Whole Grains and Kidney Disease | Whole Grains Can Improve Kidney Disease

This video is about whole grains and kidney disease, especially if you’re in the later stages of kidney disease, and how you possibly and most likely can have whole grains when you’re in stage three, stage four, and even stage five.

So what are whole grains? What are refined grains? When they talk about whole grains, they’re talking about using the entire part of the plant. When they talk about refined grains, they’re talking about using part of the plant and discarding the other parts of the plants. When you have the whole part of the plant it’s much healthier for you and that’s called a whole grain. It’s got fiber, it’s got more vitamins, its got more minerals, it’s so much healthier for you when you have refined grains.

White rice would be a refined grain, brown rice would be the whole grain. Wheat or refined wheat or just regular wheat when you see it in products that would be refined grain and whole wheat would be the whole grain. When you have refined wheat it’s not as healthy, it’s not as good. However, when it came to kidney disease and kidney diets for quite a long time, a couple decades now, we were always told that you should have refined grains in a kidney diet, especially in the later stages because we’re always worried about phosphorus.

You don’t have to be so worried as we used to be and I got some good information here. We’re going to talk about whole grains. I’m referencing a piece of information: Nutrition and Kidney Disease Core Curriculum 2022 March, 2022 from the American Journal of Kidney Diseases. What they say and what they reference here is that if you’re into the later stages, you have declining kidney functions say stage 3, 4 and 5, that you should have whole grains in your diet. Now if you look in the past everything’s gonna say don’t but we know so much better now because we have so much more conclusive research. So much more has come out in terms of kidney disease where a lot of the old recommendations were theories that didn’t have good research to back them up.

Whole grains include brown rice, yams, sweet potatoes, it’s going to be your whole wheat products. It’s got to be the whole wheat, the whole part of the product. This can be your quinoa, this could be your buckwheat, kasha, corn is a whole grain. So you can have these and generally for most people you don’t have to worry about the phosphorus, now if you want to know for sure you can go get your phosphorus levels tested. That’s the best way to know, and if your phosphorus is normal you can have lots of whole grains.

If you’re at a higher range then you can still have some whole grains maybe do like a 50-50; 50 whole 50 refined. It’s always good though to see a nutritionist or dietitian, someone that can help you with your diet when it comes to whole and refined grains. If you’re out of range then most likely you’re going to have to avoid whole grains, but another beautiful thing about whole grains is that we don’t absorb the phosphorus that’s in them. The phosphorus that comes from whole grains is much less absorbed as compared to phosphorus that comes from an animal product.

For example let’s say you eat a piece of protein chicken, fish, turkey, beef  it may be and it has 100 milligrams of phosphorous you’re going to absorb a very high percentage of that. That same 100 milligrams that came from maybe beans whole grains whole grains in particular, you’re not going to absorb that much so that’s a great thing plus then you’re going to get the fiber the vitamins, minerals, so we know now. However, make sure to always check with your doctor.