Fact or Fiction: Stop eating meat to prevent kidney stones

Fact or fiction: Do I need to stop eating meat to avoid getting kidney stones?

Welcome back to the Kidney Stone Diet podcast, the show about reducing your kidney stone risk and living your best life. I'm your host and fellow student, Jeff Sarris.

And I'm Jill Harris, your kidney stone prevention nurse.

Yeah, so we're back at it again. Today we're doing a frequently asked– not even a frequently asked question, but a fact or fiction, which…

Fact or fiction.

I feel like these are fun. I like being able to dive into these individual topics that, could be a little bit of a confusion for people.

Yeah, listen, I, it, you, you didn't have to correct yourself because this is something that I am frequently asked, or this is said to me. "Jill, my doctor told me I better go to a vegetarian diet. I should give up meat."

And, you know, we've talked about this before, on this channel, and you don't have to give up meat. There's very little you have to give up. I don't want you eating an abundance of cashews.

I don't want you eating, what do people always call me up for, rutabaga, rhubarb, rhubarb. Yeah, don't be eating that all the time. Don't be eating spinach,

Almond products, no, they're too high in oxalate. But, honestly, everything, including meat, is on your table. I've also had vegetarians say, "My doctor told me to start eating meat." You can't ask a patient to change their whole lifestyle unless they're eating like they're going to a five-year-old's birthday party,

Then you can ask. But even then,

Even then, slow change. Now, back to the meat.

Please enjoy meat. I eat lean meat.

Jeff eats meat.

So, you can absolutely eat meat. "Jill, I don't eat red meat." Meat is meat, people. Anything that swims, flies, and runs, we consider that meat.

So, from fish to chicken, to lamb, to beef, to all the things, pork, all the things. You can have all of that. We just don't want you eating so much of it.

Carnivores, paleo,

Keto?

Keto, yep, all those all those people tend to overeat the meat stuff. And so, when we overeat meat, it can lower our citric acid. It can lower our pH.

It can increase our uric acid. It can increase our urine calcium. These are things that can increase your stone risk.

We need citric acid, which we get from fruits and vegetables. We need that to protect calcium in our urine, so other crystals like oxalate don't connect to her there.

We need a higher pH, normal pH, not too high, it's like Goldilocks, not too low. We want it around 6, 6.1. You can't have a diet that's like, "I'm going to get a 6.1 pH." We all naturally fall somewhere, but what you do with diet can increase it or decrease it.

So, if you have a low pH,

You have a very acidic urine. You can– that's also a great breeding pool for crystals.

So, that's why we care. The meat is very important to make sure you're not overeating it. To find out how much meat is good for you, go to kidneystonediet.com or just Google this:

How does meat

Fit into the Kidney Stone Diet? And Jeff has a calculator on there. You would plug your ideal weight in and you can figure out based upon your weight, weight, how much

Meat protein you can have. Then, separate from that, there's total protein, which will be discussed in that article. So, I eat probably about 55 g of meat protein a day.

I do that because the older I got, the more I noticed it was just harder for me to balance all this, and meat is a very easy way to get your protein needs met. And I bodybuild, so if I if I have, you know, 6 oz of meat, there it is. So, 3 oz for lunch, 3 oz for dinner or breakfast, whatever I want, and I'm done with that portion, the meat protein.

And then I get about 30 to 40 g of

Protein from other things, like Greek yogurt or,

You know, small amounts of beans or quinoa or some of these things are higher in oxalate, but again, look at your list and you can see that you can absolutely eat other forms of protein. I also eat eggs.

Sorry, you can eat other forms of protein that are also higher in oxalate and still remain under 100 mg of oxalate a day by portion size. If you're eating foods within portion size,

Can easily be done.

So, there's plenty of ways to get enough protein. Dairy is another way. For those of you that don't use dairy, there's things like, especially for vegans and vegetarians, pea protein is a great way to meet it.

But, you know, I have lots of stuff on the blog that will tell you this. Do you have to give up meat? 100% no.

You do have to eat it responsibly and don't overeat it.

And I will say this, too.

Some people are like, "Well, Jill, I do eat a lot of–" well, they'll say, "I do eat a lot of meat, and my husband eats a lot of meat. I got kidney stones, he didn't." Okay.

So, he's not genetically predisposed to form kidney stones and you are, or he didn't get one yet, or he doesn't have a symptom, he has one, but he doesn't have any symptoms, unless he's getting checked for something else, he wouldn't know. So, there's, you know, what works for somebody may not work for somebody else. It's always the analogy I give, it's like the person who smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for 60 years and didn't get lung cancer, and then there's somebody in their 50s that has lung cancer and never smoked ever.

So, you know, we're we just do have our genes, as well. So, it can be very frustrating. I had a patient today, actually, that

She's like, "You know, I feel like I've given up so much and for my diabetes and other ailments, and now I'm eating healthy, and here I go. I was trying to do keto, and, you know,

She just overate meat, and now she has uric acid stones. So, it's because, and also, she is a diabetic. And diabetics tend to have lower urine pH.

So, if you add all this meat on top of it, went even lower, and all this stuff happens. Try to eat a wide variety of foods within portion size. You'll make your oxalate goals.

You can certainly still have meat. There's plenty of other ways to get protein. Go to kidneystonediet.com, the blog.

There's a lot of articles on non-meat protein, so you can figure that out for yourself because each and every one of you is different. As you know here on this channel, we don't tell you to eat one way. We have a set of goals, and whatever lifestyle works for you, we're just asking that you fit into those goals.

If you can do that, which most every patient I work with privately can do, you'll be on your way. You'll be on your way. But nobody here has to give up meat if that is part of your lifestyle.

Yeah, and I think also like how you said, like, "I do this, I got a stone. This person does the same thing, didn't get a stone." I think, too, there's so many variables. It's hard for us to even quantify.

It's why a lot of nutrition studies don't really show a complete picture because a lot of times it's just a journal. "What did you eat today?" "I list all these things." "Oh, maybe you ignored this, or you ignored this other part of the lifestyle." And that's where these goals come into play and why it's so important to really understand what the Kidney Stone Diet is, how it can improve your life and your health, and reduce your risk for kidney stones, and then work that into your lifestyle.

Absolutely. I think keto is a great example of, and I'm not dogging keto, I'm just stating a fact, and everybody who does keto will know this. But when I'm working with my patients one-on-one, and they'll say whatever diet they're on, the people that did keto, now they've switched over to the Kidney Stone Diet, they're just like, "You know, I was so focused on sugar that I never looked at sodium.

And, oh my god, have I been eating a lot of sodium." And that's why they have high urine calcium. But, so, which is a major precursor for kidney stones, and you know if you have high urine calcium if you do a 24-hour urine collection. It's a main cause for kidney stones.

Most of you are saying, "I'm sitting here, I'm a stone maker my whole life, and my doctor says I'm just a stone maker." Have you done a urine collection, Henry? No? Well, get one done!

Henry calls me up, "Holy Toledo, you got high urine calcium! You would never know this unless, blah, blah, blah!" Next thing you know, no more stones. You get that fixed and you're on your way.

But when we are focused back in the '80s and '90s, we were so focused on fat that, again, so we took the fat out of products, I always say the SnackWell's cookie deal, and we got fatter. Why? Because there was so much sugar put in those cookies!

They sucked out the fat and put in sugar in the cookies. So, I'm just saying, when we're micro-focused on one nutrient, or in this case, lack of any nutrients, quite frankly, one macro or one thing, sugar, salt, whatever, when we're just- protein, when we're just focused on one thing, we ain't looking at nothing else. You got calories, people, you got saturated fat, you got salt, you got added sugar, you have all these things.

The fact that we are, I mean, we're going to look back on this, too. Protein is extremely, it's necessary. Most people that I'm doing a urine collection with, there's two, two types: way over protein,

Way under protein. The older we get, we tend to not eat enough protein, and that's a problem, too, because you want to sit up. I want to be able to get out of my chair in 10 years, folks, so you do need protein.

You just don't need as much as the world is telling you need these days. " Jill, I tried to– I wanted to get a graham cracker, but there's no protein in it! I don't understand, I can't–" Nobody's eating,

We're too obsessed with protein. Get the right amount for your body. Go to kidneystonediet.com and look at, the blog, "How Meat Protein Fits Into the Kidney Stone Diet," and you'll get the total protein that you should be having.

So, you know, protein is just, we really are obsessed with it. We need normal amounts for our lifestyle, but we don't have to be eating three times the amount of protein, people. Your muscles only grow so far.

There's then a point of no return. It is nuts.

Yeah, I think that's a perfect note to end on. If you want to dive deep, you want to learn everything about the Kidney Stone Diet and how it can improve your life, head over to kidneystonediet.com. You can find the course, you can find the Kidney Stone Diet meal plans, you can find all of the premium and free products on the site.

And real quick, I just want to say thanks to Paula who joined the Patreon, patreon.com/kidneystonediet. That is not–

Oh, thank you, Paula!

Yeah, there's no extra content. It's purely for people who've asked how they can support the show

That's so nice.

Beyond just purchasing the products. So, I think that's it for this week. If you're watching on YouTube, you can go right here, or maybe right here, left, right, I'm not sure which side, to see the video that YouTube thinks you will like to watch next.

And we want to thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.

Bye, everybody! Thanks, Paula, so much! How sweet is that, Jeff?

It's so nice.