Explainer | How your kidneys work and the best ways to take care of them
- The kidneys regulate blood pressure, produce vitamin D and several hormones, stimulate red blood cell production, and much more
- Kidney disease has little pain and few symptoms; a healthy diet, with foods low in salt, is one of the best ways to keep them healthy
The kidneys produce urine, but the two fist-sized organs, located on either side of the spine just below the rib cage, are about much more than that.
If something is wrong with your kidneys, it can throw your entire body out of kilter. But how do you know if something is wrong? And how can you keep your kidneys healthy?
“Unfortunately, [dysfunctional] kidneys take a very long time to make themselves felt,” says Dr Volker Lechterbeck, chief doctor in the nephrology department of Petrus Hospital in Wuppertal, Germany.
The reason is that kidney disorders often aren’t accompanied by pain or other symptoms, he explains.
The kidneys: how they work and the best ways to keep them healthy
To make sure your kidneys are functioning properly, it’s important to be examined regularly by your general practitioner. A urine test strip can show, for example, whether they’ve excreted an unusually high amount of protein.
“We’ve lately been heavily promoting urine albumin determinations,” says Dr Kai Martin Schmidt-Ott, a specialist in internal medicine and nephrology at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, Germany.
Albumin is a protein found in the blood; one of its functions is to keep fluid from leaking out of the bloodstream. The kidneys filter the blood and remove waste products that are then excreted via urine.
As healthy kidneys don’t remove proteins and other important nutrients, albumin excretions are associated with progressive disruption of kidney function and can indicate chronic kidney disease.
There are a number of things you can do to prevent kidney problems, the most important of which is maintaining a healthy diet, according to Schmidt-Ott.
A diet low in potassium – in consultation with a nephrologist, or kidney specialist – can be helpful for people with advanced kidney disease, he says.
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Heavy alcohol consumption can damage the kidneys as well.
While popular wisdom holds that drinking a lot of fluids is good for your kidneys, this isn’t necessarily true, according to Lechterbeck, who says there’s no scientific proof that large fluid intake prevents the progression of kidney disorders.
In fact, some patients with an advanced stage of kidney disease are told to drink less, he says, for example if water has accumulated in their body due to heart failure.