Three Tasty Fridge Foods That Reduce the Risk of Heart Failure and Death
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The older you get, the more you start to worry about your health. That’s only natural: many of us have seen friends and loved ones have to take expensive medicine and purchase expensive equipment in order to stay healthy…sometimes just to stay alive! To avoid that fate (at least, for as long as you can), it’s important to eat a healthy diet.
However, your diet needs to be strategic: that is, you need to know what to eat in order to ward off particular illnesses. For example, are you interested in reducing your risk of heart failure and death? You can do just that by making three tasty foods a staple of your diet.
What are those foods, though, and just what do they do to you? Keep reading to find out!
The dangers of potassium deficiency
All of the fridge foods we’ll feature today have something in common: they are great sources of potassium. And there are many wonderful benefits of adding more potassium to your diet (more on this soon). But the chief benefit is that it helps your body avoid potassium deficiency!
What is potassium deficiency? As you might expect, this is the term for when your body isn’t getting enough potassium. Over time, this deficiency can lead to many major problems, including fatigue and muscle problems. In some cases, it can lead to your body having an irregular heartbeat or even heart failure.
Remember, if that happens, you need to contact your doctor right away!
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What causes potassium deficiency?
The most basic cause of potassium deficiency is not getting enough sodium. But the amount of potassium in your body is affected by other factors, including the local climate, how much you have exercised, and even how well your kidneys work. And you are likelier to develop this deficiency if you are dehydrated, low on magnesium, on diuretics, or have a metabolic condition.
More people get potassium deficiency each year than you might think. In fact, a recent survey revealed that a quarter of United Kingdom residents are at risk of a potassium deficiency. Even worse, one-third of teenagers are at risk! That may seem shockingly high, but keep in mind that our ancestors grew up eating very differently than we do now, and our bodies aren’t necessarily designed for the processed foods we consume on a regular basis.
Care to replace those foods with a great source of potassium? Keep reading to discover some healthy, delicious foods you may already have in the fridge!
Avocados: always good for the heart
Looking for easy ways to consume more potassium? If so, you can never go wrong with eating more fruits and veggies. If you want a tasty, heart-healthy snack that you’ll want to keep coming back to, it’s not that hard to find. As it turns out, avocados are a great source of potassium, making them a healthy way to reduce the risk of heart failure and death.
This fruit isn’t just good for your health, either: as any Millennial can attest, avocado is seriously tasty. Plus, there are many ways you can get more of it in your diet, including consuming avocado bread. However you eat avocados, though, it will be an improvement over taking potassium supplements separately. Unless you have been ordered by your doctor to do so, taking those supplements can put too much potassium in your body, which can cause its own set of health problems.
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Bananas: embrace potassium power
One way of getting enough potassium in your body is to treat it like a numbers game. For example, you might try to find the foods that have the highest amount of potassium in them; that way, you don’t have to eat as much to get all of the mineral you need. If that sounds interesting, you should know it just doesn’t get much more efficient than a banana!
For example, a single banana has 500 milligrams of potassium. Half a baked potato contains 600 milligrams, but it takes a long time to cook a potato, and some of what you might add to it (like butter and sour cream) may cut into the health benefits. But bananas require no preparation, are tasty as is, and pack plenty of potassium into a portable package.
Spinach: it’s not just good for Popeye!
You may have grown up watching the cartoon adventures of Popeye, the Sailor Man. This salty sailor always had a surefire way to get more powerful: eating more spinach, which gave him the strength to fight brutes like Bluto. This made for great cartoon adventures, but did you know that you don’t have to be Popeye in order to receive the benefits of eating spinach?
A cup of raw spinach packs 450 milligrams of potassium, making it almost as good a source of this mineral as bananas. Plus, spinach is a very versatile food that you can prepare and eat in a number of different ways. And remember, you don’t have to choose one or the other: you could always eat a banana for breakfast and spinach for dinner, maximizing your potassium intake the healthy way!