Recognizing the Signs of Kidney Disease: What You Need to Know

today we're going to discuss the first sign of kidney disease and actually this will surprise you you know the kidney is a filter and it converts blood into urine and it's a fascinating piece of your body because it's not just a little passive filter it does a lot it recycles all your fluids let's say you drink I don't know eight glasses of water a day now for those people in Europe especially Dennis from Germany uh eight glasses of water per day is roughly about two liters and so if you drink eight cups or two liters

of fluid a day you're going to pee out that amount right throughout the day but think about this the amount of fluid that travels through your kidney in a given day is a 180 liters that's 760 cups of fluid so there's a lot of recycling going on in the kidney it's a a magical recycler because it recycles protein nutrients hormones it recycles like 99 of all the water that you drink and so we have this magical little filter that has all these sensors that coordinate the amount of fluid in your body that help you convert

vitamin D into the active form of vitamin D to help regulate your blood pressure and the hydration of your body and the elimination of toxins and drugs if you really appreciate what that nephron the filter of your kidney does for you you probably are going to think twice about eating junk food or or consuming things that might harm the kidney because it's an amazing amazing organ an average person has between one million to 1.5 million of these little filters they're called nephrons and so when you start developing kidney disease the amount of nephrons starts to

decrease to the point where you might end up with half of your nephrons and also as you age you lose your nephrons so we have a decreased ability to do all this magic and filter out things there is this one underlying most common cause of kidney disease as well as end stage renal failure and that relates to diabetes it's called diabetic nephropathy nephro meaning kidney apathy meaning disease so it's this high blood glucose situation that is the most common reason why the kidney gets destroyed and the mechanism of how this filter gets destroyed is this

when you have high levels of sugar interacting with these protein enzymes and other protein structures you start to get this reaction called glycation and that's the morphing when you have sugar and proteins okay it starts to damage these proteins to the point where they become unavailable and the medical term for this is called Advanced glycation end products so when you have a lot of those you have a combination of um nephrons or these little filters that don't work anymore or they're all gunked up with protein that is stuck in there and they can't filter and

so the key thing that they diagnose kidney disease with is the amount of protein in your urine because if we get less recycling of the protein it ends up in your urines not actually pulled into the body so protein in the urine means there's a kidney damage with that little filter and also because it's ending up in the urine there's going to be less protein in your blood and that main symptom is edema okay and it could be all over your body is just filled with fluid so you'll be puffing the face fluid in your

hands and your legs all over and the interesting thing about kidney disease is when the disease starts okay it takes 10 years sometimes before you even notice the first symptom okay and so now I'm going to tell you the first symptom that a person will experience with kidney disease it is nocturia now what is nocturia that is a situation where you're urinating at night okay usually multiple times and it's very difficult for you to hold your urine throughout the night that is one of the first signs that means there's something going on with your kidney

and it makes a lot of sense because the majority of diabetics also have that same symptom and it also makes sense because diabetes usually takes 10 years before you start noticing problems so kidney problems go hand in hand with diabetes and one thing about diabetes is that it affects four tissues one is the kidney okay which we're talking about now next one is the eye next one is the nervous system okay and then the arteries and so with kidney problems you're going to see protein in the urine and you're going to see a decreased filtration

rate we no longer have the filtering mechanism going on so we have a lot of backup with toxins we have a loss of a lot of nutrients including amino acids then we get a lot lot of Edema but because there's a huge delay of 10 years it's difficult to identify the cause and effect relationship but I have found the most successful way to get rid of this nocturium is just to Simply handle the blood sugar situation so let's talk about that for a second so in medicine they will tell you that diabetes is basically a

situation where you have poorly controlled blood sugar levels so the key word with that is controlled or they use this other term called managed they manage the complications of diabetes they manage the symptoms of diabetes okay that's kind of interesting you're going to manage these complications and symptoms but what about correcting yeah you know they don't really get into that why not manage or control what the patient is actually putting in their mouth and I'm talking about sugar the amount of sugar or carbohydrate that an average person consumes in America is astronomical if you especially

if you take all the hidden carbohydrates like the breads the pasta the cereal crackers you're talking a massive amount of sugar right and it's just so obvious why we have diabetics in the world because they're consuming too many carbohydrates yet the American Diabetes Association uh still to this day does not tell you how much carbs you need to control they know there's a link they know you need to reduce your carbs which is great but they don't tell you how much you should lower your carbs instead there's all sorts of ways of managing your blood

sugar and the complications what are the complications well fluid retention so we can manage that with a diuretic we also have high cholesterol we can manage that with statins we also have high blood pressure we can manage that with high blood pressure medication and of course the blood sugars could be managed by metformin and insulin and other medications for diabetes but my question is this when you manage the blood sugars remove the sugar out of the blood where does it go is it just magically evaporate does it just disappear it's just moved from one place

in the body to another place it's moved from the blood into your cells into your liver around the organs converted into fat I mean what about the complications of all the medications that you're using to manage these complications from diabetes I mean just it's just bizarre so whether you have kidney problems or you want to prevent kidney problems or you're getting up at night right now urinating um there's several things you can do to turn this thing around the first thing and the most obvious thing is to reduce the amount of sugar in your bloodstream

okay that would mean going on a ketogenic eating plan okay second thing is doing intermittent fasting because the less you eat the less you will raise insulin the less insulin resistance you'll have and the less diabetes you'll have so those go hand in hand and the type of intermittent fasting that I would recommend is the type that I'm doing right now which is one and a half meals a day now what does that mean you have your your big meal a little bit afternoon or maybe right at noon okay so you have your protein your

fat um and then later I like to do it at three o'clock but maybe you can do it later at six o'clock you can you can call it your second meal or your half a meal but you're not really doing a lot of protein you're not doing a lot of fat you're doing all your vegetable carbohydrates okay and so what I do right around three maybe three Thirty at the very latest I'll have this big salad with roughly about seven to ten cups it's usually about 10 cups but maybe you could do seven cups and

it's a big salad it's easy to eat I'm not going to eat anything else so I have my protein and fat at 12. and that three of my big salad that way it's easier to eat the salad because I could take my time I do put various things in the salad I'll definitely put olive oil sometimes I'll use apple cider vinegar sometimes I use balsamic vinaigrette I'll put little seeds on that little nuts but it's mainly greens and I might do different types of greens I like to use arugula or cabbage sometimes but if I'm

doing cabbage I'm not doing seven to ten cups right so when you're doing more dense vegetables you can do a lot less when I talk about seven to ten cups I'm talking about the lettuce leaves okay so that seems to work really good I like it because it gives me a very long fasting period okay and am I hungry for that salad no because I just ate you know a few hours before but roughly it gives me like 21 hours of fasting now a couple of very important things about that salad that I want to

mention in relationship to what we're talking about you know people always talk about oh yeah there's vitamins and minerals and salad um well there's also something very important in relationship to the complications of kidney disease and the complications of diabetes and that is phytonutrients okay phytonutrients have all sorts of pretty cool properties but the big one is nephro protection they protect the kidney against oxidation and complications of high blood sugar so if you took two diabetics right and you side to side and you gave one a diet with low phytonutrients and you gave the other

one a diet high in phytonutrients both of them would still be a diabetic but the one with the phytonutrients would have a lot less complications okay so apparently these phytonutrients are there they have antioxidant properties they help reduce the oxidation they act to neutralize a lot of the bad effects of all this high glucose flowing through your bloodstream so that's why you should be consuming this large salad every single day yes it has magnesium and vitamin C and potassium which by the way is very important for the kidney to protect it of course the only

time I would recommend not doing it is if you have end-stage kidney disease then you have to get with your doctor but I'm talking about potassium from the food so plant phytonutrients are definitely on the list the next thing I want to mention and this is a remedy that you can get and it's very powerful there's a lot of research behind it it's called benphotamine it's a type of vitamin B1 that is fat soluble and it really helps reduce the common applications in a powerful way of diabetes like I said reduce the glycation effect decrease

oxidative stress and protect the cells this is why benphotamine is really good for peripheral neuropathy as well that's the damage of the nerves in the bottom of the feet as well as problems with your eye called diabetic retinopathy but it's also really good to decrease the complications from diabetic nephropathy okay damage to the kidney you basically take one pill which I think is uh usually like 300 milligrams four times a day another thing that you could add if you really wanted to it's not totally necessary if you're doing all these other things I'm recommending but

alpha lipoic acid is another powerful way to decrease the complications from this condition another thing you can use is a turmeric okay turmeric has this phytonutrient called curcumin which is extremely potent and decreasing the symptoms the signs the complications of diabetes we want to reduce the amount of carbohydrates and we want to actually correct the underlying problem and that's why keto intermittent fasting are a necessity but at the same time we can do some great things by reducing all these other side effects that are occurring because of the high blood sugar as an experiment okay

if you're unwilling to lower your carbohydrates maybe you just want to prove it to yourself and see how these other things can work by adding some of these remedies to see how it can actually reduce maybe even the need for medication or the amount of medication you're taking of course check with your doctor but it can definitely help you so anyway I just wanted to cover this topic and give you some information that you need to use if you have this problem and I think if you are urinating at night frequently this is exactly what

I would recommend now you might say well there's no way that I'm a diabetic you know I don't I have my blood pressure checked well you should actually get a test called Homa IR which measures the insulin resistance which happens way before diabetes but the point is there is a connection between the carbohydrates that you eat and nocturia getting up in the middle of the night and urinating now to have the right plan in place to know what to eat and how to do intermittent fasting I have my very simple playlist up here you should

check this out right here