14 February 2011

Kidney Dysfunction Prevalent in Western Diets

After losing three friends to kidney failure, this is of interest to me and if you have diabetes, you should be interested too. At the same time, the study is biased toward women as there were no males included in the study. Excellent topic for a study, but then they invalidate the results by limiting the participant pool to elderly white women.

Even the study authors even said it could have been made more generalizable by validation in nonwhites and men. How studies like this are funded leaves me wondering what people that think up and design these studies have on their agenda.

The study compared three types of diets which can be good examples. These are a Western diet high in red and processed meats, saturated fats and sweets, a prudent diet high if fruits, vegetables, legumes, fish, poultry, and whole grains, and a DASH-style dietary pattern.

The study showed that diets similar to the Dietary Approach to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet may be protective against rapid decline of kidney damage. Previous research of dietary patterns to cardiovascular disease and other chronic diseases have been linked, but none have made any connection between diet and and the likelihood for the development of microalbuminuria or kidney function decrease.

If this is indeed one of the earliest studies of this nature, then more studies should be done immediately for conclusive evidence and allow for actions to reduce the problems in people using Western diets.

Read the article on the study here.

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