Potassium: Food Sources & Daily Intake

Table of Contents

1. How to Read These Tables
2. Recommended Intakes & Upper Limits
3. Bioavailability & Absorption
4. Cooking & Storage
5. Vegetarian & Vegan Sources
6. Who Needs to Pay Attention
7. Key Research Papers
8. Connections
9. Featured Videos

How to Read These Tables

• It is not just bananas. A banana is a fine snack, but it is mid-pack for potassium. A cup of beet greens, a baked potato with its skin, a cup of white beans or a serving of acorn squash each carries roughly two to three times as much. Variety beats relying on any one food.
• %DV vs your Adequate Intake (AI). The %DV column compares a serving against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Daily Value of 4,700 mg — a single high benchmark used on labels. Your personal target is the Adequate Intake in the table below (3,400 mg for adult men, 2,600 mg for women), so a food can be potassium-rich even when its %DV looks modest.
• Per 100 g vs per serving. Per-100 g lets you compare foods fairly; the serving size shown beside each food is what you actually eat. Most people fall short of the Adequate Intake, so the goal is to stack several moderate sources across the day rather than chase one big number.

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Recommended Intakes & Upper Limits

Your personal target depends on age, sex and pregnancy. The Daily Value used for the %DV column above is a single label figure; the table below is the age-specific guidance.

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Bioavailability & Absorption

Potassium from whole foods is very well absorbed — on the order of 85–90% and the body is excellent at fine-tuning its own levels: healthy kidneys excrete whatever is surplus, which is why there is no Upper Intake Level for food. There is a meaningful difference between food potassium and supplemental potassium salts. The potassium woven into beans, greens and fruit comes packaged with fiber, magnesium and organic acids (which the body turns into bicarbonate, buffering acid load), and it raises blood potassium gently. Concentrated supplement doses, by contrast, hit the bloodstream faster, and under FDA rules (21 CFR 201.306) coated potassium tablets supplying 100 mg or more of potassium carry prescription labelling and a warning about small-bowel injury (narrowing, ulcers, blockage, bleeding and perforation).

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Cooking & Storage

Potassium is water-soluble, so the single biggest avoidable loss is boiling: the mineral leaches out into the cooking water and gets poured down the drain — a pot of boiled potatoes or greens can shed a large share of its potassium that way. Baking, roasting, steaming or microwaving keep more of it, as does cooking potatoes and sweet potatoes in their skins; when food is boiled, using the cooking liquid in a soup or sauce keeps the potassium that leached into it. (People who need to limit potassium for kidney reasons sometimes use boiling deliberately, for exactly this reason — see below.)

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Vegetarian & Vegan Sources

This is one of the easiest nutrients for plant-based eaters — in fact the richest sources are almost all plants. Beans and lentils, leafy greens, potatoes and sweet potatoes, winter squash, avocado, tomatoes and dried fruit are potassium powerhouses, and a varied whole-food vegan or vegetarian diet typically delivers more potassium than a standard omnivorous one. There is no animal-source gap to plan around; the only caution is the same for everyone — favor whole foods over heavily processed ones, which lose potassium and add sodium.

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Who Needs to Pay Attention

For most people the problem is too little, not too much: the large majority of adults fall short of the Adequate Intake, largely because diets lean heavy on processed food (high sodium, low potassium) and light on vegetables, beans and fruit. Raising potassium toward the Adequate Intake is one of the best-supported dietary moves for lowering blood pressure and easing the strain of a high-salt diet. The important exception runs the other way: people with chronic kidney disease, reduced kidney function, or on certain medicines (potassium-sparing diuretics, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, angiotensin receptor blockers) can build up dangerously high blood potassium, which strains the heart. In kidney disease, potassium intake often has to be LIMITED rather than raised, because blood potassium can climb to levels that strain the heart — the general advice to eat more potassium does not apply. In people with normal kidney function, overload from food is not a realistic risk.

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Key Research Papers

1. NIH Office of Dietary Supplements — Potassium Fact Sheet (AI by life stage; no UL)
2. Linus Pauling Institute — Potassium Micronutrient Information Center
3. PubMed — potassium intake and blood pressure (effect on hypertension and stroke)Search PubMed
4. Ma Y, He FJ, Sun Q, Yuan C, Kieneker LM, Curhan GC, MacGregor GA, Bakker SJL, Campbell NRC, Wang M, Rimm EB, Manson JE, Willett WC, Hofman A, Gansevoort RT, Cook NR, Hu FB. 24-Hour Urinary Sodium and Potassium Excretion and Cardiovascular Risk. N Engl J Med. 2022;386(3):252-263. — PubMed PMID: 34767706

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Connections

• All Minerals
• The Sodium–Potassium Pump — interactive animation
• Potassium (Main Page)
• Potassium Benefits
• Potassium History
• Magnesium
• Sodium & Potassium Balance
• Calcium
• Cardiology & Blood Pressure

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Featured Videos

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