In this in-depth conversation, Dr. Justin Marchegiani and Rob Edwards from Heritage Health break down one of the most persistent nutrition myths — eating too much protein harms your kidneys. They reveal what the research shows and explain the root causes of kidney stress, including insulin resistance, inflammation, and oxidative stress.
✅ Why high protein intake doesn’t damage healthy kidneys
✅ How insulin resistance, not protein, drives kidney stress and disease
✅ The link between blood sugar, sodium retention, and high blood pressure
✅ Key lab markers to assess kidney health (BUN, creatinine, cystatin C, uric acid)
✅ How PPIs, dehydration, and toxins increase kidney workload
✅ Functional medicine strategies to protect kidney function long term
Key Takeaways
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: [00:00:00] Hey guys, it's Dr. Justin Marjani. Welcome to the Beyond Wellness Radio podcast. Feel free and head over to justin health.com. We have all of our podcast transcriptions there, as well as video series on different health topics ranging from thyroid to hormones, ketogenic diets, and gluten. While you're there, you can also schedule a consult with myself, Dr.
J, and or our colleagues and staff to help dive into any pressing health issues you really wanna get to the root cause on. Again, if you enjoy the podcast, feel free and share the information with friends or family and enjoy the show. And we are live. It's Dr. Jay in the house with Rob Edwards from Heritage Health.
We're gonna be talking all about protein myths. Does protein hurt your kidneys? We'll go into some of the data on it and what the actual real mechanism is. We'll break it down for you guys so you can understand. Rob, how are you doing today, man? Nice to chat with you.
Rob Edwards: Good. It's been a long time. Been a couple months.
Yeah. It's great to be back together, man.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah it's been a bit. And what's your website again? It's Heritage Health Life.
Rob Edwards: Yep. Heritage, health Life. That's it. Yep.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: All right. Heritage, [00:01:00] health, life and uc. Patients worldwide on the functional consultation. So I'll make sure that we put, your website Rob's site on there.
So it'll be up there. Now if you guys wanna reach out, it'll all be there. Alright, cool. So let's dive in. I get this topic a lot. It's the number one trending thing on my YouTube channel now, and so it's why I chose it. And so we have this myth that's out there, right? That protein causes kidney damage. And the question is, how did that myth happen?
Okay. And the reason why it happened is because there's been studies over the years that have been done on chronic disease kidney patients, and they found when the kidney is diseased. Its filtration is poor. It may not filter out the protein as well, or maybe there's extra filtration, extra, let's say, protein in the urine, and thus we see higher creatinine, lower mular filtration, higher bum.
We see, we actually see more kidney stress with more protein because of these earlier kidney studies being done on chronic kidney disease patients. [00:02:00]
Rob Edwards: Yeah, I think a hundred percent. And that, I think that's the that's a big thing that I think where when we look at older studies or even newer studies, is whenever we look at things and we try to put them in the context best we can, and oftentimes we get that wrong, especially when we look back at studies that are, back in time regards to that.
Just because something is present doesn't mean that it's the root cause of what's going on.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, so a couple of studies here I'm gonna put, there was a systemic review study, a Van LSW in 2018. High protein, increased kidney workloads slightly, but cause no damage in healthy adults. And couple other things.
We look at what are some of the big mechanisms of why the kidneys get stressed. So we have a little overview here. I created a little overview, so keeps us on track 'cause it's a lot of stuff we wanna talk about. Insulin resistance drives inflammation and vascular injury, right? The reason why it does that, high levels of insulin cause more sodium retention.
More sodium retention tends to increase blood pressure, and the more inflamed your vasculature system is your cardiovascular miss, the higher the blood pressure, that means [00:03:00] more filtration, right? If you try to. If you have a cheesecloth and you're filtering something up, but you try to put more pressure through it, you can break it, right?
You can bust it, the more pressure you put through it, right? And so this is what's happening in your kidney. So the more filtration we have through the mechanism of high insulin. Thus creating endothelial dysfunction. So that can create narrowing of these different structures of the glomeruli of the blood vessels in the body.
That then increases the blood pressure. And as the blood pressure increases, we also are now retaining more sodium 'cause high insulin causes more sodium retention as that the fluid goes through the loop of Henley and such. And then. More sodium then equals more fluid, then equals more blood pressure and the more inflammation we have via advanced glycation end products, that's when we sugarcoat proteins via blood sugar.
That creates oxidation, right? We go, we think about it at the fancy steak [00:04:00] restaurant, right? They pull out the blowtorch, they make the creme brulee with the blowtorch, it starts to brown on top. That is glycation right there in the real world.
Rob Edwards: Hundred percent. Yeah. I think the truth is, we just mentioned a while ago is that, protein really only stresses out your kidneys if they're already compromised via like different stages of kidney diseases and things like that.
But in healthy people this, the study that you're just showing right there we're not finding that same kind of damage from that perspective.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And again, why do we have some data that says this So most. Studies, right? That found protein as being a problem. They were studying it on patients that already had kidney disease.
That's number one. Number two is there are studies that show a increase in glom filtration, right? That means your kidneys are having to filter more when protein does go up. But that's an acute type of situation. So the longer you go. With that study, the more the kidneys will actually adapt. All right.
And then also observational studies sometimes [00:05:00] find correlation with higher protein. But like I mentioned, the longer we go or if we factor things like hypertension, that's high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, which means. High blood pressure, which typically correlates with more insulin. And then also just making sure we look at the protein sources, right?
Because we know the meat at McDonald's that's burnt is different than the grass fed meat. We know fast food's different than the whole food eggs that we have, right? So we know that matters. And also there can be some nitrates in some preservatives in some of these processed meats that may not be the best, right?
And so some of those could be a potential issues. And then I would just say. High protein diets, right? The shorter studies, I think are the big ones. And do you know almost 50% of all people that have kidney transplants, guess what the root cause of most kidney transplants are? Rob, do you know? The root cause of it?
Yeah the biggest driving factor of, I would say the majority of kidney transplants.
Rob Edwards: Biggest driving factor? What you mean? What their body's being exposed to?
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: The biggest mechanism is gonna be diabetes. Oh, okay. Yeah. And the question is, and [00:06:00] the question is what's harmful, right?
Is it just the high blood sugar? 'cause it's not just the high blood sugar, it's also the high insulin. So insulin in and of itself when it's high, is inflammatory. Number one, insulin in and of itself causes higher, more filtration. So then you reabsorb the sodium and then when that happens, then you increase the blood pressure and then that puts more stress on the kidney.
So it's a vicious cycle. So let's go over our, like on our overview here. So what are some of the big mechanisms driving kitty damage? High blood sugar and diabetes. And so the problem is diabetes is a state of chronically high blood sugar that's 1 26 mg per DL or higher. But we know we have patients showing functional dysglycemia problems very early on, and if we have ways to look at blood sugar before or five or 10 years in, 'cause it may take that long for diabetes to show, now we can pivot and make changes, not lose a whole decade.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. And I think that's a huge thing. Like there, it used to be [00:07:00] that practitioners thought we couldn't even reverse it at all. And and now obviously we can we do it all the time from type two reversing, type one is different. But when we talk about high blood sugar and what causes damage or resistance at a cellular level.
Glucose, excess glucose, sugars, but also processed foods, toxins and things of that nature, which we'll go into a little bit later as we're going down these other things that stress out, the body and produce these things.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And also when diabetes was originally looked at, right? Gary Tobbs came out with a great book in the last year called Rethinking Diabetes. It's pretty heady, but it's it's detailed, but it's very good. When diabetes first came out it was called Diabetes Mellitus, and essentially, I remember that essentially means sweet urine, right?
Mellitus means sweet urine. And so it originally was picked up. You'd have to have blood sugar very high for sugar to be dumped into the urine. Okay, so normally like it's 1 26, right? But you'd have to have blood sugar. Into the one forties, one fifties, one sixties, one seventies, chronically, and there was a doctor, right?
Someone's job was to go in [00:08:00] and actually taste your urine. Imagine having that job. I'm not sure you could pay me enough. So someone would go in there and they literally, they'd take specimens of the ear and they literally taste it, which is crazy. But the problem is for your blood sugar to be that high and for your kidneys to be that beaten up where it cannot filter out the sugar.
And it's using the kidneys to filter it out. We got problems, right? And so that's how diabetes started with the kidneys, where the kidneys literally could not filter it out. And so we had the sugar kind of being a problem in and of itself. And then we have the insulin, and then we have the high blood sugar.
Now the high blood pressure comes next because one thing is the more we inflame the kidneys, that creates nephro sclerosis. We have nephro. These are the functional or the glomeruli, right? These are the functional filtration units in the kidneys, and then sclerosis means to narrow. And so as that happens, we have less blood flow.
And then with the high levels of insulin, we actually start to reabsorb more sodium and that causes more blood pressure. And so a lot of [00:09:00] times people talked about blood pressure and salt being a problem. It really isn't a problem. It's only a problem when insulin is very high. Now you're reabsorbing it.
So salt in and of itself is totally fine, especially if it's a good quality sea salt. The difference is you will see lots of salt in processed food. And so the question is it the salt or is it the processed food? And again, salt when it's higher with processed food with extra sugar, yeah, it definitely could be a little problematic, but if you get the insulin and check healthy sea salt is gonna be fine.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, because, and that's probably more of the root cause conversation. 'cause even in diabetes or high blood pressure, those aren't necessarily root cause. Those are mechanisms that will affect of course the kidneys and those kind of things. Yeah. But from a root cause perspective, yeah, a hundred percent is, still good salts, minerals and things of that nature.
Is what our body needs. And glucose, I think we're over. I don't know what the number is now. I think it used to be like we used to eat something like two or three bags, equivalent of two or three bags of sugar, back in like the, a hundred, 200 years ago. Now we're at something like [00:10:00] 98 bags or something like that on average as Americans.
And so that's gonna push all of those things into overdrive, which, which is gonna start to affect your kidney function.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And I'd also say just nutrient density, like just not having good antioxidants in our diet, not having good vitamin C. Good nutrients from our vegetables, from our healthy fatty acids, just not having the nutrition right.
Healthy nutrients, healthy antioxidants, healthy compounds are gonna be good. They're gonna help starve off the extra oxidative stress. Oxidation is nothing more than losing an electron. I remember in what was it, UMass? I figured one of the biochemistry classes I took, one of the biggest monic devices we used was oil rig.
Oxidation is a loss. Reduction is a gain. I still use that today. 'cause you think oh you're reducing. It's you're losing. It's no, no reduction's actually a gain. It's talking about the charge, right? Because a electrons are negative. So if you're.
If you are essentially if you are gaining it your charge is actually getting more negative. So you're reducing the charge, right? 'cause you're making it more negative. So it's more has to do with the [00:11:00] charge, not the amount, right? And so that happens let's just say with an apple or an avocado.
You cut it open, you leave it on the counter, come back, three, six hours later it starts to get brown. Right? Little trick, you can squeeze a little bit of organic lemon or lime on that. That's the a citric acid. Vitamin C will help prevent the oxidation from happening.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that's where, we get into sort of antioxidants to try to deal with the anti, the oxidative process, which is what a lot of people, underlying factor with a lot of people that I work with.
And you too is over oxidation at a cellular level. It just displays in different areas of the body. But antioxidants, good foods whole food properly, d dense, properly prepared foods. Those are the most important things that your cells can actually use to start to repair and rebuild and the more damage you have that's where I tell people, get into more like the soups and the, the bovine correct.
And the more things that are more bioavailable to your cells and more bioavailable to your body and easier on your kidneys too.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And again, when you have kidney disease, you have to be careful with electrolytes. 'cause your body may not have the. [00:12:00] Optimal ability to regulate them and excrete them.
And so you may over accumulate potassium or sodium. So if you are in that like kidney disease range. You may wanna run a metabolic panel more frequently. That's good to look at just so you can get a sense of where your electrolytes are. 'cause it's hard people to get enough potassium or magnesium.
You probably need some supplementation. And so it's good to look at it just to make sure you're not overdoing it. Because extreme high and low with kidney issue with potassium could look the same also next when we test, how do we test kidney stuff, right? So we can run a metabolic panel. We look at bond, that's blood urea nitrogen.
That's looking at a protein byproduct that can go up with exercise with more protein. But usually with more kidney damage it could go higher. Creatinine's one, that's another amino, it's their kidney protein breakdown. So the higher that goes, the more protein breakdown we have and the more we're excreting protein out.
It can also go up higher with exercise. And so if you're doing one of these tests, make sure you're not making yourself feel overly sore or tired at the gym within two to three days before [00:13:00] the test. I'm not saying you can't work out, just keep it so you're, whatever you're doing, you're not really feeling tired or icky or fatigued the next couple days.
And then. So we have bun, we have creatinine. We can look at serum protein. So BUN should be usually around like mid-teens. Creatinine is usually 0.6 to like low ones. Once it goes above 1.1, it's usually high. Then we have our serum protein, which is usually 6.9 to low sevens is usually pretty good.
And then we have another marker that's more functional. It's called cystatin C. Cystatin C is a great marker to look at because it looks more at protein retention from proteins in the kidney, and so it's not as influenced by dietary protein. It's not as influenced by muscle breakdown. So it gives you a pretty good window into mular filtration, independent of muscle breakdown and internal dietary.
External dietary proteins. So it's looking at this protein in the kidneys. So cystatin Cs a great one. And the next one is uric acid. [00:14:00] Uric acid's good too, because uric acid can go up with excess carbs and excess fructose. So this next bullet here, excess fructose, high levels of fructose can increase uric acid.
Uric acid when it's high, can inhibit an enzyme called carnitine. Palmetto transferase one, CCPT one, and that enzyme is very important for using carnitine to shuttle fatty acids in the mitochondria to burn them. And so that means you're less likely to be able to utilize fats for fuel, and that then increases your risk for non-alcoholic fatty liver.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. So that, and that's, so the excess fructose, processed foods with uric acid I've actually never looked into that. So that's what tests are you, so the doc, the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: doctor to look at is Dr. Johnson. Richard Johnson out of the University of Colorado. He's done studies on uric acid and its connection to fructose.
And so the mechanism is like high fructose, right? Fructose. You have high fructose corn syrup, which is 55, 45, 50 5% [00:15:00] fructose, 45% Glucose. Glucose primarily goes to the muscles to get metabolized. 80% right? Fructose primarily goes to the liver. The difference with fructose is the liver is a much smaller site for storage.
Your muscles are bigger and so you have less storage, so you're more prone to. That liver being full, and then what happens next? That liver can become fatty and insulin resistant starts. Plus, when you're consuming fructose, and again, not fructose from fruit per se, but more fructose from high fructose corn syrup, you don't get leptin secretion.
And so leptin allows you to feel full and satiated so you don't get good leptin secretion. So it's very easy to overeat when we're dealing with added. High fructose corn syrup, so people are like, oh, it's just willpower. We just count your calories. It's no. There's a mechanism where appetite and satiation and neuropeptides are involved, and if you eat foods over here that allow you to feel full, willpower doesn't have to come in as much, but if you eat these foods that are bad and then you don't get the satiation signal, [00:16:00] this is how and why.
It's very easy to overeat, and that's why it's not just a calorie thing, because you are neurotransmitters. Neuropeptides and hormones are stronger than willpower.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Signaling, because it's signaling, it's, it's more it's more of a, the way I think about it is it's a subconscious kind of thinking.
It's not something that you're thinking about, but it's something that your body's doing. It's kinda like whenever you go to a, like if you go to a Mexican restaurant, right? And they give you like free chips and salsa with all the high fructose corn and syrup, glazed on those chips and everything else, highly processed and you're gonna get hungry again.
Very shortly thereafter, versus if you were to eat like a whole food thing, like you can't sit down and eat four apples. It's just not gonna happen. Like you're gonna get full, it's normal. Plus you get the
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: fiber, you get the fiber with it as well, so that makes you feel a little bit full.
That creates, those stretch receptors, it stimulates them, and then you, plus you get some nutrients and vitamin C and such.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. That separation though, that's a, that's actually I've heard that before, but I'm glad that you brought it up. So the differentiation between fructose versus other types of sugars are acting differently on the body.
[00:17:00] So one is suggestively going towards the liver and, making it predisposed for fatty liver disease, which I think, I don't know what the exact numbers are now for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, but it's pretty, pretty high. Higher than it should be. And it's not even, wasn't even a diagnosis, 10, 15 years ago.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Here are the numbers. Write it down. So when you're a LT and a ST. Alanine, aminotransferase or aspartate. Aminotransferase start to creep above 30. It could start to be an issue, right? It could start to be an issue, right? And then of course, you can always confirm it with the ultrasound. You can also run your fasting insulin, right?
Fasting insulin above 10. But usually you're gonna start to see it into the teens. That can be a problem. And, oh, yeah here's the dirty secret that restaurants do, right? It's the same thing every time. Once you understand it, you can you can hack it. So what restaurants do, what's the first thing they do when they come to your table?
They get your drink order, right? And ideally, if you're consuming alcohol, what does alcohol do to your blood sugar? Yeah, reasonably it lowers it. No, it actually lowers it. It actually, if you're talking like most [00:18:00] alcohol actually lowers it unless it's like a lot of added sugar to the drink. Most alcohol lowers it and you can go talk to a type one diabetic.
They know this because type one diabetics typically have to account for alcohol because they can lower their blood sugar and they actually have to give less insulin. 'cause if they're keeping their insulin the same and their blood sugar's dropping, they could actually go more hypoglycemic. And so what's happening is you're lowering blood sugar.
That can then start to create more cravings. And then they're typically offering you some kind of carbohydrate, whether it's bread or pretzels, right? And then that creates this blood sugar rollercoaster. And then now your cravings are up. Now you over order food, now you over order dessert, right? And all that stuff, right?
And so it creates this rollercoaster of your, eyes becoming bigger than your stomach, so to speak. So I tell people, if you want to eat right away, try to have a mineral water first, and maybe order like a shrimp cocktail or some oysters, something that's nutrient dense and better protein that stabilizes your blood sugar.
And then if you want something after that's usually a better time to do it.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. No, that's great. That's good advice. Yeah, plus you'll save a lot [00:19:00] of money doing it that way too. Which Yeah, exactly. Which will lower your cortisol levels because you won't be so stressed.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Let's talk about medications.
PPIs, this is a big one. There was a study. I think it's a Cochran systemic review that came out last fall on there being a correlation with these type of medications and impacting the kidneys. And they saw more of a correlation with chronic kidney patients. But we know these medications could be harmful on the kidneys.
They could be a stressor. And these medications are a big deal because people, when they go on 'em, they could be on 'em for years or decades. And so it's not oh, I just used it like an ibuprofen for a day. 'cause I was sore. No, you're on 'em for life now. And so that's a big deal with PPIs. Gimme your take on PPIs, Rob.
Rob Edwards: I think they, PPIs do a lot of potential damage to the body. I can understand whenever somebody gets, chronic, inflammation that they're trying to, the initial idea is to get the damaged off of the esophageal area so that you're not predisposed for cancer. So that's why they do it, right?
But the downstream effects of that is whenever you're utilizing it, you don't create enough hydrochloric acid inside of your stomach, and now you [00:20:00] can't absorb your nutrients properly, start having gut infections. And from there, we're gonna have a onslaught of issues. Most issues that we see, and I think you would agree with this, tend to start in the gut and then there's a downstream effect to that as things get into their bloodstream. But yeah, the PPIs affecting kidney long-term. Yeah. 'cause people will be on that stuff for 15, 20 years. They'll be on it every single day, 15, 20 years because they have a longstanding gut infection.
They have a longstanding issue going on that they've just never addressed
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: a hundred percent. And then the question is, what's the mechanism? What is the mechanism? Why are the kidneys hurting? Like, why is that happening? And so when you look at it, a couple of things. So this is a big deal.
So number one, it's reducing magnesium and mineral absorption, right? And so without magnesium, without calcium, without potassium, minerals are very important. So low magnesium can stress out the kidneys. What does magnesium do naturally? It keeps blood pressure down. It's a [00:21:00] natural beta blocker, right? And so that means it relaxes the heart, right?
And when the heart's more relaxed, what happens to blood pressure? It drops when blood pressure's lower, what's happening to the kidney? Filtration. Stress. It's dropping, right? Next, it's oxidative stress, right? PPIs can produce reactive oxygen species, so think of that pro oxidation, and that can impact the renal tubules and trigger like fibrosis and scarring and narrowing.
Also, there's studies on interstitial nephritis, so autoimmune like reactions where the immune system can get triggered. And can start to attack the kidneys. And if it's long term, that can impair it. And there's also studies on gut microbiome and how SIBO and bacterial overgrowth and LPS and gut inflammation can impact the kidneys.
I, that's the big one. It's the biggest one really. It's the on grade, it's the ongoing low grade inflammation, followed by nutrient depletion, followed by oxidative stress. And then of course, if you add insulin and blood sugar, it just continues to get worse and worse over time.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, it's like [00:22:00] this, getting back to the root cause, of everything.
And a lot of the issues comes down to, again, all the other things we've been talking about is the food intake that you're bringing into your body your small intestines, ability to break all that down and utilize it in your body and how much pressure, how much stress is on your kidneys to have to deal with these things.
Yeah.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And if you, yeah, and if you guys like these podcasts, like I, I'm putting the screen up just 'cause there's a lot of things. I wanna hit and if we do this, it just guarantees we don't miss anything and it keeps us on course. If you guys like it, let us know in the comments. Appreciate it.
So dehydration and mineral issues. Let's talk about electro electrolytes and just patients being dehydrated. Rob.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. So that's number one of the number one things that I think most of the people that I see deal with they don't get enough hydration, they want to, they desire to, or they don't feel like they're actually able to absorb it.
One of the two. They, they drink it. They don't feel like their cells are actually able to take it in again, which is another. Potential sign of an absorption, malabsorption issue inside of the gut or something of that nature. But, so I, I think that's a big deal. Our cells can't work properly.
Our body can't work properly if we're under [00:23:00] hydrated. I think when we're born we're at like, what, 50? No, we're like 88% water or something. Very high percentage as we get older. I think past 65, I was reading something the other day, I think we're closer to something like. We're closer to something like 60%.
And so especially as we get older, hydration is a huge issue inside of our body. Our body can't connect, can't communicate electrical signals if we don't have the water there for it to do it.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And the electrolytes are important because our cells require that sodium, potassium pump to work, right?
Potassium and sodium out. And that's how the cells membranes work and communicate. And so it's hard to get enough potassium. You need 4,700 milligrams a day, and most people don't get close to that. Yep. It's a big deal. Alright, so let's see here. Toxins and heavy metals can be a big deal, right?
Whether it's lead, whether it's cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, these mercury can all be a problems. So that's a big deal. Also mold. Toxins can eat really hard on the kidneys and glyphosate. So for eaten, a bunch of pesticide ridden food, GMO food, these could be hard things. If we're living in a moldy home, it's unaddressed.
That can be a problem thing too. [00:24:00] Also quality proteins. Are we getting grass amine or is it junky? Processed protein putters? Is it a bunch of soy protein? What about that? So hopefully we cleared up the protein myth, right? Eating protein does not wreck your kidneys, right? Kidneys can handle protein just fine.
The real threat is the insulin resistance, the blood sugar, the toxins, the inflammation, the oxidative stress. And then of course, you know what drives that. The gut can be a big thing. Medications can be a big thing. Nutrient deficiency can be a big thing, right? And then really only advance. Kidney disease patients need to be on top of their protein, and they need to be on top of their electrolytes too.
They may need magnesium and potassium and sodium, but they have to be very careful with it because their bodies may have a hard time excreting it and it may go too high. So you really have to be on top of it. Here's some of the big studies I saw, right? The Van Sic study the cost miss study looking at insulin and looking at high protein and no damage, and then also.
One study on hypertension and chronic inflammation are the major dependent risk factors of chronic kidney disease, and so big [00:25:00] takeaway, right? Blood sugar, blood pressure, inflammation, truth, that's truth, that's medication, toxins, big threats, dehydration. Also, this can be a double-edged sword because you can be drinking a whole bunch of water with your protein and that may lower your stomach acid and make it harder for you to break your protein down, so make sure you're not overly hydrating with your food, and then focus on quality protein, how much I say anywhere between a half a gram to one.
Gram per pound of body weight is pretty reasonable. If you're totally sedentary, probably one gram is okay. But I would say even. Point six to 0.7 is probably better on the low end and then up to one on the high end. Unless you're doing a lot of lifting. Professional athletes may even be at 1.5 grams per protein per pound, so it just depends upon stress on your body.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think the final word there, I like what they're saying. That's exactly true though, is that like protein is not the enemy. Now it's more difficult. It can seem like it's the enemy in somebody that's like stage four kidney failure stage stage five.
But that's because we're now in a situation where the kidney [00:26:00] is just. Super sensitive. You have to watch it. You have to, if you're gonna come back from that, you have to watch that. But otherwise, we're looking at root cause situations, right? We're looking at more balancing the blood sugar.
We're looking at managing certain things upstream in that nature versus kidneys itself. We talked about this earlier before our podcast, is that so many times we're still stuck in this western way of thinking of like, how do I fix my kidneys? How do I fix my kidneys? How do I fix my kidneys?
And it's really, root cause is very rarely the kidney itself. It's the amount of stress that the kidney has to deal with on a daily basis.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes. Yes, I agree. And we see patients that have kidney issues all the time. Big tests that will run we'll look at creatinine, we'll look at bun. We'll look at glom filtration, right?
These are good markers. Serum protein, we'll look at albumin or globulin and then we'll look at S statin C and then we'll also look at fasting insulin. We'll do what's called a functional glucose tolerance test. 'cause I can pick up. Insulin resistance on one of these bad boys easily. Yeah. We just test our blood sugar fasting, [00:27:00] right?
We got our meter. We got our little lancet, and then we have our blood sugar test and we do a fasting reading. We wanna be below a hundred fasting. That means you haven't eaten for at least four hours. And then we wanna be not ideally higher than one 20 in the first hour, one 40 max, but definitely ideally under one 20.
And then hour two, ideally back below a hundred. And then definitely hour three below a hundred that starts to tell us when our blood sugar starts to go up and take longer to come down. That tells us we're starting to move into the insulin resistance camp. And again, the big things that we do are three major things.
First off, we work on restricting carbohydrates, especially more processed and higher glycemic. Two, we make sure if food is anti-inflammatory, keeping gluten and processed, foods out, that could be more on the infl inflammatory side. And then second. We're gonna be adding in some movement after meals, a simple five or 10 minute walk in lower blood sugar, 10 points.
And then after that would be blood sugar, nutrients. So my line, we use a product called Glucose Supreme. It's gonna [00:28:00] have, different B vitamins, alpha lipoic acid, vanadium, chromium, magnesium, right? You can use different herbs like jimma, bitter melon cinnamon. These are all herbs that are shown to help modulate blood sugar.
And there are also some good nutrients that can be very helpful for. Kidneys cordyceps. Mushrooms can be good for the kidneys too. Ign mushroom can be good. Yeah, astragalus can be interesting. Ginseng can be good. Again, these compounds are not gonna be like something that you wanna just do in and of itself.
You wanna work on all the foundational things first, and that could be like the cherry on top of the cake. So just an order of operations of what it will be. The most important thing that would, those would be at the end.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I think that it's really about identifying, one is the healing opportunities, and two, identifying like what are the interferences that are getting in play in terms of your cells and your ti tissues and your kidneys and everything else running properly inside of your body.
But yeah, that's great man.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So blood tests to look at, like I mentioned, a metabolic panel, which will include your bun, creatinine and your serum protein, your lyin filtration. So [00:29:00] statin C is usually an add-on. Fasting insulin is usually an add-on. Usually uric acid comes in a metabolic panel most of the time too.
So those are good ones to look at out of the gates. And then your blood sugar meter here just health.com/keto mojo, keto mojo. Anything else you wanna highlight there, Rob?
Rob Edwards: No, I think it really comes down to, I, I think it's the takeaway for me in most of these conversations is understanding that mo most, most of the time when somebody has a kidney issue, it's, I don't know if I've ever had anybody that had an isolated kidney issue and that was the only issue that they had.
Correct. It's a downstream issue. It's a filtration, right? It filters out certain things in your body when there's too many mechanisms pressing on it, there's too much stress inside of the body. Eventually your kidneys are gonna get damaged. Eventually you are gonna have liver issues going on.
Eventually you're gonna have gut signs going on, right? That's what's gonna happen.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct? Correct. Oh, and that link is, justin health.com/keto Mojo without a hyphen, so [00:30:00] K-E-T-O-M-O-J-O. That's a good blood sugar meter. I like it because it connects Bluetooth to your phone and then you get graphs so you can look at it and you can graph it out and it makes it nice.
Someone running. How do you discern test if kidney tissues are caused by autoimmune? Usually people like that are gonna have positive a NA. And they're gonna have some other systemic inflammatory markers and maybe other autoimmune issues. 78% of the population who has autoimmune issues, they have poly glandular autoimmune syndrome, meaning they have multiple autoimmune issues.
So where there's smoke, there's fire. If there's already one, then we could assume that's at play. And then usually an a NA and some other systemic inflammatory markers like your H-S-C-R-P will also be high and or erythrocyte sedimentation rate ESR.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Markers all over your body that you can test to see where you might be able to find or identify autoimmunity going on within the body.
But I think that's true too, is that, and it makes sense that it's poly glandular, that if you find one in one place, it's highly unlikely you're not gonna find autoimmune reactivity anywhere else inside the body.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. And again, if you catch it early on, it may just not [00:31:00] be bad enough.
Enough. Enough inflammation is accumulated and where it's showing signs and symptoms and so that's good. We wanna catch it early, so if it's brewing we can get a sequestered and knock it down.
Rob Edwards: Yeah. Reverse it sooner than later. Can I tell everybody yesterday, yep. Go ahead. No, go ahead.
I was just gonna say, I always tell people, I was like, when's the best time to get started? And it's yesterday was too late and and tomorrow, no wait, tomorrow's too late. Yesterday was too, I dunno. Basically, essentially get started in terms of your health.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Exactly. That old thing, old adage is it's a better time than now.
And an ounce of prevention's worth a pound of cure. ‘Cause these things take the problem with these kind of. Physiological imbalances, right? They take years and or decades to accumulate. So when someone comes in with an issue, it's not like this just started last week. And that's the hardest thing is most patients they correlate the symptom or oh, now my kidney markers are outta whack, as like it just started and it's probably not.
And that's the hardest thing for patients to wrap their heads around is conventional medicine [00:32:00] uses very late stage indicators. For disease and for pathophysiology. And they, people just think, oh, this just started, this is a new diagnosis for me. It's the imbalance has been going on for quite a while and that's what we try to, get patients to understand that we don't wanna be chasing symptoms.
We wanna be looking at upstream and look at markers that tell us optimal function and or suboptimal function. And we can assume that the longer things are suboptimal, the more we're progressing towards a disease pathophysiology state.
Rob Edwards: Yeah, it's that idea of normal function, dysfunction and disease.
And most of the time traditional medicine waits until you're about disease stage before they ever do anything about it. But you've been dysfunctional for years.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Correct. And then someone wrote in as Type one diabetes reversible. The biggest issue with type one diabetes with kidney problems is you have the control in how much insulin you give.
But conventional dieticians and conventional doctors, they tend to. Have patients just use as much insulin as they need to cover up their blood sugar and bring their [00:33:00] blood sugar down. But then you have the side effects of too much insulin. And so I tell patients who are type one diabetics, the goal should be to use the least amount of insulin, somewhere between 10 to 20 units total for the whole day.
To keep your blood sugar in a healthy range, right? Ideally back below a hundred or in, within three or so hours after meal without impacting your kidneys and without making your blood sugar high. That should be the goal, because if you don't use enough insulin, now your blood sugar's high.
That's also stressful on your kidneys. So you need that, that InBetween situation there, right? You need to have that in between because if it, your blood sugar goes too high and your insulin's low, then that. Blood sugar can't get into your cell. So it's like being in the ocean. You have all this water around you, but you can't drink it, right?
It's like you have all this glucose, it's energy, but you can't use it because insulin brings it into the cell. And so what happens is your body then goes into a ketoacidosis state, right? Not ketosis, where your ketones are like around one, two, or three, but more like 20 or 30, and that's. Your body's [00:34:00] trying to generate fuel.
'cause all that glucose is locked away. And that high level of ketones, 10 x plus what normal ketones are, that really can shift your pH in a negative way. And then again, a lot of our enzymes in our body are regulated based on pH, and so our pH goes too low. It could put us in a coma. Yeah.
Rob Edwards: Said.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Anything else you wanna highlight, Rob?
Rob Edwards: I think we covered it. I think that's I think we've smashed that protein down and and made that more understandable for people, hopefully. It was a great conversation. I think that the name of the game of this whole thing is getting ahead of it. What I meant to say is.
Best time to get started. What's yesterday? And the worst time is tomorrow.
Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Take action now. It's not about, knowledge is power. Applied knowledge, meaning you gotta do something with this information. It's a big data dump on this podcast, but if you just take one thing away from it, then you're going on that right path.
Links to Rob's h cited his Heritage Health dot. Life. There'll be link below and myself, Dr. J just in health.com. There'll be at work Dr. J Button on there, you can click. We see patients worldwide, [00:35:00] so if you want that support, we are here to help guys, you guys have an awesome day and love to see your comments down below.
Take care, y'all. Peace. See you. Bye.
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