Diabetic Kidney Disease Treatment | 2 Tips to Improve Kidney Function

Today’s video is about diabetic kidney disease treatment and 2 Tips to Improve Kidney Function. We’re going to talk about the research and what it means.

We have an observational study in the endocrinology journal, May 2022 “impact of salt intake on urinary albumin excretion (protein urea protein in the urine in patients) with type 2 diabetic nephropathy, a retrospective cohort study based on a generalized additive model. So you can look that up.

It says sodium for most people they know that this is generally bad for kidney disease. If you don’t know then it’s really important that you look to reduce your sodium intake. It found that people that reduce their salt and sodium intake especially in stages two three diabetic nephropathy were able to lower their protein urea. We’ve known this for a long time. This should be a standard recommendation for anybody with kidney disease: how important it is to get sodium out of your diet.

You don’t want to use the salt shaker, you want to look for foods that are lower in sodium, so fresh foods, fresh fruits and vegetables could be lower in sodium, fresh animal products. If you’re eating animal products they will be lower in sodium. Next if you’re getting frozen or canned foods you should look at the nutrition facts to make sure it’s low in sodium. Most things on the shelves are going to be high in sodium, so look for lower sodium options.

Sometimes it’s put right on the front label but I want to just talk to you about this. It is so important because it lowers protein in urine and that’s one of the things that is the most damaging to the kidney over time. That’s why they’re always trying to give medications to stop it. By adopting certain diets, and changing your diet, you can improve it. So you want to get that salt down.

Now you’re going to have to know how to read a nutrition facts label which is in the back of most foods that you buy which will list the sodium there. We’re going to do a separate video about that but that’s something that you really need to be mindful of is looking at the nutrition facts label, turning over or finding it on whatever food packaged food that you’re having, and it’ll tell you how much sodium has been added to it.

If you’re looking for guidelines, ideally 1500 milligrams or less which is really hard to maintain. 2000 milligrams or less is more realistic but for diabetic kidney disease no more than 2300 milligrams per day of sodium. You should strive for the lower amounts because more good things happen when you have lower amounts so make sure you do that.

Next, we have the journal of diabetes research May, 2022 “association between vitamin d status and mortality among adults with diabetic kidney disease” So if you were deficient in vitamin d or you were lower than normal you unfortunately died quicker if you had diabetic kidney disease. So it talks about the importance of proper vitamin d supplementation. You should have your levels tested. They should be a little bit higher than the cut off which is 30 on most blood work. So if you’re 32-33 still not that great you get more protective benefits if you get that level up to 40 to 60. You probably need to supplement. You can try getting a lot of sun but you would need that every single day for periods of time of at least 15 20 minutes but you still might not convert it with tiny disease so supplementation is generally best.

So make sure to get it tested so diabetic kidney disease do those two things to really improve your health your situation and with vitamin d you get lots of other benefits besides that reduced risk of mortality.