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Alcohol and Kidney Damage – How Does Alcohol Affect Your Kidneys?

by | Health | 4 comments

Alcohol and Kidney Damage (Transcript)

Hi, how you doing, I’m Kevin O’Hara for Alcohol Mastery and today I’m going to be talking about alcohol and the damage to your kidneys.

What Do Your Kidney’s Do!

I think everybody knows that there are certain organs in your body that you can’t do without, there’s your brain, your lungs, your heart, and your kidneys are also one of those organs.

Kidneys normally come in pairs, they’re shaped like a red kidney bean, if you know what that looks like, you know what a kidney that looks like. They’re about 5 inches long, 3 inches wide and they’re positioned one on either side of your spine.

If you put your hands on your hips, with your thumbs on your back, move your hands upwards until you touch your ribs and press your thumbs into your back at that point, that’s generally where your kidneys are. You won’t be able to feel them but that’s where they are.

The basic job of your kidneys is to clean your blood of a lot of the waste that goes in. The nutrients basically go into your body, there are a lot of chemical reactions that take place, and the chemical reactions produce a lot of waste, so that’s one form of waste that your kidneys have to deal with.

Another form is just some of the nutrients and other stuff that’s in your body that your body doesn’t need so your body will expel it.

The blood goes into your kidneys through the renal artery, so anything that is called renal is to do with your kidneys.

There’s about a gallon and a half of blood going through your system at any one time, that’s the average person and your kidneys will basically go through that about 400 times, in one day.

So, as the blood passes through your kidneys, it’s filtered by about a million of these tiny little microscopic filters called nephrons.

Once it passes through them, the waste is combined with water and it passes out of a tube called the urethra and obviously once it goes into your urethra, it comes out of your body as urine.

The Kidney Balancing Act

Another job that your kidneys are responsible for is homeostasis. That’s balancing out the minerals and the water in your body.

They say that if you put the amount of water that you take into your body on one side of the scale and the amount of water you’re passing out of your body on the other side of the scale… that both sides should balance equally.

Alcohol and Kidney Damage

That’s where alcohol comes in and does some damage.

In the normal function of the body, water will come out of your body in just different ways. it comes out in urine and your poop, it comes out when you sweat, and it comes out when you’re breathing.

So the basic principles behind keeping you balanced, keeping you hydrated, is that when you’re thirsty, your brain is telling you to drink, to drink water.

When you haven’t got enough water in your system the brain will send a message down to the kidneys which releases a hormone which in turn holds on to water.

When you’ve got enough water and you’ve been drinking and you’re fully hydrated, it sends a message to your kidneys to stop producing the same hormones, so it’s all balanced out.

You can see the state of your body in your urine when you are peeing out. If you look at your urine and it’s a very dark colour, you can see the waste coming out, and it really means that you’re dehydrated.

So you need to drink more water. Your wee should always be coming out clear. If your wee is not clear, you need to drink more water.

Alcohol is definitely not good for the kidneys, it can cause all sorts of wild fluctuations in the water supply in your body, through the diuretic effect of alcohol, and it can also affect your kidneys in relation to diabetes.

Diabetes is the number one reason for kidney failure and it can also be the cause of high blood pressure and high blood pressure is the second highest reason for kidney failure.

Again alcohol is just a…it’s a bad thing to be putting inside your body, it’s a toxin, the sooner you give it up the better.

If you’ve got any questions about that at all, don’t hesitate to ask, give us a shout over on the website or leave a message down here below on YouTube.

Until next time, I’m Kevin O’Hara for Alcohol Mastery, Onwards and Upwards.

Alcohol and Kidney Damage

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4 Comments

  1. Angel

    Hi Kevin. This is such a great site, you are so inspiring.

    Your latest post was helpful, and I’m not sure the kidneys are involved with thusm but I think it might be good to talk about hyponatremia and hypoglycemia and how alcohol fits in with that. Especially for women who don’t eat or eat very little, but drink, what can happen is there is too much liquid and not enough salt or nutrients. I’m just posting this cause I went thru this and felt I was dying. Hyponatremia can be fatal actually. I’m not as educated on alcohol as you are, but you are helping me learn that it is a body poison. What can you share about the effect of alcohol on critical body nutrients?

    Reply
    • Kevin O'Hara

      Hi Angel, It’s on my list, a post about overall nuturitional deprivation because of alcohol. Don’t know when it will be up though, long list to get through. Thanks for your kind comments and glad I could be of help to you.
      Kind regards
      Kev

      Reply
  2. Holly

    Thank you Kevin! I have been watching all sorts of videos today on the dangers of alcohol. I am finding yours to be the most informative and down to Earth with your concern.
    Going to watch some more of what you have to teach me.

    Reply
  3. John Pavlovic

    Hi Kev in regard to the private Facebook idea ,sounds good ,I am on another private music site on facebook and it works well.If any clowns start carrying on they are blocked.Keep up the goood work love the site Pav

    Reply

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