Folic Acid and Kidney Disease | Is Folic Acid Good for Kidney Disease?
Today we’re discussing folic acid and kidney disease, an old nutrient, B9 folic acid and the tremendous benefit it has on kidney disease. This often gets overlooked for fancier supplements, but this nutrient has been studied for decades for kidney disease.
If you go into the National Library of medicine and do a search for folic acid and kidney disease, you’re going to find over a thousand citations, over a thousand research papers over, a thousand studies, and majority of these show a tremendous benefit when it comes to kidney disease and taking folic acid.
It helps slow down kidney disease, helps with all the complications, and helps break down homocysteine. When you have kidney disease, 85% of people have a high homocysteine, which is correlated with a lot of the problems with kidney disease and its complications. By taking folic acid, you can lower this homocysteine. So if you’re looking for a blood test to justify the use of folic acid with chronic kidney disease, you can ask for a homocysteine test.
Any type of folic acid seems to benefit even, using really low dose and poor quality ones. A folic acid of 400 micrograms a day has shown benefit. But what has really shown a tremendous amount of benefit is using a type of folic acid called methylated. It’s a better form.
It’s better for majority of people’s genetics. It’s better for what’s called M T H FFR gene mutations, which a lot of people with kidney disease have. Methyl folate, methyl folic acid. It’s generally L-methylfolate. There’s a few different forms, but you want the l-methylfolate that is shown to have the best, most amount of benefit.
And you can get this in a variety of doses. You can get one milligram up to five milligrams, to 10 milligrams, to 15 milligrams. I would recommend for anybody with high homocysteine to take at least five or 10 and probably 15. I’ve tried for years to lower my homocysteine with a variety of different products, different folic acids, using five 10 milligrams of the l-methylfolate, and the only way I was able to lower my homocysteine was by using 15 milligrams of L-methylfolate a day. That’s what you want to use.
You want to use it as part of a program. Don’t use it by itself and think that this is the end all, be all. What they’re even writing now in, in medical journals is they want to “stack” medications for people with kidney disease and diabetes. They want to give you multiple meds to address different things, and when you’re addressing something naturally, the same concept applies.
You want to take your methylfolate, you’re following a good kidney disease diet, you’re taking vitamin D. If you’re taking omega-3 and you’re taking other supplements, sodium bicarbonate, and when you stack all these is where you get to see tremendous benefit and where we see in in research papers where people can reverse their kidney disease.