Dirty Water Can Cause Kidney Disease | Reason for Unexplained Kidney Disease

Today’s video is about how drinking dirty water can cause kidney disease. This is coming from a journal article which is titled “Water Sources and Kidney Function: Investigating Chronic kidney Disease of Unknown Etiology in a Prospective Study.”

We know about how pollution is bad for people and it’s a direct contributor and a cause in a lot of cases, dirty water can cause kidney disease. We were finding large cases of kidney disease in parts of the world, and they had no idea what was causing it. This was going on for years and generally it’s agricultural workers; so people who work on farms and own farms. So we’ve looked back on different populations in time and we have lots of studies now showing what’s a lot of causes of these issues, and what you can do. This affected a lot of parts of the world. I’m going to go over here in case you’re in one of those parts: South Asia, Central South America in the U.S., and the central valley of California.

Sri Lanka was a really big one, there was a lot of contamination, a lot of KFC’s. So what they found was that places where there was well water, so most of these people were drinking well water, and this well water had a lot of agrochemicals; which are pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and anything that is used to help protect the plant against the environment that’s not natural. It’s synthetic-  a chemical called glycopvhosphates.

So all of these are called agrochemicals and agrochemicals are bad for the kidney, and so these places were drinking well water and these agrochemicals that were used in the area were seeping into the water, into the well water, and into the water supply. This is what was causing their kidney disease. This is one of the issues they also found, hydration to be another one, but the big one was these agrochemicals: really really bad so if you’re not drinking well water this is generally nothing you have to worry about. It’s not a big issue even though you can be exposed and you actually are going to be exposed to agrochemicals if you live in the united states to some degree. You don’t have to worry about them. It’s only super large amounts that have caused the kidney disease. In all of these populations here, and thousands of thousands of people.

So clean water, now if you don’t know where your kidney disease is coming from, and you’ve been to doctors and they can’t find it, this is something you know that you can get tested for and get an evaluation and see if that may be causing some of your issues. So that’s something you want to check. You want to make sure you get clean water. The biggest thing they talked about here is why do these agrochemicals cause kidney disease? 

Eventually through time and taking these agrochemicals into your body they weaken your body’s defense system. That combats cell damage and eventually these get weak enough and you start getting cell damage and kidney cell damage. So what you want to do is if you live in a populated place, you want to get clean, filtered water. Most of the water, even the tap, is going to be better than well water in most places. You do want to check it, so get your clean water. Also, get an antioxidant supplement or a good multivitamin, because that will keep your antioxidant systems up to deal with all these pollutants, that will be coming into your water supply and even through the air you breathe.

So that’s probably the most important thing you can do as well as making sure you’re getting good clean water. I don’t recommend going out there and spending tons on water. There are all types of filtration systems out there. The basic carbon-based filters are really good. That’s The Brita and Pure. Those take out very large amount of toxins and chemicals especially heavy metals. So, clean water is important. Get an antioxidant supplement. You can always ask for heavy metal testing. Agrochemical testing is a little bit trickier to do. There are specialty labs out there: Vibrant Health is one of them, but there’s a lot out there where you can check those if you wanted to. You can also get a multivitamin or antioxidant type supplement just to help help with all the pollution that we encounter daily by just living here on planet earth. Thanks for watching everybody, to your best kidney health.

Find out how other contaminants in water can effect kidney disease here