Hi there! It's Mathea Ford with Renal Diet HQ and today I wanted to do a live and talk to you about some handy tips for eating to remember when you have chronic kidney disease and I'm going to go over five tips that I have for you but I want to remind you that it's really important to try to manage some of your eating and to do it kind of slowly not like pull off the band-aid kind of quickly.
When you try to follow a kidney-friendly diet, it isn't always just as simple as like eating the healthiest options because sometimes your seemingly ingredients that are good for you can have high levels of phosphorous and if you're worried about phosphorus, if your lab levels show that you have high levels of phosphorous, then those can be bad decisions or you know maybe something you should choose less often or potassium amounts. If you're worried about your potassium and your potassium levels are high, then you certainly should manage the amount of potassium that you eat. Not everyone has to limit their phosphorus or potassium so don't just automatically reduce that or don't automatically change that.
The things that we know that you should change that would be the most helpful when you have chronic kidney disease are eating less sodium and eating lower amounts of protein. Those help with your creatinine and other levels in your body. These five tips should help you remember what to eat when you're kind of making that choice.
Number one: Back away from Beige. If you're worried about potassium you need to choose things that are not whole as much whole grain. Now, I for one want you to eat some whole grains because I know they're healthy for you. You need the fiber, you need the extra that's got extra vitamins and nutrients in it but you need to watch out for eating too much whole grain.
Now, in the US, I don't know that that's a huge problem but you can get fiber in other ways as well. You can get it from vegetables, you can get your oatmeal or other like hot cereals but just watch out for those like whole-grain bread and brown rice if you're worried about potassium.
If you're not worried about it you certainly should steer towards those things because they have more fiber and more natural vitamins and minerals that are very helpful to you and healthy for your heart.
Number two: If you are concerned about phosphorus you probably want to switch out your dairy. If you have high levels of phosphorus. If you're in late stage 4 or early stage 5 or on dialysis, you're probably going to switch out your milk to something that is more has less phosphorous like unflavored rice milk and it's really something that you probably would want to do as you moved towards later stages of kidney disease but not when you're in stage 3 and stage 4 kidney disease you can still drink regular milk. You just still need to pay attention to the amount of protein that's in regular milk because 8 ounce glass of regular milk has as much protein as an ounce of meat or poultry so you have to balance that when you're trying to control the amount of protein that you're eating.
Number 3: Red is best when it comes to fruit. This one's really kind of easy for you. A handy rule of thumb for choosing fruits is to generally stick with the red options like red berries, strawberries apples, watermelon. Yellow fruits like bananas or orange like oranges can be higher in potassium and so people tend to steer away from those. I always think of it as a great balance between how many you… Balance.
Eating a little bit of some is not going to be a bad thing. Eating too much is going to be what's going to cause the problem. If you find yourself overly eating you know bananas every afternoon, you might want to balance that out with eating some berries or some apples that can or grapes that are also healthy, also have fruit, have fruit or fiber and yet are not as high in pot...