Go easy on burgers, pizzas and desserts for healthy kidneys

The western diet has more and more processed junk food and fat and there is a well-established link between excessive consumption of this food and recent increases in the prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes

Try to avoid junk food at times, as eating fatty food regularly can cause as much damage to your kidneys as diabetes, a study has warned.

In Type 2 diabetes, the body does not produce enough insulin or does not react to it which causes an accumulation of sugar (glucose) in the blood that can have severe long-term consequences for organs, such as kidneys and can lead to diabetic kidney disease.

“The western diet has more and more processed junk food and fat and there is a well-established link between excessive consumption of this food and recent increases in the prevalence of obesity and Type 2 diabetes,” said lead study author Havovi Chichger from Anglia Ruskin University in Britain.

Read: Basically people eat too much junk food when they are bored

“In our study, Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes both induce changes in glucose transport in the kidney but junk food or a diet high in fat causes changes that are very similar to those found in Type 2 diabetes,” Chichger added in a paper published in the journal Experimental Physiology.

The rats were fed junk food consisting cheese, chocolate bars, biscuits and marshmallows for eight weeks, or a rodent ate high in fat (containing 60 percent) for five weeks.

They then tested the effect of these diets on blood sugar levels and the different glucose transporters in the kidneys.

Read: Junk food really does mess with your brain, makes it shrink

The effect of the diets on these transporters was compared with the changes also seen in rat models of Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

The results revealed that certain types of glucose transporters as well as their regulatory proteins were present in a higher number in Type 2 diabetic rats.

But a high-fat diet and junk food diet caused a similar increase in those receptors.

“Finding a way to block glucose re-absorption in the kidneys could offer a potential treatment for lowering blood sugar levels,” the authors stated.