Health & Fitness

As you know, a novel coronavirus (initially labeled 2019-nCOV before being renamed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization¹) originating in Wuhan City, Hubei Province in China, is rapidly spreading across the world.

The first case was reported in Wuhan on December 21, 2019. Symptoms include fever, shortness of breath, severe cough and pneumonia which, in more severe cases, can lead to impaired kidney and liver function and kidney failure.^2,3

On January 21, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first U.S. case⁴ — a patient in Washington state who had recently visited Wuhan. Then, the first U.S. death was reported February 29, 2020, in Washington state.⁵

Less than a week later, CBS News reported March 5, 2020, that the number of deaths had quickly risen to 11 nationwide in the U.S. — 10 in Washington state and one in California.⁶ Not only that, but as of that day, “The World Health Organization urged governments around the world to pull out ‘all the stops’” to fight the outbreak. On the up side, China “appeared to be over the worst” of it, CBS said.

All told, as of March 5, 2020, there were 98,067 reported cases of novel coronavirus infections affecting 88 countries, 80,430 of which were in China. Worldometer.info provides an easy overview of confirmed cases and deaths that you can check for the latest statistics.⁷

COVID-19 — A Weaponized Coronavirus?

In this interview, Francis Boyle — whose background includes an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago, a juris doctor (lawyer) degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. in political science — shares his theory of the origin of this novel coronavirus.

For decades, he's advocated against the development and use of bioweapons, which he suspects COVID-19 is. In fact, Boyle was the one who called for biowarfare legislation at the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, and the one who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, which was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by George Bush, Sr.

At the time of this recording, February 14, 2020, more than 50,000 people in China had been infected with the virus. Certainly, it does not originate from infected bat soup.

As a result of Boyle's antibiological warfare work, which goes back to the early days of the Reagan administration — a time in which they were using DNA genetic engineering to manufacture biological weapons — Boyle has carefully followed "mysterious outbreaks of disease in both humans and animals around the world" that have appeared since then.

"My biowarfare antiterrorism act was specifically designed to not only to deal with regular biological weapons but also with DNA genetic engineering for biological weapons that was just coming into its infancy when the BWC was being drafted.

Even though the BWC would cover DNA genetic engineering, I wanted to make it clear by name that it was covered. I also made it clear [that] it covered synthetic biology as well," Boyle says.

"So, when these unexplained mysterious illnesses break out, I monitor them a while and usually I just conclude they can be explained by normal reasons: lack of sanitation, poverty, things of that nature. But in Wuhan it seemed pretty suspicious to me.

There is this Biosafety Level 4 facility there in Wuhan. It's the first in China, and it was specifically set up to deal with the coronavirus and SARS. SARS is basically a weaponized version of the coronavirus.

There have been leaks before of SARS out of this facility, and indeed the only reason for these BSL-4 facilities, based on my experience, is the research, development, testing and stockpiling of offensive biological weapons.

For that reason, I stated my opinion: That this Wuhan coronavirus leaked out of that BSL-4 facility … maybe mid-November … and the Chinese government has been lying about it and covering up ever since."

Many Unknowns Remain

The first reported case of COVID-19 infection was December 1, 2019. Depending on the incubation period, which is still unknown, the initial lead, provided there was one, might have occurred anywhere in November. The official estimate is a 14-day incubation period, but a British health expert believes it's 24 days, and North Korean biological warfare experts believe it's 30 days, Boyle says.

"As for Wuhan and Hubei Province, they're basically under martial law. There's no other word for it. If you read the statements by President Xi and his assistants, they've made it very clear they're at war here, and that is correct. They're at war with their own biological warfare agent.

President Xi just fired the party apparatchiks in charge of this and has brought in trusted military personnel to handle it, as well as large numbers of PLA [People's Liberation Army] forces saying they're health care workers. They don't look like health care workers to me. So, as of now, that's my best reading of the situation."

When asked about rumors the COVID-19 virus might have been stolen from a high-security laboratory in Winnipeg, Canada, Boyle says:

"It could have been. I want to make it clear that, in my opinion they were already working on that at the Wuhan BSL-4 facility. They were working on a biological warfare weapon involving SARS, which is a coronavirus to begin with.

We do know that Dr. [Yoshihiro] Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin … resurrected the Spanish flu virus for the Pentagon, obviously for weapons purposes, and he specializes in mating the Spanish flu virus to all sorts of hideous biowarfare instrumentalities. And there was a record of him shipping his products to Winnipeg.

Winnipeg is Canada's equivalent of our own Fort Detrick. It's a BSL-4 facility, and yes, they research, develop tests, manufacture and stockpile every type of hideous biological warfare weapon that we know of. So, some of this technology could have been stolen from Winnipeg. I don't know about that but, as I said, the Wuhan BSL-4 was already working on this to begin with.

They had already developed SARS. SARS had leaked out two to three times before this, and it seems they were turbocharging SARS, which is what [COVID-19] looks to be. This is a brand-new generation of biowarfare weapons we haven't seen before.

Its lethality goes from 15%, as estimated by Lancet, up to 17% to 18% by a British health official and even Chinese statistics. Its infectivity is 83%. It can infect maybe three to four people for every person infected.

It has gain of function properties, which means it travels through air at least 6 or 7 feet, and … there are reports that even contaminated human feces give it off, that the human feces radiate off maybe 6 or 7 feet. So, we've never seen anything like this before in the history of biological warfare, at least in the public record.

I want to make it clear: I have never worked for the United States government. I've never had a security clearance. I've never had access to any type of secret information.

I just read what is in the public record and the scientific record and try to draw my own conclusions, and that's what I'm giving you today. I could change my opinion if people can provide me reputable scientific evidence to the contrary.

Right now, I'm standing by my conclusion that it leaked out of the Wuhan BSL-4, the highest level of the Chinese government has known about it, they've been covering it up from the get-go, until they informed the WHO at the end of December."

Despite Laws, Biowarfare Experimentation Is Alive and Well

As noted by Boyle, the Wuhan lab is a designated WHO research lab, which may sound odd, considering these facilities specialize in developing and researching dangerous pathogens that can easily be turned into bioweapons.

According to Boyle, we should not be surprised however, as "WHO is up to its eyeballs in this type of work and has been for quite some time." The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the drug industry also appear to have had their hand in many of the outbreaks of what appear to be weaponized viruses.

"I won't go through the long history of big pharma getting involved in this. There's huge amounts of money here. I believe the West Africa Ebola pandemic originated out of the US BSL-4 facility in Sierra Leone, and [that] they were testing out a so-called vaccine that contained live Ebola and gave it to these poor people," Boyle says.

"As for the CDC, it has been involved in every … BSL-4 biological warfare death science you could possibly imagine … It's a matter of public record that during the Reagan administration, the CDC and the American Type Culture Collection sent 40 shipments of weapons-grade biological warfare agents to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, in the hope and expectation that he would weaponize these agents and use them against Iran …

Of course, the problem is that when that war was over … an order was given to U.S. military forces to blow up Saddam Hussein's biological warfare facilities, and that's not how you deal with biological warfare weapons …

[It] contaminated our own troops, and that was a causative factor in the Gulf War Syndrome that … murdered about 11,000 U.S. troops and disabled about 100,000."

According to Boyle, the U.S. government spent $100 billion on biological warfare programs since September 11, 2011, up until October 2015, which is no small sum. To put it into perspective, the U.S. spent $40 billion (assuming a constant dollar value) on the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb. Boyle also estimates the U.S. has some 13,000 life scientists working within the biowarfare industry.

"Clearly, the Reagan administration, under the influence of its neoconservatives who definitely believe in biological weapons and ethnic-specific biological weapons (you can see that in the PNAC report), were engaged in the use of DNA genetic engineering for the purpose of manufacturing biological weapons.

That is why I gave a Congressional briefing in Washington, D.C. in 1985. I was asked to do that by the Council for Responsible Genetics that I work with, which involves the leading life scientists in the world from MIT and Harvard.

I spent seven years at Harvard. I have three degrees and I knew all these people. They asked me to serve as their lawyer and give this Congressional briefing. I blew the whistle, and then they asked me to draft the implementing legislation, which I did …

I want to make it clear I'm not here to speak in their name, I'm only speaking in my name, but if you look at my book, 'Biological Warfare and Terrorism,' professor Jonathan King wrote the foreword. So, I have the leading MIT professor of molecular biology supporting what I'm saying, if you don't think I know enough science about it."

US Prepares for COVID-19 Pandemic

While there have so far only been a limited number of reported cases of COVID-19 infection in the U.S., the U.S. military has designated several detention sites around the country to quarantine Americans,⁸ should the situation take a turn for the worse.

Historically speaking, however, government health officials have been vastly exaggerating the threat of pandemics in the U.S., including the bird flu, the swine flu, anthrax and Ebola.

For example, as detailed in my 2009 New York Times bestseller "The Great Bird Flu Hoax," then-President George Bush Jr. projected 2 million Americans would die from bird flu; the best-case scenario taking only 200,000 lives. The final death count in the U.S. from that pandemic was zero.

It generated massive profits, though, as U.S. taxpayer dollars were used to purchase 20 million doses of Tamiflu. One of the people who was able to line his pockets from that hoax was defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was president of Gilead Sciences when the drug was created.

"[The bird flu] was another DNA, genetically engineered biological warfare weapon," Boyle notes. "It was a chimera. It had three different elements in it and we were all lucky that somehow they attenuated the lethality and the infectiveness of the bird flu."

Whether or not COVID-19 will be similarly ineffective in its spread and lethality remains to be seen. Judging by the statistics in China, "it doesn't look very good," Boyle says.

Understanding the COVID-19 Virus

According to Boyle, the COVID-19 virus is a chimera, like the avian flu virus before it. It includes SARS, an already weaponized coronavirus, along with HIV genetic material. "That was in a published article by Indian scientists. You could see the pictures right there, [but] political pressure was brought to bear upon them so they withdrew [the paper]."

This is why some scientists are now looking into using HIV drugs to treat it,⁹ Boyle says. COVID-19 may also have a flu virus mixed in, along with gain of function properties that allow it to spread a greater distance than normal.

Pandemics Repeatedly Used to Further Police State

Pandemics have also been used to chip away public freedoms. For example, the anthrax scare of 2001 was used as the impetus for signing the Patriot Act, which was the first step in taking away many of our personal freedoms and rolling out a complete surveillance state. To me, such outcomes are far more concerning than the risk of infection itself. Boyle adds:

"They used Amerithrax to ram the Patriot Act through, that is correct … We became a police state … And as I pointed out in 'Biowarfare and Terrorism,' I think the same people who were behind the 9/11 terrorist attack were also behind the Amerithrax, but I'm just connecting dots there …

What's called Amerithrax came out of a U.S. government biological warfare weapons lab and program, and I publicly blew the whistle on that the first weekend of November 2001.

The Council for Responsible Genetics was having its convention at Harvard Business School and I was chairing a panel with King and other experts on biological warfare, on U.S. biological warfare programs.

As I was walking into the Harvard Divinity School, Fox TV had a camera crew there and I said, 'Obviously, this came out a U.S. biological weapons program and probably Fort Detrick.'

I conducted the session and made the same comment. Then I made a comment to a Washington, D.C., radio station to that effect [and to] the BBC, so everyone in the world heard me.

At that point, someone gave an order that I was never to be interviewed again by any mainstream news about biological warfare programs. And that's been the case since the first week of November 2001."

As noted by Boyle, George Orwell's book, "1984," has become reality. Boyle has since lectured lawyers at DePaul Law School in Chicago about the totalitarian nature of the Patriot Act.

"Snowden has correctly pointed out the federal government is spying on everything we say, all of our electronic communications, you name it," Boyle says.

"And again, the proof is I've been completely blackballed out of U.S. media. Indeed, if you go back and look at the Amerithrax attacks, they also hit mainstream U.S. media to make it clear to them that if they covered this issue they will be killed too."

Bioweapons Are Developed To Be Used

As noted by Boyle, the U.S. government has a large stockpile of Amerithrax — a super weapons-grade nanotechnology anthrax with 1 trillion spores per gram — and that's just the tip of the iceberg of the biological weapons developed. What's more, Boyle has no doubt these weapons will eventually be put to use, as they have in the past. He says:

"There was a tabletop exercise at John Hopkins University last fall … on coronavirus.¹⁰ Tabletop exercise, that's a euphemism for a war game. Their estimate was that it killed 65 million people¹¹ …

John Hopkins is up to their eyeballs in this Nazi biological warfare dirty work. They have a BSL-3 facility there … that they proudly announce on their website … They justify it by saying they're developing vaccines. OK … How do they do that?

They go out around the world, and this is a matter of public record, and scour for every type of hideous disease, fungus, virus and bacteria you can possibly imagine. They then bring it back to these BSL-4 labs and develop an offensive, biological agent using DNA genetic engineering and synthetic biology … set up by the Pentagon under DARPA …

Once they have this offensive agent, they then proceed to develop a vaccine, because the agent is no good unless you can have a vaccine to protect your own people.

So, they're developing vaccines to have biological weapons, because a biological weapon consists of two elements: the offensive biological warfare agent in the first place, and then, second, a vaccine to protect your own people, and that is what is being done at all these BSL-4 facilities, and many of the BSL-3s as well.

John Hopkins has a BSL-3 and they admit they do dual use. That's what dual use means. They first develop the offensive biological warfare agent and then they develop the supposed vaccine."

Indeed, Johns Hopkins University is the biggest recipient of research grants from federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Department of Defense. It has also received millions of dollars in research grants from the Gates Foundation.¹² In 2016, Johns Hopkins spent more than $2 billion on research projects, leading all U.S. universities in research spending for the 38th year in a row.¹³

How Can We Best Prevent or Treat COVID-19 Infection?

While it's unclear exactly which treatment is the most effective, my guess is that Dr. Paul Marik's intravenous vitamin C protocol for sepsis would be a good starting point, seeing how sepsis appears to be what kills those who succumb to a serious COVID-19 infection.

Marik's retrospective before-after clinical study^14,15 showed that giving patients IV vitamin C with hydrocortisone and vitamin B1 for two days reduced mortality from 40% to 8.5%. The precise protocol used was 200 mg of thiamine every 12 hours, 1,500 mg of ascorbic acid every six hours, and 50 mg of hydrocortisone every six hours.¹⁶ Importantly, the treatment has no side effects and is inexpensive, readily available and simple to administer.

According to Marik, vitamin C and corticosteroids have a synergistic effect,¹⁷ which is part of why his combo protocol is so effective. Still, simply using high-dose IV vitamin C exclusively has been shown to improve survival in patients with sepsis and acute respiratory failure, reducing mortality from 46% to 30%.¹⁸

It also reduced the number of days they needed to remain hospitalized. On average, those who received vitamin C had by Day 28 spent three fewer days in the intensive care unit than the placebo group (seven days compared to 10). By Day 60, the treatment group had also spent seven fewer days in the hospital overall —15 days compared to 22.¹⁹

While there are no trials that look at integrating hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT), my suspicion is that this would provide a powerful synergy that could get the fatality rate from sepsis even closer to zero. Sadly, HBOT is not available at many hospitals, and even if it were, it is not approved for sepsis.

You can learn more about Marik's sepsis protocol in "Vitamin C — A Game Changer in Treatment of Deadly Sepsis," along with commonsense recommendations for how to lower your risk of sepsis in the first place.

You can also review Marik's PowerPoint presentation, "Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid and Thiamine for the Treatment of Severe Sepsis and Septic Shock," presented at the 2020 Critical Care Reviews meeting in Australia. For COVID-19 at-home care advice from the WHO, please see "Novel Coronavirus — The Latest Pandemic Scare."

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In this interview, Dr. Lynda Frassetto, a nephrologist and professor emeritus in the department of medicine at University of California San Francisco (UCSF), shares important information about how acid in your diet affects your kidney health and longevity.

“When I was in internal medicine training, I happened to have a really super mentor, Dr. Eli Friedman, at the State University of New York (SUNY) in Brooklyn,” Frassetto says. “He made nephrology sound really interesting.

And so, after I finished my residency and was a hospitalist for a couple of years, I decided to go back and do nephrology, because people who did nephrology just have a better understanding of physiology than most internists do.

I thought that would help make me a better doctor. After I finished my fellowship, I started working with Anthony Sebastian here at UCSF. He was interested in diet acid load in people who were relatively healthy.

The kidneys do a lot of things. One of the things they do is they get rid of acid. We know that as kidney failure progresses, you have trouble getting rid of the acid. It accumulates in your system and has a lot of bad side effects.

We also know that, as you get older, your kidneys tend not to work as well. What Tony was looking at was, in otherwise healthy, older people — whose kidneys just aren’t working as well as they did, let’s say, 40 or 50 years earlier — does eating a high-acid diet have any potential side effects?”

Low-Acid Diets as a Means to Protect Kidney Function

In the initial stages of their work, Frassetto and Sebastian worked on neutralizing acid in the diet using bicarbonate. Then, just over a decade ago, they started looking at low-acid diets. While all foods contain precursors that can be metabolized into acids, fruits and vegetables contain a lot of alkali precursors that are metabolized into bicarbonate, like citrate or malate.

Frassetto’s interest in low-acid diets began with the paleo diet, promoted by Loren Cordain, Ph.D. According to Cordain, many foods in our modern diet were unavailable to our ancestors, such as processed grains and sugars.

He believed a diet closer to our ancestral diet would be healthier, and one of the reasons for this is because any diet high in fruits and vegetables (and devoid of processed food) will be lower in acid. As explained by Frassetto:

“If you look at any large population, and you just look at the average kidney function over time, on average, everybody’s kidney function declines. But if you look at specific individuals, kidney function either declines much more slowly or may even level out.

The question is, ‘How related is that to eating a low-acid diet or doing things that wouldn’t bother your kidneys?’ This has actually been looked at by Dr. Donald Wesson, a nephrologist at University of Texas (UT) Southwestern.

He’s looked at both alkalized supplements and fruits and vegetable diets in people with Stage 2 kidney disease, with an estimated glomerular filtration rate (GFR) between 60 and 90, and Stage 3 chronic kidney disease (CKD), which has an estimated GFR from 30 to 60.

[GFR is] an estimate of kidney function. So, if you’re 50 years old, your GFR is about 90. If you’re 80 years old, your GFR is about 60. On average, people who are older are going to have … Stage 2 or Stage 3 CKD.

Wesson showed that in these people, if you either give them alkalized supplements like baking soda, or put them on a diet with more fruits and vegetables, that you could slow the rate of decline ...

If you extrapolate that from people with kidney failure to just older people, the idea would be that, maybe, you can slow the rate of decline of your kidney function, even if you’re otherwise healthy and just getting older. That’s the idea.

Everything that you do, everything, is related to kidney function in some degree. Because the kidneys get rid of a lot of things. The worse the kidneys work, the worse everything works.”

Fasting Also Protects Kidney Function

According to Frassetto, most kidney disease in western countries is more advanced kidney disease caused by high blood pressure and Type 2 diabetes. Three-quarters of patients on dialysis are there due to high blood pressure and diabetes. So, ultimately, anything that helps improve diabetes and high blood pressure will also improve kidney health.

One strategy known to significantly lower your risk of Type 2 diabetes is fasting, including time-restricted eating. I’ve previously interviewed Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist in Canada, who uses fasting to reverse diabetes in his patients. Exercise is yet another strategy that will lower your risk of diabetes, and thus protect your kidney health.

Acid Versus Protein Damage

Acid isn’t the only thing that can damage your kidneys. High-protein diets can also cause harm, thanks to the ammonia generated. As for which may ultimately be worse for you — high acid or high protein — Frassetto explains:

“All proteins contain acid precursors. If you’re eating a high protein load and you don’t have enough alkali to help the kidneys either buffer or get rid of the acid, then that’s ultimately bad for your kidneys. But you do need to eat a certain amount of protein, or you’re going to have problems building things too.

This is really a balance question. It’s not that protein is bad. It’s that, if you’re eating a lot of protein, you should also be eating a lot of alkali. That will help you not use the body systems to neutralize or buffer the acid in your system. The whole idea is that you want to maintain your blood pH within the range considered to be normal.

To do that, you either move the acid inside the cells, you break down the muscles to supply glutamine, ultimately to the kidneys, to excrete the acid as ammonium. You also break down your bone, which is calcium hydroxyapatite, which is the alkali.

Or, you have to decrease the amount of endogenous acids that you produce in order to be able to maintain your blood pH. Your body has a lot of ways of dealing with the acids that the kidney has to get rid of.

So, if you’re giving the body exogenous alkali, meaning you either take bicarbonate or you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, you don’t need to break down your bones and muscles in order to be able to neutralize the acid in your system …

Hydrogen ions are balanced at the level of 10-9, which is a super-low level of free hydrogen ions in the body. And the changes that you can make to that without going outside the range of normal and becoming ill is not very big.

There are only a couple of things you can do here. Either you’re going to break down your body systems or you [need to] give your body exogenous alkali.”

Patients with advanced kidney disease will typically get exogenous alkali — usually a combination of sodium bicarbonate and sodium citrate — as it’s been shown to slow the advancement of the disease and delay the need for dialysis. The sodium citrate will also lower your risk of kidney stones.

Potassium bicarbonate should not be used when you have kidney disease. The reason for this is because, when you have kidney failure, potassium can accumulate to lethal levels. Controlling blood pressure and diabetes are also important when you have kidney disease, as is controlling proteinuria (damage to the glomerular barrier).

How Klotho Benefits Kidney Function

The protein klotho is helpful for ridding your body of phosphate, and phosphate is another acid that has to be excreted by your kidneys. Interestingly, transgenic animals that have been genetically edited to overexpress the klotho gene also live 10% to 40% longer.

Klotho is a membrane transporter and a soluble protein. When you eat a high-phosphate diet, you release fibroblast growth factor 23 (FGF23), which attaches to klotho as a cofactor and then goes to the kidneys, where it removes the transporters that allow your kidneys to reabsorb phosphate. This helps maintain a normal phosphate balance.

However, with age and declining kidney function, you need more and more FGF23 to get rid of the phosphate. FGF23 also prevents the actions of 1-alpha hydroxylase, an enzyme necessary for the activation of vitamin D, and vitamin D is necessary for the production of klotho.

So, as you get older and continue eating a high-phosphate diet (which is easy since phosphate is in most foods), your FGF23 goes up while your vitamin D and klotho levels go down. As a result, your kidneys start reabsorbing more phosphate, thus incurring more and more damage.

The answer, then, is not only a low-acid diet. You also want your diet to be relatively low in phosphate. What is a high-phosphate diet? Frassetto explains:

“First off, dairy products. All dairy products contain essentially four things: calcium, phosphorus, protein and fat … So, for kidney failure patients, we pretty much eliminate dairy products.

And then colas. They add phosphatidic acid to a lot of things, including soda. We try to get people not to drink stuff that has phosphatidic acid in it. And then there are some other specific foods, like chocolate and nuts that we tell people with advanced kidney failure to avoid ... Beans are another high source of phosphate.”

Assessing Your Kidney Function

To get an idea of how well your kidneys are functioning, you’d typically start with a renal panel. This will give you your blood urea nitrogen level and serum creatinine. Your GFR is then calculated based on your gender, age, race and serum creatinine level. Based on the results of your renal panel, other tests may be prudent.

“In terms of just looking at kidney health, there are two things that we look at,” Frassetto says. “One is [the estimated] GFR number. Two is, ‘Do you have any protein in the urine?’ Those can be two separate problems. Protein in the urine, in and of itself, is bad for kidney function …

This was discovered many years ago by Dr. Barry Brenner. He did five/sixth nephrectomies in rats (so only a small part of one kidney remained) and showed that the remaining kidney, the so-called nephron remnant, had to hyperfilter to be able to clear all the blood. That hyperfiltration through the glomerular membrane was bad for the membrane, so the membrane started to leak protein, and the kidneys failed faster.

So, we now know that there are a number of kidney problems where the membrane is leaking protein. That causes the kidney to be more damaged.

If you had to do just two things just to see how healthy you are, the first would be to get a blood test to see where your kidney function is. The second is to get a urinalysis. Pretty much any time you go in for a primary care visit, those are the two tests that they usually do.”

Acidotic Stress

While most people are familiar with oxidative stress, acidotic stress is another type of stress that can take a significant toll on your health. Frassetto believes both are equally important, especially where kidney disease is concerned. Acidotic stress also plays a role in aging.

“A friend of mine named Dr. Elissa Epel has looked at the relationship between telomere length, telomerase activity and oxidative stress. [She] has shown people who are under a lot of psychological stress have shorter telomeres and abnormal telomerase function.

They have higher levels of oxidative stress. I happen to have done more research on [acidotic stress], but really, I think it's a combination of both,” Frassetto says. “So, the whole idea would be to lower the amount of oxidative stress and lower the amount of acidotic stress, and therefore limit the damage to the body.”

More Information

To summarize, a low-acid diet is basically a diet high in fruits and vegetables, with a moderate amount of protein. Again, the more protein you eat, the more fruits and vegetables you need to maintain a healthy balance. A low-acid diet is also low in or devoid of dairy products.

Keep in mind that by the time most people are sent to a nephrologist, they’ve already lost three-quarters of their kidney function. So, to make a difference, you really want to start thinking about your kidney function early on. Get regular blood tests of your BUN and creatinine, and a urinalysis, and if they start revealing a problem, address it as soon as possible.

While the kidney transplant process has improved a great deal in recent years, the number of available donors is limited, so the number of patients on dialysis has steadily risen.

As noted by Frassetto, dialysis is extremely expensive, and just barely keeps you alive. Moreover, while end-stage renal disease is covered by Medicare in the U.S., it only really covers dialysis. It does not cover all needed medications, for example.

The take-home message is that you cannot count on sophisticated end-stage therapies. The answer is preventing the problem in the first place. The role of dietary acid is a fairly recent discovery that is not widely known, but that can make a big difference in your renal health.

Avoiding high-phosphate foods could go a long way toward improving and maintaining your kidney function as you get older. Cronometer, a free online nutrition tracker, is an easy way to track the amount of phosphorous is in your diet. The National Kidney Foundation’s website¹ is another helpful resource.

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