This Lifestyle Halts Chronic Kidney Disease

Approximately 10 percent of people worldwide suffer from some form of kidney disease.

Which is why it is a mystery that public health organizations do not release statements with lifestyle guidelines for preventing it.

A study in the latest Journal of the American Society of Nephrology addresses this oversight by mining a list of lifestyle factors from already published literature associated with chronic kidney disease.

The researchers from Karolinska Institute in Sweden and Griffith University in Australia searched through medical databases to find studies in which people reported the lifestyle factors to which they were exposed before they developed chronic kidney disease (CKD).

CKD was defined as an estimated glomerular filtration rate of less than 60ml per minute. In fact, a score between 61 and 90 already indicates mildly reduced kidney function, but we’ll stick to their official definition here.

Together with estimated glomerular filtration rate, they also checked whether the studies reported renal replacement therapy, glomerular filtration rate decline, and the presence of the protein albumin in the subjects’ urine where it should not be.

They found 104 studies with 2,755,719 participants from 16 countries, from which they concluded the following:

1. Consuming a relatively high amount of vegetables reduces our risk of CKD by 21 percent.
2. Appropriate intake of potassium reduces the risk by 22 percent.
3. Physical exercise reduces the risk by 18 percent.
4. Reducing alcohol consumption from heavy to moderate reduces the risk by 15 percent, but the risk again increases when alcohol intake is zero.
5. Lowering our sodium intake reduces the risk by 21 percent.
6. Never smokers have an 18 percent lower risk than current and former smokers.

The researchers recommended that these guidelines should be adopted by public health organizations and by doctors in discussions with their patients.

Following these guidelines is, however, not enough if you already suffer CKD. But hundreds of readers have reversed their CKD using the simple lifestyle changes explained here…