Kidney Transplant and What Foods to Eat and Avoid After

Have you wondered :

Ever wondered the best things to eat to help protect your kidney transplant stay tuned to find out thanks so much for watching today make sure you hit that subscribe button and click that bell like this video make sure you never miss a new recipe or a new health tip before we get going here’s the disclaimer my name is dr blake shusterman i’m a board-certified

Nephrologist kidney doctor but i am not your doctor so this is just informational purposes only this is not medical advice so the absolute best day for me as a kidney doctor is when somebody i am caring for gets a kidney transplant it takes their kidney function from abnormal to good often takes people off of dialysis often makes them feel better takes away a lot

Of the burden of part of their life it’s just a great day all around and if you’ve gotten a kidney transplant i am sure that you’ve been wondering how are you going to eat to help protect that kidney because that is a precious organ in the united states there are more than 100 000 people waiting for a kidney transplant so if you have one that’s a precious gift

And you need to take care of it before we get to my favorite part the food let’s talk quickly about how a kidney transplant works kidney transplants are given to people who have stage five kidney disease or who are on dialysis those kidneys can come in two ways one is if they get a living donor kidney transplant so a friend or relative or a stranger who’s feeling

Altruistic decides to donate one of their kidneys to somebody who has kidney failure the other way a kidney transplant comes is through something called a deceased donor that’s when somebody dies but their kidneys are in good enough shape that they can donate those kidneys to people who are in need of a kidney transplant now when you get a kidney transplant they

Take one of those kidneys and they put it in your body without removing either of your two kidneys so most people with kidney transplants end up with three kidneys two of them are the original kidneys which don’t work very well and the third one is the new kidney which does most of the function now in the future we may be looking at other great ways for kidney

Transplants like pig kidneys or artificial kidneys with nanotechnology lots of great things out there for the future i hope they come soon but in the meantime those are the only two ways for you to get a kidney transplant now diet is a really key way to help protect that kidney after the transplant many people gain weight after a kidney transplant for a variety

Of reasons the first is that they may not be feeling well around the time of the surgery they may be a little weak and so they may be less active and during that time they may put on some extra pounds people also are taking medicines if you have a kidney transplant that can cause you to gain weight one of those medicines is called prednisone and prednisone is a

Steroid which can lead to increased appetite in some people and weight gain especially if people have to take prednisone for the whole rest of the life of that kidney the last reason that i think people gain weight sometimes after a kidney transplant is because they’re hungry you may not have had an appetite when you had kidney failure when you were on dialysis

And now that your kidney function is much better oftentimes the appetite is stimulated and you want to eat and that sometimes causes people to eat more food than their body needs and that can lead to weight gain so i went looking deep into the data to try to figure out exactly what our research says that you need to eat to protect that kidney and i was a little

Disappointed there’s not a lot of studies to tell people how to best protect that kidney and that sometimes leaves you in the lurch and me having to provide guidance without some real specific data so even without that real specific data i think we have some ideas of how to best eat to protect that kidney and some dietary guidelines just for people who are on some

Post-transplant medicines so here goes now remember these recommendations and ideas don’t apply necessarily to you out there or to everyone these are general recommendations just to think about the first thing to know is that if you take a medicine called tacrolimus which is very common in people who’ve had a kidney transplant it’s one of those immunosuppressive

Medicines then you probably have to limit drinking grapefruit juice isn’t that crazy grapefruit juice has a tendency to change the way your body metabolizes the tachylimus so drinking a lot of grapefruit juice can affect your tacrolimus levels and your tacrolimus levels are very important because if those levels go too high it can cause problems in the body and

If those levels go too low it can cause you to not have enough protection in that kidney for rejection next is the mediterranean diet the mediterranean diet is one of those diets that has actually been studied albeit in small studies and people with kidney transplants the one study that i saw which has some significant problems was done with dietary recall and if

You’ve ever watched any of my videos before you know that dietary recall is not a great way to do a study because i have no idea what i ate yesterday this study found that people who followed a mediterranean diet over the course of five years had improved kidney function now the mediterranean diet is a great diet in general and so i am hopeful that the results

Of this study can be expanded to a broader population but i think that’s a good place to start the mediterranean diet now what does the mediterranean diet include lots of fish fruit vegetables legumes olive oil lower red meat the kind of things that i always talk about that are healthy for you healthy for your body and healthy for your kidneys next if you have

A kidney transplant you are on immunosuppressive medicines those medicines protect your kidney from your own body attacking this foreign organ that’s been put in there by the surgeons anytime something comes in your body and your body doesn’t recognize it it will attack it so immunosuppressive medicines keep your body from attacking that kidney those medicines

Also though have a tendency to keep your body from attacking other bacteria and other viruses that may come into contact with you and have the potential to cause disease so there are some food borne illnesses that you have to watch out for and that you may have to change your eating patterns to help prevent them some of those things include undercooked meat and

Poultry raw fish like sushi things like raw oysters all those things have increased risk of foodborne illnesses and if your body doesn’t have the ability to fight it off then you should avoid that now obviously there’s cooked sushi and vegetarian sushi so that would be a way to get around that we’re also talking about things like unpasteurized milks and cheeses

And yogurts the pasteurization process will lower the risk of bacteria so if you’re eating unpasteurized food that can increase your risk that also includes things like undercooked eggs and finally you just need to be washing your fruits and vegetables extra well what else can you do to help protect that kidney well there’s some things that i always talk about

Lower sodium diet less animal protein lots of fruits and vegetables those are not new things those were there before you had your kidney transplant and are still there at the end of the day once you have that great functioning organ finally a lot of your diet with a kidney transplant will be dependent on your stage of chronic kidney disease people who have kidney

Transplants with relatively normal kidney function and people who have kidney transplants have stage five kidney disease and are needing to go back on dialysis soon and those people have to follow the same guidelines as anybody with chronic kidney disease in their native kidneys thanks so much for watching today i’m dr blake shusterman i’m a board certified kidney

Doctor and i’m also the cooking doc i hope you enjoyed it i hope you learned something if you’re lucky enough to have a kidney transplant please take care of it check out my website thecookingdoc.co check out my book the cooking docs kidney healthy cooking a modern 10-step guide to preventing and managing kidney disease and i’ll see you next time

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Kidney Transplant and What Foods to Eat and Avoid After | The Cooking Doc® By The Cooking Doc