What happens when you start to eat healthy and why is it so darn hard? Ever wonder what would happen if you were to start eating healthy? If you’re like most people, making a commitment to eating healthy and sticking with it can lead to some dramatic changes even if you…
If you have kidney disease, holiday parties and family meals are not always carefree events. While other friends and family celebrate without a second thought towards healthy eating or restraint, you may feel the stress of your dietary restrictions and know that you can’t afford to forget to pay attention to…
As a kidney doctor, I prescribe a lot of medications. My goal is to protect my patients’ kidneys through every way I know how. I also know that a lot of people want to protect their kidneys without using medications. That’s where these steps come into play. How many of these…
Many of my favorite foods just so happen to be among the highest potassium foods you can eat: ripe bananas; sweet potatoes that are perfectly slow-baked until their inside melts like butter and tastes like honey; butternut squash soups of any variety; and just-ripened avocados, whether they’re sliced up in a…
Rail thin, pale and a little grumpy, Dean was my first introduction to veganism. We lived together as college sophomores in 1995, in a communal living space called the Environmental House at Tufts University. As empty pizza boxes, sub wraps and chicken wing bones piled up in my room, Dean subsisted…
People often ask me what changes they should make to their diet in order to improve their health or to help them lose weight. Sometimes they are looking for a quick and easy solution to a complicated problem. The answer I give them is often simple, but not in the way…
The ketogenic diet, or keto diet for short, is a high-fat, low-carbohydrate eating plan designed to put the body into a state of ketosis. In ketosis, the body burns fat for fuel instead of carbohydrates, leading to rapid weight loss and improved metabolic health. I have had patients lose anywhere from…
Suppose you have just left your primary care doctor’s office with a new diagnosis of Stage 3 Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD). Because you have been managing your diabetes and high blood pressure fairly well over the last ten years, the diagnosis comes as a shock. That evening, you decide to make…
Consider these five things. 1. Healthy dishes taste delicious in a much different way than unhealthy dishes. In order to be serious about changing your diet, you have to teach your taste buds to appreciate different flavors. That’s what I mean when I say, #ChangeYourBuds. (Watch my video explanation of #ChangeYourBuds here.)…
It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that excessive sugar intake contributes to the development of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. What you might not know, is that all of these are risk factors for kidney disease. As these associations have become apparent over the last fifty years, scientists,…
