Hi guys! It's Mathea Ford with Renal Diet Headquarters and today I wanted to take a minute and talk about something a little different than I've been talking about recently. I want to talk about Easy Renal Diet Swaps.
If you're new to kidney disease or you've had kidney disease for a while but you are kind of bogged down with similar foods, I want to talk about some things that maybe you could swap out that might give you some ideas to try new things. I'm always about trying new things, getting new foods. So, today I wanted to go over some easy renal diet swaps.
First of all, you probably notice if you've been diagnosed with kidney disease that it's overwhelming to be diagnosed with kidney disease. Any treatment that you might need. There are changes to your lifestyle that you have to adjust to. Going to maybe more doctor's appointments, definitely changing your diet, adjusting, talking to
your family about it. All those things come about and today I wanted to give you some quick ideas to change your swap out some things in your diet.
Swap number one is dressings and marinades. So, think about how easy it is to make some of your own dressings because a lot of times when you buy like a standard dressing it's going to be really high in sodium and that's one of those things that you really want to eliminate from your diet so I would encourage you to either look for some recipes online or I have on the website renaldietHQ.com, search for Zestify recipes or at the top of the page it says recipes, there are several salads and they have a salad dressing that's in them. But a lot of times vinegar and oil, some herbs and seasonings that you can get from like nickannyskitchen.com. Those can all make your salad dressing flavorful without all the salt that's in a regular store-bought salad dressing. 
That's one change and I honestly think they taste a lot better because you can flavor them specific to that salad or mix that you're using and a lot of times, salad dressings can be used as marinades so you might mix up some vinegar and oil and a few seasonings then marinate your meat or chicken or poultry in it.
Swap number two is grains. So, there are so many options out there when it comes to grains and more than just white rice and more than just plain pasta because those can be if you're especially if you're diabetic it may be something that you're not as interested in eating as much of. So, when it comes to grains, there are things like
couscous and bulgur, you can test out a few find your favorite when it comes down to both taste and texture. You may even make some vegetarian. I have a vegetarian broth recipe on my website and you can use that vegetarian broth which is flavorful to cook your grains and that will make them even more flavorful. 
If you're looking at high phosphorus you may want to eliminate the brown rice or brown whole-grain bread but just think about looking at some different types of grains that you might want to use instead of I understand a lot of people want to get rid of potatoes because of potassium.
Number three: soft drinks. So, you might like all different kinds of soft drinks, you may like water. I drink a lot of water. The one thing you want to avoid with kidney disease is the higher phosphorus ones and the higher phosphorus ones are the dark sodas. So, things like Dr. Pepper, Cola, Pepsi you want to try to drink clear soft drinks and lower phosphorus or potassium ones.
If you're like a diabetic and you want to adjust your blood sugar, say you've got a low blood sugar then one of the things you can do is obviously a lot of people go “oh orange juice” but orange juice might be high in potassium for you if you have renal diet so you may want to drink cranberry juice or like it clear like a sprite or clear soda to get less potassium in your diet but still affect that l...