Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast. I'm Patrick Cummings here with EC Sinkowski. Each week, we simplify the principles and practices of nutrition, health, and fitness. It will help you perform better, feel better, and of course live better. Thank you so much for tuning into the show. Hello, EC. How are you? Great. How are you doing? I'm wonderful. Happy summer to you and to everybody. That's right. We're going to talk about

the science behind high protein diets and kidney health today. Cool. Yeah. One of the more

prevalent, let's call it myths or points of confusion perhaps on the interwebs is that high protein diets

are bad for our kidneys. So that's really what we're going to talk about today. So we're going to talk about protein, but as it relates to kidneys, we're going to talk about some common measurements of kidney health as well. I think we'll get to that towards the end. But let's start with maybe a little background on kidneys and their function. And then of course we've in why we're talking about protein as it relates to those things.

Yeah. Okay. So the kidneys, we've got two of them. They're located at the back of our abdomen.

Some of us do. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Some of us do.

Located at the back of the abdomen below the rib cage and kind of either side of the spine.

The kidneys have a ton of roles from like regulating blood pressure and blood

volume to producing hormones for red blood cell production to vitamin D activation. I mean, they do a ton

of things. But specific to the topic today, they are responsible for filtering waste from the blood.

And then that filtered waste ends up being disposed of via the urine.

And they're pretty amazing at this filtering capacity. The human body has about five quarts

of blood in terms of total blood volume. And every day, the kidneys filter about 150 quarts of

blood. So that means that upwards of 30 times a day, your entire blood volume is being filtered,

and then disposing on average about two quarts of urine. Again, all on average, of course,

there's going to be some variation here. Now, some of the waste products that they're filtering

out are the breakdown of protein, which we're going to discuss, but also things like excess

salt. Should you be taking all of those

electrolyte salt drinks that I don't think you need, or many people don't need, as we've talked about

before. So they're filtering that out and then disposing of that. But yeah, the concern with the high

protein diet is that they might kind of overwork the kidneys. And so what happens here with proteins, the building blocks of proteins are these amino acids,

and amino acids have the compound nitrogen in them.

...