Got Potassium? Maybe that is why you don't have glowing health!

[Dawn]

Modern agriculture is making us very ill. How many people have arthritis pain and increased blood pressure because we are starving? Instead of taking medicine, why not add potassium to your diet?

Originally From http://joevialls.altermedia.info/potassium.html [which has since been removed from the internet]

POTASSIUM DEFICIENCY SCAM KILLS AND MAIMS MILLIONS
Deliberately restricting your potassium intake makes you very ill, and thus vulnerable to hundreds of highly profitable medical "cures"
Copyright Joe Vialls, 30 January 2004

The title immediately suggests to the reader that a giant pharmaceutical atrocity has been inflicted on the poor natives of some far off third-world country, by a predictably greedy drug multinational, but this is simply not the case. By far the largest number of deaths and permanent crippling disabilities from potassium deficiency occur in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other western nations. How this horrific state of affairs came into being and was perpetuated thereafter, is a very long and frequently confusing story, meaning that we must start at the very beginning if we are to have any real chance of understanding the lethal implications.

We first need to understand what potassium is, how much our bodies need on a daily basis to stay healthy, and what happens to us when our body's critical store of potassium is inadvertently or deliberately depleted. Unlike toxic sodium [table salt], potassium is essential to our health. Potassium is present in all cells and is critical to cardiovascular and nerve function, regulating the transfer of nutrients into cells and facilitating muscle energy.

This wonder mineral also regulates water balance, assists recuperative powers, and aids rheumatic or arthritic conditions by causing acids to leave the joints, thereby easing stiffness. At the same time potassium is vital for the elimination of wastes, is a natural pain desensitizer, helps control convulsions, headaches and migraines, and promotes faster healing of cuts, bruises and other injuries. Because of its very high electrochemical activity, potassium is on the move all the time, and we need vast quantities to replenish that lost every day. When we exercise and sweat, we lose potassium through urine. When we are under extreme stress for a variety of other reasons, potassium loss can treble instantly. But as renowned nutritionist Adelle Davis points out, it is toxic sodium that causes the greatest problems. "Persons eating [sodium] salt as they wished excreted nine times more potassium than when their salt intake was limited, and human volunteers kept on diets deficient in potassium retained so much salt that they developed high blood pressure." If Mother Nature was to deprive you of potassium completely, hard scientific evidence proves you would be dead in less than three weeks. But in many ways this would be a merciful release when compared with the infinitely more painful and far slower death caused by slow potassium deprivation, the preferred method of the FDA and AMA. Proper scientists agree the daily potassium requirements of an average adult lie between 3,200 and 4,100 milligrams, but the average potassium intake of Americans through the food chain is only 1,500 to 2,100 milligrams per day, representing an overall average shortfall of 1,850 milligrams. Obviously humans can survive at these savagely depleted levels, because Americans manage to eke out about 70 years each, before this basic potassium deficiency overwhelms them and they finally die, sometimes in great pain from a number of directly related illnesses including arthritis, osteoporosis, hypertension [high blood pressure], angina, strokes and so on. It is scientifically beyond question that all would live longer and suffer less pain if they received the necessary quantity of potassium each day, which is where the American Food & Drug Administration [FDA] should do a John Wayne job, and ride gallantly to the rescue. Alas, the Food and Drug Administration has not and will not do so, because of sustained lobby pressure by the pharmaceutical multinationals. Despite having full and unrestricted access to the real scientific data providing hard proof of widespread potassium deficiency bordering on a pandemic, the FDA has deliberately avoided specifying a "Recommended Dietary Allowance" [RDA], while simultaneously passing a law restricting the potassium content of all alternative medicines to a mere 100 milligrams.

Far too many of the 'illnesses' we suffer today can be laid at the door of potassium deficiency, though hordes of pharmaceutical and medical apologists will probably reject this, claiming that medical 'research' proved long ago that simple deficiency cannot cause life-threatening conditions. Sadly the apologists will be defeated by historical fact, chronicled long before your local pharmaceutical multinational decided to use your body as a private playground for the benefit of its shareholders.

Scurvy is caused solely by Vitamin C deficiency, and is thus predictably cured quickly by large quantities of Vitamin C. There are thousands of documented cases, especially in the British Royal Navy, where sailors became known as "Limeys" because of the vast amounts of citrus fruit provided free by The Admiralty. Rickets is less well known, but is caused by a deficiency of Vitamin D, rapidly corrected by the generous application of Vitamin D and calcium. Embarrassing though this may be for modern pharmaceutical salesmen and medical doctors, these bald facts are there in the history books for all to see.

So why not admit potassium deficiency? The beginning of the end for obtaining essential minerals from fruit and vegetables happened in the middle of the 19th Century, when German chemist Baron Justus Von Liebig analyzed human and plant ash, and determined that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium [NPK] were all the minerals plants needed. He claimed that if fed synthetically to plants, farmers could force plants to grow and support healthy humans. Thus Von Liebig became the father of synthetic manure, which in turn spawned superphosphate, the mother of all deceptive fertilizers. Though NPK and superphosphate are able to create a synthetic soil environment sufficient to stimulate plant growth, the resulting fruits and vegetables are always seriously deficient in trace minerals, with some containing none at all. Baron Von Liebig watched the deficiencies his invention caused with horror, and recanted before he died, but it was all too late. By then, the big investors had moved in for a quick kill.

Running in tandem with the depletion of potassium in fruit and vegetables during the 19th Century was an even bigger problem. Until then, salt of any kind had been so highly valued on most continents, that at one point in history it was actually used as money. In Europe, Asia and Africa most of the salt moved by the camel trains over thousands of miles was sylvite, otherwise known as potassium chloride. Great chunks of sylvite were dotted along the trading routes for the beasts of burden to lick at, thereby restoring their electrolytes lost through sweating and other exertion. But when the railroads opened up America from east to west, they started carrying vast quantities of cheap salt produced in giant pans on the two coasts. Unfortunately for Americans this was sea salt, comprised of 98.8% sodium chloride, the favorite of fishes but a deadly enemy of man. And so it was that in less than seventy years, western man had his healthy potassium replaced almost entirely by unhealthy sodium.

It was not until the early 20th Century that medical 'science' started to determine what it considered were healthy 'normal' levels for blood pressure, serum potassium and so on, using data drawn from the population as a whole. The problem is that medical 'science' was by then dealing with seriously damaged human beings, who had already been subjected to the ravages of sodium for nearly fifty years. So what seemed normal to American medical 'researchers' in the early 20th Century, would have horrified the Yanomami or any other self-respecting tribe one hundred years earlier. But because American medicine got off on the wrong foot, it stayed on the wrong foot, and slowly built a giant pyramid of myths based largely on ignorance and fatally flawed biochemistry.

This is your first clue to understanding how it is that we get so ill, and then willingly swallow billions of dollars worth of useless 'patent medicines'. Remember, just to keep up with the average shortfall of 1,850 milligrams of potassium per day, you would need to swallow at least 19 pills from your local health food shop, and no ordinary person could possibly afford that in the long term.

In order to keep their medical doctors in line, both the FDA and AMA have circulated a number of truly frightening stories about potassium. Most common among them is that the potassium will 'react' with one of a wide range of synthetic pharmaceutical medicines, frequently resulting in death. This is actually true, but it is the poisonous synthetic medicine which causes the lethal cross reaction that kills you, not the natural potassium so essential to your health. Then there is the even scarier rumor that 'too much' potassium will kill you by stopping your heart from beating, as in the case of a lethal injection execution. Too much of almost anything will kill you, including simple water and air, especially if applied too quickly or by the incorrect route. When Timothy McVeigh was strapped to a gurney and put to death, the third chemical injected directly into his vein was a 'chaser' containing 50 milliliters of concentrated potassium chloride, which finally stopped his heart. If you are stupid enough to try this at home, you will die just as quickly, and in order to put this deliberate FDA and AMA scare mongering into the proper perspective, it is necessary to explain why. The normal route for potassium to enter the body is by way of the mouth, either in the form of food, or sometimes as a solution made up of 100% water soluble potassium chloride dissolved in fruit juice. As the potassium passes through the digestive tract, the cells extract what they need and any excess is then passed out of the body, partly as solid waste, but mostly through the kidneys as urine. It is a perfectly normal biochemical process that the body itself knows how to handle very well, without any outside help from medical doctors. However, if you inject the potassium directly into a vein, you bypass the body's biochemical safety processes and stop the heart. Exactly the same can be said of concentrated hydrochloric acid, always present in our stomachs in order to digest food, but incapable of harming us because of the body's sophisticated biochemical defenses. However, if you injected this same concentrated hydrochloric acid from the stomach directly into a vein, you would die even more quickly than you would from injecting potassium.

You can only be scared by a medical doctor if you allow yourself to be scared, and you will no doubt gain added confidence where potassium is concerned later in this report, when we examine the extraordinary case of the Yanomami Indians of South America. The Yanomami were fortunate enough to escape the attention of western medical 'science' for thousands of years, and still shun it now. These fascinating people receive virtually no sodium [table salt] at all, but every adult consumes around 8,500 milligrams of potassium every day. They are incredibly fit and have no history whatever of arthritis, osteoporosis, hypertension [high blood pressure], angina or stroke. We will return to the Yanomami a little later on.

Despite the best efforts of the fledgling pharmaceuticals and medical 'science' in general to belittle the problems, by the nineteen thirties it had become obvious to most Americans that something was seriously amiss with their soils, with their crops, and with their rapidly deteriorating personal health. During the 2nd Session of the 74th Congress in 1936, the United States Senate published Document #264, which really laid the problems facing American nutrition on the line.

Verbatim extracts from Document 264 are provided at the bottom of this page, but for the specific purposes of this report, here are the three most important paragraphs.

"The alarming fact is that foods [fruits, vegetables and grains] now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them."

"The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren't worth eating as food...Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack or one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives."

So sixty-eight years ago, the American Government knew full well the problems facing the people, but the stuffed-shirt medical fraternity did absolutely nothing to help. In fact, driven ever onwards by the extravagant fiscal needs of pharmaceutical shareholders, medical 'science' and its subordinate doctors stood reality on its ear, and proceeded to steadily undermine what little good health the general community had left. Learned doctors published papers on the 'potassium-sodium balance needed by all humans', when a quick field trip to almost any Indian Reservation would have reversed their absurd findings in seconds. More and more sodium found its way into every kind of food imaginable, and blood pressures started to rise sharply. By the nineteen-forties, relatively new diseases such as arthritis, hypertension and angina started to climb through the roof, to be met with a veritable shock wave of expensive 'patent medicines' to help with the new 'disease' problems.

A handful of alert doctors recognized the problem for what it really was, and started giving their patients massive doses of potassium [between 5,000 and 20,000 milligrams per day] in order to bring their blood pressures back down to normal, and to relieve problems with angina and other heart complaints. In fact these treatments were entirely successful, but the use of a basic mineral that could not be patented by the pharmaceutical companies was frowned on, and medical research grants in this field mysteriously started to dry up.

By the late sixties such research has been suppressed, as you can see from the [limited] general references provided at the bottom of this page. The pharmaceutical multinationals were by now exerting increasing pressure on the medical fraternity, providing all kinds of 'assistance' during their university training, with copious quantities of fancy-sounding scholarships and research grants. Both were vital in helping to get medical doctors to "see things the right way", meaning of course that profitable drugs were the answer to all ills. As more doctors peddled more drugs to their patients, pharmaceutical corporate profits rose sharply, allowing perks for the doctors to be extended to include 'training seminars' at luxury hotels and golf complexes, along with other varied forms of discreet bribery. By the seventies, all meaningful references to serious mineral deficiencies had been removed from the curriculum, with medical students taught that patients could obtain all the minerals they needed from a diet rich in fruit and vegetables, although their university tutors knew this was a complete lie. Deficiencies manifesting as cramps, arthritis, osteoporosis, hypertension, angina and strokes etc, became 'diseases' that could be treated by a truly dazzling array of brightly colored and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. It was all a terrible illusion of course, but the show had to go on.

As toxic sodium increasingly overwhelmed healthy potassium, the resulting potassium deficiency caused hardening of the cardio vascular system, and 'essential hypertension' [high blood pressure of 'unknown' origin] became the order of the day. Incidences of angina, stroke and heart attack increased dramatically, as did stress, with the latter feeding on the former. Because of a lack of space, this report will only cover the effects of potassium deficiency on the cardio-vascular system. Other directly related horrors such as arthritis, osteoporosis, diabetes etc. will have to wait for another day.

Modern medical 'science' has tried to explain away the critical and frequently lethal human sodium-potassium imbalance with an artfully designed theoretical model generally referred to as the 'Potassium Pump', in which the medical buzzword is 'balance'. To quote one medical article, "Potassium is pumped into the cell by active transport systems, which concomitantly pump sodium out of the cell. The preferential segregation of sodium and potassium across the cell's biological membrane is important in maintaining osmotic balance". What osmotic balance? The Yanomami and other tribes prove that ancient man had no need for toxic sodium, proving to all but a certifiable cretin that the potassium pump is an emergency one-way biochemical protective mechanism, designed to drive toxic sodium out of the cells before it can cause mayhem and premature death.

Despite the Yanomami's overall levels of sodium being incredibly low, researchers who examined more than 10,000 of these cheerful people found that there was a direct correlation between marginally increased sodium intake and increased blood pressure. "... a highly significant statistical relationship was observed between sodium excretion and systolic blood pressure for the 10,079 participants. The higher the urinary sodium excretion [and, therefore, the sodium intake], the higher the blood pressure." The reader should remember that for the Yanomami Indians, normal blood pressure averages out at 95/60 and does not increase with age. Try comparing this with the AMA western 'normal' blood pressure of 120/80, which then goes up in incremental steps as you ingest more sodium and lose more potassium while getting older. Of course, the medical apologists will claim this is because we are more civilized, have evolved, and are thus 'different', but rest assured this is pathetic rubbish. The only significant difference between the Yanomami and Americans or Australians, is that the Yanomami are stuffed full of healthy potassium, while we are stuffed full of toxic sodium.

The researchers also noted that another benefit for the Yanomami related to their lack of obesity. "Adults of industrialized populations have an increase in weight with age. The Yanomami Indians did not increase their weight with age." Short, but to the point. Somebody remind me to add "obesity" to my shopping list of potassium deficiency-related ailments. Those western ladies with a slight weight problem, should resist the temptation to pack their bags and rush off to the headwaters of the Orinoco River. Yanomami husbands are hot on protocol, and do not take kindly to the lady of the house sneaking off into the bushes for a quickie with one of the young bucks. If caught in such a situation, the wife can expect her husband to fire a sharp hunting arrow into the fleshy part of her buttocks. Not enough to kill, but certainly enough to stop her lying on her back for several weeks thereafter. Some choose to call this behavior "barbaric", while others suggest that it merely reinforces strong family values. And oh, yes, before I forget, the favorite supper dish is barbecued frog.

Of course, to prove that any of this Yanomami potassium stuff is relevant to western folk, medical 'science' demands that you must have western guinea pigs for 'controlled trials'. I am one of those guinea pigs, though the trial was controlled strictly by me without independent medical observers, which means that my testimony is suspect at the very least, and I should probably not to be believed. Quite frankly I don't give a damn about that, but the information might be of use to someone out there who either already has cardio-vascular problems, or is seriously interested in avoiding cardio-vascular problems at any time in the future.

For more than 25 years I suffered from 'essential hypertension', in other words high blood pressure that the medical fraternity cannot explain. During that period about eight different medical doctors gave me a staggering variety of 'patent medicines', none of which produced a steady reduction of blood pressure, though on two notable occasions the medicines caused 'bad reactions' which dropped my blood pressure so low and so suddenly, that my wife could barely get a reading. At no time during this 25-year period did any of the medical doctors suggest that it might be a good idea to measure my serum electrolyte levels, in order to check for potassium deficiency. As you might expect, this entire sequence put me off the medical profession in a very big way.

Towards the end of 2003 I started getting the classic signs of 'angina', which, over the next six weeks, rapidly progressed into 'unstable angina', a textbook case involving an accelerating or "crescendo" pattern of chest and back pain that lasted longer than ordinary 'angina'. This was accompanied by acute breathlessness, especially after even moderate exertion or a small carbohydrate meal.

The fact that the medical profession did not know the cause of 'angina' infuriated me, because everything on the planet is caused by something else. My basic knowledge of chemistry indicated that I might be suffering from a sodium overdose, so although in extreme pain and at times barely conscious, I managed to hook up to the Internet and do a few basic Google searches. The only sodium overdoses I could find were those caused by various synthetic drugs, so I reversed my search pattern and tried "potassium deficiency" instead. It was then that I discovered my medical 'angina' symptoms precisely matched those exhibited by a person suffering from an acute potassium deficiency. This information came as no great surprise. On the face of it, I had uncovered the underlying cause of medical 'angina', the latter credited with the sale of more than a billion dollars worth of synthetic 'patent medicines' every year. The problem was knowing what to do next.

In Australia I was limited to 100-milligram potassium pills from the health food shops, or to a product called "Slow K" available from some pharmacies. Basically Slow K is a slow-release 600-milligram chunk of potassium chloride, which allows a 'non-lethal' dose of potassium to be administered under the direct control of the pill, rather than under the control of its recipient. The problem here is that all chunks of salt are biochemically "hot', meaning that as the sugar coating wears off the outside of the pill, the chunk of undissolved salt is exposed, and can then come into direct contact with delicate internal tissues. In my casual view, this could easily cause some sort of perforation or an ulcer. Clearly what I needed was an industrial quantity of potassium in free flowing 100% water soluble form, which would allow me to first dissolve the potassium in water and fruit juice, thereby ensuring that no salt 'hot spots' could later cause problems in my digestive tract. In the end I settled for a kilogram of AR [Analytical Reagent] grade potassium chloride salt from a chemical warehouse, mercifully not yet under the direct control of the American FDA, or the Australian AMA. Cost wise this was also a plus, because the whole kilogram set me back a mere US$30.00 including taxes, which is cheap enough when you realize that my potassium chloride purchase contained approximately 620 grams [or 620,000 milligrams] of the same potassium the FDA has restricted to 100-milligrams per dose in the health food shops. You do the math. Pop down to your local health food provider and ask for a quote on 6,200 x 100-milligram potassium supplements. Be ready to write a very large check.

By this stage there was so much pain so often, that I made a personal executive decision to attempt to slowly try to absorb a minimum of 50 grams or 50,000 milligrams of potassium, representing about 1/5th of the 250 grams total that an adult male should contain within his body. Simple common sense suggested that such an acute deficiency, with the extreme symptoms I was suffering, could hardly be caused by a minor reduction in whole body potassium, and, quite frankly, I also wanted the stop the overwhelming pain before it had a chance to accelerate into a fatal stroke or heart attack. With this in mind, I dissolved 4 grams [4,000 milligrams] of potassium chloride in water and fruit juice, slowly swallowed the lot, and then kept grimly repeating this process every eight hours. After about five days [or 60,000 milligrams] most of the pain had gone, but I was still incapable of truly coherent thought. It was not until I was well past the 110,000-milligram mark that my faculties truly returned, though by then I was so exhausted I could no longer write or use the computer. Expressed in the same terms used by the FDA, in ten days I had slowly ingested 68.2 grams of dissolved potassium [68,200 milligrams], or sixty-eight times the maximum quantity permitted under American law. However, it should also be noted that this figure represents only five days of the maximum quantity administered by licensed American doctors to their hypertensive patients during the nineteen forties, before their research funding was mysteriously and abruptly withdrawn. When viewed in the latter context, my actions do not seem unreasonable.

At the end of the ten day period, all of my 'unstable angina' pain and breathlessness had vanished completely, and along with it most of the 'essential hypertension' that plagued me for more than twenty-five years. Nowadays I take a daily maintenance dose of 2,000 milligrams potassium per day [3,200 milligrams of AR grade potassium chloride salt], plus 200 milligrams of magnesium orotate to minimize losses.

Though medical doctors might rave about me illegally 'giving medical advice without a license', I am doing no such thing. In the first place potassium is a naturally-occuring mineral essential in our diets for normal development, which places it firmly in the 'nutrition' rather than 'medical' basket. Secondly there is no way that any government agency can prevent determined people from getting their hands on potassium chloride if they really wish to do so. The material is produced in bulk and used for hundreds of applications. For example, about every third oil rig drilling in the Rocky Mountains probably has about 25,000 pounds of the stuff, neatly stacked in sacks at the edge of the rig site.

There are less difficult ways of obtaining potassium, especially in America where there are a range of "No Salt" products, most of which simply replace sea salt with potassium chloride. Fruit and vegetables grown in strict organic rotation on properly maintained soil will probably contain significant quantities of potassium, though it is very difficult to check precisely. Although I have the necessary knowledge required to test for potassium in a range of different substances, I lack the laboratory equipment needed to do so consistently.

On a closing note, try not to believe the advertising garbage that keeps telling you the banana has the highest level of potassium known to man, because it is a lie. If grown side by side on suitable soils, the humble jacket potato has more than four times as much potassium as the banana, weight for weight. This might bring a wry smile to the face of many an Irishman, whose ancestors were forced to live on a 'poor' diet of potatoes in Ireland more than a century ago. The reality is that those potatoes, so very high in potassium, gave the Irish the huge strength and endurance they needed to build bridges and lay railroads half way round the world. Looking back briefly on the Yanomami Indians, it is not hard to see why.

Scroll down page for Senate quotes and further references.

Verbatim Unabridged extracts from the 74th Congress 2nd Session, Senate Document #264, 1936 :

"Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins, or upon precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"Do you know that most of us today are suffering from certain dangerous diet deficiencies which cannot be remedied until depleted soils from which our food comes are brought into proper mineral balance?"

"The alarming fact is that foods (fruits, vegetables and grains) now being raised on millions of acres of land that no longer contain enough of certain minerals are starving us - no matter how much of them we eat. No man of today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his system with the minerals he requires for perfect health because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them."

"The truth is that our foods vary enormously in value, and some of them aren't worth eating as food...Our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories or vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein or carbohydrates we consume."

"This talk about minerals is novel and quite startling. In fact, a realization of the importance of minerals in food is so new that the textbooks on nutritional dietetics contain very little about it. Nevertheless, it is something that concerns all of us, and the further we delve into it the more startling it becomes."

"You'd think, wouldn't you, that a carrot is a carrot - that one is about as good as another as far as nourishment is concerned? But it isn't; one carrot may look and taste like another and yet be lacking in the particular mineral element which our system requires and which carrots are supposed to contain."

"Laboratory test prove that the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the eggs, and even the milk and the meats of today are not what they were a few generations ago (which doubtless explains why our forefathers thrived on a selection of foods that would starve us!)"

"No man today can eat enough fruits and vegetables to supply his stomach with the mineral salts he requires for perfect health, because his stomach isn't big enough to hold them! And we are turning into big stomachs."

"No longer does a balanced and fully nourishing diet consist merely of so many calories or certain vitamins or fixed proportion of starches, proteins and carbohydrates. We know that our diets must contain in addition something like a score of minerals salts."

"It is bad news to learn from our leading authorities that 99% of the American people are deficient in these minerals, and that a marked deficiency in any one of the more important minerals actually results in disease. Any upset of the balance, any considerable lack or one or another element, however microscopic the body requirement may be, and we sicken, suffer, shorten our lives."

"We know that vitamins are complex chemical substances which are indispensable to nutrition, and that each of them is of importance for normal function of some special structure in the body. Disorder and disease result from any vitamin deficiency. It is not commonly realized, however, that vitamins control the body's appropriation of minerals, and in the absence of minerals they have no function to perform. Lacking vitamins, the system can make some use of minerals, but lacking minerals, vitamins are useless."

"Certainly our physical well-being is more directly dependent upon the minerals we take into our systems than upon calories of vitamins or upon the precise proportions of starch, protein of carbohydrates we consume." "This discovery is one of the latest and most important contributions of science to the problem of human health."

Further References
Bryant, J.M. Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. Med. 67, 557, 1948
Burnett RB Yeap BB Chatterton BE Gaffney RD 1996 Chronic fatigue syndrome: is total body potassium important? Med. J. Aust. 164; 384.
Dall JLC Paulose S & Ferguson JA 1971 Potassium intake of elderly patients in hospital. Gerontol. Clinic 13; 114
Davis, Adelle. (1965) 'Let's get well'. Unwin Paperbacks.
del Castillo, E. B., et al., Medicine 6, 471, 1945
Egeli, E.S. et al., Am. Heart J. 59, 527, 1960
Grim ce et al 1970 On the higher blood pressure of blacks: A study of sodium and potassium intake and excretion in a bi-racial community. Clinical Research 18; 593
Keith, N.M., et al., Am. Heart j. 5, 80, 85, 1943
Keith, N.M., et al., Proc. Staff Meet. Mayo Clin. 21, 385, 1946
Mancilha-Carvalho, Jairo de Jesus and Silva, Nelson Albuquerque de Souza e. The Yanomami indians in the INTERSALT study. Arq.
Bras. Cardiol., Mar. 2003, vol.80, no.3, p.295-300. ISSN 0066-782X.
Oliver WJ Cohen EL Neel JV 1975 Blood pressure, sodium intake, and sodium related hormones in the Yanomamo Indians "no salt culture". Circulation 52;146151.
Scott LV Dinan TG 1999 Small adrenal glands in chronic fatigue syndrome: a preliminary computer tomograph study psychoneuroendocrinology 24; 759-768.
Sharpey-Scafter, E. P., Brit. Heart J. 5, 80, 85, 1943
United States Senate, Document No. 264, 74th Congress 2nd Session, 1936
Weber CE 1974 Potassium in the etiology of rheumatoid arthritis and heart infarction. Journal of Applied Science

[shadowstalker]

Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to joevialls.altermedia.info

[Dawn]

Default Re: Got Potassium? Maybe that is why you don't have glowing health!

Oops! Google Chrome could not connect to joevialls.altermedia.info

Yes... that is why I noted that this page had been deleted from the web. You can no longer find the info on the web, which is why I reprinted it here.

[Carmody]

Soil additive:

AZOMITE:

http://www.azomite.com/

To answer your question about the logo, yes the company was bought and brought under the umbrella, by all appearances.

This does not lower the importance of the product regarding being what is likely the finest trace mineral mix for revitalizing soils - that is currently available, anywhere.

[Hervé]

Joe Vialls was removed from the living and his websites disappeared after publishing his research on the Sumatra "quake" and tsunami.

His summary:

If everything had gone to plan, then Indonesia, Sri Lanka and India would have been in hock to the IMF and World Bank for thirty or more years - time enough to wait for the price of oil to come down again after the lethal fiasco in Iraq. At the same time, if the Indian Government had taken the bait, the deadly Russian-Chinese-Indian-Brazilian coalition would have been dead in the water. Not a bad day's work for a single thermonuclear weapon discreetly removed from the decommissioning process.
Joe Vialls

His tsunami research can be found here: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ci..._tsunami14.htm

Sorry for the off topic, although it explains why his articles have disappeared off the internet or are hard to find.

[TigaHawk]

pffft for revitilizing soils

If the diddnt grow the sme stuff in the same field year after year after year....

Love to see a cornfield tied up in a webb of kindey beans, a field of carrots planted next to onions, basil and rosemary.

So what if you cant automate looking after it with a tractor? A walk a day thru the fields to pull out and unwanted weeds, have a bit of a snack while you're at it too!


If i keep imagining that money is going to turn into rabid Rats - and the person that has the most is more than likely to be overrun and eaten for rat dinner - it will happen right?

Take money out of the picture and people would be all over doing things the slow way - at their own pace- and the right way - first time around. I am sick to death of hearing "no we cant do that its not cost efficient"

[Mike]

i did some research into potassium a few yrs ago. was looking for solutions to my high blood pressure and various other heart issues.

like iodine, potassium is one of the most vital nutrients for your body, particularly your heart. the potassium-sodium pump in all of our cells helps to regulate metabolism, among other vitally important things. and like iodine, the efficacy of potassium has been marginalized purposefully by those who stand to lose most (pharmaceutical cartels) with a wide-spread propaganda campaign.

ideally, you should get 2500-3000mg/day of potassium(at least) and keep your potassium to sodium ratio at 2:1. initially i thought supplementation might be useful but i was wrong. the government has a 99mg max regulation on all potassium supps, due to "the effect it can have on our cardiovascular system." oh the irony! the best way to work around this is to use 'Nu-Salt' or any other potassium salt substitute, and sprinkle it in orange juice or gatorade or whatever. go slow and work your way up. if you're extremely deficient it will be quite a shock to your body to suddenly receive huge quantities.

for those of you who are thinking of death penalty injections, let me remind you that that's potassium cyanide, not to be confused with potassium gluconate or potassium chloride or whatever form of potassium you might find in a supplement.

there are many good books written on the subject, but i recommend 'The High Blood Pressure Solution'. even if your bp is in the healthy range, the book explores the multitude of reasons to intake more potassium in the diet. a must read.

[mahalall]

Thankyou for raising and highlighting the issue surrounding the poor nutritional mineral content of fruit and vegetables. This supports the view that organic and home grown are probably the better ways to improve the mineral content of plants and to a degree meat sources as well.

However without being able to access your reference list to support your view on the recommendation for potassium supplements, I would be wary about advising people to take potassium supplements especially if they have a history of kidney failure. I've attended to many cardiac arrests due to hyperkalemia and a work colleague committed suicide through a large bolus of potassium and insulin (although the potassium was administered intravenously and was therefore of a far higher concentration to that you are recommending)

Although i admire your passion on the subject and i do believe their is some validity to your debate-especially in reference to sodium. In the meantime i'll keep to the dark organic chocolate.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Chinaski (here)
the government has a 99mg max regulation on all potassium supps, due to "the effect it can have on our cardiovascular system."

My cynical and unreliable recollection is that the 99mg max is there because potassium "interfered" with some profitable pharmaceutical of the time (many years ago.) By "interfered", I mean if you took more potassium, you needed less of the drug .

In any case, other ways to supplement potassium include:

• Wholesale Nutrition's C-Salts - which are various mineral salts of ascorbate, with (nicely enough) the dominant salt being potassium.
• Make your own - get a pill making machine, some OO empty gel caps, and some bulk potassium gluconate powder. Each cap will hold about a gram of potassium gluconate, which is about 1/6-th elemental potassium. So this is not much better than store bought pills, but a little. Bulk potassium citrate might work better, as it is 36% elemental potassium.

Beware however that potassium is common in many foods (a banana has about 500 mg) and too much potassium can be toxic, even fatal. The body needs to maintain a basic sodium-potassium balance across cell boundaries. It will work very hard to maintain that balance, as life depends on it, but if you get way out of whack on either, way too much or way too little, your body can cease living.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Posted by mahalall (here)
I've attended to many cardiac arrests due to hyperkalemia

Are more cardiac arrests due to too much potassium ... or too little magnesium. I'm no expert or professional in the matter, but I'd have guessed low magnesium.

Posted by mahalall (here)
i'll keep to the dark organic chocolate.

Aha - best idea yet. I knew I was addicted to good dark chocolate for a reason.

[Mike]

yes, Paul and Mahalall are both right about being cautious, and in light of this i'd like to reiterate that replacing potassium in deficient cells SHOULD BE DONE EXTREMELY SLOWLY. i cannot emphasize that enough and should have emphasized it more in my original post.

once you become sufficiently saturated, you can begin to take higher dosages.

[Hervé]

All right, as a way of redeeming my off topic, here is an excerpt about a subject dear to Carmody:



Kervran's Proof of Biological Transmutation
In orthodox chemistry, one of the strongest dogmas is the stubborn insistence that it is impossible to create another element by chemical reaction. Most chemists also insist that all reactions occurring in living systems are chemical in nature. They believe fervently that chemistry can and must explain life itself.

In the early 1960's, a French researcher named Louis Kervran published work which flew directly in the face of the accepted chemistry dogma. Kervran reported the astounding results of his research showing that living plants were able to accomplish limited transmutation of elements. Kervran was then the Conferences Director at the University of Paris, and his first paper was published in La Revue Generale Des Sciences, July 1960.

What was so revolutionary was that, according to the prevailing wisdom of science, you can't transmute elements (permanently change the nucleus) except with enormous energy - certainly not with the microvolts and millivolts (and microwatts and milliwatts) that living systems can muster electromagnetically.

Rutherford, the British physicist who discovered the nucleus of the atom, had shown in 1919 that you can bombard elements with alpha particles and transmute them. The accepted wisdom of today is exactly the same, except that the physicists have used heavier and heavier "bullets" in their artillery approach. No one has tried a controlled approach, for the catechism is that you have to use the wham it harder! approach.

In other words, to most scientists the whole thing had to be preposterous, and Kervran had to be deluded.

Kervran published further details of his work in a book, Transmutations Biologiques, Maloine, Paris 1962. But the initial reaction of most scientists was disbelief and skepticism. Few scientists would stoop to repeating Kervran's experiments, which of course they knew could not work anyway.

Actually the effect is widespread amongst living systems. As Kervran pointed out, the ground in Brittany contained no calcium; however, every day a hen would lay a perfectly normal egg, with a perfectly normal shell containing calcium. The hens do eagerly peck mica from the soil, and mica contains potassium - a single step below calcium in the standard table of elements. It appears that the hens may transmute some of the potassium to calcium.

Further, if one tests this assumption, it is quickly shown to be true. Hens denied calcium but not potassium, stay perfectly healthy and lay perfectly normal eggs. Hens denied both potassium and calcium will be sickly and lay only soft-shelled eggs. If these sick chickens are allowed to peck only mica - which they will frantically do - everything returns to normal again.

Most orthodox scientists nevertheless remained skeptical or downright hostile.

However, a few other scientists began to repeat Kervran's experiments and

Figure 72. The Kervan effect. A biosystem can accomplish limited transmutation of elements

replicate his results. Several of these corroborating scientists were (1) Professor Hisatoki Komaki, Chief of the Laboratory of Applied Microbiology at a leading Japanese university, (2) Professor Pierre Baranger, Head of the Laboratory of Chemical Biology of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, and (3) J.E. Zundel, then head of a paper company with a chemical analysis laboratory, and later a chemical engineer of the Polytechicum School of Zurich, Switzerland.

Later work by Zundel was particularly decisive: he utilized the mass spectrometer at the Microanalysis Laboratory of the French National Scientific Research Center, and neutron activation mass analysis at the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research in Villigen to positively confirm an increase in calcium of 61% to an accuracy of 2%. Such results and instrumentation, of course, removed any doubt that the effect could be due to statistical variation. In the same experiments, the plants increased their phosphorus 29% and their sulphur 36%.

Komaki became head of a research laboratory at Matsu****a Electric Company. There he conducted research conclusively proving that microorganisms (including some bacteria and two kinds each of molds and yeast) could transmute sodium into potassium. In fact, he placed a brewer's yeast product on the market that, when applied to composts, increases their potassium content.

Extensive work in the area has been done in the Soviet Union, where results similar to Kervran's have been substantiated.

Thus all doubt (to an open-minded scientist) was removed: living systems are able to change one element into another by some unknown means, using very feeble energy.

A noted French physicist, O Costa De Beauregard, suggested a mechanism for the transmutations, using weak force interactions and advanced waves.

No one - even Kervran himself - thought of negative energy/ negative time interactions. The jury is still out on the actual mechanism, but it is absolutely clear that the transmutation does indeed occur .

The Japanese researchers, having replicated Kervran's astounding results to their complete satisfaction, recommended him to the Nobel Committee for a Nobel Prize for such epochal work. Thus Kervran became a Nobel nominee, though he was not granted the prize.

Kervran has since passed away, leaving behind his books and papers that point to a revolution in chemistry and physics - transmutation of elements at very weak energy.

Biological Transmutation Has a History
Actually biological transmutation - and transmutation of elements (alchemy) in general - has a history, of both results and suppression.

Louis Nicolas Vauquelin, a celebrated French chemist, discovered that chickens could produce more calcium in their eggshells than entered their bodies. Hence they had to be able to "create" the calcium, else their own bodies would have been completely depleted.

One of his contemporaries, however - Antoine Laurent Lavoisier - became the "father of chemistry ." Lavoisier laid down the dictum that nothing was created. So chemistry fixed upon the notion that the combinations of elements could be shifted, but the element itself could not be transformed.

Not until the discovery of radioactivity did any crack in this solid wall appear. But still, the basic ideas of chemistry said the element couldn't be transformed chemically. It could only be transformed if one blasted the daylights out of it with an atomic or particle bullet.

Today most chemists still hold that exact same opinion, unshaken.

To resume: Over a century ago, a chemist named Albrecht von Herzeele proved that germinating seeds somehow transmuted elements in the process. In 1873 von Herzeele published a book, The Origin of Inorganic Substances, where he showed research proving that plants continuously create material elements.

Even earlier, in 1822 an Englishman named William Prout had studied chicken eggs in incubation. He found that hatched chicks had more lime (calcium) in their bodies than was originally present in the egg!

Another French scientist named Henri Spindler discovered that a kind of algae called Laminaria could create iodine.

A German researcher named Vogel had planted cress seeds in a bell jar. They were fed nothing but distilled water; still, when grown they contained more sulphur than had been in the seeds originally.

Lawes and Gilbert, two British researchers, also found that plants could "extract" more elements from the soil than the soil actually contained in the first place.

Baranger performed thousands of meticulous experiments in plant transmutation of elements. He proved that the transmutations do occur. He also discovered that many things affected the germinating seed transmutation process: the time the seeds germinate, the type of light they are exposed to, the phase of the moon, etc.

None of these experimenters understood the transmutation process used by the living organism. But they proved beyond question that the process existed, and universally occurred.

[Cjay]

Posted by TigaHawk (here)
pffft for revitilizing soils

If the diddnt grow the sme stuff in the same field year after year after year....

Love to see a cornfield tied up in a webb of kindey beans, a field of carrots planted next to onions, basil and rosemary.

So what if you cant automate looking after it with a tractor? A walk a day thru the fields to pull out and unwanted weeds, have a bit of a snack while you're at it too!


If i keep imagining that money is going to turn into rabid Rats - and the person that has the most is more than likely to be overrun and eaten for rat dinner - it will happen right?

Take money out of the picture and people would be all over doing things the slow way - at their own pace- and the right way - first time around. I am sick to death of hearing "no we cant do that its not cost efficient"

I wholeheartedly concur TigaHawk. Revitalising soils is one of my passions and indeed part of my mission in life. I am confident that I can improve soil fertility on almost any farm to increase harvest quantity by at least 50% and up to a 900% increase while increasing the nutritional quality of the harvest. Give me a field of clay or beach sand or the harshest desert and I will prove it is possible to revitalise that "soil" with minimal effort and grow perfectly healthy organic food - in the first year! The problem is that most farmers are brainwashed to do things a certain way and that way degrades the soil year after year. Part of the reason they don't change is because they are convinced that it is not economically viable to make the necessary changes to farming practices. Meanwhile, the food they produce is progressively declining in nutritional value. Eventually, they destroy the soil, go broke and walk off the farm. This global problem is a source of great frustration for me but also great hope because I know it can be fixed very quickly!

[Dawn]

I love allowing my body to transmute food. Yet I am not yet a breatharian (though I am working on it), and am still caught in a paradigm in which food is needed. I believe this is, ultimately, going to change for many of us. In fact thousands of people no longer need food at all and make all their nutrition from the ingestion of light and breath at this time.

However without being able to access your reference list to support your view on the recommendation for potassium supplements, I would be wary about advising people to take potassium supplements especially if they have a history of kidney failure. I've attended to many cardiac arrests due to hyperkalemia and a work colleague committed suicide through a large bolus of potassium and insulin (although the potassium was administered intravenously and was therefore of a far higher concentration to that you are recommending)

Anyone who feeds themselves intravenously is flirting with serious danger... the body isn't made to eat that way, which is why we have a layer of protective skin all over the outside of the body. So, of course people who have been fed potassium intravenously have been poisoned!

Potassium is easily available, despite the FDA. For example, NOW (a popular supplement brand) sells both Potassium Gluconate and Potassium Chloride in pure crystalline form very inexpensively. Potassium Bicarbonate is also easy to purchase in crystalline form.

yes, Paul and Mahalall are both right about being cautious, and in light of this i'd like to reiterate that replacing potassium in deficient cells SHOULD BE DONE EXTREMELY SLOWLY. i cannot emphasize that enough and should have emphasized it more in my original post.

I have added 2 Tablespoons of potassium Gluconate crystals to my daily water jug without ill effects and have found my joints are more flexible. At first it seemed bitter, however within 24 hours my body had recognized how much it was needed and the taste actually became sweet. (Wise body!)

I also make home-made salt from Potassium Chloride and herbs for seasoning my meals... it is delicious. Historically the salt wars were over Potassium Chloride, not the (now common) Sodium Chloride.

[ThePythonicCow]

I had forgotten about this fine old thread until someone linked here today (from here.)

I'll add my latest potassium blurb here as well:

I have been adding sulfates and potassium to my drinking water, making it substantially more basic:

• Willard Water is a good source of sulfates.
• potassium bicarbonate seems especially beneficial. The following article discusses potassium bicarbonate: Diet, evolution and aging -- The pathophysiologic effects of the post-agricultural inversion of the potassium-to-sodium and base-to-chloride ratios in the human diet, by Frassetto L, Morris RC Jr, Sellmeyer DE, Todd K, Sebastian A. (pdf)

[kanishk]

This Doctor gives great importance to Potassium

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=q2vPQYP0dpI

[Ewan]

Good thread, fallen off the radar.