At the age of 27, Denver developed an auto-immune disorder called vasculitis which also resulted in kidney disease. When Denver was admitted to the hospital, he had an estimated glomeruli filtration rate (eGFR) of 3. This can be considered a percent function of the kidneys, meaning Denver’s kidneys were basically functioning at 3%.

A big part of treating kidney disease is diet. Normal functioning kidneys are really good at filtering out things your body doesn’t need, but with damaged kidneys you have to do some of the filtering on the outside. This means only eating exactly what your body needs to avoid putting extra or unnecessary stress on your kidneys.

When we first got out of hospital, the diet seemed daunting. Grocery shopping took twice as long as we learned to read every label and nutritional facts (for more on this, see page 12). So we started making things. We have had to learn how to bake bread, how to make pickles, how to make sausage, what is the functional purpose of salt in food, why some foods are higher in potassium than others, and what even is phosphorous. We learned you can still eat good food with kidney disease.

We thought we could take the things we’ve been learning about how to manage kidney friendly eating and share it with others. A lot of the recipes you will see here are based on cravings and trying to find ways to make kidney-friendly versions of food that is not typically kidney-friendly. We like a challenge, and we’ve joked that in the months since hospital, it has felt like we are homesteading in our downtown Edmonton apartment.

We hope that this book can help you where ever you are in your kidney journey, be that supporting someone adjusting to kidney disease or in the thick of it yourself.

It is doable.