The TOP Best Foods to Improve Kidney Function (END STAGE KIDNEY DISEASE)

What are the best foods for kidney disease? Well, they're somewhat different than the foods that you would eat to prevent a kidney problem. If you were trying to prevent kidney disease, you would consume the foods on my program, which is the healthy version of the ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting, because that provides not just low-carb, but high-quality foods, since the cause of most kidney problems stem from diabetes, insulin resistance, high-sugar, high-carb diets. But that being said, we want to talk about what do you eat if you have a kidney problem. There are various stages of kidney problems. You have stage 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, 5 being end stage, which means you're usually on the list for dialysis, and it's irreversible. So I'm going to kind of split this up into kind of the make-break point of when you would start eating what I'm going to suggest, okay? And that would be stage 3a through stage 5. So if you're between a 3 and a 5, then we're going to talk about what foods you should eat. And the kidney has a bunch of tiny little filters called nephrons, and they're basically there to filter the blood. So when they can't filter anymore because they're damaged, you start getting waste that backs up into the blood. And you also have problems with these very specific nutrients. Phosphorus becomes too high. Potassium becomes too high. Sodium becomes too high. And then protein in general. So that's one way to diagnose kidney problems is having protein in the urine. So let's first take a look at protein, okay? You need to lower your protein a little bit, okay? But of course keep the quality there as well, which I'll talk about. So how much protein would you really need? A normal amount of protein, let's say for myself, I weigh about 185 pounds. I would need to apply this one formula, and this is kind of really a rough estimate, like 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram. And what that really comes out to is about 65 grams of protein per day. That's kind of what I need right now. But if the kidney becomes a problem, you can't handle that much protein. So you have to lower it to about 45 grams of protein per day. I would go from like 9 ounces of beef per day to about 6 ounces of beef per day. If it was eggs, okay, it's a little bit different protein ratio in there. I would go from 9 eggs a day to 6 eggs a day. If it was seafood or fish, I would go from 9 ounces of fish or seafood to 6 ounces of seafood or fish. Now that's per day, okay? So you just reduce your protein. You don't want to reduce it too low. You just want to have it just right, and you want to make sure the quality is there. The best protein, as far as quality goes, is the egg, then the fish or seafood, and then beef, but you have to make sure it's grass-fed, grass-finished. And the eggs, pasture-raised, organic, and then the fish, well-caught. Now, as far as sodium goes, you don't want to bring your sodium down too far because you need sodium for various reasons, but you want to bring it down to roughly about 2,300 milligrams of sodium per day. So in other words, don't use a lot of salt on your foods, and of course you're not going to be eating processed foods or junk foods, so you're not going to get that hidden sodium. But you want to have just a little bit but not excessive amounts. And then with potassium, okay, let's talk about potassium. What foods are high in potassium that you would have to avoid? Beet greens, avoid those. Avoid spinach, kale. Avocados are very high in potassium. But you would want to have foods low in potassium. If we take a look at the vegetable family, we would be consuming cabbage, cauliflower, radish, cucumber, onion, regular lettuce, bell pepper. And of course, protein in general doesn't have a lot of potassium, so you could do like tuna and cod and eggs, especially turkey, and even some organic chicken. Now let's talk about phosphorus, okay? How do you lower the phosphorus? Well, you definitely want to avoid anything with a lot of phosphorus, like phosphoric acid, as in sodas. Sodas are the worst for kidney disease because you're going to really jack up your phosphoric acid, not to mention the sugar. But also, meat in general is higher in phosphorus, and so is milk and dark chocolate. But most vegetables are low in phosphorus. Berries are low in phosphorus. Poultry is lower in phosphorus, if you look at the meats. And certain seafood and even eggs are low in phosphorus. Even though they have phosphorus, there is some conflicting data on potassium. In other words, there's an equal risk of dying from too much potassium or too little potassium. And again, always work with your doctor to make sure that they monitor these key nutrients to make sure they're not out of range. That being said, a lot of the recommendations as far as food for end-stage kidney problems include grains, which I totally disagree with. There's no benefit of having grains when you have a kidney problem. Instead, focus on the foods that I recommend, as well as adding a natural source of the B vitamins, natural vitamin C, vitamin D3, as well as omega-3 fatty acids, probably from cod liver oil. That would be the best. So these recommendations are for those people that have kidney damage already. Like I said before, if you want to prevent kidney problems, you can have more of these nutrients. And for that, I recommend this video right here. Check it out.