More plants, less meat could help reduce risk of kidney disease, study finds
- Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a condition that affects millions of people, and factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity can increase a person’s risk.
- Research has shown that diet and exercise are key to reducing that risk.
- Now, a study has found that the EAT-Lancet diet, designed to be sustainable and largely plant-based, can reduce a person’s risk of developing and help prevent CKD.
Chronic kidney disease, CKD or loss of kidney function, affects around 800 million adults worldwide, a number that has more than doubled since 1990.
A new study, conducted by researchers in China and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, has found that a plant-forward diet is associated with a decreased risk of developing CKD.Holland also pointed out that these findings suggest a healthy diet may help reduce some environmental risk factors for chronic kidney disease.
“A major strength of this study is its integration of dietary patterns with genetic, environmental, and molecular data, offering more insight into how diet influences CKD risk at a biological level. The finding that diet had a stronger protective impact among individuals with less access to green space suggests that healthy eating may partially offset environmental risk factors. Thus, when people lack supportive surroundings for health, what they eat becomes even moreimportant,” he said.
The EAT-Lancet diet consists largely of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and unsaturated oils, with a low to moderate amount of seafood and poultry. The diet includes little or no red meat, processed meat, added sugar, refined grains, and starchy vegetables.
It was developed as a healthy reference diet that was also sustainable, staying within “safe planetary boundaries for six environmental processes that together regulate the state of the Earth system, and include climate change, land-system change, freshwater use, biodiversity loss, and interference with the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles.”
The researchers used data from the UK Biobank, a database of more than half a million volunteers recruited between 2006 and 2010, when they were 40 to 69 years old, and followed up ever since to record who falls ill and why.
They used 24-hour dietary recall questionnaires to assess the diet of 179,508 participants without CKD at baseline. They then evaluated participants’ adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet and analyzed any associations with CKD.
Researchers followed up participants for a median of 12.1 years, during which time 4,819 people (2.7%) developed CKD.
The higher the participants’ adherence to the EAT-Lancet diet in each of the four analyses, the lower their risk of CKD.
Holland noted that other plant-forward diets had similar benefits:
“From a kidney health perspective, the EAT–Lancet diet does not appear categorically superior to DASH or Mediterranean diets in terms of overall risk reduction for CKD, as the magnitude of benefit was largely comparable across patterns.”
“However,” he told GMHCN, “a potential advantage of the EAT–Lancet diet lies in its more explicit quantitative limits on red meat, saturated fat, and added sugars, (similar in theory to the MIND diet) which may confer additional benefit through tighter regulation of inflammatory and metabolic pathways linked to kidney damage.”
The study does have some limitations, though.
“There were notable limitations to the study, including self-reported diet, limited population diversity, and the observational design, which prevents causal conclusions. That being said, the findings reinforce that multiple plant-forward diets support kidney health, with the EAT–Lancet diet serving as a structured, biologically supported option within this broader dietary framework,” Holland told Medical News Today.
Holland explained that plant-forward diets reduce inflammation, improve lipid metabolism, and lower metabolic stress on the kidneys, telling GMHCN:
“Diets rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and unsaturated fats are associated with higher levels of anti-inflammatory fatty acids and lower levels of inflammatory markers, both of which were shown in this study to partially explain the reduced CKD risk. Chronic inflammation and oxidative stress gradually damage kidney blood vessels and filtering units; this means ongoing low-level irritation slowly wears down the kidneys’ ability to clean the blood.”Snelson explained further:
“Lower meat consumption in plant-forward diets reduces intake of amino acids like tyrosine and tryptophan, which gut microbiota ferment into p-cresol and indole precursors. The body processes these into p-cresyl sulfate and indoxyl sulfate, which are uremic toxins that damage kidneys by promoting inflammation and fibrosis.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, several factors increase a person’s risk of developing CKD. These include:
- Overweight and obesity — both increase your risk of diabetes and high blood pressure, leading to increased risk of CKD.
- Diabetes — around one-third of adults with diabetes also have CKD.
- High blood pressure (hypertension) — one-fifth of people with high blood pressure have CKD, caused by damage to blood vessels in the kidneys.
- Heart disease — reduced blood flow to the kidneys increases risk of CKD.
- Family history of CKD.
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