I don’t normally talk a lot about studies on my channel, but I do think it is very important to sometimes for you to understand what the researchers are doing and the background that comes from your doctor giving you health advice.
What happened in rural china when they replaced dietary sodium chloride with potassium chloride it was fascinating stay tuned to find out thanks so much for watching make sure you subscribe to my channel click that bell so you never miss a new recipe or a new health tip now even though i am a kidney doctor and i study salt and high blood pressure and cardiovascular
Disease for a living i am not your doctor well i’m not most of your doctors i know some of you who actually watch are my patients so thank you for watching but for the rest of you i am not your doctor so make sure you talk to your doctor before you make any changes in your diet or to your health now i don’t usually talk a lot about studies on this show but i think
It’s real important sometimes for you to understand what the researchers are doing and the background that comes into your doctor giving you health advice so this is a great study from rural china and they took people who were at high risk for cardiovascular disease the premise being that high sodium diet or high sodium chloride diet puts you at risk for things
Like heart attack and stroke and so they went to this uh place in rural china and they got people that were over 60 with high blood pressure or these were people that have already had a stroke and they followed him for five years and what they did is during that five years they took 25 of the salt that they normally take in as sodium chloride and they replaced
It as potassium chloride now that probably doesn’t mean a thing to you but switching out that sodium for that potassium is a really big deal for your health now if you didn’t watch it yet i did a taste test where i talked about some different potassium chloride salt substitutes i’ve got a couple here new salt and a morton salt substitute so this is the kind of
Thing that they’re talking about when they say they replaced the sodium chloride with the potassium chloride and they only did that for 25 percent of their salt so if you have 10 grams of sodium chloride a day they took 25 percent of that replaced it with the potassium chloride now high dietary potassium has been shown in a healthy population to have great health
Benefits so high dietary potassium can lower your risk for stroke high dietary potassium can make your blood pressure easier to control now the thing about high dietary potassium and i know what you’re all thinking out there if you have kidney disease is if you have kidney disease you have to be real careful about how much potassium you eat especially in the form
Of potassium chloride as a salt substitute because your kidneys cannot process that extra potassium so this study was mainly targeting people who do not have kidney disease now if you have kidney disease definitely want to talk to your doctor before using any kind of salt substitute because it can be very dangerous if you don’t so the results of this study were
Absolutely fantastic what they showed is that the rate of death the rate of cardiovascular disease and the rate of stroke was all less in the people who had replaced that sodium chloride with potassium chloride and because these were all people who had normal kidney function they didn’t see any episodes of high potassium level in the blood which was one of the
Concerns going into the study of course so what’s the bottom line here for an at-risk population so if you’re over 60 if you have high blood pressure if you’ve had a stroke or if you have heart disease lowering the amount of sodium chloride and increasing the amount of potassium in your diet may reduce your risk of having further events or even of dying so a
Really amazing outcome one that we are all looking for the caveat of course is that if you have kidney disease that high potassium may not be for you so again disclaimer if you have kidney disease do not try this at home without first talking to your doctor especially if you have stage four or five kidney disease or are on dialysis here’s the other great thing
About this study you don’t have to just switch your sodium chloride for potassium chloride to get these results you can make these changes at home without doing it just like that how just start lowering the amount of sodium that you eat by eating less processed foods and less restaurant foods and replacing it with higher potassium foods things like cooked greens
And potatoes and bananas and nuts so those kind of things will increase your potassium you can lower your sodium and you may be able to get the same effects as the people in these villages in china got if you have more interest in how to incorporate high potassium foods into your diet and how that affects people with kidney disease make sure you check out my book
The cooking doc’s kidney healthy cooking a modern 10-step guide to preventing and managing kidney disease you can get it on amazon the paperback or the ebook or you can go to my website thecookingdoc.co and order it right there today thanks so much for watching i’m dr blake the cooking doc make sure you check out my website thecookingdoc.co my book the cooking
Doc’s kidney healthy cooking a modern 10-step guide to preventing and managing kidney disease make sure you subscribe to my channel make sure you like this video make sure you comment what do you think about replacing sodium chloride with potassium chloride and thank you so much for watching we’ll see you next time you
Transcribed from video
What Happens If You Switch From Sodium Chloride (Salt) to Potassium Chloride? | The Cooking Doc® By The Cooking Doc
