8 Surprising Causes of Edema: Uncover the Truth!

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you know I actually had pitting edema in my lower legs in my late twenties so I’m a lot older now and I don’t have it so I’m going to share with you some of the things that I did as well as um some other causes common causes rare causes and what to do with each one so specifically I want to talk about edema in the lower legs and the feet so a lot of people have it a lot of people take medication but they don’t actually at the same time correct the underlying cause so cause number one is sugar and a high carb diet and as that relates also to a spike in insulin okay so it’s kind of a double-edged sword when you consume excess amounts of sugar what happens your body has to store the sugar as glycogen okay what is glycogen glycogen is a series of glucose molecule stuck together with potassium okay so they’re going to basically when you consume sugar you’re gonna it’s gonna use up potassium to store this glycogen and water so with every glucose that you’re going to store okay you’re going to store three water molecules okay so you’re going to store a lot more water compared to glucose when you consume glucose you know slash sugar so this is all retained fluid this is why when someone goes on a low carb diet they just dump a lot of water like real quick within the first week it could be anywhere between seven to thirteen pounds of water weight so eating sugar and refined carbs causes water retention from glycogen it also causes a potassium deficiency when you consume sugar too and when you lower your potassium okay ratio to sodium we have this retention of fluid so in other words we all know that sodium retains fluid well potassium is the antidote to that so the less potassium I have available because it’s all locked up within this glycogen then you’re going to actually cause retention of fluid just because of the relative sodium in your body in low potassium but also the spike in insulin okay which is associated with these the glucose causes an additional factor of retention of sodium from the spike in insulin this is why diabetics are just like they have this puffy fluid retention in the lower legs and the feet because they have a high glucose running through the bloodstream all the time because obviously they didn’t discover the low carb diet connection to solving this mystery now on top of that when you consume refined sugars you get a depletion of B1 and a B1 deficiency can also cause edema or swelling in your legs in your feet so the solution can be corrected by going in a low carb diet it’s called the ketogenic diet all right number two consuming a lot of sodium without the buffer called potassium potassium protects you against too much sodium in fact it’s not even a big concern if you have a lot of salt in your diet as long as you have the protective potassium that comes along with it and you definitely need at least twice as much potassium than you do sodium so the requirements for potassium are kind of shocking to people once they find out how much they need the rdas call for 4 700 milligrams that’s how much potassium we need so if you have that much potassium you can buffer the bad effects of sodium like fluid retention so anything that increases the sodium without the same time increasing potassium can create a problem so let’s talk about what can do that well number one consuming a lot of salty foods without a lot of potassium foods like I know this might be shocking but some people don’t like vegetables right so they don’t consume much vegetable now why am I saying that because the average person in America at least consumes only one and a half cups of vegetables per day do you realize to get your potassium you would have to consume at least seven to ten cups of salad every single day so that’s a lot of greens but that will provide the potassium to really help buffer this sodium and get rid of a lot of fluid now some other people what they do is they do a combination they increase their vegetables but they also take a potassium electrolyte supplements so they can actually get more potassium to push out the fluid and that can happen pretty quick in fact if you take potassium and the next day when you wake up you’ll notice that wow my puffiness in my legs are much less now another hidden source of sodium is MSG mono sodium glutamate which you would get in a fast food restaurant right all these you know delicious tasting addictive uh junk Foods or fast foods are loaded with MSG MSG dilates your taste buds to make things taste better than it really is you’ll usually be hungry like an hour and a half later MSG also spikes insulin so it’s kind of like eating sugar so it’s a double-edged sword because the next day after consuming it’s really tasty food from a fast food restaurant you’ll notice the next day like you’re all swollen you can’t pull your rings off your your feet are all puffy listen I used to do that I have firsthand knowledge of that I used to live on fast food for a few decades so just do an experiment just cut out those Foods start increasing potassium and watch how the fluid goes away now another thing in relationship to sodium so when people have high blood pressure or they have fluid retention they’re usually given a diuretic diuretics get rid of fluid because they cause an excess release of sodium so it gets rid of sodium so it gets rid of the fluid problem solved right well there’s one minor complication it has a side effect of something called hypocalemia now what is hypokalemia that means low potassium that’s right those diuretics decrease your potassium so here you are trying to get rid of your fluid getting rid of your sodium but you’re also getting rid of your potassium guess what that’s going to do it’s going to make things worse as a natural diuretic you can just eat foods high in potassium sometimes you can even um take the Rind of watermelon just the Rhine part or any melon and juice that and drink that and you will wake up the next day and you’ll just like get rid of a lot of fluid and the Rind of these melons are loaded with potassium another cause of fluid retention is low protein in your blood but this most likely is not stemming from you not consuming enough protein coming from either liver damage or kidney damage you see your liver makes certain proteins like albumin and when the liver is damaged like in cirrhosis or a fatty liver you can’t make sufficient amounts of that protein so now we’re going to have low protein in the blood and what happens is like this protein the blood attracts water so it keeps the water in your blood when the protein goes down you lose the water and it goes out of the bloodstream and it starts to accumulate in between the cells causing edema and swelling this is why with Advanced liver disease you usually see pitting edema in the lower legs you see people with a lot of swelling usually the liver problem will cause swelling on the right ankle and leg before the left and the left ankle or foot or lower leg is more heart initially but then it kind of spreads off into both also when you have kidney damage kidney is a filter so if you can’t filter this Blood okay and help recycle these proteins you end up losing a lot of protein in the urine and this is one way they diagnose kidney disease is by having protein in the urine so that means you’re losing protein in the blood and that means you’re going to retain fluid from that so both liver damage and kidney damage can Create Edema number four a heart problem so if you have heart disease congestive heart failure there’s a lot of different types of problems with the heart it’s either not going to pump the fluid that well and then what’s going to happen you’re going to get congestion in the vascular system through the capillaries and that can show up in the lower legs or it could be partly because of the high blood pressure that’s push