Can kidney disease get better? - Treating Kidney Failure Through Diet

Can kidney disease get better?




>> A doctor speaks with a patient in his office.
>> Can kidney disease get better?
>> The kidney damage that occurs in
chronic kidney disease is usually permanent
and tends to get worse over time.
Diabetes and high blood pressure, which are
the major causes of chronic kidney disease,
cause scarring in the kidney over time,
and as you know, scarring doesn't go away.
As a result, the kidneys don't improve.
What we aim to do with treatment is
to try to prevent further damage.
The GFR test, the blood test which measures how
well your kidneys are filtering will not get
better because the kidneys don't get better.
What we aim to do is to keep
it from getting worse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2LXOW9hKDU


Treating Kidney Failure Through Diet




andquot;Treating Kidney Failure Through Dietandquot;
One of the most important functions of our kidneys is
to filter out excess phosphorus from our bloodstream,
and so when our kidney function declines, phosphorus can
build up in our bodies and cause something
called metastatic calcification, where your heart valves and muscles
and other parts of your body can
build up calcium deposits and eventually result in skin
necrosis, gangrene, amputations, all sorts of bad stuff.
So, if a person has diminished kidney function, their doctor
will likely put them on a low phosphate diet,
which is tough, because basically everything with protein
has phosphorus. So, both plant foods and
animal foods have phosphorus. But when omnivores have been compared to those eating vegan,
vegans had significantly less protein leaking out into their
urine, a sign of intact kidney function.
So while they concluded that, “These results can confirm
the usefulness of vegetarianism here and support...
the use of a vegan dietandquot; for patients with kidney
failure, maybe it was just because the omnivores
were getting “a higher protein load,” and we know that
lower protein diets appear to delay the progression
of kidney failure. So did the plant-based diet help because
they were eating less protein or because the
body somehow is able to handle plant protein better than animal protein?
Now to figure that out, you’d have to split people into
two groups, half on a vegetarian diet, half not,
with the critical caveat to make sure both groups
eat the exact same amount of protein and
the exact same amount of phosphorus. And that’s what researchers did.
Published recently in the Journal of the American Society
of Nephrology, they took vegetarians and put
them on a meat diet, and then took meat-eaters and
put them on a vegetarian diet. Even though
phosphorus and protein intake were kept the same in
both diet groups, here’s the level of phosphorus
stuck in the bloodstream of those on the meat
diet, compared to those on the veg diet.
So there's just something about plant foods that enables
our bodies to better handle their phosphorus content.
Same amount of phosphorus, but plant phosphorus appears
easier to cleanse away from our body.
Positive results have been seen even with semi-vegetarian
diets, but the reason the new study
observed more dramatic differences after only 1 week, was perhaps because of the pure vegetarian
diets used in this study. Taken together, a vegetarian-based
diet may be beneficial for the control of
phosphorus balance in patients with chronic kidney disease.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E1FXNGswoU