CKD: What Diet Changes You Need To Make

Once you are diagnosed with chronic kidney disease (CKD), you have to change your lifestyle so as to reduce the progression of your kidney disease. Well, what changes have you made to your diet? And in CKD, what you can eat and what you can not?

1. Limit salt or sodium intake

Healthy kidneys have the ability of excreting excessive water out of the body. With decreased kidney function, it will cause retention of water in your body, called edema or swelling. In your daily life, the main ingredient of salt is sodium. If you still ingest much salt, your swelling symptom will increase. To relieve your edema symptom, you can choose some low sodium or less salted foods and avoid some high sodium foods, including pickles, bacon, processed foods, canned foods and cheese etc.

2. Proper protein intake

With chronic kidney disease, protein in urine is often seen. Therefore, you should limit your protein intake. Otherwise, proteinuria aggravates your kidney disease and even puts you at a risk of advancing kidney failure. At the same time, you should also consume some high quality protein to meet your daily needs, such as fish, egg white, lean meat and dairy products. Balance your protein intake is helpful for you to reduce your illness conditions.

3. Low phosphorus and potassium

When your kidneys are damaged, phosphorus and potassium levels easily increase. In that case, you should limit your phosphorus and potassium intake and make your lifestyle changes to some low phosphorus and potassium foods. Besides, you should know some low phosphorus foods may be high potassium, like bananas, so you should pay much attention to your foods.

4. Ingest some high calcium foods

When you have CKD, your phosphorus level is usually high and calcium is low, which easily leads to bone disease and make your bones easily broken. In order to avoid its occurrence, you should choose some foods containing high calcium like diary foods and broccoli.

The above dietary tips do not suit for every CKD patients. What is suitable for you depends on your own illness conditions. Before making diet changes, you should find a dietitian or consult our doctor. Making healthy food choices just contribute to slow down your progression of chronic kidney disease, while they can not cure your chronic kidney disease radically. The best and effective treatment is to repair your injured renal intrinsic cells.