When your kidneys start to fail, you don’t immediately go on
dialysis. You have a period of time
before your kidney function gets to the point that you have to resort to that
step. If you have concerns about renal
pre-dialysis, you need to understand it first of all.
When you have kidney problems, you are in need of
understanding about how your kidneys work and what you need to do to improve
their function. Maybe you also need to
understand that you CAN improve their function.
All is not lost. Kidney disease
is a highly complicated disease that affects a lot of the systems of the
body. Depending on the "stage"
for kidney disease, you not have to control your protein as tightly. Stages 1 & 2 are going to be less
restrictive on protein but as you get to Stage 3 & 4, you will need to
limit the protein you eat to not continue the damage that is being done to your
kidneys. You see, you have a window of
time to improve your kidney function with diet.
What is kidney function?
It’s what your doctor is talking about when he measures your BUN and
creatinine clearance to see how well your body is able to handle the food that
you are eating. Your kidneys are your
body’s filter. Think about a filter, it
is made to let some things through and other things remain unable to go
through. Just like any other filter,
your kidneys let the “bad things” – blood urea nitrogen (urine) and extra salts
and fluid out, while keeping in your red blood cells and other “good things”
that are in your blood. It does this at
a very microscopic level. It has done
this your entire life, but things like diabetes, high blood pressure, amongst
other things, do damage over time at the cellular level where the filter is
working and your filter stops working as well.
What that means is, as your cells are damaged, they either
let out too much or don’t work at all and levels of certain types of blood
chemicals – like blood urea nitrogen (BUN) – get higher because your kidneys
can’t filter them out. This is how you
know that your kidneys are damaged. And
as the amount of protein they let out and BUN that they keep in goes higher,
you get your stage of kidney disease.
Which means, what percentage of your kidneys are working or not.
Now, to the best part – when you are here – before you have
dialysis, you can stop the damage, possibly reverse the damage, but at the very
least you can stop it. If you are
cooking for someone who needs help with their renal pre-dialysis understanding,
you can cook your way to better health.
Healthier meals are what you need.
You can limit the amount of salt and protein that you eat, and yet still
eat enough of other foods so that you are not starving.
You see, a pre-dialysis renal diagnosis is like a wake up
call. It’s a chance to change things
that are going in the wrong direction, even if you have not managed to do it
before. You may be on medications to
lower your blood pressure and even control diabetes if you have it, but this
will not be enough if you have a need to stop the progression of renal
predialysis. You need to change some
things about your diet to improve your health.
If you want to learn more about a renal predialysis diet,
then you can read more in our article on renal pre-dialysis diets at our
website – http://www.renaldiethq.com/how-a-renal-pre-dialysis-diet-is-going-to-help-you/