Hi there! This is Mathea Ford, the creator of the Understanding Your Kidney Test Results course and today I want to talk to you about something that is really important to me. I want to talk about something that I suddenly realized was happening when I with… to a lot of people with kidney disease. It’s something that’s really holding you back and really keeping you from being able to move forward or understand your labs better and what to do next.
So it’s the idea that you can read your labs and know what they mean or asking your doctor what they mean is going to somehow tell you what to do next perhaps your doctor even never told you that you had kidney disease and you find out by looking at your labs and you wondered what to do and so you started googling. So what
happens is you go you find your labs and you realize that they say that your eGFR is high or low and it’s out of whack and all of a sudden you start googling and looking around and your doctor never even mentioned it to you or they tell your eGFR is high but they don’t tell you what to do next.
So, you don’t know how to address that so again start googling and you may find the information you may not find reputable good information or you may not. So, you know what your labs are and you know what is a normal range because a lot of times on the paperwork it will show you the normal range. The normal range might be for potassium, for example, like three point five to five and so you’re in that normal range but do you know what to do with that knowledge on how to change?
So maybe your EGFR is high and you google and you find out that means for a kidney diet that you should restrict protein and salts and maybe even these this information says you should also restrict protein and potassium. I mean protein, phosphorus, and potassium but for a regular kidney patient, it’s typically only the protein and the salt that you have to worry about but a lot of people restrict potassium because they don’t know if they should or not. They don’t know if their labs are okay or not so I understand why people believe that just knowing and they’re
like make a few changes or maybe they make a ton of changes and then you don’t know really what was important or what might have worked so I’m actually a believer in making the least restrictive diet if possible because it will get more restrictive and it will change over time but it’s valuable to adjust your protein intake based on the stage of kidney failure you’re in for sure but it’s a little bit of a misnomer to not realize that there’s more depth to that
that there are other labs that should be taken or there are other ways to know whether you’re processing or progressing quickly and your kidney disease is getting worse or you can slow down kidney disease.
There are some other labs that maybe your doctor didn’t even measure that would tell you “hey! this means it’s progressing quickly we need to make more changes” or maybe they didn’t measure your potassium and phosphorus and you don’t know what you should do but that’s why so many people start restricting every single thing. They limit their diet, they excessively limit their diet. They end up with a diet that’s hard to follow and hard to tolerate and they might get upset or frustrated so you find out you have a 45 eGFR but you don’t know if it’s
progressing quickly or not so you suddenly switch and change everything you stop eating salt, you cut out protein, and unfortunately, I’ve heard from several people that their doctors just told them to eat no protein and while it
seems like doing a little bit of a change would be good and a whole lot would be even be...