As Julie's kidney function remains in decline and her diet gets stricter in order to compensate, many people have asked me an unwittingly vague and complicated question: "What can Julie eat?" I appreciate the question, but unfortunately the answer is somewhere between "almost everything" and "almost nothing." Here it is: she can eat a portion of anything that would not throw her strict daily regulation of sodium, protein, potassium, and phosphorus out of balance.
Not that helpful, right?
Unless you studied medicine (or chemistry?) or know someone with serious health issues, you probably know next to nothing about potassium and phosphorus. That's okay—we hardly knew anything either! They aren't required to show up on nutrition labels, but let me give you an idea of what this whole deal looks like. Julie has to be careful about (or even avoid altogether) the following:
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