High-protein diets may be of great harm to your kidneys, even if they seem to be very ‘in’ right now.
Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, Holly M Kramer and Denis Fouque have co-written a new editorial that speaks about the harm that might come to your body if you eliminate carbohydrates from your diet and replace them with protein. According to the three experts, the people who are most at risk when having a high-protein diet are morbidly obese and people who have diabetes.
Why high-protein diets are bad for you
We already knew that red meat tends to be bad for your kidneys, but this editorial takes matters a step further. The authors say that food items like meat, eggs, cheese, and other high-protein diets staples, when consumed too much, might trigger a host of kidney problems, like glomerular hyperfiltration.
Denis Fouque explained: “To put it in a nutshell: To recommend a high-protein diet to an overweight diabetes patient may indeed result in loss of weight, but also in a severe loss of kidney function. We want one, but we also get the other.”
The elderly, individuals who only have one kidney, obese people, anyone with diabetes, and others are at a particular risk of “ringing the death bell for their kidney health” by eating a high-protein diet, according to Fouque.
People who might have mild kidney disease could be the most affected by high-protein diets because they are unaware that they shouldn’t follow these diets.
This is obviously a nod to the keto diet, which follows these exact rules: high-protein, high-fat and low carbs. So, before you follow these high-protein diets, make sure you do a check on your kidneys and evaluate your health.