How to Make Kidney Transplant Last Longer With Diet
Today we’re talking about one of my favorite topics kidney transplants and how to make a kidney transplant last longer. I’ve been living with a kidney transplant going on 18 years, much longer than it was ever supposed to because I’m very aggressive in my kidney care where I see different transplant doctors just to get different ideas and perspectives to different nephrologists to where I do all the nutritional natural health research into kidney care.
I’m going to reference two studies about a couple things that you can do to help your overall health and your kidney transplant last longer. First off journal of renal nutrition 2021 association between dietary intake and serum uric acid levels to break down product from certain foods. With kidney disease or kidney transplants you generally don’t have good uric acid levels when they go higher they’re bad for your health, and they’re bad for your kidneys where it can accelerate the loss of kidney function over time. If you have elevated uric acid levels some dietary things that you can do or if you’re worried about it or at risk here are some things you can do.
These people who had the higher uric acid they didn’t have any gout attacks so we’re not doing this to prevent gout which is a painful attack in your big toe related to high uric acid levels. You could have no symptoms of this but if your levels are high it’s not good. So people with transplants they found had lower levels of uric acid they had more plant proteins in their diet. Now we know plant proteins are preferred if you look at our channel in the overwhelming amounts of research in years plant proteins are greatly preferred over animal proteins for kidney disease.
The plant proteins they reference were beans and cereals. A lot of the people got some of their plant protein from those so you want to include more of those in your diet. They’re easier on the kidney and way easier for your body to break down, metabolize, and the phosphorus that’s in these plant proteins like beans doesn’t absorb well so you generally don’t have to worry about the phosphorus content. So that’s the one thing you can do to help your kidney and help your uric acid levels which could be an issue.
Make sure to get your uric acid levels tested. The second study we’re going to reference is diabetes care 2021 diabetes care is the journal androgens which are male hormones and development of post transplantation diabetes colitis and male kidney transplant recipients. It’s got a little longer name to that study so this was in white males mainly, but this applies to all males. What they found were people who developed type 2 diabetes after the kidney transplant, one of the reasons aside from diet is because they had low testosterone levels.
The testosterone level they looked at was dehydrotestosterone. It’s a metabolite of testosterone and they found people who had lower levels were diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Now they’re not saying it’s a direct cause or relation, just something they notice. We know from other studies with people with diabetes without kidney disease who have low androgen levels low testosterone, we know that they have low testosterone when they have the type 2 diabetes development and we address that and people generally get a lot better. Also, they just feel better overall.
It gets a lot of the issues that come along with that but you definitely should always be doing some type of diet to help the diabetes. Avoiding the sugar, the junk foods, the high glycemic foods, large bowls of pasta rice. So if you are at risk of type 2 diabetes with a transplant if you’ve been diagnosed check your testosterone levels because addressing those can improve the type 2 diabetes or improve your blood sugar levels. So those two things to do: plant proteins the beans; the cereals, make sure you have plenty of fruits and vegetables to help uric acid levels and help your kidney plus getting your testosterone levels checked if you’re at risk for type 2 diabetes.
