When Doctors Make Chronic Kidney Disease Worse

Doctors’ advice is sometimes far behind scientific research, and since so much research is published, one cannot blame them.

A study in the Journal of Renal Nutrition suggests that current dietary advice for chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients is completely wrong and that they should eat more of a specific type of food, not less, as most doctors recommend.

This wrong advice by most doctors may be the reason millions of cases of CKD are escalating much too quickly.

Patients with advanced chronic kidney disease are often advised to limit their intake of vegetables and fruits due to the risk of elevated potassium levels in their blood. However, this advice seems to contradict general population studies that associate lower vegetable and fruit intake with a higher risk of death.

As a result, the authors of the new study decided to settle the issue by examining the relationship between vegetable and fruit intake and mortality in CKD patients.

The study, led by scientists from the Niigata University Graduate School of Medical and Dental Sciences in Japan, involved 2,006 patients who visited the outpatient department of a general hospital between June 2008 and December 2016.

Of these participants, 902 (45%) were non-dialysis-dependent patients with CKD, and 131 (7%) were dialysis-dependent. Participants were categorized into three groups based on self-reported vegetable and fruit intake frequency: never or rarely, sometimes, and every day.

During a median follow-up of 5.7 years, 561 participants died. When they compared the groups, they discovered that vegetables and fruits were indeed advisable.

1. Compared with the everyday consumption group, those who consumed them sometimes were 25% more likely to die, a risk that increased to 60% for the never or rarely group.

2. Vegetable and fruit intake reduced the risk of death for people with CKD of all stages and for people without CKD.

3. Vegetable and fruit intake declined in patients with advanced CKD, meaning that they were consuming fewer healthy foods when they needed them the most.

Therefore, don’t cut vegetables and fruits from your diet, even if you have CKD.

Indeed, the development of CKD can be stopped and even reversed using this and other simple lifestyle changes explained here …