Early Stage Kidney Disease Treatments (Stage 1 & 2) Renal Diet, Medications and More

This video is about early stage kidney disease treatments, and what to do if you’ve been diagnosed in an earlier stage.

These are general guidelines provided by the American Journal of Kidney Disease from Nutrition and Core Curriculum, March 2022. It’s actually a very large article about current practices and what’s best to do with certain stages of kidney disease. I’m going to go through those and what you can do and apply it to yourself. So we’re talking about the early stages of kidney disease. We’re talking about stage one stage to two.

If you’re at stage three or more these will still apply but you should be much more aggressive and these recommendations coming from the American Journal of Kidney Disease are not very aggressive really types of approaches. So you can be much more aggressive, but at the bare minimum you should be doing these things if you have kidney disease. So let’s get into it. Early ckd, here’s the things that they mentioned to watch out for. Hyperlipidemia: that’s high cholesterol. Maybe you need something to support cholesterol like a medication, or maybe you want to change your diet, take some supplements but that’s something to be aware of.

Proteinurea– this is something to really be aware of and to really address and really focus on. That’s protein in the urine. You can do that through blood pressure medication, diet changes but if there is a lot of protein in your urine, blood pressure meds can really help. A lot of them have decades and decades of research talking 30,40,50 years, so we know a lot. We know the side effects and it’s something that can be very beneficial because having protein in your urine for any period of time is just going to accelerate the loss of kidney function. It’s not good.

Proteinurea, hyperglycemia, and hyperinsulinemia so that’s high blood sugar and high insulin. This goes back to dietary approaches. You might need to take medications, but diet is so important. Some basic dietary tips they recommend that everyone start doing is limiting salt intake, reduce or really limit your salt intake. The amount that we have in the standard American diet just accelerates the loss of kidney function so much faster through blood pressure through increasing the amount of proteinurea, if you have more salt, you have more proteinurea, if you have less salt you have less protein in the urine so that’s tremendous.

They find that people with diabetic kidney disease who get their sodium down to twenty two hundred twenty three hundred milligrams or less per day there’s a big reduction in the amount of protein. So look at labels, don’t add salt, and even what’s supposed to be healthier versions of salt like himalayan sea salt it’s still salt it’s still going to have the same impact it’s healthier that it has some other nutrients in it but it’s still sodium so you really want to limit it. Your taste buds will get used to having limited sodium in your diet. I can promise you that from someone who is very high sodium to now very low you’ll get used to it and then you go back to the high sodium foods and you just can’t eat it.

Reduce the salt and increase fruit and vegetables in your diet. You need fruits and vegetables. In stage one and two there’s no worry about potassium levels, so load up eat up. You get lots of fiber which is so good for your kidney, so good for your microbiome, your digestive system so increased fruits and vegetables.

Consider weight loss intervention so if you need to lose weight. If you’re obese or morbidly obese, losing weight is really important at this stage because that alone may be able to reverse all your kidney problems. If you’re overweight, it’s still really good and really healthy for your kidneys to lose weight. The last thing they mentioned is reduce saturated fats. I don’t think this is important but it can help with your cholesterol.

These are the recommendations by the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. You can be much more aggressive. They do talk about reducing protein intake and animal protein intake, but they talk about more when you have a declining gfr I think you should be more aggressive because you want to avoid those points. I’ve given you the basic recommendations that are terrific for anybody with any type of kidney disease to start incorporating.