Your Questions About Metabolic Syndrome Answered
Podcast #73 Released on January 27, 2018
Metabolic syndrome is a set of diseases or conditions that tend to go together and they tend to cause their own set of problems so doctors refer to them as metabolic syndrome.
Sounds a little scary. With kidney disease, you have a higher chance of having metabolic syndrome so I wanted to talk about it because it really can be something that you can manage and deal with your kidney disease.
Metabolic syndrome is a term used to define a group of symptoms or conditions that often occur together. Usually, it’s like diabetes or high blood sugar, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and sometimes kidney disease. A lot of times, in addition to those things, you may be overweight, you may have excess body fat around your waist.
Who’s at risk for metabolic syndrome are people with chronic health chronic health conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes, chronic kidney disease. Mix those altogether and if you are overweight or you smoke or you have a poor diet, you’re even more at risk.
If your doctors never told you if you have metabolic syndrome, you may ask them, “Do I have metabolic syndrome because I have diabetes, high cholesterol, kidney disease?”
It’s caused by a lot of factors. Lifestyle, poor diet, the genetics, the conditions kind of feed into each other so having diabetes makes you more at risk to have chronic kidney disease. If you have both of them, you are more at risk to have the other conditions as well.
Insulin affects you and it’s important to be aware that it can affect your hormones. It is a hormone and it can do different things to your body.
When you have metabolic syndrome, you are more at risk for heart problems or cardiovascular disease. If you have type 2 diabetes, you have more risk for developing the condition. It’s 80% of people with type 2 diabetes eventually end up having metabolic syndrome and it is estimated that a third of our population in general has metabolic syndrome.
There’s no specific symptoms for the condition and the risk factors are often the reason why they start testing for it and it’s not going to just go away. It is something that you need to manage and work on. Always improving your diet, living a little healthier, eating a little better, exercising – all those things help you manage your conditions which then manages the metabolic syndrome.
I want to encourage you that if you have these conditions and you like do if you have chronic kidney disease, then, talk to your doctor and find out what you can do, eat a little healthier. Start small as it’s always important to not jump off the deep-end in my opinion.
You should do things like eating more fruits and vegetables and replacing part of your sugary foods that you may snack on with healthier foods like replacing your fried potato chips with baked potato chips. Actually, counting out a number of potato chips, that’s already a portion.
If you don’t want to use potato chips, you can use portion control cups and portion out the food that you are eating for a week. Don’t try to measure calories, don’t try to do anything else. Just measure your portions and when you’re looking at how much you’re eating, how much the volume is just be aware that it’s two portions or that’s technically one portion. I recommend just start to get control of your regular conditions.
Metabolic syndrome is not going to go away but you can control it better by controlling your related conditions, controlling your diabetes, controlling your heart disease, controlling your kidney disease.
I encourage you to head on over to the website if you have kidney disease and get the free meal plan related to just plain pre-dialysis, renal with diabetes, or dialysis and we also have informational guides on there to help you if you’re just new to kidney disease.
If you’re helping someone with kidney disease, I encourage you to find out like are they consistently taking their meds? Are they managing their diet fairly well? Do they have some sort of meal plan? Are they seeing their doctor on a regular basis? Keeping up with their labs? What do you need to do to help them do better with that?
I want to be encouraging about metabolic syndrome and let you know that it is something that you should be concerned about, something that you can talk to your doctor about, something that you can manage just like every other part of this diet, you have control over where it goes.
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