Kidney Stones

wabmester

Heh. I guess that was confusing for me to respond to a post about vitamin K with a post about potassium.

What I meant was that, in terms of supplements, only potassium citrate is known to be useful and is pretty widely recommended to prevent stones.

In the case of Vitamin K, the idea would be to reduce calcium loss.

In the case of potassium citrate, it's actually the citrate that helps. It binds with calcium and prevents stone formation.

GaleHawkins

@wabmester Vitamin K2 (not K1 involved with the blood clotting factor) job is to tell Calcium where to go (to teeth and bones) as I read it. There are many types of K2 and the two that seem to impact bone health are the 4 and 7.

Assuming this is fully factual then to develop a stone one would have to be low in Vitamin D and K2.

It seems overdosing on K2 is not technically possible. If K2 is high enough then the odds of overdosing on Vitamin D3 is not likely from what I am reading. My Vitamin D level was >93 because the lab does not test beyond point.

Lillith32

Thanks to this thread I found out I have a family history of kidney stones and now I'm worried (and drinking apple cider vinegar).

Sabine_Stroehm

Thanks for this thread. I'm late to the game, but thanks for telling us all of this. I hope you're feeling better!

GaleHawkins

nutristart.com/more-benefits-of-vitamin-k2-part-1/

It sounds like K2 may do a lot more than just potentially protect against kidneys stones but cancer and many other negative health states as well.

Yi5hedr3

Keto has nothing to do with it. Soda pop and/or magnesium deficiency do!

wabmester

I'm almost done with the Saga of the Stone and the Stent. I met yesterday with The Stone Lady -- the doc who does metabolic analysis to investigate the root cause of your stone formation and recommend counter measures.

I had envisioned her as a hard-core chemistry geek who lived in the lab, but she was a nice normal doc.

I tried to get her to talk science with me, but the best I could get from her was that the benefits from oxalate-eating bacteria were unproven in terms of research/therapy. She also suggested an interesting aspect of eating high-oxalate foods -- they're good for you, but you need to balance the oxalate intake with calcium intake so that the two bind in the gut rather than in the kidneys.

Take-home message: moderate oxalate intake, increase natural calcium intake (not supplements).

The same message is given by Johns Hopkins here:
http://urology.jhu.edu/kidney/STONESprevention.php

It's worth a read if you've had a stone before and you want to prevent recurrence. They list the various causative factors and how to mitigate them.

The next chapter for me: wait for my 24-hour urine collection kit, mail my urine to a lab for analysis, wait to hear the results from The Stone Lady.

Unknown

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Yi5hedr3

Magnesium is King. Most stones are caused by Soda-pop.

lithezebra

I sincerely hope this never happens to you again, and that your kidney heals completely.

wabmester

The final chapter: I consulted with The Stone Lady last week to discuss the results of a 24-hour urine collection and metabolic analysis.

I was a little surprised by the results in that I was expecting too see a genetic component (calcium losses) since my dad had a couple stones. Nope. Calcium was fine. The stone appears to be completely due to dietary factors.

Here are the results:



And the interpretation:



"SS" = Super Saturation. If in the red zone, that means crystals are being formed. Those crystals are the seeds of future stones.

So even though my urine volume was pretty good at 2.3 liters, the doc would like to see that go up to 2.5. More water, but not a lot more. That should reduce the tendency to reach super-saturated levels of solutes.

The high oxalate content was no surprise since I formed a CaOx stone. The doc recommended cutting my oxalate intake in half. That's going to be tough. It's all the stuff I love: nuts, cocoa, and berries. Even spinach!

But the big surprise to me was uric acid and pH. I figured since I formed a CaOx stone, uric acid would be OK. I'm deep into the danger zone for uric acid stones.

Those two factors are mostly due to protein intake. I told her I was targeting around 90g/d. She said to cut it back to 70g.

She also recommended supplementing with Mg Citrate. The Mg binds with oxalate, and the citrate binds with calcium.

I'm going to modify my diet and then do another test in a year. I went one day without any chocolate or nuts, and it was tough! I'm an addict.

totaloblivia

Interesting! And worrying too....

GaleHawkins

Thanks for the detailed follow up. That is SO helpful.

I had to drop down to 70 grams of protein to just stay in a state of ketosis in my case so perhaps that was good in more than one way.

macchiatto

Huh. Thanks for sharing all this with us. I haven't had a kidney stone before but I've wondered about possible effects of this WOE. This was eye-opening and a little scary. Sorry you've had to cut back on a bunch of your favorite foods. I hope you never get another stone!

MelodiousMermaid

@wabmester

I know this thread has been sleeping for a long time, but I stumbled across it and am wondering how you've been doing. Have you gone through more testing? Been able to avoid more stones? Were you able to implement the dietary changes you noted long-term, and have they affected your keto journey?

ccrdragon

I will add my own 2 cents here, from personal experience. I have had kidney stone episodes 5 times - 2 as a child and 3 as an adult. My stones (as an adult) were CaOx and most likely caused by a combination of dehydration and massive intake of chocolate, nuts and spinach (spinach has the highest concentration of oxalates of any food normally consumed by humans, followed closely by American chocolate and - dammit - nuts).

I was eating the normal SAD at the time and was under a time-crunch at work to deliver a new software product so the entire team was powered by chocolate at the office. I was not drinking soft drinks at the time of any of my adult episodes. All of the episodes occurred during a time that I has sworn off drinking caffeine (diet cokes, coffee, tea, etc), so my liquid consumption was definitely way down.

My episodes as a child were never diagnosed, but looking back from the adult episodes, I can pretty much rule out anything else to explain what happened.

Interestingly, since I am now consuming caffeine again and drinking more liquids in general, I have been free from stones for several years. I have cut way back on chocolate and I self regulate on spinach so I know that helps as well. To my way of thinking, the best thing that I have done is to increase liquids and consume caffeine - both of which help to keep the kidneys active and flushed on a regular basis, so that any crystals that start to form are routinely expelled before they can become large enough to create problems.