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Overlooked, overworked and misunderstood. What part of the body meets this description? The kidneys!

––They work hard. They are on call morning, noon and night to filter toxins from your body and regulate fluids and blood pressure.

––Kidneys are overlooked. Most people don’t know where they are. (Kidneys are located near the back of your body near the waist.)

––The kidneys’...

Water, or H2O, is essential to life. It performs many important functions in your body like flushing out toxins, transporting nutrients and regulating body temperature.

Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars buying bottled water. If you walk through the beverage aisle in the supermarket, the number of choices can be overwhelming and confusing. Are you buying a drink that is good for you or is it...

A healthy diet consists of a variety of foods from different sources. When it comes to grains, there are many different types, and equally as many (if not more!) product claims about these different grains. It can get confusing, so use this guide to help sift out the healthiest grains.

Grains are seeds that have been harvested and formed into food products. They can come from a variety of...

When doctors look at your blood vessels with an imaging test, they may need to inject a dye. Contrast dye is used for many procedures such as a CT scan with contrast or coronary or heart x-ray (angiogram). It helps doctors to see the exact site of blocked blood vessels and also to see certain problems with organs more clearly. This is very useful for diagnosis, since the blockages in blood vessels can be hard to see without the dye. Doctors...

Shedding pounds may be hard work, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. People tend to underestimate how much they actually eat, which can contribute to weight gain. For those with kidney disease, certain dietary restrictions limit low calorie food choices, adding another element to the struggle. It’s not all bad news though and the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) is here to help you win your battle with the scale. Get the...

Diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and hardening of the arteries (arteriosclerosis) cause damage to both the heart and kidneys. So if you have heart disease, then it is likely that you have kidney disease and vice-versa. Many people don’t experience severe symptoms until their kidney or heart disease is quite advanced, but there are some warning signs. Could you be ignoring them?

The National Kidney Foundation shares...

Each year in the United States, about 51,000 adults will be diagnosed with kidney cancer. The exact cause of kidney cancer is unclear, but having advanced chronic kidney disease may place you at increased risk for developing kidney cancer. Other risk factors include: smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, family history of kidney cancer, chronic kidney disease, exposure to radiation therapy or carcinogenic chemicals, and long-term use of...

The terrible pain of kidney stone disease may be more common in people with metabolic syndrome -- a cluster of five traits that also sets the stage for heart disease and stroke, according to new research.

In fact, the prevalence of kidney stone disease was tripled among individuals who had all five traits of metabolic syndrome in a study published this month in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, the official publication of the...

Kidney failure can strike anyone at any age -men, women and children. For more than 380,000 Americans with kidney failure, dialysis treatment performs the life-saving job of filtering the body's toxins that their own kidneys can no longer do. People receiving this therapy can continue on with their lives, yet myths about the treatment abound. To help address some of the most common misconceptions about...

Pentoxifylline, a drug used to treat patients with circulation problems, may also benefit those with kidney disease caused by diabetes and other conditions. Specifically, pentoxifylline decreases proteinuria, the abnormal leakage of protein into the urine, according to two articles in the September issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, the official journal of the National Kidney Foundation.

"When kidneys are healthy, very...