Renal Diet Podcast 076 - Diet, More Important for Kidney Disease?

Renal Diet Podcast 076 – Diet, More Important For Kidney Disease?Is Diet More Important Than Medication For Kidney Disease

Podcast #76 Released on January 31, 2018

Is diet more important than medications for kidney disease?

I want to let you know that both diet and medications are important but let's talk about the different things that can happen with diet medication.

Lots of people think that they can just take a pill and that'll make their condition better, they won't have to worry about their diet, they won't have to exercise, they won't have to do anything but medication can only go so far and medication is highly affected by your diet.

If you're continuing to eat high potassium foods, high phosphorus foods and you have a potassium level in your blood and you really need to lower that, it's not going to help to take medicine because your just kind of contradicting that.

I think that diet and medication work together really well but they also work against each other well. Diet has such an effect on your kidney disease because you can really change what you have contribute to that with your body so your body has salts.

Let's take salts for example. Eating more salt is going to affect your blood pressure and you can take blood pressure medicine but what if you didn't have to take as much medicine because you lowered your sodium intake? Or the same with potassium and phosphorus, what if you didn't eat as much of those so you didn't have to take your potassium and phosphorus blockers.

Your protein intake is affected your kidneys. Your protein leads to how much waste your body builds up and so if you give it a less protein it doesn't have to do as much work and that saves your kidneys for a little bit longer and helps them to manage a little easier.

So those components of your diet - the fluid, this protein, the sodium, potassium,  phosphorus - those all affect what your body does and if you change your diet and you eat better and you manage kidney disease diet then you're gonna be a lot better off with whether you take your medicine or not.

Medicine can impact your kidneys as well, in both a positive and negative way. Medicines help your kidneys by reducing your potassium and phosphorus,  they lower your blood pressure, they help you control your diabetes - all those are good things. But some medicines like Ibuprofen and Metformin are known to have effects on your kidneys which is why I tell you to ask your doctor how will this affect your kidneys. Because those medicines even though they're helping you they may not be the right choice because they do affect your kidneys so make sure you're checking on that and seeing if that's going to make a difference.

Overall, you can make a huge difference in your kidney disease by watching your diet and watching your medicine.

As a dietitian I think diet has a lot of importance to where your outcome ends up being and I think it's significantly can help slow down the progression of kidney disease just by a managing a good diet.

Send in your questions about all things related to Chronic Kidney Disease to [email protected]

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