Today we’re talking about the keto diet and kidney disease from one of the first major published journal articles on studies on the ketogenic diet and the effect it has on kidney disease and that was in the frontiers of nutrition in august 2021 and we’re going to talk about it and i want to talk about a little bit of history about the ketogenic diet so it’s not a new diet even though it’s new uh to the public it’s been very popular in the last couple years it’s been around for over a hundred years to help children control epileptic seizures in conjunction and sometimes when they don’t respond to medication but sometimes in conjunction so this diet’s been out it’s been studied now in terms of being studied in children in the long-term effects that have the seizures we know that they’re at a higher risk for kidney stones.

We try to mitigate that by giving magnesium citrate products potassium citrate but we generally wouldn’t ever use that in chronic kidney disease or kidney disease so that’s what we know about the diet in the last couple of years it’s become very popular and i haven’t talked about it because i consider it to be one of these come and go diets that they’re just popular for a while people try to sell recipes books everything and then they uh leave the public eye and then a new diet comes available and i’ve seen this through atkins south beach dash diet the zone diet um paleo diet okay now we have a ketogenic diet which is very popular and we don’t we didn’t know what the long-term or any impact on what the long-term act is on people with chronic kidney disease this is the first study really uh showing it and it was a a looking at a grouping of a lot of different studies and for the most part what they recommend is people to not use the ketogenic diet because a lot of the a lot of safety reasons that go along with it which i’ll talk about first off they mentioned that the general public in this article uses too high protein in a ketogenic diet so it’s supposed to be a moderate protein but the average public is using between 1.2 and 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.

So that’s quite a bit and we know that that high protein stress is the kidney and i’m also going to talk about some safety measures if this is a diet that you want to try because it does help some people lose weight control blood sugar so if you are going to try this diet we talk about some tips first of all is lowering that protein intake so what they mentioned was most people use 1.2 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight so a kilogram you would take it’s one pound equals 2.2 kilograms so you take your body weight i’m going to say 150 pound person divided by 2.2 gives you 68. now if you take 68 you multiply it by 1.2 you get 81 grams of protein if you multiply it by 2.0 you get 136 grams of protein so that’s way way way too much protein especially if you have chronic kidney disease so a safer way to go about it is lower those protein amounts okay drop them down to that 60 70 range they talk about all that protein damages the kidney which you know from other videos that’s something we always got to watch out for is protein because it’s very damaging to the kidneys when they’re ready when you already got decreased kidney function or any form of kidney disease.

So next was high fat okay they mentioned that high animal fat really bad for heart health people develop more heart issues who stayed on this long term now that’s if you get your fat mainly from protein sources so aside from lowering those protein amounts i recommend maybe switching to some vegetarian based proteins you might have to use some soy products because they’re lower protein vegan protein shakes could help and then so you can use more um plant-based fats in its place like olive oil uh instead of using like a coconut oil you’re better off using like an olive oil um and depending if you don’t have issues with potassium levels you can add in some avocados there’s a healthier fat some olives so you want to try to do those healthier fat swaps and food right there and look for those better fats lower protein a little bit more vegetarian-based proteins or vegan based protein or a lot more depending what your diet is any disease kidneys which are going back to chronic kidney disease they say avoid the fat void the protein another thing was metabolic acidosis was a risk from the protein and all the excess fats and metabolic acidosis is too much acid buildup which is bad on your kidneys so that was something to be mindful of to watch out for but if anybody’s going to try this go see your doctor your health practitioner whoever and get your blood work beforehand with diabetes they say it’s mixed results some people got benefits some didn’t that’s going to vary depending on your you know what’s going on with your history of diabetes do you have a history of heart problems do you have heart problems uh what are your your diabetic numbers at so they couldn’t say if it really benefited.

If you’re going to do this you know make sure you get some blood work so you can check it a little bit later they mentioned pkd polycystic kidney disease where there’s possibly some benefit right now ketogenic diets have been used successfully with mouse models cat models but no humans yet and it looks like in those models it helped in the study so it is a possibility but they say it’s a little bit too early i’m not against trying the pkd diet with the proper pkd keto diet with the proper advice and i recommend most  people if you’re going to try the keto diet see a professional about it someone who really knows it because if you go by books blog articles videos you don’t know the right information and as the study recommended people are eating way too much protein with the ketogenic diet which is not the right amounts.

Especially if you have kidney disease you should be eating much lower you can take some magnesium citrate or another magnesium product but magnesium citrate is also helpful if you’r going to try this but overall i don’t recommend the keto diet i think there’s a lot of other better therapeutic diets out there but as i mentioned this varies with everybody it could help some if you want to try it that’s up to you your practitioner but i feel there’s other better diets out there for kidney disease make sure to drink plenty of water.