Health

Have you ever passed a kidney stone before?  If so, you know it's terrible!  The key to making changes that stick is to add them into your life intolerable ways,  like moderation, so you can be successful long-term.  Here are 5 dietary recommendations that can help prevent kidney stones. 1) Drink more water We want to try and make about 2.5 liters of urine in a day.  I know we don't all pee in a measuring cup, or hopefully not many of us at all.  My workaround here is:  If your urine is clear, you're hydrated.  If it's yellow, drink more water.  Not soda or juice, more water. 2) Eat less salt While most kidney stones are calcium-based, it's how much salt the kidney sees that really  matters.  The more salt your kidney sees, the more calcium your kidney shoots into your urine.  When I say salt or sodium here, they're interchangeable and mean the same thing.  I have a lot of patients who say "doc, it's not a problem - we don...

  The biggest kidney stone on record weighed more than a kilogram  and was 17 centimeters in diameter.  The patient didn't actually swallow a stone the size of a coconut.  Kidney stones form inside the body,  but unfortunately, they're extremely painful to get out.  A kidney stone is a hard mass of crystals that can form in the kidneys,  ureters,  bladder,  or urethra.  Urine contains compounds consist calcium,  sodium,  potassium,  oxalate,  uric acid,  and phosphate.  If the levels of these particles get too high,  or if urine becomes too acidic or basic,  the particles can clump together and crystallize.  Unless the problem is addressed,  the crystals will gradually grow over a few weeks, months, or even years,  forming a detectable stone.  Calcium oxalate is the most common type of crystal to form this way  and accounts for about 80% of kidney stones.  Less common ...