Children with CKD are Lacking These Nutrients | What Supplements to Take

This video is about children with CKD. The two pieces of research i’m going to cite here are from the pediatric nephrology Journal March, 11 2022 “scoping review of the dietary intake of children with chronic kidney disease.”

Basically they found that children with CKD and children on dialysis missed a lot a lot of their key nutrients and they got too much nutrients depending on the certain foods that they were eating really often in their diet. So one thing that they found was they got way too much protein and way too much salt and the standard American diet we call it tends to be high salt, high protein for the most part. If you’re doing the burgers the hot dogs, pizza, is also high protein. All these typical foods are really high in sodium. Most kids foods are high in sodium. I should not even call it kid food it’s not even real food for the most part.

If your kids already adjusted to this, it’s really hard to make changes in their diet so you can try to make changes gradually. We’ll talk about one thing you should take. In this study they found children with chronic kidney disease from mild to severe were lacking in fiber and didn’t get enough fiber intake. Calcium, iron, and vitamin C were inadequate. On dialysis it was much worse they were lacking in vitamin c b1 b2 b3 b5 b6. So if you have a child with kidney disease chronic kidney disease on dialysis or not on dialysis, what you want to do is you want to give them a multivitamin.

You always want to make whatever diet changes you can but it can be difficult. But you can definitely find some way to get a multivitamin into their diet. Even not so great, low-quality multi still shows benefit. We like the better quality multis. You can always go to any health food store, vitamin store, online children’s multivitamins, there’s a lot of chewable liquids all depending on your age of your child, so you want to check by age.

Off the top of my head there’s Child Life as a brand they make multivitamins Smarty Pants is one that also makes chewables for kids easier to take but a lot of different ones a lot of different liquids. The point is you really want to take that multivitamin because it’s going to make up for a lot of those lost nutrients.

You also have the absorption problem, the issues that the kidneys play with metabolizing and utilizing all these nutrients so multivitamins are so important. You can always give them more supplements, you can always look at the omega-3s, vitamin d, so basic things.

You can ask for a vitamin d test which we’ve talked about before. I just did a video not long ago about vitamin d in children with chronic kidney disease. So multivitamin for sure. Another piece of literature I read here was in the Journal the May 2022 medical journal. This was from Slovakia and it was left ventricular hypertrophy in children and adolescents before and after kidney transplantation. So that left ventricular hypertrophy is from when the left chamber of your heart enlarges and you don’t get as good function of your heart. This also causes issues with cardiovascular problems and you become at risk.

I actually had this at one time when my blood pressure wasn’t controlled and I got my blood pressure under control and it went away in time. What they talk about here is children have a very high rate of of getting this. Children with chronic kidney disease transplants they’re looking at.

So one thing I really want to recommend is take the blood pressure medications. It’s one of the best things to control it. It’s usually one one pill per day. It’s also going to prevent that left ventricular hypertrophy. It can also reverse it so make sure to take the meds it’s important for your child especially if they have high blood pressure where most of them will. This a lot of times leads to left ventricular hypertrophy, so make sure they do that.

Also just keeping their body weight into a normal BMI, and doing the best you can in terms of their diet in terms of a clean diet, less sodium, whatever you can do there and also making sure their their hemoglobin levels stayed okay.