Renal Diet Podcast 078 - Vegetarian Meals For Kidney Failure

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Vegetarian Meals For Kidney Failure

Podcast #78 Released on February 2, 2018

I get lots of e-mails, lots of questions whether I have vegetarian meals or not.

Vegetable broth that you can make, anyone can make, its delicious and it fits into a lot of recipes.

If you're trying to make some, you know flavorful additions to your food and you need a vegetarian broth then it'll be excellent so I encourage you to watch out for that.
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The other thing about vegetarian meals is that they have a lower amount of protein. The things you watch for in kidney disease are potassium, phosphorus, sodium and protein. Protein is the most important in my opinion especially when you're just beginning.

Vegetarian is whether you're a lacto-ovo vegetarian or whatever type but vegetarians basically I know there's more details of this but they basically don't eat meat. Vegetarians are not going to get as much protein naturally in their food. They tend to eat more vegetables, cheese, milk, eggs - those types of things so cheese, milk and eggs have the same amount of protein. One egg has as much protein as one ounce of meat 7 grams, an ounce of cheese has about the same. So you are going to count those as the same but anything else you might replace with some protein within a vegetarian meal like vegetables or fruits or beans. Even beans are going to have the same amount of protein to. It's just that they're going to be easier to kind of fill up with so you're going to be able to get more volume to your diet just by eating these vegetables and beans and protein.

In terms of protein, your going to get more bang for your buck because you are going to get less protein and more of the vegetables.

I wanted to give you some ideas of some things you can have a vegetarian meals even if you just want to add one or two vegetarian meals to your week, like an arugula frittata. You can reduce the amount of protein that eat and when you reduce the amount of protein you naturally reduce the amount of phosphorus and potassium because those are naturally in protein foods. When you are the amount of protein actually reduce that which is why I tell a lot of people if they are concerned about potassium and phosphorus that if you've already lowered your protein intake just continue unless your doctor tells you differently. Continue to see how that affects your levels, your GFR because you may find that's enough of a change to make the difference that you want and then you don't have to worry about the other pieces for a while until your kidneys continue become damaged.

Couple of ideas, vegetarian chili is basically a chili with beans and no meat. You could  put a little bit more in there like onions, green peppers and some celery, garlic, different kinds of beans instead of meat and that will help you to get more volume fullness with the food.

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