Coffee, Tea, and Kidney Stones: The Caffeine Episode

Coffee, tea, and kidney stones. Let's dive into the caffeine episode.

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.

All righty, so today we are diving into caffeine. Caffeine is, I mean, the most used drug probably in existence in all of history. It is a- effectively, it is a- it's a stimulant, but how does this play in to kidney stones and kidney stone prevention?

I'll tell you this is one of the biggest myths about kidney stones, kidney stone risk. And people will say throughout my day, "Jill, my doctor told me no tea, no coffee, no tea, no coffee, no tea, no coffee." It's not true, people. It's not It's just, you know, in the world I think that somebody says something,

Just like this. Creatine, if anybody's talking about the creatine supplement they will say, the very first sentence is, "It's the most studied supplement in the world." They say it over and over again. And so every health influencer says it.

Every everybody says the same thing over and over. They hang on to one thing. So, people in the kidney stone world really hang on to this:

No tea, no coffee, no tea, no coffee. Caffeine is a problem. You will make kidney stones.

No, you won't. Of course, there's always more to say after that. But you can have coffee and tea.

"Well, Jill, tea is high in oxalate." Tea is high in oxalate when you drink it all day long and you're sitting there with bag after bag that's sitting in your cup steeping for hours.

So, with tea, a lot of people in the South have their sweet tea, which also has a lot of sugar in it, but it's sitting on their driveway in the sun and it's being steeped for a very long time. So, it will have higher oxalate than say somebody just steep their tea bag in their cup for a minute or two, right? So, the longer tea bags are steeping,

The higher the oxalate. Now, we know that black tea is one of the highest oxalate products, teas, and so people will pellet me with this, "What about this tea? What about this tea?" There's about 1,000 teas.

I don't know, thousands of teas, right? So, here's advice that I will give you if you enjoy tea that I have given for almost 30 years and I'm looking at follow-up urine collection, so I don't give advice

Glibly. I know what I'm talking about. Everything else in my life I'm a good mother, I'm good at this, everything else I'm kind of half, you know, I'm okay.

But this, just listen to this. So, tea, you can have it. You just can't have it all day long.

And as far as what tea is the highest, yes, black tea is. Turmeric tea will have some oxalate in it, because we know turmeric is high.

There are other tea- Ginger may be a little high. But even that, I'm looking at urine collections all day long, follow-up ones, and people are like, "Well, I'm going to drink some tea when I do my follow-up, because I trust you Jill, but I'm just nervous, so I want to make sure that it's not going to raise my oxalate," and it doesn't.

So,

Even though some of these teas maybe a little higher in oxalate, if you're not drinking it all day, it's just not a problem. That and getting your calcium needs met. So, one of the biggest ways we lower our oxalate is having enough calcium throughout the day.

And some people have even started, and a lot of people in, England, this is how they drink their tea, they put some milk in their tea.

And so you could do that, but you don't have to do that. But I do suggest, and one of the goals of the Kidney Stone Diet is to get enough calcium, because calcium and oxalate will bind together in your small intestine and when they are bound there, that molecule is too big to be sopped up by the bloodstream. Whereas if you just have the tea by itself,

Oxalate goes from your stomach to your small intestine and the blood will take the oxalate, cuz that's a smaller molecule, and oxalate will get reabsorbed back into the blood and then into your body, okay? So, if you had the tea with some milk, the molecule will be too big to get sent back to the bloodstream and that oxalate gets sent to the colon and out through the stool.

That's how that works and that is why we want you to pair calcium with oxalate foods. But please hear me,

You do not have to have your tea with milk or whatever you're using if you don't want to. Because it's just not going to make a big difference if you're having a true cup or two a day. And the caffeine, which we'll talk about with coffee, well, we'll talk about that in 1 second.

But, so enjoy your tea a cup or two a day.

Not 10 cups a day anymore. Okay? So, my patients who drink tea, they stopped drinking it all day long.

They don't steep their tea as long as they used to, which was hours. The tea bag just sat in there. And they're absolutely fine.

And they get their calcium needs met, which by the way, I want to remind everybody you have bones, you need to feed them. So, there's that. Now, coffee,

God, is this country addicted to coffee. I mean boy, are we addicted to coffee, myself included. My day does not start unless I have a big piping hot cup of coffee.

I love the caffeine. Not that I really need it, but I mean I love it. So, it makes me a little bouncy and happier and I just love it, so I'm very addicted to caffeine.

But I have I have

Two cups of coffee a day in the morning and that's it, because if I have coffee past noon, I'm up for the next 2 days. So, I have, you know, I get up at 5:00, 5:30. I have my two cups of coffee, and I'm done for the day.

What does caffeine have to do with kidney stone formers? Is there an effect? Is Will your kidney stone risk be raised if you have too much caffeine?

No.

No. Okay? Now, I'm going to there's more words after that, though.

If you're drinking coffee all day long, at some point you're going to become dehydrated if you don't start drinking water, because coffee and caffeine in general acts like a diuretic. It makes you pee more.

So, if you're not replenishing that, you're going you can be dehydrated. So, it's not that you can't have coffee, it's that you can't have it all day long without drinking water. And even that, I just put it I put the goal just like I do tea: a couple cups of coffee a day.

Not Starbucks coffee that's 20 oz each.

A regular cup of coffee, one or two a day, is all you need. Two, fine. Hey, look, even I have stone formers that have three cups of coffee.

It's not causing kidney stones unless you're not hydrating yourself. So, that's how that stuff becomes a myth: coffee and tea will cause kidney stones. The caffeine of coffee and tea will cause kidney stones.

Not if not if you're drinking your water throughout the day as well.

So, at some point somebody said, "Caffeine's a diuretic. If you pee, which will make you pee more, and if you pee more without replenishing, it will be a problem and you'll become dehydrated." So, you definitely need water to counterbalance that diuretic effect, okay? Also, there's some There's some myths around that coffee has is high oxalate.

It's not.

In fact, coffee and tea are going to decrease your kidney stone risk, simply because it's more fluids into your diet. And that's really important to know. Dr.

Coe and I have an article at kidneystone.uchicago.edu and we talk about this. I think it's called A Variety of Fluids. If you just Google "Jill and Fred Coe, C-O-E," you'll see that article.

And we talk about

How having a couple cups of coffee or tea a day is going to decrease your risk and there's science around that. I'm not just making it up. Simply because you're peeing more and it's adding more fluids to your overall goal.

So, you don't have to only drink water. All fluids count. Water is best, but all fluids do count.

So, when I'm counting my, fluids for the day,

I do count my two cups of coffee, but I am also, as soon as I'm done with my coffee, I start drinking my water. So, I start that right away and I do drink it throughout the day. So, it's not a problem.

Also here's something interesting. Coffee contains a little citric acid, so for those of you who are low in citrate, you could benefit from that.

And also coffee is known to have great antioxidants in it. So, I am a coffee drinker. I enjoy it.

If you want to drink coffee, please do. You do not have to stop drinking tea and coffee and lower your risk of kidney stones, because if you do it proportionally and if you don't do it all day long, you don't increase your risk. As a matter of fact, you decrease it a little bit, because it's counting towards your daily fluid amount.

That's it!

When you're ready to dive in and prevent kidney stones for good, you can head over to kidneystonediet.com where you can find all the free resources and the all-access pass, the kidney stone prevention meal plans, the course, everything you need to never have a kidney stone again. I think with that, we'll wrap, and we'll see you next week!

Goodbye and have a great week, everybody!