Clean Your Kidneys of Uric Acid and Oxalates

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Let's talk about the kidney and how amazing it is and how to protect it and exactly what

you should be taking to minimize any type of toxicity or damage to the kidney, especially

long term.

The kidney is actually very rugged.

It's similar to the liver in that it can take a beating, but it can regenerate.

Each kidney is composed of roughly about a million tiny little filters, and these

kidneys have to filter all day and all night long, 24, 7, constantly.

They filter blood, and so where does the blood come from?

Well, it comes from what you eat, right?

All the food that you eat, all the junk food, all the alcohol that you drink, all the medications

and the drugs that you're exposed to, all the pollution, all the plastics end up in the

blood, and then they end up in the kidney.

Your kidney just has to be able to differentiate what it wants to recycle and what it needs

to get rid of.

There's a high degree of complexity going on in this little filter called the nephron.

As you age, you start losing these little filters to the point where you can actually

lose up to 20% of your kidney.

They can shrink as you age.

It becomes even more important that as you age, you really start eating better and are

exposed to less toxins, drugs and medications.

Of course, that's just the opposite.

As we age, we take more medications and unfortunately, older people, especially if they end up

in some type of home, are not eating the right foods.

The kidneys also make certain hormones, one being to make red blood cells.

The other one is for blood pressure, but let's dive into some things that really destroy

the kidney.

There's even so-called healthy foods that are destroying the kidney and we'll talk about

those as well.

Let's first talk about what makes it a kidney stone, because having a kidney stone can

create a lot of damage to your kidney, especially because it has these little crystals that can

damage and create a scar tissue of the kidney itself as well as a little tube that connects

the kidney to the bladder.

Kidney stones most commonly come from what's called oxalate stones, like calcium oxalate

stones, but you can also get them in a form of uric acid stones as well.

One of the most important things to do, especially if you're prone to kidney stones, is to limit

the amount of oxalates that you're exposed to.

If you're on the ketogenic plan, chances are you're probably eating something right now

that is very high in oxalates.

Almonds, spinach, beet tops, peanuts, grains, beans, sweet potatoes, cassava, tapioca, which

comes from cassava, kiwi, chocolate, Swiss charred, turmeric has a good amount of oxalates.

However, turmeric has a lot of other properties to help decrease inflammation as well as prevent

the binding of calcium and oxalates, but also cinnamon is a bit high in oxalates as well

as clove.

Now, the other point I want to mention about these oxalates, because they can really

create some issues that go beyond just problems in the kidney.

They can create arthritis, as well as something called pseudogout.

Gout is normally created by this uric acid crystal that's developing, but with pseudogout,

it's not uric acid.

There's some other types of crystals that are developing from calcium, and also can

be worsened if you have high levels of oxalates, either in a diet or your body is just making

them.

One point about pseudogout is that anything that increases the excretion of too much calcium

could worsen it.

Interestingly enough, too much salt can cause a release of this calcium from the kidneys.

If you currently are consuming a lot of salt, and probably not enough potassium, you might

want to just make a change and see if that doesn't help you.

The most of the population you can handle a lot of salt, but for a select small group of

people, especially if they have gout or even pseudogout, they might do better without excessive

salt.

I think really the big problem is the ratio of potassium to sodium, and if you had enough

potassium, your salt level would be fine, but I would just recommend playing around with

the dosage and start lowering the salt and raising the potassium and see if you don't

feel better.

By decreasing the salt, you're going to be excreting calcium a lot less, and it won't develop

into crystals.

The other interesting point about oxalates has to do with malabsorption in your gut.

If you have malabsorption, and I'm talking about damage in the gut, let's have inflammation,

you have acyliac, or crones, or irritable bowel syndrome, gastric bypass, for example.

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There's a certain level of damage in your digestive tract that doesn't allow you to absorb

certain things, especially fats.

If you're doing the ketogenic diet or even carnivore and you have all this fat that's

coming into the gut, but you can't really absorb the fat, some of that fat is going to bind

with the calcium.

That's going to leave the oxlates free to be reabsorbed, go into your blood, and end

up in a kidney.

There is this interesting connection between fat binding to calcium and then freeing up

this oxlates.

If you're eating foods low in oxlates, you don't have nothing to worry about.

Another point about that, if you're eating foods high in oxlates and you take more calcium

with it, maybe through the dairy, then you're also protected.

If you're going to do some spinach dish and you had cheese with it, that might be helpful.

That's just another way to counter the damage of these oxlates on the kidney.

Since the kidney can be very sensitive to too much of your acid and oxlates, when they

usually do a urine test for people with gout or kidney stones, they usually always find

that there's excessive amounts of calcium in the urine, excessive amounts of urine acid,

oxlates.

There's also lower amounts of this other thing called citrates, now what are citrates?

Your body makes them.

Also you can get it from consuming citrus like lemons or limes, and citrus is really

interesting because it actually binds with the oxlates in a way that prevents the calcium

from binding and it can lower your risk of getting kidney stones.

The thing about consuming lemons is if they're alkaline, that's one way to counter gout

if you have too much of your acid.

This is why lemons are really good for that kidney.

They protect the kidney, they have potassium in there, they provide some alkalinity, but

they also protect against these oxlates.

Another interesting natural remedy would be apple cider vinegar, take like a tablespoon

in your water in the morning as a way to prevent stones.

Let me just kind of circle back to potassium again and talk a little bit more about that.

Potassium is probably one of the best minerals to protect the kidney and people are so concerned

about taking potassium because they've heard something that potassium is bad for the kidney.

It's only bad if you have a stage 5 kidney disease like end stage kidney disease where

you would want to take potassium, but apparently even if there is some damage to the kidney,

potassium can be protective.

Since the general population doesn't consume a lot of potassium foods, potassium in a electrolyte

powder or just high potassium foods are very, very beneficial for the kidney and they can

help balance the sodium, leafy greens, large salads, avocados, very, very high in potassium.

Let's or our beet leaves, but beet leaves are very high in oxlates.

You want to consume vegetables that are high in potassium, but low in oxlates and so even

no spinach is very high in potassium, you wouldn't want to do it because it's high in oxlates

as well.

There's other things you can do to counter that damage.

You can actually, again, have a little cheese with that and that way it will give you

the calcium to prevent some of those oxlates from binding, but I probably didn't talk

about the most damaging thing to your kidney, which is sugar, because the number one cause

of end-stage kidney disease is diabetes, and that comes from a high carb diet.

It's so interesting if you look at the flips out of that, the ketogenic diet, low carb.

You might hear reports that the ketogenic diet is really bad for your kidneys, so you

need to avoid it, because you might develop ketoacidosis, and well, first of all, we're

always recommending the healthy version of the ketogenic diet, so you're not going to develop

ketoacidosis.

Ketoacidosis occurs when you're in a diabetic and you forget to take your insulin and you have

super high levels of acidity and ketones, which you're never going to see if you're not a diabetic.

Actually, ketones are very healthy for the kidney, and a high carb diet is not very healthy to

the kidney, because you're exposing the kidney for the little filters with so much oxidation,

and that's basically kind of rusting out the kidney.

And then what happens is once you destroy that filter, then you start seeing glucose in the urine,

because we're not recycling it anymore.

And one test to evaluate what's going on the kidneys is actually to check your blood,

like your waste product, a protein that's called urea, so it's called blood urea.

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Trigin. So with kidney disease, you'll see excessive amount of protein in the urine,

which is not good, but you also see urea or a waste product protein in the blood.

But you'll also see another compound called creatinine in the urine as well in excessive amounts.

And that just indicates there's another protein problem with your muscles not being handled by the

kidney. But creatinine can also occur from other reasons as well, because when you eat a lot of

cooked meat, when you cook it, you actually convert creatine to creatinine, and that can show up

in the urine, as well as consuming just large amounts of protein. But typically you're only

going to see a problem with that if your kidneys are not healthy. If your kidneys are healthy and

you're eating a lot of protein, I think you're not going to see any problem. In fact, I really have

not found any really good evidence to show that eating too much protein will do any damage to the

kidney. It's usually when someone's eating a lot of protein and a lot of sugar at the same time.

But creatinine can also show up if there's liver damage, or even as a side effect from taking

ACE inhibitors, which are medications for blood pressure. Or if you're doing heavy duty exercise,

it can show up. So you have to be able to differentiate, is it kidney problem, or is it something else?

So let's just summarize some of the things that you can do to really keep these kidneys in check.

I would do lemon water every morning. Actually, if you can squeeze a lemon, that would be best.

Put it in the water, add your outside of vinegar, drink your liquids. It's probably a good idea,

especially if you're prone to kidney stones to consume two and a half liters of water, because

kidney stone occurs because there's a super saturated amount of urine, and you're getting all

these crystals developing. So if you're drinking enough liquids, you're going to be fine with that.

The second point is to avoid high oxalate-type foods. And of course, there's a lot more to talk about

that, but I give you the ones that are like the most important. And if you do eat foods high in

oxalates, well, add some dairy to it, or add some calcium to counter that. And of course,

a really important point is to go on the low carb ketogenic plan within a minute fasting.

And also out of all the sugars, fruit toast, by the way, and I want to just add this to the mix.

It can really spike your uric acid more than a lot of other things. So fruit toast is really,

really bad as in high fructose corn syrup. Also, when you're consuming a lot of vitamin C,

and I know there is some benefits of doing high levels of vitamin C for certain things.

But if you're trying to get rid of your gout, or your pseudo gout, and you're consuming massive

amounts of vitamin C in the form of the scorpic acid, well, just to make some changes,

cut that out for a couple days, and see if your pain doesn't just go away. I just wanted to,

in this video, include a lot of different links to things that could be aggravating your condition.

Now, let's say you are a diabetic, or you have kidney damage already. There are things you can do

to help protect the kidney even more. In addition to potassium, and that would be

consuming a lot of the phytonutrients, so the antioxidants, and certain plant foods, especially

in microgreens, which are these little baby plants, they grow a little bit more than sprouts.

And I recommend the ones grown in soil if you can get them. And the reason I'm saying that is,

if you're consuming microgreens compared to adult vegetables, you're going to get some of these

phytonutrients in levels that are 20, 50 to 100 times more than the adult vegetables. So all it takes

is a small amount of these things to create a big effect. And if you're trying to, you know,

protect the kidney, this is very doable. It's very easy. Just add it to your salad, and it can help

protect you. And I'm talking about the phytonutrients, like sulfurophane, flavonoids, carotenoids,

even chlorophyll, all of those are really good to protect the kidney. But just one last point about

that, turmeric does have high levels of oxalates. So there's mixed reviews on that powerful phytonutrient.

Now that you have that information, if you have not seen my video on the seven warning signs

of the toxic kidney, I put that up right here. Check it out.

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