Sodium and Kidney Disease | How Much Salt in a Kidney Diet?

This video is about sodium and kidney disease. Sodium chloride, that mineral that’s added to foods that makes foods taste so so good but is so so bad for kidney disease.

Whenever you hear sodium and kidney disease high blood pressure you’re always told to restrict sodium and that you should lessen the amounts of sodium in your diet. What are the recommendations on sodium for people with kidney disease?

Let’s talk about a few associations what they recommend. The national kidney foundation recommends less than 2300 milligrams per day of sodium and they also recommend 1500 milligrams may be more adequate for people with kidney issues, meaning that you get more benefit when you have less of sodium and so you should try to get to that 1500 milligram area which is much better for you. KDOQI, the kidney disease outcome quality initiative which sets a lot of the recommendations for nutrition and kidney issues updated their last recommendations. They recommend no more than 2300 milligrams a day.

The American heart association says if you have high blood pressure you should strive for 1500 milligrams of sodium per day. American Diabetes Association says if you’ve got diabetes with kidney disease you should strive for less than 2300 milligrams per day. So we can see that the range for sodium recommendations for kidney issues is 1500 to 2300 milligrams per day. You want to stay within those areas. Now when you’re looking at sodium intake everything has sodium. Even a bag of baby spinach and spring mix blends two cups of salad has 60 milligrams of sodium.

So when it comes to kidney issues you want to restrict sodium as much as possible because by even eating healthy you’re still going to get plenty of sodium in your diet. You almost never need to use a salt shaker. If you have kidney disease and you’re really accustomed to salt you gradually begin cutting it down in time it will come down but everything you have sodium in it even if you’re eating just fruits vegetables lean proteins are all gonna have some degree of sodium.

Just a plain piece of chicken with nothing else on it has about 100 milligrams of sodium for about four ounces. Now you start adding in any commercial breads, crackers, oatmeal any other different foods if you eat out somewhere your sodium intake starts to increase pretty fast. The average slice of bread in America is anywhere from 150 to 300 milligrams of sodium per slice, so you can see that by just eating a healthy good diet you’re naturally going to be getting in good amounts of sodium so you don’t need extra sodium in your diet. You don’t need to add the salt shaker generally.

There is no better salt than another kind of salt, so Himalayan sea salt isn’t better than regular table salt okay, regardless if they try to tell you’ve got more minerals it has this but still sodium is still going to have the same effect on your vessel so the same effect on your kidney.

If you’re new to this you’re going to have to look at labels okay. After reading a lot of labels to find out the sodium content you’ll eventually understand it quickly and if you eat out the sodium amounts are really high that you’re getting it so for example I had a Thomas english muffin with a tablespoon of butter and right there is about two to three hundred milligrams of sodium for that one item. You can see that you just don’t need the extra the extra salt that comes from the salt shaker right for the most part.

Lowering your sodium has drastic benefits from reducing protein in your urine to helping your blood pressure, to helping swelling, to slowing down kidney disease, so that’s the one thing that you can do it just pays tons and tons of benefits.