Potassium Intake Calculator: Add Up Potassium-Rich Foods

Potassium is an essential mineral and electrolyte that regulates fluid balance, muscle contractions, and nerve signals. The heart and kidneys are especially sensitive to potassium levels. Both deficiency (hypokalemia) and excess (hyperkalemia) cause dangerous cardiac arrhythmias, which is why this is one nutrient where more is not automatically better.

What this page does

It adds up the potassium in the foods that carry the most of it, so you can see how far a day of them gets you. Enter servings, and it totals them against the target for your age and sex.
If you only want the target, with the blood pressure range and the kidney disease warning, the Daily Potassium Needs Calculator gives that on its own.

Why the total is a floor, not your whole day

Unlike calcium, potassium is in almost everything: meat, bread, coffee, tomatoes, milk. No list of ten foods can catch all of it, so what this page totals is the potassium from these foods alone. Your real intake is higher. Use it to see which swaps move the number, not to prove you are short.

Potassium per serving (USDA figures, as printed in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans):

The banana’s reputation is mostly marketing. A baked potato with its skin carries more than twice as much, and half a cup of beans nearly half again.

The targets

Potassium has no Recommended Dietary Allowance. The National Academies publish an Adequate Intake instead: an observed intake assumed to be enough, rather than a figure derived from measured requirements.

Worked example:

A 35-year-old woman (target 2,600 mg) eats a banana at breakfast, half a cup of cooked spinach at lunch, 3 oz of salmon at dinner with half a baked potato, and a cup of yogurt as a snack:

• 422 + 419 + 534 + 471 + 573 = 2,419 mg from those five foods alone, already 93% of the target before the bread, coffee and everything else.

Potassium and blood pressure:

Higher potassium intake goes with lower blood pressure. For people with high blood pressure, the 2017 American College of Cardiology and American Heart Association guideline asks for 3,500 to 5,000 mg a day, preferably from food, and the DASH diet (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) used in the trials ran near 4,700 mg.

Kidney disease warning:

People with chronic kidney disease (CKD) may need to limit potassium intake. The kidneys regulate blood potassium, and impaired kidneys allow it to build up. Always consult a nephrologist or registered dietitian before raising potassium with CKD, or if you take an ACE inhibitor, an angiotensin receptor blocker or spironolactone.