Improve Your Kidney Health By Around 10% With This One Change

How healthy are your kidneys? Most people don’t know, unless a problem has already been identified.

There are clinical tests that can be done (they’ll just need a urine sample from you; ask your doctor about it), but there’s some screening that can be done at home already:

Are Your Kidneys Healthy? Take This One-Minute Quiz To Find out

👆 this is about medical indicators; there are also non-medical factors that affect risk, including:

• Where someone lives
• Where they work
• The foods they eat
• How much exercise they do
• If they are able to get the medical care they need

For more information on this, see: Keeping Your Kidneys Healthy (Especially After 60) ← there’s a lot more to it than just hydration!

So, what about that “the foods they eat” item?

The greener choice

It’s well-established that most people should eat more plants, and generally speaking, less meat. For a more general overview (rather than specifically kidney health), check out: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?

Most recently, a team of researchers (Dr. Sisi Yang et al.) analyzed data from 179,508 participants in the UK Biobank who were aged 40–69 and did not have chronic kidney disease (CKD) at the start of the study, and found that people who more closely followed the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet had around a 10% lower risk of developing CKD.

You may be wondering what that diet involves, so, for your information: the EAT–Lancet planetary health diet focuses on fruits, vegetables, legumes, nuts, and low amounts of animal products while especially avoiding red or processed meat, added sugars, and unhealthy fats (e.g. most animal fats especially from mammals, and some processed other fats).

You can read more about it here: Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems

As for how it happens, the study found 122 metabolites and 143 proteins linked to the diet pattern that were also associated with lower CKD risk, including markers related to inflammation and kidney injury such as interleukin-18 receptor 1 and kidney injury molecule 1.

Further, the protective effect of the diet appeared even stronger in people with lower* exposure to residential green space and in people carrying a specific genetic variant known to its friends as rs2010352 GG.

^{*Not because lower exposure to residential green space is a beneficial thing in and of itself, but rather because those who have the worst starting point will tend to see greater improvements.}

CKD affects about 10% of adults worldwide and is projected to become the fifth leading cause of death globally by 2040, so the researchers argue that the EAT–Lancet diet could be a useful strategy for kidney disease prevention while also supporting environmental sustainability.

You can read the paper in full, here: The EAT–Lancet planetary health diet and risk of incident chronic kidney disease

Want to learn more about different dietary approaches?

Check out:

Which Diet? Top Diets Ranked By Experts ← a panel of 69 doctors and nutritionists examine the evidence for 38 diets, and score them in 21 categories (e.g. best for weight loss, best for heart, best against diabetes, best for the liver, etc).

Choose wisely!