Potassium and the Things We Want

I have seen a person with low potassium level makes him impossible to stand up and move around. And I don't want to watch another human being get a heart attack for excessive potassium in his blood. Balance is always a wisdom many of us don't want to hear about.

ONE of the recommended nutrients for stroke prevention that need to be increased in diet is potassium. It is an electrolyte that is very important in the human body.

Potassium helps regulate the balance between acid and base chemicals in the body fluids, necessary for the building of muscles (thus, for normal body growth, and in relation to stroke, it is essential for the normal electrical activity of the heart.

And being a factor in electrolyte balance inside the body, its level in blood is very critical. Having too much (hyperkalemia) or too little (hypokalemia) potassium can have very serious consequences to your health.

The good thing is, so many foods around us contain potassium. These are... [READ MORE]

This article appears in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 18 April 2012.

Comments

Deadly X-Gene Mutants

A RECENT study on macrophages (i.e. defensive cells in our body that engulf threatening substances inside our body) introduced me to a lethal, genetic disease that targets the male population. This disease is called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), named after the French neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne, who described it in 1861. While it has an incidence of one in 3,500 newborn males, health experts consider this as the most common lethal disease of childhood around the world. Mutation in the male (X) chromosome [dystrophin gene, locus Xp21] causes a rapid degeneration of the muscles, leading into an eventual loss of walking ability and then death. While females do not exhibit symptoms, they can be carriers of these defective genes, especially if the father had this condition or the mother is also a carrier. Symptoms usually appear before age five; at times visible in early infancy. These symptoms involve... ( Read more .) This article appears in Sun-Star Ce...

Joy, Temperance and Repose

“I RECKON being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh (1903). The term “antioxidant” was originally used in the 18th century to refer to a chemical that prevents the consumption of oxygen in laboratory experiments. However, in the late 19th and early 20th century, extensive study exploded... ( Read more ) This article appeared in SunStar Cebu newspaper on 02 June 2010.

Breakthroughs Today

Search This Blog