Holiday Prep: Online Tools for the Kidney Diet

With the holidays right around the corner, it’s all the more important for your patients with kidney disease to understand and adhere to their complex kidney diet. They may need some extra support from you with holiday meal planning and keeping up with nutritional goals. Fortunately, in addition to direct support from renal dietitians and other kidney care providers, there are a wide array of resources and tools to help increase patients’ awareness and motivation to maintain a kidney-friendly diet during the holidays.

For starters, patients can find education resources online. DaVita.com offers articles about kidney disease and dialysis treatments, as well as an entire section on the chronic kidney diet, which includes hundreds of kidney-friendly recipes.

Whether patients are pre-dialysis or currently on hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis, they can find articles to help explain the kidney diet for their needs. Of course, there is no substitute for an in-person meeting with a renal dietitian.

Other kidney diet resources include the following:

• National Kidney Foundation
• DaVita Diet Helper allows patients to plan meals, download suggested menus, create recipes, store a database of favorite foods and track daily food intake to see how it measures against goals for potassium, phosphorus, sodium and protein. The nutrition tracker and shopping list are available on mobile devices, too—perfect for patients on the go.

Even with the array of valuable tools, face-to-face consultations with patients about their diet are invaluable. It’s up to us as care providers to be the support team behind all our patients and their nutritional health. Help your patients stay on track with these resources and tools.