Diet cookbook

[Purplepuzzle]

Is there a simple diet cookbook? I don’t like herbs or sauces on my meats.

I don’t want to spend orders of dollars on special foods.

[Skeptix]

What diet you looking to follow? The treatment paradigm comes first, the diet follows, so to speak.

[WinJ3]

What food do you like?

[18125 in reply to WinJ3]

I like all food and regularly eat at vegan cafes, and my favourite food is salad but I am also a lover of fish and meat, for the past few months I have reduced my meat and alcohol and started using low sodium salt, my alcohol consumption was never big my weekly consumption being 9- 12 units and is now 0 to 5 units a week, milk is another thing I have reduced from 2 pints to 0-to1 pint

[RoxanneKidney]

just don't eat anything that comes out of a box or jar etc. Eat as fresh as possible and go easy on the meat.

[Skeptix in reply to RoxanneKidney]

Whilst generally true and good advice, there are good products from the prepared sectors that add welcome convenience.

I worked in the ready meal industry years ago and the raw ingredients were top notch - they had to be to look and taste good after processing (it was a clear topped tray so the meal was on display rather than hidden in a box with a non-representative photo to guess from. Nothing untoward was added and the meals were merely pasteurised at lowish temperatures then onto the chill shelf

Better to look for clean declarations (short ingredients list and ingredients that are fairly recognisable as food rather than Frankenfood..

Take this product:

GOSH veggie sausages: chickpeas, onion, rapeseed oil, green lentils, butter beans, rice flour, potato flake, salt, parsley, sage, thyme, nutmeg, coriander, mace, black pepper, white pepper.

Sure, the butter beans will be canned, the chickpeas maybe not. Not a bad declaration and something to knock up a tasty lunch with without having to DIY it. I'm certainly never.going to make these sausages myself!

[RoxanneKidney in reply to Skeptix]

There are alot of simple bean burger recipes online.

[lowraind]

From the time I was first diagnosed, I began to scour recipes and collected them in my own version of a recipe book. I would put the name of the meal that I was looking for, followed by CKD, and found various versions of meals that I wanted to try making. This was made more difficult because my husband, besides having CKD, also is diabetic. However, knowing what we could have and eliminating what we should not have has given me quite a collection. I continue to search to this day, and have also learned to eliminate items from regular recipes to make them more CKD friendly.

[curleytop1 in reply to lowraind]

Hello lowraind,

Yes, I did something similar when I was diagnosed wit h CKD over 6 years ago. It eventually becomes second nature, and, like you, I still scour the internet and supermarkets for new ideas. I'm lucky in that I'm not diabetic, just have to reduce my potassium intake, but since it is in all foods it does require attention to diet.

No one has mentioned that they need to lose weight, or keep their weight stable. This is the most difficult problem I have found. Many vegetables are high in potassium, beans (except green beans), peas, lentils, potatoes, tomatoes to name a just a few and it is the same for many fruits, especially dried fruits. So it is difficult to use vegetables or fruits for snacking.

This leaves carbohydrates, which can be eaten more freely, but they are mostly high in calories. So I look for the lowest calorie carbohydrate foods I can find. Things like crispbreads, corn or rice cakes are good but choose carefully as their calorie count can vary quite a lot as can what one puts on top of them. It is the same with many prepared foods. Choose as large a supermarket as you can cope with and spend time reading the ingredients and calorie counts of the meals and foods you like and it is possible to find items which you can keep in the fridge/freezer to help with the days when cooking from scratch is not an option!

By doing this I have trained myself to actually enjoy things I have previously disliked, such as celery and red peppers , blueberries and cottage cheese (all relatively low in potassium).

The general advice for kidney patients is to eat white meats rather than red and avoid dairy products as much as possible so I use cottage cheese instead of butter when making an open sandwich (1 slice of bread), sprinkle a little black pepper and/or lemon juice (rather than salt) where flavouring is needed. I also avoid extra sweeteners and just use the natural sweetness of strawberries and blueberries in things like instant porridge which I make up with plain water rather than milk.

Hope I've given you all some new ideas and if you have any tips/tricks you've discovered please let us all share them so we can make our diets more varied and interesting. The biggest problem for us all is that there is NO one kidney diet fits all........... Curleytop1.

[WinJ3]

Davita has a list of free cookbooks

davita.com/diet-nutrition/k...