A high-protein diet is believed to be healthy. It is suggested that it keeps you fit, helps you to lose fat and to retain lean muscle mass.
Avoiding carbohydrates and substituting them with proteins has become a leading dogma for all those who care for their looks and health.
But in a new paper, researchers question this belief and put a tough warning label on our modern eating habits.
They found that high-protein diets may save calories, but people may also risk the health of the kidneys.
The research was conducted by a team at the European Renal Nutrition Working Group.
The promise of saving calories and losing weight is why a high-protein diet is very often recommended to people who suffer from diabetes or who are obese.
But the crux of the matter is that these groups of people are especially vulnerable to the kidney-harming effects of high protein intake.
The team says a high-protein diet induces glomerular hyperfiltration, which may boost a pre-existing low-grade chronic kidney disease, which is often prevalent in people with diabetes.
It might even increase the risk of de novo kidney diseases.
To recommend a high-protein diet to an overweight diabetes patient may indeed result in loss of weight, but also in a severe loss of kidney function.
In view of the rising number of people affected by type 2 diabetes, and the fact that at least 30% of patients with diabetes suffer from underlying chronic kidney disease, the researchers believe it is high time that the diabetes population and the general public are warned.
Advising people—especially those with a high risk for chronic kidney disease, namely patients with diabetes, obese people, people with a solitary kidney and probably even elderly people—to eat a protein-rich diet is ringing the death bell for their kidney health and bringing them a big step closer to needing renal replacement therapy.
One author of the study is Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh.
The study is published in Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation.
Copyright © 2019 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
