The Potassium-Sodium Baseline in Nutrition

In what has to be one of the clearest articles I have read on the nutrition of the acid/alkaline balance, Jack Challem, the author, makes an interesting point on the evolution of the human acid-alkaline baseline: our evolutionary diets were potassium dependent and our current diets potassium depleted. This inbalance, he says, is causing wide-spread nutritionally related diseases.

From the work of the Paleo Diet scientist Loren Cordain, Ph.D., a professor and researcher in the department of health and exercise science at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, we are told that we have evolved a biological baseline of 10:1 in regards to potassium in ratio to sodium. Over the course of modern times that balance has drastically inverted to a 3:1 ratio with sodium way out front of a fast disappearing potassium.

Since "the human genome has changed only minimally since behaviorally modern humans appeared in East Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago", according to research done by S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University in Atlanta, Cordain's statement on our evolutionary dependence on potassium could be pointing to a source of wide-spread imbalance of the acid/alkaline balance in our diet.