you start adding potassium, a lot of things start getting better. Click To TweetIn my mind, potassium is one of the best things you can take. If you want to go take it, I went in for my InBody test to see what my body composition was. I think I was drinking my mix. Every time I drink my mix, I see a better muscular volume versus fat volume. I’m like, “I’m doing something right here.” That is where I would start down that rabbit hole. I’m going to go down through this one page here. It helps the body regulate fluids and nerve signals regulate muscle contractions. It functions as an electrolyte inside your body.
When we’re taking this as a powder into water, it turns into an ion. If it’s dry, it cannot ionize properly in your body. You can take more faster by putting in water. The sodium or the potassium and the chloride have this basically ionic form. Instead of being connected together, they’re magnetically connected. They disconnect that magnetic.
You can get it into your body better. If I was to dump this element into my mouth right now, it wouldn’t go very well. It honestly isn’t a healthy way to take electrolytes.
This part here is fluid balance. I’ve seen the number of between 60% to 80% water, but 40% of that water is inside your cells. The potassium is driving that into your cells. That’s your intracellular fluid. We can measure extracellular fluid very well. That’s all our blood and our spinal fluid. We cannot measure the intracellular fluid as well. We want to make sure we are giving that the ideal osmolality. That’s a big fancy word to say that we have all the right conditions for the cell to work properly.
We talk a lot about chiropractic balancing the nervous system. What we’re talking about in this episode is balancing the fluids in your body. Inside and outside have different osmology.
We’re looking to balance this out.
It needs to be balanced. If you remember from Science class, when you’re a kid, they put this semipermeable barrier between two things. The water will even out depending on how much salt is on one side and how much is on the other side. You might push water to one side. Our cells are these semi-permeable membranes. That is the essence of how these electrolytes work in fluid in your body.
A lot of times people will take things or take medications that can change that because it might push things out of their urine. Caffeine is one of the things that we often see with that. People drink caffeine and neither Dr. Sugar or anti-caffeine, we both like caffeine. if you drink caffeine, it does make you pee more. It will push electrolytes out. It’s something that you have to consider.
When we talk about things like coffee, some teas are diuretics. They are going to run and flush your system out. There are a lot of medications that are diuretics. The question becomes, “When do we have enough of the electrolytes and how can you tell that you have enough electrolytes in your system?” Quite honestly, I would recommend you make up a quick batch of this this is a 2:1 ratio of Redmond’s Real Salt and potassium chloride.
You can put some magnesium powder in there too.
I wouldn’t, and I’m going to get to that here in a second because I’ve tried that ended badly.
Was it magnesium chloride?
It was not.
That’ll end badly.
You start mixing this up and you can start saying, “That’s refreshing.” In fact, I have recommended this happens to be my Trader Joe’s bottle of apple cider vinegar. A splash of this in your water bottle with electrolytes is a very refreshing drink. This happens to be Bragg in the actual bottle. I picked this up down by your office a couple of years ago because I wanted a small bottle in the office.
I’ve gotten away from Bragg for the apple cider vinegar and I use Fairchild’s now. If you read about it, you’ll realize why you get a better quality product. It’s higher in acidity.
Bragg has changed ownership recently.
Fairchild is good. You can buy it on Amazon.
There are pieces of mudder at the bottom of this that don’t look like a normal mudder.
It’s gone bad.
No, vinegar never goes bad.
I don’t know. I think it can.
We had a bottle of a name-brand of ketchup. It was their brand of apple cider vinegar. For whatever reason we didn’t use it. It just sat there on the counter. It was not in a place that got a lot of sun. It was a clear bottle. Nothing too fancy. What was interesting is we didn’t touch it for a long time, then I looked at it and I realized, “Wasn’t that brown before?” All the brown pigments had disappeared. They had broken itself down and it was just white vinegar. I suspect it might’ve been white vinegar, to begin with. If you can make good ketchup, don’t necessarily think you can make other things that are good too.
Potassium is important for the nervous system. We are chiropractors. We are trying optimize and benefit. We’re trying to get your nervous system working the way it’s supposed to so that everything can work better. Potassium is a huge one. I was going to make the comment about how you know when you’ve had enough. You’ll know. I say this because if you taste it and you’re like, “That’s a lot of salt,” even though you’ve been putting in the same amount every time you know that you have hit your body’s limit switch to clean fresh water at that point in time until you’re like, “I am thirsty for thing again.” Honestly, that is your best method to say, “Do I need more? Do I need less?” You can balance it back and forth that way. Muscle and heart contractions. That’s what you want. what you want to be jacked in hand.
People will talk a lot about muscle cramping. At nighttime, if you start keto or carnivore, cramping is very common.
Even working out.
Cramping absolutely can be a sign of probably not enough potassium, but also salt. Salt has been demonized for years. Eating table salt with iodine in it, I’m not a huge fan. it’s not the best salt. I tend to go with the Himalayan.
It has some iodine in it.
It’s not heavily processed. It’s not white. We know white is bad, but if someone is having cramps at night, this is a good rabbit hole to go down and figure out what are you doing. Typically, you’re not having enough of this stuff. I’m going to be honest, hitting up a Gatorade, Powerade or Pedialyte is not the right route. First of all, most of that is disgusting. The amounts of sugar. If it is sweet and zero sugar, then you’re eating artificial colors and sweeteners. Finding elements is mostly not artificial. Some of their flavors might have some artificialness, at least Stevia flavored. You can just put it in water and honestly, it’s okay.
It’s real simple. Getting back to the cramping, the two ways to think about cramping, and it’s very well possible that I’m going to have these backward because sometimes they sit backward in my brain. But when you are cramping at rest potassium, when you are cramping in activity, magnesium. I think that’s right. If it’s wrong, the point of it is you need more potassium and magnesium either way. You need both.
Element has 1,000 milligrams of sodium in one packet, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium. it’s magnesium malate.
There’s a new one that came out. I can’t remember the name brand that Robert Sykes on the Keto Savage Channel reviewed that was 900, 300 and 100 of sodium, potassium and magnesium. The point is to get some of these into your system on a regular basis because these are things you need to consume because quite honestly, you don’t have good quality in the food supply and the stuff that was in the vegetables that should be in the vegetables isn’t getting there if you’re eating vegetables at all. I’m going to run through these potassiums because I want to switch over to a couple of things.
We’ll go up a little bit which may help reduce blood pressure. Many people have been told they have high blood pressure because they eat too much salt. I’d like to tell you, it’s not because you’re eating too much salt, it’s because you’re eating too much processed food. Processed food is high in salt, but that’s not the reason you have that high blood pressure.
This is where anything that’s overly processed is going to be a problem in general. Why did Mrs. Dash become very popular? They were able to put a potassium chloride with low sodium together and that became more popular. There are some benefits to blood pressure, probably because you’re not getting enough potassium in the first place and maybe protective of strokes. There are, according to the healthline, some osteoporosis benefits. It’ll help as far as building better bones and mineral health. If you’re having, the question becomes, “You have too much salt,” that’s why you have kidney stones. No. You don’t have a proper balance of salt and potassium.
You’re not probably drinking enough water on a daily basis too. You have to be able to dilute your urine. If unless you’ve been taking some supplements, your urine should be a light yellow color, not dark in the toilet. If it is dark in the toilet, go drink some water right now.
About 5,000 milligrams, which is 5 grams of potassium, it seems to be optimal. If you’re active, that’s going to go up because you’re going to sweat stuff faster. If you are on keto, carnivore or any one of the restrictive diets where you’re eliminating certain things out of your diet, you will need to supplement with it because otherwise your body will not hold onto it because you have reduced your glucogenic load. As you hold or consume more carbohydrates, the carbohydrates will help you maintain that sodium potassium level. As you get rid of that, then you’re going to need to add in and supplement outside of that.
I’m going to add to this list that you’re showing up because I know beef has potassium in it. A 6-ounce ribeye filet has roughly 438 milligrams of potassium. You can get it from meat too.
When people say, “Meat is protein,” and most of our vitamins because they stopped looking at them and they haven’t broken down all the stuff that’s in meat. Over-the-counter, 99 milligrams is likely because many studies have found high doses of potassium from supplements. This is a dry powder, may damage the gut and even lead to death by heart arrhythmia.
You need to have it mixed with water and in a solution.
When you do it in a solution, it is much easier on your system. It does not cause any of these problems. Less than 2% of Americans meet the US debt recommendations for potassium. This doesn’t surprise me in the least.
That surprises me. Looking back to our ancestors. Cavemen or whatever you want to talk about. Where were they getting their potassium?
You’re spot on. They were getting it in the meat. They don’t have avocado toast.
Why? Why didn’t they just Uber Eats some?
The baked sweet potato that we eat that I could have my wife cook up for me before I come home, the tuber, if you go to Africa, to some of the tribes, the Hadza, they have something that is akin to a sweet potato except it is just all fiber. It is like root all the way through it. You can barely chew on the thing and then you end up spitting it out because you will never digest that fiber. It probably does not have 475 milligrams of potassium in it.
Maybe that’s why they live to the age of 25.
They live to 80 as long as they don’t fall out of a tree trying to fall out of a bail bob tree.
I’m talking about the cavemen. We don’t know. One of the reasons I think they were able to get more nutrients is our ancestors, the ground had potassium and magnesium in it. When they ate the foods that they harvested, it was naturally in the foods that our farm system has decimated. I’m glad that we have a farm system. I’m not yelling at farmers. They’re not doing anything wrong, but we don’t have the nutrients in the soil anymore.
All of this stuff and minerals are bound up by pesticides like glyphosate and Roundup that prevent us from getting into our food. In any case, that’s it. Anything else we should cover on potassium?
In other episodes, we’ve talked about the importance of magnesium which you can take in supplement form. It’s not going to burn a hole in your stomach. There are ways that are, although I do enjoy the element, I think it’s easy. It’s an on-the-go type of thing. If there are more cost-effective ways to get it, like the new salt or by the bulk supplement of the potassium chloride. Mix it with water. Don’t just put it in your mouth.
If you did 2 water bottles with a half tablespoon of that 2:1 mix, that will get you 3 grams of potassium plus whatever you’re going to eat in a day, you will feel better. You are like, “I didn’t realize this was a thing.”
2:1 you’re saying, the 2 would be the sodium, a Himalayan salt or something like that.
Some people flip it. Some people will do 2 potassium and 1 sodium. I think you need more sodium.
That’s what element does.
That’s what most of the people are doing. I said, “I’ve seen it flipped. If you want to do a 1:1 ratio because you know you’re getting a bunch of salt in other places, you can do that. You can play around with it to figure out what you need to do. You can buy the element. I think it’s a fantastic product. Redmond’s Real Light has something. There are several products out there that exist if you need something on the go. If you can buy it in bulk and do it at home, you’re going to save a ton of money because a box of LMNT is probably going to run you $30. Maybe you’re going to get 30 to 40 sticks out of that depending upon how they package it. They have to package it as opposed to that bag of potassium chloride is $25.”
It was that much. It’s lasted me quite a while. I don’t mix it all at once.
I used to have it on auto-ship from Amazon. I had to take it off auto-ship because I had two extra bags and that was on a 4 or 5-month auto-ship. I wasn’t going through it as fast. Let’s talk about salt. For those of you who are reading at home, there is a U-shaped distribution and I’ve got a couple of different graphs of this, this was one that I found that was at least pretty to start with, where if you have too little salt, your disease level goes up. If you have too much salt, your disease level goes up. We are hitting right around a 5-gram per day ideal salt intake. We could talk about how what I was recommending for a salt intake is a little bit higher.
You can gauge that based on how salty is your drink. If your drink is too salty, move to straight water and if you’re drinking straight water and it feels empty, add a little bit of salt. I’ve got another one that’s better here. Between 3 to 5 grams a day of sodium is ideal for most people. This is a sedentary thing. China is much higher but they also use monosodium glutamate a lot over there. we’re a little bit on the low side because we got freaked out by sodium intake. Global average seems to be around four the problem is you start going further to the left of this graft. You start having more and more health risks overall. This is a major electrolyte. This is out of a CrossFit study here. This one was interesting. This is a 2016 paper that they were looking at and this was for CrossFit athletes.
This was 133,000 individuals. They were looking at people with and without hypertension. What they found in the hypertensive group, if your salt level got too low in all groups below about that 4,000-milligram group, this is a more recent study than that other chart was showing, the ideal level is 3 to 6 grams a day. When you are in the overall and when you look at everybody and when you look at the hypertensive group, you are having a situation where you don’t want to push it too high. When you have people who aren’t hypertensive, we were talking about hypertension being a potassium issue potentially as well as a junk food issue.
When you have people who don’t have hypertension, look at this. This is an interesting graph where the people, the problem, the hazard ratio when you start seeing other problems from having too much salt in the hypertensive group goes away in the mean group over here. They saw people were taking up to 12 grams of potassium a day but they were also getting rid of it as fast as they were using it. it was turnover that was more important in these cases here.
When you start thinking about things like, “What is my activity level? A quiet day here in the office, no workout for me. I’ve had 2 of these with extra salt, maybe 3. I’m running around, I’m active but I’m probably not as active as I will be tomorrow when I’ve got a major workout ahead of me. I’m going to kick my butt to see how much I could push. I do my workout facet. I’m going to need extra electrolytes to push myself through my workout right off the bat. I’m not going to have a problem if I’m approaching consuming 12 grams of salt tomorrow. In fact, I’ve seen some of these charts where it is suggesting up to 15 grams a day is still not a problem if you’re utilizing all of that electrolyte and you’re getting rid of it because you’re staying hydrated.” That’s the short of it.
The short of it is most people don’t need 15 grams of salt but it’s not causing the epidemic of hypertension like they’ve been talking about.
We have health lines that talk about what’s going on in salt and how much food there is. It is heart-healthy or heart failure. You need to eat a lot of salt to get to that point.
You can poison yourself on anything. You could poison yourself on salt. exactly. It would take quite a bit.
Most people consume one to two teaspoons a day. That’s not going to be a problem. Maybe some links to stomach cancer. For how much of these studies have been based upon poor salt quality? Is it salted meats? Is it pickled vegetables? Is it some of the canning stuff that we’ve been doing forever but we’ve changed the product that we now have something different going on there? They’re not certain. We definitely know that too little salt is a major problem for hypertension, low blood pressure and dehydration. My wife has a lot of problems staying where she needs to be for salt. If she’s a little underneath for her sodium levels, she needs a transfusion of salt, which is odd but she feels great right afterward. Here’s the worst part. Two loaves of salt elevate your cholesterol and triglycerides.
They’ve been telling us to reduce our salt for years and now all of a sudden everyone needs to go on statin drugs to reduce their cholesterol. Maybe you need to eat some healthy salt.
People have been telling us to reduce our salt for years, and now everyone needs to go on statin drugs to reduce their cholesterol. Maybe you just need to eat some healthy salt. Click To TweetI’m not a fan of Morton’s white processed. It is clear as can be. The problem ends up being lacking the minerals that would’ve normally buffered it. All of these salts can move us into a more acidic ratio. Whereas if it has the mineral content associated with it keeps it at a very more even level. We’re staying at that roughly 7 pH, which is very similar to water.
That reminds me of fruit juice when people drink Welch’s grape juice or something, inundated with that huge amount of sugar where grapes are still high in sugar but they’re not necessarily bad for you. You can only eat a handful of grapes and you’re full, but you could drink a whole bucket of Welch’s grape juice. You’re giving these kids all of that sugar, but you’ve taken out what helps your body mitigate that sugar burst. That’s the fiber, nutrients, and all the good stuff.
It was already packaged perfectly.
We have to squeeze it and take all the pulp out. It does taste great. Soda and neither of those are good for you. There was a big study that came out and everyone was like, “Duh?” It was, “Juice makes kids fat.” I was like, “That happens.” Everybody on the post that was underneath it was like, “We know that.” I wonder how much the NAH or whatever government grant paid for that study.
I’m going to hit on a couple of others that may or may not fall and why I don’t put magnesium in that mix.
I want to know that.
You can add zinc especially for men might be considered an electrolyte. I would add that separately. I would not add that in straight water. You could add some magnesium to the water. The reason I don’t add it to my mix is it does weird. Something happens. Maybe it was my choice of magnesium or the chelate that I chose when I mixed it with the salt and the potassium chloride that it ended up binding weirdly and changing the entire mix.
There’s a chemical reaction that I suspect is happening in a dry situation, which does me no good it makes the mix undesirable. You got to be able to drink this stuff and say, “I need that. That tastes good and that helps me through my day.” If you can’t do that, you’re going to not use it, best pitch it and start over. That’s why I would use magnesium separate from that mix and maybe why they use a much smaller dose. I was using a higher dose. I was having problems with the mix breaking down. That was why I’ve opted not to put that in.
We do have magnesium in this mix and it’s never caused that. It may be because it’s such a lower dose.
The last thing I want to hit on is that I have gone down a rabbit hole since the ice day that we had. I had gone down the boron rabbit hole because I was like, “We’re going to talk about electrolytes. The electrolyte of our body is boron.” Readers, I’m going to save that for a whole episode or at least a good half of the episode. This is the short stack of papers that I have. I’ve got about 5 or 6 articles here. I’ve got a couple of others that I’ve saved that are only 200 or 300 pages long going into Boron. We’ll talk about that. I’m excited about that one and we’ll share about that one next time. That’s a good place to wrap up the electrolytes. Let’s talk about family stuff. You had some ideas. I had an idea about it and I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say about it.
I don’t even know if we’ll have time to talk about family stuff because I have so much to say.
You go ahead and had some ideas that you wanted to touch on.
Family dynamics, one of the issues that I hear a lot in my office and I have personal opinions about is narcissistic personality disorder or a narcissist in your life. I don’t know if I attract people who are more like me and have had experiences with narcissists, but I honestly think this is a whole episode. I think in the next 1 or 2, people are going to have to read because I have much to say about it. I could go for 45 minutes on this.
Why are electrolytes important to the upper cervical doc? We want to get your nervous system working. Ideally. Let’s put your head on straight. I had a patient come in and she’s like, “I’m doing better,” but she was holding her adjustment. If I said, “We’re going to take care of your neck and I’m not going to take care of whatever’s going on in your shoulder,” it is a short changing her appointment if I don’t say, “What else is going on?” She didn’t need electrolytes, but she did need some stretches and some rehab that she could do especially since she’s got a couple of weeks before she’s going to be able to get back in here. She’s taking care of family out of state here.
“Do this every day. In a month, you won’t even know that that was a problem.” It’s a matter of finding what are the other things that are going on in your life and your health that we have to fix again. I like to look at the big things that will have a huge impact. Getting your head on straight, huge impact, electrolytes, potassium. If you do nothing else off this episode and take a bunch of potassium, you’re going to do better.
Get in the water though. Don’t just put it in your mouth.
Do not be the bro who decides that they’re going to freebase a scoop of free workout directly into their mouth. I’m like, “I don’t get this. You have a shaker bottle.”
You’ll burn a hole in your gut. Let’s not do that. It is safe to take in water. Do that and don’t do it the other way. Talk to your doctor about any of the things that we talked about today because we’re not your doctors unless we are, but then still talk to us because everyone’s different and we can’t put every person’s reading into one basket. In general, as you pointed out, 2% of the US population is getting enough potassium. My guess is I’m not either, even though I do take it.
2% of the US population is getting enough potassium. Click To TweetFive grams is what you need. I’ve seen 4,700 milligrams. I’m like, “Five grams. Be simple. Round it up to an easy number.”
The element here is only 200 milligrams. That’s not even touching it.
The other thing that I’m going to point out is many of these numbers are RDAs. They’re the Recommended Daily Allowance. Do not get scurvy. The RDA for vitamin C is so you do not get scurvy. The RDA for the longest time of vitamin D was so you did not get rickets now. Scurvy and rickets are mostly taken care of. There’s a lot of stuff that has been fortified that we get these vitamins in what they call cereals. I call it crap. RDA is enough that you don’t get the disease.
To keep you from being super sick.
It is not enough to be optimal. What we do by correcting the atlas and the upper neck is we benefit the nervous system to work optimally.
There was a cool thing, that I was talking to a patient about he’s thinking about retirement. We’re getting closer to retirement. You’re tucking money away, investing it and doing all these things that one day you can be retired. The problem is a lot of people are spending all their time thinking about investing in money and their finances, but they’re not investing in their health. Now you turn 68 or 70 years old and your health is deteriorating that you can’t even enjoy all of that money and things that you sucked away for retirement.
Invest in your health as much as you would invest in your retirement. If not, more because sometimes you can’t get it back once it’s gone so far.
This was the family thing that came to me earlier when I sent this, and we will wrap on this. My cousin was telling me at my uncle’s funeral that he had sold his business and he was visiting his family. He’s got three kids. One in Toledo. One in Youngstown. He lives in the Cleveland area and then a third down in Florida. He says, “I’m 60. My health isn’t great.” He has this big old walking stick to help him get around. He’s looking at his older siblings. Their health isn’t great. He’s enjoying his time with his family. I think that you got to make that choice and say, “I’m going to do something different than what everybody else has done before me.” We are off upper cervical, especially the Blair Upper cervical is something different.
Dr. Bagley, where are they going to find you so that they can get something different?
Something different is in the west area of St. Louis County. We’re at PrecisionChiropracticSTL.com.
I am at KeystoneChiroSPI.com in Springfield, Illinois and all the socials. Make sure you like, subscribe, leave a comment and tell us what you think here.
If you have an idea of what you want to know, we will go over questions too.
We’re going to talk about family and Boron very soon. It’s going to be awesome. Thank you so much.
We’ll see you next time. Remember, 5 grams of potassium per day.
Get it.
Important Links
Recent Comments