How To Do Kidney Cleanse

Greetings, Greetings! It’s naturopath Eric Bakker from New Zealand. Author of Candida Crusher and formulator of the Canxida range of products. Thanks again for checking out this video in the detox series. I hope you’ve been looking at some of these videos, which I previously completed and uploaded. We did one a few days ago on liver cleansing/detoxification, and the one that followed that was the gallbladder flush.

Now we’re going to talk about the “Royal Flush.” Who knows what the royal flush is? We’re not talking about the poker hand royal flush. A couple of my patients do online poker, which is quite interesting, so I looked up what royal flush is. Apparently, it’s ace, king, queen, jack and ten all in one hand. What an amazing hand of cards to have. The royal flush is the king in poker. It trumps everyone and everything.

The kidney flush out-trumps everything when it comes to detox. The amazing thing is nobody talks about this stuff. I had a look on YouTube and I hardly found anything at all on kidney detoxification/cleansing. I found a couple of wacky people saying things like you have to drink 20/30 glasses of water a day, and many people say you need to drink 10 to 12 glasses a day, and other people tell you that you need to drink all these other kinds of beverages. That was about the extent of kidney cleansing that I saw.

I can tell you kidney cleansing is amazingly important, and it’s often entirely overlooked. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. The “Royal Flush.” The kidney flush. This is perfect to do once per year. A kidney cleanse. The kidneys play an incredibly important role in keeping your body healthy. If they didn’t function well for one or two days, you would be dead. You would be gone really quick because you’d have all these toxins building up in your blood really fast and you wouldn’t like that.

Did you know that the kidneys filter a staggering 200 plus liters of blood per day? I think that equates to 400 pints, 200 liters, about 400 pints of blood. They produce an incredible four pints of waste every day, about two to two and a half liters of waste. They’re always filtering and blood, and they’re always cleaning the body. Keeping you clean. They’re trying to get rid of all the crap that you keep putting into your body all the time. All the beer, all the chocolate, all the wine. All of those things that we enjoy to eat here have to come out somewhere down there.

A lot of the stuff that we eat and breathe and put on our skin and we’re in touch with in our environment all gets into our bloodstream. Have you ever wondered what happens to that hand cream that you put on your hands and it disappears really quick? Where do you think it goes? It goes into your blood. All those chemicals in there that you can’t pronounce the names of – the kidneys have to filter all that out.

What about the air that you breathe? You’re walking down New York City and a taxi blows all this black smoke in your face. A lot of my patients from London and the UK have told me they go back to their room later in the day, they blow their nose and it’s all black from soot. It goes into the lungs, into the bloodstream, kidneys filter it out. The liver and the kidneys are the two main cleansers or detoxifiers. It’s very important.

Try and understand it’s a little bit like your car. Every time you get your oil or oil filter changed or every second time you need to get an oil filter change. The oil filter in your situation would be the kidneys and the liver. You can’t rip the kidney out and throw it and put a new one in in a hurry, it’s not that easy to do, but you can cleanse the kidney. No medical doctor talks about detox. Not many naturopaths I’ve ever heard talk about kidney detoxification. In fact, I’ve never heard any who talk about it, which is really crazy to me. All the focus is on bowel cleansing and liver detox, but there’s never any mention on kidney, and that’s what we’re going to do today.

What do the kidneys do? The kidneys perform a vital role in the body on keeping the electrolytes balanced. When you eat salt, for example, and it gets broken down into sodium and chloride, it’s very important for some system in the body to help regulate this balance. The kidneys do that. The kidneys also create multiple hormones. They create one called erythropoietin, which is responsible for red blood cell production, for example. They create other hormones like angiotensin 1 and 2 that help to regulate blood pressure. Without kidneys, you’d be feeling pretty crappy on your feet.

What are some of the signs and symptoms of kidneys gone wrong? Headaches, high blood pressure, nausea, itchy skin is a common one, fatigue, and a whole bunch of other stuff. Feeling wasted and terrible is a common one, too. Just feeling like crap. Where are the kidneys? They’re actually in your back. It’s hard for me to point them out because I’m on YouTube, but you’re going to find them about here somewhere. In normal peoples’ bodies that’s where they are. Some people have got one kidney, some people have got three kidneys. Quite rare, but it has occurred.

The kidney, or the renal gland, has the adrenal glands sitting on top of them. Lots of people I’ve seen over the years have complained about a sore lower back, when it fact they had a very small amount of dull pain emanating from the kidney region. You could sometimes feel a bit of dull pain coming from the lower back region and it could well be kidney.

I had a chiropractor bring me his wife a few years ago as a patient complaining that he couldn’t fix her back up no matter how much he adjusted it. When I did some iridology (looked at the eyes) and I asked a bunch of questions, it was quite evident that the right kidney was pretty sick, which needed a lot of cleaning up. Of course, she thought she had lumbar pain, when it fact she had kidney problem. Bear that in mind. Maybe it’s not your chiropractor, maybe it’s your kidney.

We didn’t really go into all of the roles that the kidney plays, but suffice it to say, there are many different roles that the kidney plays in the body, but the big one is the filtration system. It keeps the blood nice and clean. Do you want clean blood or do you want dirty blood? It’s your call. It really depends on the kind of foods that you eat.

It’s pretty obvious the most important thing to say up front is the consumption of fresh and clean water. It’s obvious. You’re not going to be able to detox on Budweiser beer. I once told a male patient he had to drink more, and his wife ended up sending me an email later saying, “He’s drinking more beer! You told him to drink more.” How crazy is that? Then I realized you have to tell people to drink more WATER. If you tell them to drink more, some males could see that as a reason to drink twice as much beer. Water is not beer. We’re talking pure clean water, preferably filtered water.

I’m not a fan at all of reverse osmosis water. This is basically water that’s flat. It’s got no oxygen in it – it’s dead. It’s not really a good idea. I’m sorry, I’m talking about distilled water. I’m not a fan of distilled water. I think that distillation fad hopefully is behind us now. Distilled water is good for laboratory use, and also for putting in batteries. Although, you can’t really buy car batteries anymore to put water in there, you just dump them. Don’t drink distilled water, it’s not a good idea to drink water that’s got no oxygen in it. You don’t find that naturally. In nature, there is no water with all the oxygen taken out.

So, reverse osmosis water I think is quite a good one. There are lot of different filtration systems you can look at that take fluoride out of the water, chlorine, pesticides, heavy metals and junk like that. I’ve got quite a nice filtration system in my kitchen. I recommend to definitely to do that, especially if you live in a big city. It’s also known that in places like New York, there’s over a 100 different pharmaceutical drugs in the tap water. Every time you have a glass of water – oops! A bit of birth control pill, a bit of Prozac, bit of anti-psychotic medication. Why go to the doctor, when you can have a glass of water with 15 different drugs in it? Anyway, let’s get into this cleansing.

Remember, if you don’t regularly look after the organs that filter the body, you’re going to be in a position, as you get older, for the kidney function to decline more markedly because it’s containing a lot more junk in it. Every year, the kidney function (especially my age, like 50 plus) is going to decline between 1 to 3 percent per year. It’s going to go down, down, down. That’s just by default. Young people have got very good kidneys. Strong kidneys. Older people have weak kidneys. It’s called getting old. Join the club.

How do we cleanse the kidney? What are ways to do a kidney detox? Well, you can keep the kidneys very clean by preferably keeping a lot of junk out of your diet. We’ve spoken about that in numerous videos, but let’s look at some of the key things that the kidney doesn’t like. Some of the key things it doesn’t like is a lot of caffeine, alcohol, and chocolate. That’s right, chocolate. Now you might think chocolate is a really healthy food, but it’s pretty darn hard on the kidneys.

Proteins are very hard on kidney function. This is where the Paleo diet seems crazy to me. They tell you to eat meat three times per day, or lots of eggs, lots of meat, and cut out all the carbs. “Eat a lot of meat, you’ll get healthy.” What a load of crap. It’s not true. The kidney foundation in the US say especially when you’re vulnerable or older, you don’t want to consume any more than about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of bodyweight. Other people say you need to eat between 1 to 2 grams if you want to maintain muscle mass. Take it from me. Keep your red meat consumption right down when you get beyond 50. Red meat is really tough on the kidney, and also creates a lot of creatinine and urea, uric acid. Different wastes that your kidneys have to filter out.

Meats are tough on kidney, but all proteins are tough on kidneys. The vegans shouldn’t tell me, “You can eat lots of beans! Tons of beans and lots of this and lots of that.” Protein is protein. All protein is tougher, but protein in general you need to be cautious of. When you get older, you don’t need a lot of protein, unless you’re digging ditches all day and doing a huge amount of physical labor, which a 75-year-old shouldn’t really be doing in my opinion. He should be sweeping paths or going on Facebook and stuff like that, but not lots of hard physical work. Younger people have got healthier kidneys and can eat more protein and physically work harder. But as you get older, you should be using your brain and not your brawn.

Let’s get into this kidney cleansing. Let’s look at a couple of steps we can talk about for keeping the kidney clean. We talked about the red meat, we talked about caffeine, we talked about alcohol, we talked about chocolate. Those are all foods very tough on kidney function. Water consumption we mentioned. I think it’s important to drink water when you get up, before meals, during the day. Eight to ten or twelve glasses in my mind is not necessary at all. Nobody I know drink eight to ten glasses a day. You’d have to be crazy to walk around drinking all day and peeing and peeing all day. It’s not natural to drink 10 to 12 glasses a day. People who tell you that you must drink eight glasses every single day. We’ve got enough bloody limits set upon us already. Speed limits, this limit and this limit. It’s up to you to decide how much water that you want to drink, but I would say a reasonable amount is anywhere between three/four/five glasses per day. It’s really nice if you can drink six glasses per day, but you don’t need to be walking around with one of those drink bottles everywhere you go during the working day.

Check out my video on “Stop Worrying About Health.” I know some people who would go nowhere without a water bottle. They go to the bathroom with a water bottle. Having a pee, they’re drinking water. They’re drinking water watching TV, they’re drinking water when they’re on Facebook, they’re drinking water when they’re in bed. You don’t need to do this kind of crap. This is being anal about water. It’s ridiculous. You need to drink when you’re thirsty. If you’re also like me and drink herbal teas or green tea, that also factors as water. You’re eating a lot of vegetables like steamed vegetables and salads, that also is water. You don’t need to be drinking every three minutes. “An hour’s gone by and I haven’t had a glass of water, I better drink another glass.” Don’t do that. You don’t need that much water.

Keep an eye on the urine. If it’s coming back pretty clear without too much smell, you’re pretty well hydrated. Sometimes if you haven’t been drinking water for a while, you can step your water intake up and see how you feel. You may notice a marked improvement just on the extra two glasses per day. I often tell patients it’s like when you walk into the garden in summer. A very observant gardener will walk into a garden and have a look at the foliage, the leaves on plants and trees and things like that. They can actually see by the angle of the leaves how well hydrated the plants are. Some people who don’t like gardens are not observant at all. They’re also not observant about their own hydration.

The interesting thing is, when you water the garden, you quickly notice how all the leaves will start coming back up again and the plants are well-hydrated. These are the plants that grow beautifully. There’s no such thing as a green thumb in my opinion. The people who haven’t got green thumbs are the lazy people who don’t water their garden. “Oh my God, my plant’s dying. What’s happening? I can’t get this garden happening. What the hell’s happening?” Maybe you should water the garden. Maybe you should take a drink occasionally because you might feel better, too.

I’ve had some patients who’ve told me they never drink water, they only drink coffee or tea. That’s pretty bad. Those are the people who need to get a kidney function test done where we can look at the creatinine levels, and the glomerular filtration. There’s two things you want to look at: Creatinine and GFR. Creatinine is a waste product. The muscles actually create wastes. It’s a bit like your car when you drive your car, you put gas in the tank. You drive it and exhaust comes out the tailpipe. The exhausts in your muscles are the creatinine. They build up and the exhaust’s got to go somewhere. It doesn’t come out your tailpipe, it’s got to come out the urine, because the kidneys filter this stuff. Kidneys filter the blood, and they help to remove this. Creatinine clearance is the ability for the body to clear creatinine from the bloodstream.

If you start noticing this is becoming compromised, this is when you need to start drinking more water before it’s too late. Glomerular filtration is different. Glomeruli are tiny little capsules in the kidney. Try and understand that your kidney is very complicated in how it works, but a simple way to explain it to you is a whole bunch of colanders or strainers on top of each other. Those things that you put spaghetti in when you rinse it out under the tap and you drain the water out. Think of your kidneys as having thousands of these colanders on top of each other and stuff coming in there, and junk coming out of the bottom that you want to discard.

If there’s a problem with these glomeruli, these capsules, if they’re not working properly, the filtration rate will be affected and compromised. You’ll be holding junk back in the body that you want to pass out. The GFR relates more to the mechanics and how healthy the kidney is. Creatinine clearance relates more to how effective the kidneys are at clearing a particular kind of toxin. Meat also helps to produce a significant amount of waste in the body. The creatinine clearance will give you an idea on that, too. That particular pathway. Every year on your birthday get a liver function test and a kidney function test by the doctor. That’s your birthday present from me. Make sure you do it.

Drink lots of water, we talked about that. Here’s a nice thing you can do: eat more parsley. Parsley has got a lot of potassium in it. It’s a really nice way to initiate urine coming from the body, and it’s a great way to cleanse the kidneys. Put lots of fresh parsley in your salads. Parsley roots have been historically used for hundreds of years for kidney cleaning. You grow parsley because you can’t actually buy the roots, and in the second year you harvest the roots. They’re quite thick. They almost look like small carrots. You wash them properly, cut the top off and put it in the salad, and then what you do is you chop that up, and you can make a tea out of it.

The roots are very powerful. You can chop some root up or the whole plant with the leaves, add a pint of water to a pot, a stainless pot, (600 mil) and chuck a handful of parsley and maybe some roots for more effectiveness in there, and simmer with the lid on for four minutes. When cool, drink half a cup, and keep the remainder in a glass container in the refrigerator.

Drink 125 mils, or half a cup twice daily for seven to ten days. This is a nice kidney cleanse. Better results, as I mentioned in my book, are obtained when you add the carefully cleaned roots of a parsley plant that’s two years old.

Take a good probiotic capsule three times daily with meals to help repopulate urinary and digestive tract with beneficial bacteria. There’s definitely a link with taking a probiotic with the bacteria in the intestinal tract and the kidney. Believe it or not, there’s actually bacteria that live in the kidney system as well. A good probiotic. Check out my Canxida Restore product. It’s got some enzymes in it and some very good probiotics to help you achieve this end.

In addition, during this kidney cleansing week, drink a glass of apple juice every day. Certified organic or juice your own. Green apples, excellent. Also nice for putting malic acid in the body. Muscles like malic acid – gives them a bit of energy/pep. Gallbladder likes malic acid. It helps to clean the liver and it also cleans the kidney.

Eat more of the following kidney friendly foods, especially in this particular week. This is great to do in summer time. After you’ve done your liver cleanse and gallbladder flush, you do the kidney royal flush. Watermelon contains a lot of different flavonoids and compounds that help to initiate kidney cleansing. Celery is superb for cleaning the kidney. Celery, watermelon, red bell peppers, cabbage, cauliflower, garlic, onions, green apples, cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, red grapes, egg whites and fresh fish. If you’ve got a yeast infection, omit the grapes, of course.

Cranberries and blueberries or any berries are very good for kidney cleansing. They contain different kinds of organic compounds that convert to this stuff called hippuric acid. Hippuric acid is a really good scrubber or cleaner of uric acid and urate from the body. Uric acid is like the deposits that affect the kidney. Uric acid’s important to clean from the body for many different reasons. It can make you quite sick and toxic. It’s also known to be bad for people with arthritis, especially gout.

When kidney cleansing, reduce these things: Red meat, white flour, sugar, which you shouldn’t be having anyway, rich foods like gravies and stuff like that, junk foods, peanuts, spinach (because it’s got oxalic acid in it, which can inhibit kidney cleansing). If you’re not cleansing, it’s okay to eat spinach here and there. I wouldn’t eat spinach every day. There’s a difference between Swiss Chard and real English spinach. The Swiss Chard can be a little bit harder on kidney function if you’ve got a compromised GFR or a poor creatinine clearance. I’ve had patients over the years with a huge amount of arthritis and pain in their body that were eating lots of amounts of Swiss Chard, so be careful of Swiss Chard.

I think that’s just about it with the kidney cleansing. We talked about the protein, we talked about the berries. Another tip for you is barley water. I remember reading about this some time ago. So barley is a little bit like corn silk. It’s a demulcent. It’s very soothing and cleansing on the kidney. Just get a small handful of barley, throw it in about a cup of water, and leave it overnight. Then in the morning, strain it and drink that water. It has a really good effect on increasing the creatinine clearance. That’s a good tip for you.

Try and do all this stuff over a seven-day period, once per year. It’s going to really help to build your health up. If you do it after your birthday, for example, at least once a year on a regular basis, I think you’ll notice that you’ll hold more stability if you’ve got poor kidney function, especially if your glomerular filtration rate is compromised and your creatinine clearance is compromised. You’ll be able to actually put that on a slow hold.

Clever thing to do that I’ve told many patients: when you do blood tests at least once a year, put stuff that’s flagged by the doctor on a spreadsheet and track it each year to see if it’s going up or down. Same with your business. You’ve got to track money coming in and out. Clever people do that. I hope that was some good information for you on kidney.

Remember: water, reduce protein intake, especially red meat, eggs and red meat can be hard on kidney function, increase foods with a high water content that are good for kidney cleansing like watermelon and celery, berries are very good. Chocolate, caffeine, alcohol kick the kidney in the backsides so watch out for those. Increase your water intake, but don’t be anal. “Whoops, I haven’t had a glass of water in an hour, better drink a glass.” Don’t be like that.

So, thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to click on the link below for a free report if you haven’t already received it, and don’t forget to subscribe if you’re not a subscriber. Thank you so much.