IgA Nephropathy

Change Your Diet to Live Longer with IgA Nephropathy

A specialized form of kidney disease called IgA Nephropathy will require that you make changes to your daily life in order to live longer.  If you have this disease, you’ve likely experienced blood in your urine and have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or both.  To slow the growth and effects of IgA Nephropathy, you need to have your blood pressure and cholesterol under control which means you need to make changes to your diet to help slow the effects of this disease.  If you don’t make changes, you might need a transplant in the future.

 

Diet Won’t Do it All

While a change in your daily habits and your diet can help slow the effects of IgA Nephropathy, you still might need a kidney transplant in the future.  If this happens, you will be put on a list and eventually need to have a transplant.  A change your daily habits and diet can help to slow the growth of this disease, but different people respond to IgA Nephropathy in a variety of ways.  Even though you might still need a transplant, positive changes to your diet can help you live with this disease longer.

 

How Can You Change your Diet?

If you have a diet that’s heavy in processed or fatty foods, you need to cut some of these out of your diet and replace them with fruits and vegetables to improve your overall health. Your diet should be a mixture of good foods that will help your body process the extra proteins associated with IgA Nephropathy.  Take a hard look at what you eat and begin to see what you can do to lower your blood pressure and cholesterol outside of taking medication to control these things.

 

Do you Smoke or Drink?

Another way to improve your blood pressure and cholesterol levels is to reduce the amount of smoking and drinking you do.  If you’re a heavy smoker, cutting back will make a difference but cutting out smoking altogether will improve your overall health and help you live longer, even if you don’t have IgA Nephropathy.  Do you drink alcohol every day?  If so, you should cut back to only a couple of times a week or not at all.  These changes in your daily habits will do more than just improve your blood pressure and cholesterol, they will help your entire body.

 

Get Some Exercise

While exercise won’t change the fact that you have IgA Nephropathy or reverse it, you can improve things that tend to make it worse by exercising regularly.  Simply taking a walk for thirty minutes every night can make a huge difference in the way you feel and your overall health.  If you’re overweight and haven’t exercised in a long time, these walks will make a difference for you and allow you to feel better every day.  You can slow the effects of IgA Nephropathy and live with this disease for a long time when you change some of your regular habits.