The advantage of staying in a tropical country like ours is having the luxury of enjoying the sunshine. However, the sultry Indian summers also bring with them a lot of health issues, if we fail to exercise caution at the right time and places.
With the extreme heat during summers, it’s common to sweat a lot, get rashes, and feel completely dehydrated. Besides the heat making one feel extremely tired, it also affects one’s internal organs.
As a fact, summer spells a dramatic rise in the incidence of kidney related diseases and stones. Data suggests that kidney stone cases spike up by up to 40 percent during summers. That’s because dehydration tends to leave one’s body bereft of minerals due to excess sweating. The resultant lack of fluids in the body makes the urine concentrated. This leaves a higher amount of filtered residual salts in the kidney, which go on to turn into stones.
To prevent that, here are a few things you can do to take care of your kidneys:
Always Stay Well Hydrated
Ideally, you must target to drink at least eight to ten glasses of water every day. That’s because staying adequately hydrated eliminates toxins from your body along with the residual salt that could remain and stay clogged in your kidneys.
In case you feel that you won’t be able to drink that much plain water, you could substitute it with fruit juice, ginger ale, buttermilk and so on. In fact, if you start your day with lemon water and honey, it could give your kidney functions a boost.
However, you must be careful to avoid caffeinated beverages like coffee, flavored tea or soft drinks as these liquids are known to contribute to dehydration.
Keep A Watch on Your Food Intake
Along with being careful about what you eat because of the slower digestion in summer, you also need to be cautious of your food habits to take care of your kidney.
You could consume more of salads, for they help maintain the coolness levels. You must make ensure that your intake salt and sugar only in constrained quantities. Eating too much salt can extract and deposit the calcium from your bones to the kidney.
Alternately, sugar also needs to be restricted since it decomposes into glucose. Having a high amount of glucose in the body can impact the kidneys negatively during filtration. Also, you must curtail intake of food rich in oxalates since it leads to the formations of calcium oxalate kidney stones. Examples of oxalate-rich food that are otherwise healthy include peanuts, legumes, sweet potatoes, spinach, and beetroot. You must only eat them in limited quantities. Lastly, if you are on calcium supplements, you must be careful to avoid an overdose by eating a lot of calcium-rich foods in addition to it.
Attend to Nature’s Call Promptly
It’s vital to be extremely mindful of not holding your urine in your bladder for too long. Doing so could put a strain on it and increase your chances of developing stones. That’s because the longer the urine stands in there, the longer time the waste materials get to crystallize and convert into stones.
Exercise & Stay Healthy
Goes without saying, it’s a must to engage in regular exercise to remain healthy.
As a fact, obesity and weight gain raise the risk of kidney stone formation, due to the increased excretion of calcium, oxalate, and uric acids.
To mitigate this risk and stay healthy it is advisable to spend some time to stay physically fit and in good shape. However, when exercising during summer, you must make it a point to wear loose clothes. Loose clothes pull the moisture away from your skin and make you feel cooler. On extremely hot days, you could also experiment with cooler cardio activities such as swimming,
Discuss Medication with a Doctor
As a final precautionary step to take care of your kidneys, you can also discuss medication to prevent stones with your doctor. There are many medicines that help control the number of acids, alkali, and cysteine in one’s urine, which ultimately develops stones. As a fact, it’s advisable to combine the medication with limited salt intake for best results. However, any medicines intake for the purpose must be under the supervision of a proper urologist.
If we go by the numbers, about five to seven million Indians suffer from kidney stones. With such high incidence of the disease, it’s best to take precautionary steps instead of suffering and getting admitted to a hospital amidst excruciating pain.
Use Health Insurance
While precautionary measures are one part, it makes sense to be protected in case of occurrenceunfortunate illness.You must make sure to get good health insurance to be financially secured in terms of treatment costs or complications.
You can buy the health insurance to protect you against diseases like kidney failures and other life-threatening situations online. You can buy this plan as a standalone policy or as a rider to an existing term insurance plan from the insurer.
The post FIVE THINGS YOU CAN DO TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR KIDNEYS IN SUMMERS appeared first on Fitnistics.com.