Greetings Eric Bakker.
Thanks for catching up with me, and thanks for looking at my channel.
I always appreciate people viewing the work that I do.
That's great.
We're going to talk about calcium oxalate stones, or kidney stones.
These are the most common form of kidney stones so you may know someone who's had a kidney
stone or you may be watching this, yourself, because you've got kidney stone problems and
want to know a bit more about it.
So let's talk a bit about that topic today.
I might break this down to a couple of videos because otherwise it's going to get too long.
Calcium oxalate stones, what are they?
Well, the kidneys are quite remarkable organs.
We've only got two of them, and they sit in the lower back.
Sometimes when people have a back problem, they, in fact, have a kidney problem and vice
versa.
If in doubt, you need to get that checked out by a doctor.
The kidneys are really hard-working organs, incredibly hard working.
They filter about 25% of the blood that your pumps every hour.
They work really hard.
They make sure that the electrolyte balance is kept really good in the blood.
Basically, they're going to regulate a lot of minerals there and also regulate the fluid
balance.
The kidneys also make a hormone called erythropoietin, I think it's called, which is responsible
for red blood cell production.
The kidneys perform a whole bunch of different tasks in the body.
Far too many for me to talk about in this video.
They're basically filtration organs.
They're like the liver.
They keep you in great shape by filtering your blood and getting all the crap out of
there.
The kidneys filter out aluminum, mercury, all the different chemicals that you'll eat,
that you're getting through your diet, or through your air, or through your beverages.
Kidneys are going to clean all that stuff out.
It's incredible how hard they work.
So what are these stones and how do they form?
Well if you think about it, the kidneys will pick up anything that's in the blood stream.
They'll filter the blood.
Anything that's in the blood, it's going to go into the kidney, it's going to stay in
the kidney or get passed out through the urine.
If you think about it carefully, calcium oxalate, so this is calcium which forms a combined
deposition with either oxalic acid or phosphate.
About 10% of kidney stones are made from uric acid.
This is more common in guys.
Women can have it too.
The guys tend to also be more prone to kidney stones, I think, a few times more than women
do, in general.
Could be because of their diet or their lack of water, or too much coffee, tea, or alcohol.
There's a couple of foods I want you to be careful of if you want to avoid calcium oxalate
stones or if you've got stones, not to have any more or create bigger stones.
These foods contain oxalic acids so you need to be a little bit careful.
I've got a bit of a list here.
I'm just going to read out a few foods that you need to be cautious of.
Beet root, rhubarb, watercress, spinach, spinach, Swiss chard, or silver beet.
Chocolate is another one and amaranth.
You might have heard of amaranth.
A lot of these foods belong to the Chenopodioideae family.
It's a particular family of vegetables that have these seeds on ... In fact, if you grow
beet root, like I do, and you let it come to seed, it doesn't look dissimilar to amaranth,
which is quite interesting.
You need to be careful with these high-oxalate foods.
I had a patient several years ago with multiple kidney stones.
In fact, her husband had kidney stones as well.
When I inquired to her about her diet, she said the only vegetable she was eating was
Swiss chard.
She ate it twice a day.
She grew it all around the house.
She had this raised vegetable garden built right around the house.
When I inquired further into the vegetable garden, it was just basically all green lumber.
It was copper-treated pine they'd put in the ground, then put these beds up, and they grew
Swiss chard in it.
I said, "Well, you might want to consider using older wood without creosote or junk
in it, or New Zealander hardwood, which is clean."
I said, "Get rid of that other stuff there, that other timber, which could be suspect,
and don't just grow Swiss chard.
You need to grow other kind of vegetables like broccoli, and celery, and things like
this."
This woman was having pain in her joints, pain in lower back, and she had kidney stones,
so you know that it may be a link there.
If you're eating a lot of these kind of foods, you may want to think carefully about that.
You can get rid of calcium oxalate stones, but can take a lot of time.
Naturally, it's not that simple to do.
Some people say drink lots of apple cider vinegar.
There are other tricks that you can do as well.
There are many different herbs you can take, but the problem is, once you've got the stones,
and they're very painful, you want to get something done instantly.
I had a kidney stone, myself, in my 20s when I was going to the gym.
I drank far too much cows' milk.
I can remember I was drinking liters of cows' milk all the time.
I ended up with horrific kidney stone pain in my groin area.
It went down sort of the thigh into my lower back, and I ended up passing it out, but I
wouldn't wish that pain on anybody.
It's a terrible pain.
Absolutely awful pain to have, so if you've got a kidney stone, and you've had pain associated
with it, I know how you feel because it's not something I would really like anyone to
have.
That's it for this video.
I'm going to talk in another video more about the treatment, about what you can do and other
aspects of this particular condition.
Just be mindful of those vegetables because they can be stone producers.
Chocolate's a big one.
Coffee's a big one.
My granddad had a whole jar of kidney stones he showed me when I was a young boy.
Years later, when I studied medicine, I realized why Granddad got the kidney stones, because
like a lot of Dutch granddads, Dutch people, particularly his generation, Granddad was
drinking between 10 to 15 cups of coffee per day.
It was the filtered coffee.
His house always smelled strongly of coffee.
When you drink lots and lots of coffee, if you think about it, coffee has an ability
to really cause problems in the body.
Coffee also helps to leach out calcium from the bones and you are more prone to osteoporosis
if you're a heavy coffee drinker.
I believe that very heavy coffee consumption led to Granddad's kidney stones, which he
proudly showed me the scar on his back when he had to get the kidney cut open.
So there you go.
There you have it.
Don't drink too much coffee.
Watch out for these oxalic acid containing foods.
Catch up with me in the next video, and I'll talk a bit more about kidney stones.
Thanks for tuning in.