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Kidney-Friendly Plate Guide

Tick the foods that show up on your table in a normal week. The guide reads your picks for the three minerals every kidney patient hears about, potassium, phosphorus and salt, and hands you swap ideas worth raising at your next dietitian visit.

Your renal dietitian's plan overrides everything on this page. Blood results, not food lists, decide what you personally need to limit.

Fruit

Potassium is the mineral to know here. No fruit is forbidden by default: it depends on your blood results and your dietitian's plan.

Vegetables

Some vegetables carry more potassium than others, and preparation changes it: boiling in plenty of water and draining reduces potassium.

Protein foods

Protein needs change with kidney disease and change AGAIN on dialysis (often upward). This is the section where your dietitian's advice matters most.

Dairy

Dairy is nutritious but concentrated in both phosphorus and potassium, so portions are usually the lever.

Drinks and packaged foods

This is where hidden phosphates and salt live. Additive phosphorus (E338 to E343 on labels) is absorbed far more completely than natural phosphorus.

Your plate reading

Tick a few foods you eat often and your reading appears here.

Sources

  1. Potassium and your CKD diet National Kidney Foundation
  2. Phosphorus and your diet National Kidney Foundation
  3. Sodium and your CKD diet National Kidney Foundation
  4. Living with chronic kidney disease: diet NHS

Last reviewed: 2026-07-16

Why no numbers?

Kidney diets are personal in a way almost no other diet is. Two people at the same dialysis unit can have opposite potassium advice, and the right answer changes as blood results change. Publishing milligram tables would invite exactly the false confidence this site exists to prevent. What a food list CAN safely do is teach the pattern: which foods tend to carry which mineral, why additives behave differently from natural sources, and which swaps are worth asking about.

One pattern is worth repeating: the phosphate additives in processed food and dark colas (E338 to E343 on labels) are absorbed almost completely, while natural phosphorus in beans or fish is only partly absorbed. Reading ingredient labels for the letter E plus a 33x or 34x number is one of the highest-value habits a kidney patient can build.