Salts of the Earth

To many of us, minerals are the Cinderella of the supplement world. We know they’re necessary for good health, but they tend to take a backseat to the alphabet of substances that make up most multivitamin supplements.

In most multi formulas, minerals are in there too, but most of us focus on calcium, iron and sometimes magnesium. We largely ignore what the other minerals do for us and what happens when we don’t have enough of any one of them.

Take potassium. Half of all Americans and nearly three-quarters of those over 60 are diagnosed with high blood pressure and given hypertension drugs. Certain forms of diuretics, such as loop diuretics (furosemide or bumetanide) or thiazide diuretics (hydrochlorathiazide or chlorthalidone) cause the kidneys to excrete sodium and water into the urine, but in the process they flush out potassium as well.

Patients taking these drugs are often told to eat bananas or take potassium supplements to avoid hypokalemia (low blood potassium), which can cause cramps, fatigue, muscle weakness and potentially dangerous changes in heart rhythms.

The evidence shows that potassium has an extraordinary property: It lowers blood pressure. In our latest Special Report, The Potassium Paradox, we demonstrate that patients taken off drugs and given potassium supplements are astonished to see their blood pressure returning to normal within a few weeks.

In fact, the true cause of many cases of hypertension may be mostly a deficiency in potassium, and when a diuretic is prescribed to lower blood pressure, it may even rise.

Besides being given a drug, patients with high blood pressure are told to severely limit their intake of salt (sodium chloride). What doctors don’t understand is how sodium works in the body. Sodium and potassium work in tandem to help muscles contract, nerves to communicate and the heart to keep beating normally.

When patients are put on salt-restrictive diets and diuretics, the delicate and all-important balance between sodium and potassium is destroyed.

This is not a recent revelation. A century ago, physicians began experimenting with potassium on patients with hypertension, and more recently, some doctors have discovered that supplementation can lower blood pressure, on average, by eight or nine points—as much as any drug or angiotension receptor blocker can.

When studying Paleolithic diets, scientists have discovered that our ancestors consumed as much as 15 times more potassium than sodium in their daily diet.

The US Food and Drug Administration has set a Daily Value of 4,700 mg a day, but most people fall well short of that intake. The root of the problem is the amount of sodium we consume, largely through processed foods, which are laden with salt, and the paltry amount of potassium we take in from green and root vegetables, its most abundant sources.

The other problem is that modern soil and the vegetables grown in it are often highly deficient in the primary minerals—calcium, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, magnesium and iron—and secondary minerals such as silica.

Add to that the fact that many multivitamin and mineral preparations aren’t in a digestible form or contain too little to be effective, and it’s small wonder that even health-minded people are walking around with deficiencies.

This is not an invitation for people to gorge on potassium supplements. Too much potassium, particularly in patients with kidney disease, can itself be dangerous. This is particularly true when it’s delivered via a slow-release capsule, which can cause damage to the gastrointestinal system—including perforation of the intestine.

Nevertheless, medical science and scientific studies are slowly waking up to the near miraculous benefits of potassium, not simply for lowering blood pressure but also for preventing strokes, cardiovascular events and even death.

If you’re worried about getting enough potassium or getting the balance right, there’s another 200-year-old method of taking your minerals. In 1838, a German doctor named Wilhelm Schüssler concluded that most human illness was caused by deficiencies in one or more of the 12 essential minerals of the body. So essential were these minerals, in his view, that he called them “tissue salts.”

Schüssler created homeopathic doses of the 12 major minerals, which made them easy to digest and absorb. Practitioners who use them claim that they work much faster than traditional minerals, and their own case studies bear this out.

The problem is, there’s little standard scientific research into tissue salts. The medical profession refuses to study them because the preparation method—diluting the substance until nothing much appears to remain other than its “energy”—defies their understanding of how the body works.

That scientific model is decidedly out of date. The latest evidence shows that, far from just a collection of chemical reactions and electrical signals, the body is a complex energy system.

Small wonder that a tiny pill, created by the principle of capturing the energetic footprint of a substance, can have such an enormous and long-lasting effect.

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