Vegetables for CKD Patients | How Many Servings per Day?

Today’s video is about vegetables for CKD patients, and how many servings of vegetables and fruit you should have per day with kidney disease. So, a little study that came out, “a lower frequency of vegetable and fruit intake linked to higher risk of death regardless of chronic kidney disease.” This was out if Japan, published in the Journal of Renal Nutrition recently in 2023.

They looked at people with kidney disease people that had the kidney disease weren’t eating enough vegetables and in response they had a higher risk of death. When you don’t eat your vegetables, you don’t eat fruits, you don’t get all those great minerals, antioxidants, fibers that do so many good things for the kidney.

Now if you have kidney disease, how much should you have a day? The recommendations vary depending on what organization you look at. There is no official recommendation that I know of from any kidney organization that tells you how many fruits and vegetables per day, you should have.

For example, the government uses MyPlate, where they just say, make half your plate whatever you’re eating fruits and vegetables. That’s a good guideline. Something you don’t have to measure. The American Heart Association says four to five servings of vegetables per day, and four to five servings of fruits. I’m going to recommend that you look to get about five servings of vegetables per day and five servings of fruit. So that’s 10 servings total. You can go higher, you can always go higher.

So what’s a serving size? Serving size does vary also depending on what source. Generally what you see is that for vegetables, a serving for cooked vegetabes will be anywhere from a half cup to one cup.

For raw vegetables, one serving will be one to two cups depending what you use. I would  recommend to stay within those areas. If you’re not doing fruit or don’t like fruit, then you try to get more vegetables to replace those five servings of fruit, but that’s what you should strive for every day. 10 servings total. At least five servings of vegetables, and at least five servings of fruit.

What they cited in this research and what we know now more than ever about kidney disease is you do not have to worry about the potassium content as much in foods unless you’re at risk or you have high potassium.

So strive for those servings of fruits and vegetables in your kidney diet. They’re going help you tremendously because you get fiber, which really helps your kidney health, you get prebiotics, you get a variety of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, polyphenols, all this great stuff with your kidney health.