 Kidney failure may be both prevented and treated with a plant-based diet, and no wonder. Kidneys are highly vascular organs. Harvard researchers found three significant dietary risk factors for declining kidney function—animal protein, animal fat, and cholesterol. Animal fat can alter the actual structure of our kidneys, based on studies like this, showing that plugs of fat literally clogging up the works in autopsy of human kidneys. And the animal protein can have a profound effect on normal kidney function, inducing what's called hyperfiltration, increasing the workload of the kidney, but not plant protein. Eat a meal of tuna fish, and you can see the increased pressure on the kidneys go up within one, two, three hours after the meal, in both non-diabetics and diabetics. So we're not talking, you know, adverse effects, decades down the road, but literally within hours of it going into our mouth. Now, if instead of having a tuna salad sandwich, though, you had a tofu salad sandwich with the exact same amount of protein, what happens? No effect. Dealing with plant protein is no problem. Why does animal protein cause the overload reaction, but not plant protein? It appears to be due to the inflammation triggered by the consumption of animal products. How do we know that? Because if you give a powerful anti-inflammatory drug along with that tuna fish, you can abolish the hyperfiltration protein leakage response to meat ingestion. Then there's the acid load. Animal foods, meat, eggs, and dairy, induce the formation of acid within the kidneys, which may lead to tubular toxicity, damage to the tiny, delicate urine-making tubes in the kidney. Animal foods tend to be acid-forming, especially fish, which is the worst than pork and poultry, whereas plant foods tend to be relatively neutral or actually alkaline, base-forming to counteract the acid. So the key to halting the progression of chronic kidney disease might be in the produce market, rather than the pharmacy. No wonder plant-based diets have been used to treat kidney disease for decades. Here's protein leakage on the conventional low sodium diet, which is what physicians would typically put someone with declining kidney function on, switched to a supplemented vegan diet, then back to conventional, plant-based. Conventional, plant-based. Turning on and off kidney dysfunction like a light switch based on what was going into their mouths.