Kidney disease is caused by the kidney's shutting down due to damage from diabetes or high blood pressure. Learn about the best diet for kidney disease in this video.
Avoid salt
Limit potassium intake
Limit phosphorus intake
Monitor daily food intake
Mary Hondros graduated from University of Georgia with a Bachelor of Science in Dietetics. She currently works as a nutritionist for New Hanover County Schools in North Carolina. Her main focus is to teach children to improve nutritional habits.
MARY HONDROS: Okay, I'm going to talk a little bit about kidney disease. What happens in kidney disease is that your kidneys shut down when they're not properly functioning. Your kidneys are made up of about a million different units called nephrons and when they're chronically exposed to damage from conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure, eventually the kidney shuts down and stops working. After your kidney shuts down, it's not able to clean your blood like it needs to be cleaned. So those waste products end up building up in your body and causing you to feel sick. Most people with kidney disease needs to limit their salt intake, their potassium intake, their fluid intake, and also their phosphorus intake. This can be a very challenging diet, especially if you're on dialysis. If you are on something like dialysis for kidney disease, make sure that you're following the recommendation that your doctor or your dietician is giving you. So, 4 tips if you have kidney disease and you need to limit certain things in your diet are, limit things like salt. Don't add extra salt to your food and look for canned versions of the food you eat in low sodium or reduced sodium format. Secondly, you need to limit the amount of potassium that you eat each day. So limit the potassium to 3 servings and keep in mind that high potassium foods are things like bananas, oranges, orange juice, broccoli, dried fruits, anything that's supplemented with extra potassium. Third, know how much fluid that you need. Your doctor can tell you this. If you need a certain amount of fluid, you can work on getting that fluid and spreading it throughout the day so that you're not consuming too much fluid and having it build up in your body because your kidneys are unable to clean it out. And lastly, you may need extra calories because you might not be able to eat all the calories that you need if your appetite is being affected by your kidney disease. So ask your doctor about taking a nutritional supplement such as Boos or Insure to make sure you're getting all those calories. Those are 4 tips on staying healthy if you have kidney disease.
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