When Life Hands You A Lemon

Make lemonade! Besides supporting your local lemonade stand, now you can help yourself avoid kidney stones.

Lemonade Helps Kidney Stones: "If you've ever passed a kidney stone, you won't forget the sudden, intense pain in your flank. Some patients compare the pain with that of childbirth.

Kidney stones form when urine in the kidney becomes supersaturated with stone-forming salts -- and when the urine doesn't contain enough stone-preventing substances. One of these substances is citrate.

For people prone to stones, doctors usually prescribe potassium citrate. It can be taken as a pill or in liquid form. But lemon juice is full of natural citrate.

When made into low-sugar or sugar-free lemonade, Nakada and colleagues found, lemon juice increases the amount of citrate in the urine to levels known to inhibit kidney stones. It doesn't work quite as well as potassium citrate. But for patients who'd rather avoid yet another medication, lemonade is an attractive alternative.

'The trend is going to be, if you can make a change in your diet and avoid medications, you are going to try to do that,' Nakada said. 'We see lemonade therapy as playing a role.'

David Kang, a medical student and researcher at the Duke University Comprehensive Kidney Stone Center, found that this role can play for a long time. Kang and colleagues followed 12 kidney-stone patients who had been on lemonade therapy for up to four years"

Imagine that, using diet instead of medication. What a concept. Probably has no side effects either if you avoid too much sugar.

Tags: kidney stones, lemonade, diet