Show notes
This episode we go all in on kidney health. It’s a little controversial but I hope you find this discussion interesting and our conclusions well supported by the best available evidence. This topic of kidney health and chronic kidney disease is huge. We are talking billions of dollars, millions of people worldwide suffering and dying early due to unhealthy kidneys.Our guest this episode is a terrific guru of kidney health, Dr. Shivam Joshi.Dr. Joshi is a board certified nephrologist and Clinical Assistant Professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. He has authored multiple scientific works on the topic of plant based diets and kidney health, including his recent AJKD paper Plant-Based Diets for Kidney Disease: A Guide for Clinicians.So this episode is about how we can preserve our kidneys so they will last a lifetime. If we have kidney disease, how can we preserve those kidneys so we don’t go on to dialysis. Most people with kidney disease suffer an even worse fate than dialysis. It’s called early death. Fatal heart disease is many many more times common than dialysis. So our mission for people with kidney disease is to protect our kidneys, our heart and our whole body in the process. In many ways, kidney health is equal to human health. The health of the kidney is measured by a blood test called Glomerular Filtration Rate, or GFR. I have read it argued that no lab test correlates better with life expectancy than GFR. You can think of GFR like a fuse that burns down slowly, from 100 at birth, down to 0 when we die. That is a massive oversimplification, but there is partial truth there. The decline of kidney function and GFR is not totally dependent on age. How well you live determines how quickly that fuse burns. Some science says if you live well enough, you might even be able to make that fuse burn backwards a little, and actually improve kidney function over time. In this discussion, Dr. Joshi and I travel deep into the science of kidney health, in pursuit of anything and everything that evidence suggests can preserve our kidneys. We uncover a lot of stuff that is more emerging science and maybe has not made it out to the mainstream. But in many cases there is solid evidence that we have tools at our disposal that can make a big difference in your kidney’s health, that you aren’t going to learn about from mainstream medicine. Spoiler alert: the new kid on the block of kidney health is plant based diets. As you will hear in our discussion, some convincing science suggests that meats and processed foods of the standard western diet damage the kidneys in numerous ways. But we live in a curious time when few doctors are aware of the emerging science of plant based nutrition and kidney health. I liken it to the time when we had the science that smoking is unhealthy to the lungs but most doctors still smoked. Intake of plants has been traditionally discouraged by kidney doctors, because plant foods are high in potassium, phosphorous, which can build up to toxic levels in the diseased kidney. That seems to be changing however.This topic is rich with science and controversy. It is super important because lives are at stake. I really hope you find it helpful. And remember, the final product of our discussion is on a web page on healthrules.org. You can go to healthrules.org/podcast, and look for the Checklist to Prevent Kidney Disease and Progression.There you will find our finalized checklist and a printable handout to take to YOUR doctor or to show to YOUR patients.If you have feedback, I’d appreciate you go to healthrules.org/feedback and tell us what we got wrong or right and tell us if you have a story to tell about your kidneys!
