Fruit, vegetables and grain cut risk of kidney stones

Published on Thursday 13 August 2009 22:09

EATING a healthy diet each day keeps kidney stones away, scientists have found.

The complaint, linked to risk factors for heart disease, can be avoided by consuming little salt, red and processed meat, and sweet drinks, while loading up on fruits, vegetables, nuts and whole grain, US researchers.

A team from Maine Medical Centre looked at three health and lifestyle investigations involving 200,000 people. Scores were given for the extent to which they stuck to a diet that reduced the risk of high blood pressure. High scorers ate the low-risk foods, more

calcium, potassium, magnesium, oxalate and vitamin C and less sodium.

A total of 5,645 kidney stones developed in the participants, the report in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology says. Those with the highest healthy diet scores were between 40 per cent and 45 per cent less likely to develop kidney stones than those with the lowest scores. The effect was also found when people with high blood pressure and diabetes, which are linked with kidney stones, were excluded.