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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure where the banana = potassium association was established, but it's odd considering that there are many fruits, like strawberries, contain more potassium than bananas per calorie.

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I suspect that it is about availability. Strawberries are only available for a few months each year. Bananas are easy to find on the go. Of course eating greens kale/broccoli is cheaper, more nutritious and more traditional so maybe the whole banana = potassium thing is all just some elaborate United Fruit Company marketing scam.

*Edit: following up on this, it does look like "banana are a good source of potassium" is indeed a united fruit company marketing myth.

Cite 1: https://episodictable.com/potassium/ Cite 2: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.31822031040892&vi...

Honey I shrunk the kids.

I think about this movie every time I eat a banana and I can confirm this is where I learned this

yes. I actually haven't heard this outside of that movie except in reference to that movie.

A medium banana has 422 mg of K. A strawberry has 18 mg of K. So you'd need to eat like 20+ strawberries to get the same amount of K.

Today you have to eat 8 oranges to get the same amount of Vitamin A as your great grandpa did.[0] Plant nutrition often has a lot more to do with the soil plants are grown on than the plants themselves. This is especially true with mineral content since plants don't produce minerals

[0] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-an...

Since No one ever talks about the elephant in the room that is the Human Population Growth problem, let's just bury our heads in the sand and pretend we aren't on the cusp of a massive catastrophic failure of limited resources.

Eh humans have managed to grow large amount of foods on the same soil for many years and be very productive. There's a myth that modern agriculture has made us produce more. The reality is that it's just made us need less labor. Agriculture, even intensive agriculture, isn't new. What's new is our obsession with monocultures and the empire of destruction needed to uphold that: vast amounts of pesticides, sterilized soils, etc.

Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi can hold 50x more water. Over 90% of plants make mycorrhizal associations and studies comparing plants that have made these associations with those grown in sterilized soils have shown mycorrhizae improves resistance to drought, frost, soil pathogens, etc and grow larger and produce more fruit. I haven't seen the nutritional content analyzed but I'd be surprised if there isn't a big difference there as well

There's a fundamental difference between, for example, the agriculture that fueled the aztec empire and the agriculture that fueled the West's "Green Revolution", China's "Great Leap Forward", Stolypin (as well as Soviet) agrarian reforms, etc.

It's easy to forget that European peasants were basically bouncing from one massive famine to the next until the Andean people gave them the potato. Possibly the single crop most responsible for ending the state of constant famines.

I think the limited resources are caused much more so by our own arrogance than by any fundamental carrying capacity of the environments we inhabit

That's why I shared the number in terms of potassium per calorie and not potassium per fruit.

You posed a question about why bananas are the “go to” potassium fruit compared to strawberries. Eating a single banana is way easier than eating 23 strawberries.

The best pro for strawberries is rather that are available grown in greenhouses where the n_p=19 can be controlled as otherwise they are both are the top of pesticide contamination and use.

Strawberries are "famously calorie free", so it just seems to make a lopsided comparison in the other direction.

Most people don't eat per calorie. They eat to fulfillment which is some combination of volume & weight.

If you like the potassium per calorie of strawberry, check out spinach (~4.76 mg potassium per calorie for strawberries vs ~23 mg per calorie for spinach, plus spinach is loaded with vitamin k and a bunch of other great stuff like magnesium).

It is a bit odd. Considering you can get 800mg of potassium from a single glass of pomegranate juice.

Nowadays everything has large doses of potassium in it due to modern farming practices. They use almost exclusively chemical fertilizer containing potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen.

Strawberries are too sweet.

Is the price point per calorie the same? How about storage/transportation? When I could go pick fresh organic strawberries in the field I loved them. Where I am now strawberries are expensive (slightly) flavored expensive cardboard. Bananas are the same both places. They seem like a pretty efficient source, consumed and available world wide with a much longer shelf life. Traveling overseas dried banana chips were one of the cheapest snack foods available everywhere to everyone. Dried strawberries not so much.

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