How (and Why) to Cut Back on Sodium for Your Kidneys

Sodium has the power to support muscles and ensure your heart keeps beating. Or it can cause harm and lead to dangerous conditions like high blood pressure, chronic kidney disease, and heart disease.

The impact of sodium depends on the amount of salt in your diet. Unfortunately, nine out of 10 people put their kidney health at risk by eating significantly more than the recommended amount.

Our team at Deon D. Middlebrook MDPC is dedicated to promoting kidney health and helping people prevent chronic kidney disease by offering exceptional health care, including working with them to reduce the amount of salt in their diets.

Why is sodium so essential and yet dangerous? Here’s what you need to know about its role and how to stay healthy by limiting salt.

High sodium damages your kidneys

Your body needs a certain amount of sodium. Sodium is an electrolyte that dissolves in fluids and carries an electrical charge. This role is crucial for supporting nerve activity, triggering muscle contractions, and promoting heart function.

Sodium also directly affects body fluid levels, blood volume, and blood pressure. As your sodium levels increase, your blood pressure rises.

Though it’s an essential nutrient, consuming too much sodium damages your kidneys in these two ways:

1. Stressing the kidneys

Your kidneys filter your blood and eliminate extra sodium and fluids. They also have a vital role in regulating blood pressure.

High sodium levels make your kidneys work harder to maintain a healthy balance. The stress impairs their function. As a result, more wastes, toxins, fluids, and sodium stay in your blood, increasing the strain and leading to kidney damage.

2. Causing high blood pressure

Excess sodium is one of the top causes of high blood pressure (hypertension). Hypertension injures the kidneys' blood vessels, limiting blood flow and impairing kidney function.

When the kidneys can’t work, sodium and fluid levels stay too high, blood pressure rises, and more kidney damage occurs. The damaged areas turn into scar tissue, and chronic kidney disease develops. Over time, chronic kidney disease progresses to cause kidney failure.

Why you should cut back on sodium

Cutting down on sodium can prevent high blood pressure and kidney disease — if you reduce your intake before one or both take hold.

After these conditions develop, reducing sodium is the first line of treatment. Limiting sodium lowers blood pressure and may be enough to avoid medication.

If you already have chronic kidney disease, reducing sodium is crucial for stopping ongoing kidney damage and preventing the disease from worsening.

How to reduce sodium

Reducing sodium comes down to monitoring the amount of salt (sodium chloride) in your diet. At first, this may take some time and practice. But before long, you can learn how to adjust your diet without thinking about it.

We can provide resources to guide your diet choices. It also helps to get in the habit of checking nutrition labels to learn the sodium content in the foods you regularly eat.

You can stop adding salt at the table or when cooking. However, that may not significantly affect your total intake because more than 70% of dietary sodium comes from the salt in packaged and prepared foods.

Some of the products with the highest salt include:

• Pizza
• Bread and rolls
• Frozen meals
• Vegetable juice and tomato sauce
• Hot dogs, cold cuts, and other smoked or cured meats
• Canned foods (with salt added)
• Pretzels, potato chips, and other salty snacks
• Fast food and restaurant foods
• Condiments (soy sauce, mustard, ketchup, pickles, and salsa)

Limiting these foods or buying products that are low in salt or have no extra salt added makes a difference. Rinsing canned beans and vegetables also eliminates much of the added salt.

How much sodium should you consume? Healthy adults should limit their daily intake to 2,300 mg of sodium, and preferably less. (That’s about one teaspoon of salt.) Unfortunately, on average, adults eat about 3,400 mg daily.

People with hypertension or kidney disease may need to limit their daily sodium to 1,500 mg or less. We can recommend the amount that’s best based on your overall health.

Need help with sodium in your diet?

Our team specializes in all aspects of kidney care and preventing and treating kidney disease. We’re here to help you navigate a lifestyle that supports your long-term kidney health. Call Deon D. Middlebrook MDPC or book an appointment online today.