You NEED to do this after passing a kidney stone

So you just passed a kidney stone? This is the first thing you need to do.

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. Oh, my goodness! I mean, for 26 freaking years, I have been screaming about this.

I want you kidney stone formers to please listen to me. I'm begging you to listen to what I have to say here. If you really want to prevent kidney stones, you must start with having your doctor order a 24-hour urine collection.

Please do this! There's no way you can go on prevention without knowing why you're forming a kidney stone. Now,

The Kidney Stone Diet is going to help you, of course. But there's things on that urine collection that you won't know you have unless you do it. So, a doctor—this is very common.

Patients come to me and they will say, "Jill," especially on my Facebook page. There's a Facebook, my Facebook page, Kidney Stone Diet with Jill Harris. It's a private page.

There's over 20,000 people on it. It's a very robust page with lots of recipes shown and people talking. I'm on there a lot.

So, because I'm the admin of it, obviously. And so, I say it throughout the day. You must get a 24-hour urine collection.

And patients on there will say, "Look, I'm still making stones!" And in the comments, I'll say, "Did you do a…" and they'll be like, "No, I didn't. My doctor told me to suck on a lemon." Why are we telling patients to suck on a lemon when we don't even know if they need it? "Oh, Jill, what's the benign thing?

Who cares about sucking on a lemon?" Because maybe your pH is already high and you're making calcium phosphate stones. And now you're sucking on a lemon to make it even higher? That's not going to work.

Okay? So, that's causing more issues. But the bigger point why I get mad at that generic advice is because

That's all people think they need to do. "Well, he just said suck on a lemon, so I'm doing that. Why am I still making stones?" Well, there's so much more to it than sucking on a lemon!

If sucking on a lemon was saving your life with kidney stones, there would not be a million visits every year. We would eradicate stone disease. This doesn't make any sense now, does it?

No, of course not!

"Jill, my doctor told me let's wait for the second kidney stone to come,

And then we'll do a 24-hour urine collection." Obviously, that doctor's never had a kidney stone. Because if he or she had a kidney stone, I don't think they would want to wait to find out why or wait to make another stone. Nobody wants to wait for another illness, a bout of illness, if they can be prevented!

Why would anybody do that? So, of course, my career's been spent for all these decades helping people prevent something. I left University of Chicago because I wanted to keep people out of bed.

So, I left. I'm like, "I got to find another way to do something." And so here I am 26 years later, and it's been the most rewarding career ever. But the point is we can't prevent something unless we know why it's happening.

And so often, so often,

Your urine collection may say, "Hey, you got really high urine calcium,

And that's why you're making kidney stones." But you would never know that unless you did a urine collection. You would never know that. And now guess what?

By the way, you also have osteoporosis because you're losing that calcium from your bones for many different reasons that could be happening. And by the way, the Kidney Stone Diet,

Most of those goals are to lower urine calcium:

Lowering salt, lowering added sugar, not overeating meat protein—these things will help lower urine calcium. But some of you may do all those things and lower your urine calcium, but not to the point of not needing now a medication. So,

If you listen to one thing I say on this channel,

It will be to find out why you're forming kidney stones, and you must get a 24-hour urine collection. "My doctor said no, Jill." Find another doctor on your care team that will order it. Primaries, GYNs,

Any doctor can order a 24-hour urine collection. Nurse practitioners in most states can order a 24-hour urine collection. And then you'll have me to help you understand it so that you can talk to these doctors having a better conversation.

So, you're not just, you know, so you know what to ask and you know how to get a better doctor's office visit. So, I don't diagnose you. I don't say go on a medication, but I educate you so you can have a productive office visit with that doctor.

And so they listen to you. They sit down. They'll be like, "Oh my god!

Bobby knows what he's talking about. Let me calm down. Let me sit down.

Let me talk to Bobby," okay? When you when we when we patients are educated on our disease and what could be causing it and all the things, we get better doctor office visits. So,

It's very important that you get this ordered. Many doctors will just say, "Hey, we're going to order you a 24-hour urine collection." Many doctors will not. So, I really want you to do that.

It means a lot to us if you do that for yourself. So, you can find out why you're forming stones. You may need a medication.

A lemon ain't going to cure all your ailments, people. Never in 26 years has it just been a lemon for my patients, and I've talked to thousands of them. It ain't just the lemon.

So, I don't want you to take generic advice. Now, "Well, Jill, they told me to drink more water." That's excellent generic advice, but it's still I it is so rare that I have had a patient just because they didn't drink enough water. It's always other things.

It's it's not just one thing why you're making kidney stones, and that's why you need the urine collection. It can be several things. "But, Jill, I don't use the salt shaker." You're still eating a buttload of salt,

Carl.

Oh, well. You know, "Jill, I don't use the salt shaker." Well, the urine collection says that you ate 8,000 mg of sodium. "How could that be?" Tommy says.

"You go out to eat?" "Well, yeah, we go out to eat every night, as a matter of fact. I also go out for…" So, people don't understand where salt is. So, the urine collection, the pee don't lie.

I always say it, the pee don't lie. What you put in your mouth that day comes out in the urine. So, that's what the urine collection is measuring.

It's measuring how the food and fluid in your what you're taking in every day is affecting your urine chemistry and what's making you what's putting you at kidney stone risk. So, lots of times what you think you're doing, you're not quite there yet, and that's why you do a urine collection to find out. And that is how you start preventing kidney stones.

It is the number one thing. The next thing after that, yeah, of course, follow the Kidney Stone Diet, which is fluids, and the salt, and the sugar, and all the goals of the Kidney Stone Diet found at kidneystonediet.com. But you can't prevent kidney stones, folks, unless you know what's causing them.

You can't prevent any disease unless you know what's causing them. No diabetic is not counting their carbs. They know what's going in their body so they know how much insulin to give or etc., etc.

With my cancer, I'm well-versed on what to do, what not to do. I get my testing. It tells me what I need to do, and then I do it.

In the kidney stone world, this preventative testing stuff is just not being out there enough. So, I'm begging you to please talk to your doctor about doing that. If your urologist or nephrologist doesn't order it, find a doctor that will.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and if you want to simplify— if you want to simplify your life and just take all the guesswork out of everything, just go to kidneystonediet.com. Jill has a free weekly newsletter where she'll keep you on track.

You can also sign up for the All Access Pass, which we haven't mentioned on the show yet, but to get access to everything Kidney Stone Diet. That includes the course, the meal plans, the eBooks that are only available through the All Access Pass, and probably some other things that we're releasing shortly that we haven't talked about yet, but you can find that and everything at kidneystonediet.com.

And hopefully, you enjoyed this episode. If you want another one, YouTube thinks you'll like one of these. And if you're listening on audio, send this to a friend because it really means a lot.

Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.

Bye, everybody. Thank you!