animal protein
How Not to Die from Kidney Disease
"How Not to Die from Kidney Disease" Kidney failure may be both prevented
and treated with a plant-based diet, and no wonder; kidneys are
highly vascular organs. Harvard researchers found three
significant dietary risk factors for declining kidney function: animal
protein, animal fat, and cholesterol. Animal fat can alter the actual structure
of our kidneys, based on studies like this, showing plugs of fat literally clogging up
the works in autopsied human kidneys. And the animal protein can
have a profound effect on normal kidney function,
inducing what's called hyperfiltration, increasing the workload of
the kidney; but not plant protein.
Eat a meal of tuna fish and you can see
the increased pressure on the kidneys go up within 1, 2, 3 hours after the meal,
in both nondiabetics and diabetics. So we're not talking adverse
effects decades down the road, but literally within hours
of it going into our mouth. Now, if instead of having a tuna
salad sandwich, though, you had a tofu salad sandwich, with the exact same amount
of protein, what happens? No effect. Dealing with plant protein
is no problem. Why does animal protein cause the
overload reaction, but not plant protein? It appears to be due to
the inflammation triggered by the consumption
of animal products. How do we know that? Because, if you give a powerful,
anti-inflammatory drug along with that tuna fish, you
can abolish the hyperfiltration, protein leakage response
to meat ingestion.
Then, there's the acid load. Animal foods—meat, eggs, and dairy—
induce the formation of acid within the kidneys, which
may lead to tubular toxicity, damage to the tiny, delicate,
urine-making tubes in the kidney. Animal foods tend to be acid forming—
especially fish, which is the worst— then pork and poultry, whereas plant foods tend
to be relatively neutral, or actually alkaline, base-forming
to counteract the acid. So the key to halting the progression
of chronic kidney disease might be in the produce market,
rather than the pharmacy.
No wonder plant-based diets have been
used to treat kidney disease for decades. Here's protein leakage on the
conventional low sodium diet, which is what physicians
would typically put someone with declining
kidney function on. Switched to a supplemented vegan
diet, then back to conventional, plant-based, conventional,
plant-based; turning on and off kidney dysfunction
like a light switch, based on what was
going into their mouths..
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
Plant-based Atkins diet
“Plant-Based Atkins Diet” This was a pretty dramatic case report,
but it was just one person. Recently, researchers at Harvard
decided to look at 100,000 people: “Low-Carb Diets and All-Cause
and Cause-Specific Mortality.” They found that low-carb diets
were associated with higher all-cause mortality,
higher cardiovascular disease mortality, and higher cancer mortality. The final nail in Atkins’ coffin. Men and women on low-carb diets
lead significantly shorter lives; more cancer deaths, more heart attacks. Sure, you may lose some weight,
but the only way we may be able to enjoy it is with a skinnier casket.
But wait! In 2009, some enterprising researchers
came up with a plant-based, low-carb diet; the so-called “Eco-Atkins” diet. They figured that maybe the problem with
the Atkins diet wasn’t that it was high-fat, high-protein, but that it was
high-animal fat, -animal protein. So they constructed a
vegan version of the Atkins diet. How is that possible? Well, lots of mock meats, seitan,
soy burgers, veggie bacon, veggie cold cuts, veggie sausage,
tofu, lot of nuts, avocado, etc. How did they do? Pretty good, actually. Instead of their bad cholesterol going up,
like it does on a meat-based Atkins, after just two weeks on the
plant-based, low-carb diet, their LDL was down more than 20%.
Now the whole study only
lasted a month, though, so you couldn’t really
make any generalizations. But it was intriguing enough that
when the data was run at Harvard, they picked out the people
eating plant-based, low-carb diets to see if they suffered
the same low-carb fate. That’s the nice thing about doing dietary
studies on 100,000 people at a time: you can find people eating
just about anything. What do you think they found? This line represents the
mortality rate of the typical diet. And this is what they found
for people following more of an Atkins-style low-carb diet:
significantly higher risk of death. But what do you think they found
for those following a plant-based, low-carb diet? Do they suffer the same crazy
mortality as the Atkins people? Or maybe they didn’t do that bad, but still had more mortality
than those eating regular diets? Or did they have the same,
or lower mortality? They had lower mortality. They concluded: “A low-carbohydrate diet
based on animal sources was associated with higher all-cause mortality
in both men and women, whereas a vegetable-based
low-carbohydrate diet was associated with lower all-cause and
cardiovascular disease mortality rates.” So it appears, what matters really isn’t
the ratio of fat to carbs to protein, but rather, the source— whether they’re coming
from plants or animals.
Video Transcript – As found on YouTube
