Hello everyone! In today’s article, we’ll be talking specifically about eight causes of edema in the lower legs and the feet!
As I noticed a lot of people have it. The problem is that they take medications for it, but they don’t actually at the same time correct the underlying causes of it.
I actually had pitting edema in my lower legs in my late twenties, but as I grew up older, I don’t have it. So, I’m going to share with you some of the things that I did as well as some other causes, including common causes as well as rare causes, and what to do in each case.
01_ Top Causes Of Edema And Natural Remedies!
01_ Sugar And High Carb Diet!
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.
Glycogen is a series of glucose molecule stuck together with potassium okay so they’re going to basically when you consume sugar, it’s going to 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.
02_ Sodium!
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 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 feet are all puffy.
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.
03_ Protein!
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.
04_ Heart Problem!
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 pushing fluid and you’re ending up with edema from that angle but of course the solution is to fix the heart I have a lot of videos on what to do for that natural things that you can do for heart health but of course a bad heart can definitely create fluid retention in the lower extremities.
05_ Hypo-Thyroidism And Hyper-Thyroidism!
it’s called mixed edema it looks like it’s a fluid retention such situation but it’s not and you see it kind of like in the could be all over the body it’s kind of like this puffy um like tissue in the lower extremities like around your lower legs it could be in the arms and again it’s not edema it’s not even fat it’s this kind of this waste product from your metabolism and the name of it is called a mucopolysaccharide.
So, it actually has sugar connected to this protein and because of that it does retain uh bind to some fluid but it’s very different than like edema that’s in your legs and apparently, they don’t know exactly what causes this but it has something to do with a spike in the thyroid stimulating hormone and there has been some results with this if you catch it in time by giving the person iodine or whatever the thyroid needs to support the thyroid Health but again the solution always has to be aligned with the underlying cause so you have to start working on why you have this hyper or hypothyroid problem in the first place.
06_ Lipedema!
This has to do with this abnormal fat accumulation in your tissues primarily in the lower part of your body they don’t know a lot about it but it’s associated with the person having this hormonal slash genetic problem with too many estrogen receptors because estrogen can cause fat in the lower part of the body it can actually just make more fat and a lot of times this condition is triggered when someone is pregnant or even in puberty when they have the spike of estrogen even sometimes in menopause when you have this it’s a relative higher amounts of estrogen compared to progesterone that’s a completely different situation it’s not fluid and it’s very difficult problem to solve
But, there’s been some studies and I’ll put the link down below of some pretty good dramatic benefits from going on a low carb higher fat diet so definitely you want to try that if you have this condition.
07_ Medication Side Effects!
If you start getting edema from the side effect from a medication you’re going to have to get with your doctor and make some adjustments and I would always recommend when you talk to a doctor always you know ask questions about like what’s really causing uh this problem why we don’t get to the root cause.
And also how long do I have to be on this medication does it actually ever correct this problem and are there safer Alternatives in the maybe herbal area that have lesser amounts of side effects but if you can pinpoint when you start getting swelling in the lower legs and then what happened just before that medications are a big cause so you might want to get with your doctor on that one.
Just as a side note on that anytime you’re on medications the number one organ that seems to be affected most is the liver so milk thistle is a great kind of a liver protective natural remedy to help buffer some of these sound effects or complications that might occur from just taking the medication so milk thistle is a good remedy but common medications that can cause edema is NSAIDs usually use for pain and inflammation calcium channel blockers and diabetic medications and also steroids.
08_ Lymphedema!
This one is a very difficult thing to work with because you’re having this problem in the lymph system and the lymph system is kind of connected to the arterial system but it’s doesn’t have like a pump so you have a lot of backup congestion in the lymph system and so manual lymphatic drainage is a great therapy for this using compression garments is another solution low-level laser therapy has also been known to produce some good benefits as well as regular or consistent exercise can help to push some of this lymph back into the place where it needs to be in and out of your lymphatic system all right so now that you have a lot of potential reasons for edema.
02_ Learn More About The Best Foods For Edema!
An article for you to read would be the one on “The Best Food To Eat For The Majority Of Problems Related To Edema”. Check it out!
