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Podcast 195: Kidney Cleanse – Part 3

Further to recent discussions on cleansing, Martin and Scott go on to discuss the kidneys – signs and symptoms of poor kidney health and kidney stones. Kidneys are organs of filtration. All your blood goes through your kidneys, many times every day.

The main symptom of kidney stones is pain in the lower and middle back (kidney area, or spine), but as that pain can be excruciating, some people may feel the pain in different parts of their body.

Lower back pain, kidney pain, edema (“water holding”), like lungs edema, arms edema, legs edema, abdomen edema, blood in urine …
It takes a lot of liquid to “wash” the inside of your body.

Podcast 195: Kidney Cleanse – Part 3

SCOTT: Hello everyone, welcome to the Life Enthusiast Podcast! I am your co-host, Scott Patton, and joining me, as usual, is Martin Pytela, health coach at Life Enthusiast! Hi Martin, how are you doing this fine day?

MARTIN: I am feeling like a star already!

SCOTT: Good! Well, the last couple of weeks we have been talking about cleanses, and we went over all the reasons they are really important. Anything that you do to clean any other organ goes into the colon, but if it gets stuck there, what is the point, right? We also talked about the liver, the most important organ we want to keep clean.

MARTIN: Indeed! The next thing we want to talk about is our kidneys!

SCOTT: Kidneys, okay!

MARTIN: What are your kidneys responsible for? What is their main function in the body? It is an organ of filtration. All of your blood goes through the kidneys many, many times every day, that is a lot of blood. When you consider that your heart pumps about a gallon a minute, that is a lot. I hope I remember my physiology stuff well enough, but I think it is a gallon a minute. So if all you have is about a gallon of blood in your body, that would mean all of that blood goes through the kidneys once a minute, right? That is a lot of filtering, a lot of work kidneys have to do!

SCOTT: That is a lot of filtering!

MARTIN: So what do they do? Kidneys eliminate metabolic wastes, help regulate blood pressure, activate vitamin D, keep our pH in balance… most often that means getting rid of acids. And also fluid balancing, electrolyte balancing, making sure that all of the minerals remain in your blood in the correct ratios.

SCOTT: Okay.

MARTIN: So what does that mean? Well, if it messes up, we are in trouble, right? A small problem can have very, very serious consequences. For example, if you get your potassium out of balance, your heart function stops. If you have your sodium too high, blood pressure rises, and your stress level remains high. Things like that. Seemingly small things that have major consequences. What are the most common problems with kidneys? Do you have any ideas?

SCOTT: Kidney stones! In fact, I was just flying back from Fort Lauderdale, and I was walking behind these two guys leaving the restroom, and they were talking about kidney stones, and one of them said it is as bad as having a baby. Obviously, they are guys, they have no idea what it is like to have a baby, so I thought: how can you make that comparison? But basically, he was saying it was an incredibly painful experience.

MARTIN: Indeed! As I understand it, for a man it is more difficult to pass a kidney stone than it is for a woman because of the way our anatomy is built. I’ve had a couple of friends with that problem, and the way they describe it is very excruciating, just really, really awful.

SCOTT: I did a little checking, as you were talking because I thought that is an interesting question: How much blood do our kidneys filter every day? And as you said, there is about a gallon to a gallon and a half of blood in the average person, and the kidneys continually filter this throughout the day. All of the blood is filtered once every 45 minutes or so, which basically means the kidney filters between 32 to 48 gallons of blood a day! Of course, it is the same blood, but it is going through that same filtration process many times. So that is a lot of blood being filtered every day, which is why it is so important that our kidneys function properly!

MARTIN: Right! And imagine that kidneys are just these two little tiny things! They would fit in the palm of your hand! Your heart is about the size of your fist, and it pumps over a gallon of blood every minute. Imagine if you squeeze your hand, you have to put out a gallon of liquid every minute. It is a lot of squeezing. But anyway, going back to kidneys and kidney stones, it is not a fun experience. Kidney stones are typically made out of calcium phosphate. What is the antidote to calcification in the human body? Magnesium! We have said it a million times. So what does that mean? Well, if you are indeed deficient in magnesium, you have a good chance of developing kidney stones. Start using magnesium. The best thing is to use it transdermally because taking it orally can cause digestive issues to some people, it can even cause a bowel flush, and that would be a tremendous shock to the kidneys.

SCOTT: So basically, if our kidneys aren’t working, the main problem is kidney stones?

MARTIN: Oh no, you could have many other issues, this is just an example of the most painful experience you can have related to kidneys.

SCOTT: So if you want to avoid pain, you want to avoid kidney stones, and the way to do that is to have your kidneys working properly.

MARTIN: That is right.

SCOTT: So what are some of the functions of the kidneys?

MARTIN: One of the most important things is blood pressure regulation.

SCOTT: So if you have high blood pressure or low blood pressure, you probably have a problem with your kidneys, is that right?

MARTIN: It could be, but it doesn’t have to be caused by kidneys. What doctors do is they give you what is called ‘water pills,’ they will try to force the kidneys to pump out water out of your body to lower the volume of fluid in the circulatory system so that there’s not as much pressure. This is, of course, totally ridiculous. The problem isn’t too much water. The problem is that you have too much toxicity in the body, and the water is there to dilute it. So the solution should have been detox.

SCOTT: Another case of dealing with the symptom, not the problem.

MARTIN: Yes, exactly!

SCOTT: What you are saying is we have this toxic sludge in our body, and our body says: “okay, we need to get rid of it.” The way we get rid of it is to dilute it with water, we start holding water in our bodies, our blood pressure goes up, the doctor says: “you have high blood pressure,” and gives you something to get rid of the water. But of course, now we have all these toxins running around, causing a lot of damage.

MARTIN: Yes, our liver, and then eventually our kidneys will be overburdened, overworked, and worn out too early, earlier than they should be. One of my favorite solutions is watermelon fast. As long as you do not have diabetes, this one is really precious, you should buy something like 50-100 pounds of watermelon, cut it all up, and then retire into the bathroom, fill your tub with water, and then start eating the watermelon. You stay in the bathroom, in the tub, and you pee into the tub. The idea is that you keep peeing into the tub that you are sitting in while eating loads and loads of watermelons. It is a comical thing, but it works.

SCOTT: I am just having a real problem imagining this. So I have 50 pounds of watermelon, I am in my bathtub, my bathtub is full of water, and I am peeing in the water that I am sitting in.

MARTIN: Yes. That is a curious thing. I think it has something to do with osmosis. I only did it while peeing in my toilet, not the bathtub.

SCOTT: Now that I would think would be relatively reasonable! We did have a talk in a previous episode about the homeopathic benefits of drinking some of your urine. So I guess this would fit in right in with that.

MARTIN: Certainly.

SCOTT: Okay, moving on from peeing in the bathtub! One of the main functions of the kidneys is regulating blood pressure. I assume it also will eliminate some waste products that our body makes, right?

MARTIN: Right. It filters it from the blood and then it is eliminated via the urine. Most typically there will be some metabolic waste. There will be a little bit of protein, but there shouldn’t be too much, there should be some minerals in it. Doctors will analyze that when you give a urine sample to the laboratory, they check the thickness of it, the protein content, the sugar content… if there is too much sugar, that is probably a problem, you are probably heading into being diabetic.

SCOTT: I keep thinking about watermelon now. For most of my life, I’ve enjoyed watermelon, but I haven’t really had any desire to have watermelon this year. One of the things that are different this year is I do a lot more hot yoga than I’ve done in previous years, so maybe I am dehydrated a little bit more than normal, so I don’t need more water to get out of my body…

MARTIN: Yes! Obviously, you are listening to your body! I think what we should do really is just describe what a typical kidney cleanse is. At Life Enthusiast, we don’t really sell any specific product, or kits for a kidney cleanse because most of everything that you need for it is readily available in any store. I would say that having good, clean, structured water, and drinking loads of that is always the right thing to do, not just for kidney health.

SCOTT: So one of the things the kidneys need is really good water because that helps them with the flushing.

MARTIN: Yes. What you don’t want to have are all the toxins in a concentrated form. The more concentrated they are, the more damage they do to the kidneys, the more difficult they are to get rid of. I don’t know if you remember, this may have happened to you, but some days you will find that your urine is almost like burning in your urethra.

SCOTT: Very rarely, but sometimes that is the case.

MARTIN: Yeah. Well, thank God it is not often, but some people have this problem frequently. It could be because the urine is either too acidic or too alkaline.

SCOTT: The acidity and the alkalinity of the body is also something that the kidney helps regulate?

MARTIN: Oh yeah! That is probably the most important function. Having your pH balanced has been one of the most important topics. We want the pH of the body fluids to be at 7.3-7.4. The blood will always be maintained at that unless you are already in the process of dying, and the kidneys are going to be filtering out as much as they can of all the excess. So when your saliva, for instance, is becoming more acidic, that is really telling us that the kidneys cannot keep up with the acidity or acid behaviors that you are putting yourself through. So the number one thing when you are doing a kidney cleanse is to drink lots of water, which is something we talked about before, we talk about drinking quality water all the time. What else do we need? The most beneficial are lemon and lime juice added to your water. I would recommend distilled or at least ionized water. There is this particular cleanse that is known as the ‘master cleanse.’.

SCOTT: I’ve done the master cleanse.

MARTIN: Really?

SCOTT: Yeah! It was like 10 days of just drinking lemon water with maple syrup and cayenne, and having salads from time to time. What I didn’t do was a colon cleanse, or a liver cleanse before this one. The first thing I was surprised about is that I never really felt hungry. I thought I would have huge, massive hunger cravings, but that never happened. But did I notice anything else? It would have to say: “Nope.” And of course it probably all got stuck in my liver, in my colon, and it really made not much difference, because I only did the kidney cleanse but did not continue on. So the results were not spectacular.

MARTIN: So I guess the problem has been the wrong order, like not cleansing the whole path.

SCOTT: So I should have had spectacular results. And I didn’t. I feel really bad about that, now that I realize that I should’ve had way better results, but I didn’t do it the right way. But I did it, and I survived. And the master cleanse is a really good cleanse, it was interesting, you know, not eating cakes and ice cream for 10 days, and actually surviving. (laughing)

MARTIN: (laughing) We are going to do all of that this year around, aren’t we?

SCOTT: That is right. Actually, as you know, my girlfriend is a hydrotherapist, she cleans out colons with water, so she is going to get me on five treatments, five flushes, and then we are going to do a liver cleanse together, and then we are going to do a kidney cleanse together. By the way, she has been listening to our episodes, and she really enjoys it, she said: “You guys are right on. You are talking about everything I talk to my clients about.” She sees hundreds and hundreds of women that have hormonal imbalances, and constipation, and can’t sleep at night. She does the colon cleanse with them, and she says they just have absolutely changed their lives because of it. So she was very excited that we were talking about this topic because she just thinks it is incredibly important.

MARTIN: Yeah, hers is one of the underappreciated professions. It is like your plumber, right? (both laughing) You call a plumber, and you pay them really well because they deal with stuff you really don’t want to deal with. Actually, I don’t know if colon hydrotherapists are paid all that well…

SCOTT: They are not paid as well as they should be. Just like massage therapists aren’t paid as well as they should be.

MARTIN: Yeah, I actually believe that a massage therapist will do much more good to your body than a surgeon. We should pay the massage therapists well. We should spend 10 times the money on massage therapists that we spend on surgeons.

SCOTT: Absolutely. Totally agree with you. It is a thing I think that we really need to educate people about. Because the doctor is usually not going to say: “well, you have high blood pressure, go see a colon hydrotherapist, so that you clean out your colon, and then we will get you on a liver cleanse, and a kidney cleanse, and you should be good.”

MARTIN: Yes, they don’t say that, instead, they are going to put you on these water pills, which will cause your kidneys to be overworked, so that 10 years down the road you will be in a wheelchair with your kidneys shutting down.

SCOTT: So we drink lots of water in the morning, and then we have the juice of the lemon and lime, and then we put a little pinch of cayenne pepper, add some maple syrup, and that is basically the master cleanse.

MARTIN: The most important thing – don’t mess with this. Don’t substitute maple syrup with agave syrup or with honey, don’t mess with it, this is the original formula, it is tested, it works, don’t try to outsmart it with some modern changes. But what about the other options? Well, you know that the most beneficial herb for detox is parsley, green parsley, it stimulates the kidneys.

SCOTT: Oh, I didn’t know that! That is why we do these talks because I want to learn new things!

MARTIN: Right! Raw fresh fruit or vegetable juice is the best way to get your vitamins, minerals, and other essential micronutrients. So that is what you drink during your kidney cleanse. If you are hungry before lunchtime, have some fruit, fruit juice, or fruit smoothie.

SCOTT: Here is the bad news: we are not talking about V8! We are not saying: “go to your grocery store, buy a can of vegetable juice.” This has to be fresh stuff, not some pre-packaged, sweetened juice.

MARTIN: Yes, you are going to have to either use a blender, your own juicer or buy fresh juice from one of the places that will actually juice fruit for you on the spot, you know, these fresh juice bars.

SCOTT: We are not talking about going to the store and spending 1.50 on a couple of boxed juices. It is just not going to do the job for you. I just want to make that clear, because some people want to do it kind of the easy way, but you need to understand there is no easy way. This does not include industrial, canned, processed, pasteurized stuff. You have to put in a little bit of effort here. The person that likes to get the frozen pizza and cook it is going to have to do a little bit more than that to make this work right. But it is worth it.

MARTIN: Yeah. So juices for breakfast. If you decide to go for lunch, that can be a little richer than just drinks. You can have a salad with a dressing that includes raw apple cider vinegar or lemon juice.

SCOTT: Oh yeah! The raw apple cider vinegar thing! I’ve been taking some, my girlfriend, of course, gave me all these tips, and I got some raw apple cider vinegar, which is actually not that hard to find, and I put it in a glass of water, and I was absolutely amazed because it actually tasted really good! Some people might not like the taste though…

MARTIN: Here is what you need to consider: your sense of taste is changing. As you detoxify, you are actually becoming more accustomed to the real taste of real food, and you are less needing to have the sweet stuff and junk food. I remember when I first started with green smoothies, I used to put a whole banana in it because I just couldn’t survive the taste of the algae. And very soon, a whole banana seemed like too much, so I cut it to half a banana, and then even half a banana seemed too much, so I cut it in quarters, and then I thought: This is ridiculous! And so I started using an apple, and I said goodbye to bananas! It is quite interesting that the taste keeps changing like that.

SCOTT: But that is really good!

MARTIN: I think so! That is why you are now drinking apple cider vinegar in water thinking: Well, this is not so bad. You know, a couple of years ago, you would have probably just puckered up and spat it out!

SCOTT: Yeah!

MARTIN: Anyway, so I am trying to illustrate a salad dressing, right? You can make a ‘liquid salad,’ like a smoothie, or you can make a salad that you will actually eat. The dressing should be whole, natural things. Either lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, some garlic perhaps, some fresh herbs… Here is a really interesting one, this thing called potassium broth. This is an ancient recipe. It includes 50 cloves of garlic in a gallon of soup that you are making. So a large pot with potato peelings, carrot peelings, whole chopped beets, chopped onions, 50 cloves of garlic, celery, and some dark green leaves, like Swiss chard, kale, beets tops… You cook it, strain it, and drink just the liquid. You can put the peelings and the vegetables in your compost if you have compost.

SCOTT: This potassium broth sounds like a cool drink, with lots of nutrients!

MARTIN: Well, it is, because you have the carrots, potatoes, and beets in it, there is quite a bit of carbohydrate in it, so this will provide some calories. You can drink that together with your tea, some people would add a whole bunch of green parsley into this… You can google “kidney cleanse book” by Dr. Hulda Clark, well, it is actually called The Cure for All Diseases, it is a nice little book. There is a cool recipe, you take four bunches of fresh parsley, serious, big bunches of parsley, eight ounces of black cherry concentrate, half a cup of marshmallow root, half a cup of gravel root, and half a cup of dried hydrangea root. So I guess you need to go visit some tea store or the herbal store to buy all that. Then you can add some ginger, some vitamin B, especially B2 and B6, and off we go! We boil that and drink that. You can add some goldenrod tincture, maybe some spices like nutmeg, and cinnamon… (Scott drinks some water) What are you sipping on?

SCOTT: I am sipping water! You got me drinking water like crazy, Martin!

MARTIN: Yeah, of course, you have been to the sweat session too, right?

SCOTT: Yes, just a little hot yoga before we started recording!

MARTIN: Cool. So can you put your forehead on your knees, right?

SCOTT: No. I don’t think I will ever be able to. I don’t think the male body bends that way, the female body obviously does.

MARTIN: I don’t know, I think it is not a gender thing. I don’t think I would be able to do that either, but there are guys that can, so obviously it is not a gender thing.

SCOTT: Okay… so back to the cleanse, you do that for five days, and then what?

MARTIN: The idea is to give your kidneys a rest…

SCOTT: …which never happens.

MARTIN: Yes, for many people this never happens, especially if you drink alcohol, if you eat too much protein, if you eat very mineralized, salty foods, if you are not sweating… I mean, it is not a big deal to eat salty foods, if you are sweating enough. But who do you see sweat enough these days? Nobody. In fact, you are not even supposed to, as the media says, so they can sell you their deodorants, antiperspirants… they make it seem like it is a bad idea to perspire in a ‘good society.’.

SCOTT: Right, I mean, it is just really gross.

MARTIN: Oh yeah. So we have a problem because if we don’t perspire, that means that our kidneys have to do all the work. Did you know that your sweat is pretty much the same composition as your urine?

SCOTT: No, I didn’t know that.

MARTIN: They are very, very similar. So next time you lick your forearm or whatever, just remember this.

SCOTT: (laughing) Okay, thanks. Well, I guess that is right though, they are both ways of removing toxins from the body, right?

MARTIN: Exactly, exactly. Lowering the mineral load that shouldn’t be there. Well, I think we have done this topic justice! Anybody who wants to do the kidney cleanse, remember – lemon, water, cayenne, maple syrup, apple cider vinegar in water, no food, just liquid food for a few days. You have options. Those types of things would be very helpful, and very cleansing to the kidneys. Green parsley is still the strongest agent we have. Somebody in the Middle East must have had a good clue because they make this meal called tabbouleh. It is basically a salad, which is really easy to make. You mix green parsley, tomato, cucumber, maybe some green onion, and dressing, which would be olive oil, lemon juice, maybe add some mint or some kind of light herbs, something that is not too overpowering. I like mixing mine with quinoa, but it is originally made with bulgur. You could even make it with rice. I ate tabbouleh salad every day for about four weeks and I am thinking: Okay, I think I am done for the season.

SCOTT: So we’ve talked about cleansing the colon, cleansing the liver, cleansing the kidney, we have gone from bigger to smaller, and next week we are going to be talking about cleansing the blood.

MARTIN: Yes, that is the last thing in the process.

SCOTT: That will be really, really exciting, I am looking forward to this, I can really feel like this knowledge is helping me to live a healthier life, and hopefully our listeners agree, and they are going to be trying some of these things, and then letting us know what the results were. It is very interesting. Being with Sophia, my girlfriend, because she knows these things. I have had this redness on each side of my nose for as long as she knows me, and we started doing some of the things that we talked about, and I also changed my diet a bit and ate less sugary things. And I am absolutely amazed how that redness has gone away, she noticed it right away, and said: “Yeah, you have done a little detoxing, and you are not putting as much pressure on your body.” And then of course I fell off the wagon and had some of that redness come back, so I was like: “Whoa, I have to go back to more fresh vegetables and that sort of stuff, and less of the processed stuff!” So, Martin, why don’t you tell everybody where they can go to get more information?

MARTIN: Visit www.life-enthusiast.com! Check out the energized water section of our store, because you will need a lot of energized water. We have a number of tools that relate to that, so you can have structured water at home. If you have any direct questions you want to ask, call me at (866) 543 3388. This is Martin Pytela and Scott Paton for Life Enthusiast, restoring vitality to you and to the planet.

SCOTT: Thanks for joining us, everybody! See you next time.