Welcome to Dishing Up Nutrition's midweek segment called Ask a Nutritionist.

My name is Brandy Burrow.

I'm a licensed and registered dietitian here at nutritional weight and wellness.

On today's show, I'll be covering a topic

that was requested from one of our Dishing at Nutrition listeners. The topic today is,

what's some dietary advice for kidney stones? I think this is a great topic. I think it's

an under-explored topic here on the show. So I'm really happy to share what I've learned

preparing for this episode and what I've learned just from working with clients one-on-one.

And if you've ever had a kidney stone, you know how painful they can be. And the clients that I've

worked with who have gone through this are very motivated to do whatever they can to prevent it from

happening again. So you're probably listening to this today because you might have a kidney

stone or maybe you've had one in the past and you just don't want to go there again. So this is your

episode. I just want to get started by discussing what a kidney stone is. So kidney stones

are hard deposits that are made of minerals and salts that are filtered through the kidneys,

but when we're not urinating often enough, the urine is so concentrated that those minerals start to stick together and crystallize, and it forms this hard stone-like material.

So dehydration, not urinating often enough, will increase your risk of developing these kidney stones.

So I will talk a lot about how to stay hydrated, because that is

rule number one, whether you have a kidney stone or whether you want to prevent a kidney stone.

And unfortunately, if you have already had a kidney stone, your risk of developing another kidney stone increases by 50%. So you'll

want to be very diligent in the recommendations that I'm going to share with you today. Other risk

factors for developing kidney stones include having diabetes, having metabolic syndrome, so maybe you have diabetes, but also high blood

pressure, high cholesterol, you might have midsection weight storage, but also folks with

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