 If you take any plant, burn it to ash, throw the ash in a pot of water, stir it around, skim it off, and let it evaporate. You'll be left with a white residue at the bottom known as pot ash, used since the dawn of history for everything from making soap, glass, fertilizers, and bleach. It was not until 1807, though, when a new element was discovered in the so-called vegetable alkali in pot ash, so they called it potashium, potassium, true story, which are bring up only to emphasize the most concentrated source in our diet, plants. Every cell in our body requires the element potassium to function. For much of the last 3 million years or so, we ate so many plants that we got 10,000 milligrams of potassium in our daily diet. Today we'd be lucky to get 3,000, less than 2% of Americans, even get the recommended minimum adequate intake of 4,700 a day. To get even the adequate intake, the average American would have to eat like 5 more bananas worth a day. 98% of Americans eat potassium deficient diets, primarily because they don't eat enough plants.