Goodness, I hear you!
Having been low carb for decades, steadily working downwards through carb intake to my present carnivore, I too have experienced mineral problems.
Tracking my potassium shows that even with supplementation I usually only get about one third of the RDA - which I am (like you) trying to resolve.
Tracking my magnesium, I fall woefully short and ended up with horrible insomnia as a symptom - which magnesium oil dealt with superbly. Very happy to use that. I don’t think the mag tablets were being absorbed.
I also usually fall very short on copper and manganese, or so says cronometer.
IMHO there are two widespread attitudes to this that are short sighted and potentially harmful:
- It is OK. This is how we are supposed to eat, so don’t worry.
Er… no. Man evolved eating wild, not farmed meats and greenery. Modern farming leaches nutrients, boosts carb content, and adds all sorts of chemical fertilisers and pollutants - all of which affect nutrient content and our bodies capacity to absorb and thrive on those nutrients.
- It is OK. Eating carnivore/keto/paleo means that our nutrient requirements are different from on SAD, so I can just eat what I like and bury my head in the sand.
Ha! Well yeah. You can. I did. But this is just a generic romantic pipe dream that may work for some, even many. But not me. I discovered I was getting all sorts of deficiency signals, cramps, insomnia, lethargy, aches… heck, it turned out that even when supplementing I had to be very selective about quality of supplement, or they did sweet FA.
I expect if I rewound time around 15-20,000 years, I would thrive on hunter gatherer auroch, bison, mammoth, ptarmigan, marrow, bone broth, bitter herbs, mosses and great glorious slabs of delicious fat. The same is not so easy to achieve with today’s foods.
My concern is that people are just storing up problems for themselves in future decades after years of slow malnutrition come home to roost. As has happened for me.
Even with supplementation, my magnesium levels got so low that I have used magnesium oil every night for months, but the symptoms return if I miss a single day. So I am a long way from restocking my body with a mineral that is used in every cell for over 300 vital processes.