This week I want to focus on an important organ that has a major impact on your lifestyle if you do not take care of them; your kidneys. Kidneys are two bean-shaped organs that are each about the size of a fist. Healthy kidneys are crucial for your overall health as they filter about half a cup of blood every minute, they remove water and extra water to make urine.
As they play a crucial part in filtering waste products in your body, not having good kidney function, can drastically affect your life in a negative way. Let’s go through some of the things that will destroy your kidneys, then we can discuss five lies your doctor will tell you that will harm your kidneys.
One of the first things that will destroy your kidneys is high blood sugar. This is a problem for most pre diabetics and those who suffer from type 2 diabetes or type 1 diabetes. When you run a chronically high blood sugar level every day, you are destroying nephrons, the little individual cell packets in your kidneys that do all the work. When you destroy enough of these nephrons, it can lead to a diagnosis of chronic kidney disease, a serious condition that causes nausea, loss of appetite, fatigue, muscle cramps and much more. Maintaining healthy blood sugar levels is important for everyone but is vital to anyone with suffers from polycystic kidney disease.
To protect your kidney function, you must maintain a healthy diet in order to get your blood sugar levels to a normal, healthy level; you do this by eating a very low carbohydrate diet and avoiding foods with added and processed sugars.
The next thing that will destroy your kidneys is chronically high insulin levels. If you are eating a high carbohydrate diet and you have been diagnosed with pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes and you are taking medication that lowers your blood sugar. The way this medication actually works is by raising your insulin to combat the high sugar levels. There is research that shows chronically high levels of insulin, AKA hyperinsulinemia, also damages your kidneys as well. So the way to fix this is to eat a low carbohydrate diet. This will make sure your pancreas won’t make extra insulin.
The next thing that will damage your kidneys is high blood pressure, most people think this is caused by eating too much salt. The truth is that 80 to 90 percent of essential hypertension in the world is caused by chronic hyperinsulinemia. This causes an excessive amount of fluid to be held in the body in an unhealthy manner, this is called edema. If you lower your carbohydrate intake – which lowers your blood sugar and as a result, lowers your insulin – you will then be able to get rid of the fluid in your body and your blood pressure will come back down to normal or close to normal.
The next thing that can negatively impact your kidney function is taking anti-inflammatory medication on a daily basis. These can be over the counter medications like ibuprofen or naproxen; this can also be prescription medication such as Celebrex. Taking these on a daily basis is very hard on the kidneys and over time will cause kidney damage. These medications are intended to be used only for a few days, and that’s fine, just don’t overdo it.
There are many habits outside of diet that can negatively affect your kidney function as well. Smoking tobacco or chewing tobacco can destroy your kidneys or kidney function by creating inflammatory molecules that will wreak havoc on your kidneys. Heavy alcohol consumption will cause severe kidney damage as well. Having a drink here and there is fine, but not every day.
The next thing that will destroy your kidneys is eating or drinking a high oxalate diet, there is a very long list of vegetables that are very high in oxalates, and some are so high that if you eat them without cooking them thoroughly, they can actually give you an acute oxalate reaction.
Now let’s talk about some lies that doctors say will destroy your kidneys, the following factors are commonly heard in the doctor’s office but have no evidence or research to back it up, but, we will see that there is lots of evidence that will refute their claims.
The first thing is that eating too much protein is hard on your kidneys. This is a lie; humans having been getting their protein from animal sources for over two million years and there has never been a problem.
The next lie is that that too much saturated fat is bad for your kidney, this is just an opinion, and while it is something we hear often in the context of kidney health, there is no research to support this claim at all.
The next lie is that being on a keto or carnivore diet is bad for your kidneys, there is absolutely no research to support that claim.
The next lie is that you should limit your coffee intake, because coffee is bad for your kidneys, again there is no research or evidence that says this is true.
The next one is a big one, you are told to lower your salt intake, this does not even make good physiological sense, when you add in the fact that ancestrally humans have been seeking out sources of salt in their diet for hundreds of thousands of years. This does not make any sense on an ancestral basis, as long as you salt your food to taste, you will be fine. It’s time you start asking your doctor more questions, be proactive in your health, and let the right food be your medicine.
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