One of the best ways to fight and prevent nightly leg cramps is to be sure your body is getting enough potassium throughout the day. Potassium is an important mineral that helps lower your blood pressure, regulates heart and muscle functions and helps keep fluid, adrenal and kidney functions in check. Having too little potassium in your diet could lead to a general feeling of weakness and muscle cramping problems. People who regularly have low potassium problems are said to suffer from hypokalemia. Getting frequent leg cramps at night is one possible sign of hypokalemia.

Fortunately, there are lots of foods that have a fair amount of potassium in them. Some people who suffer from leg cramps prefer to keep their diet the same and just add potassium supplements to their diet, but with the large variety of fruits, vegetables and other food that contains potassium, it’s relatively easy to make sure you have enough throughout the day. Be careful, though: you can have too much potassium in your diet (hyperkalemia) if you aren’t careful. It’s generally recommended that an adult’s potassium intake not exceed 2000 milligrams (mg) per day.

Consult the table below for some of the more common high potassium foods. There are obviously also an infinite amount of prepared and prepacked foods that are high in potassium, but we focussed on most of the fresh and raw ingredients that contain potassium. For your convenience the list has been arranged from highest to lowest amouns of potassium.

Most foods that you cook will retain more potassium if you cook them with dry heat as opposed to boiling or submerging in hot water. So a baked potato will definitely have more potassium in it than a similarly sized potato that’s been boiled. Lots of different fruits also have some level of potassium in them, so fruits like oranges, peaches, strawberries and raspberries all have between 150mg to 250mg of potassium in them, so a summer fruit salad might give you plenty of potassium for the day.

Even a small increase in your dietary potassium levels can make a world of difference in preventing and stopping regular night time leg cramps and charley horses.