MyNetDiary tips for tracking your nutrition for kidney disease

Keeping to a nutrition plan is challenging on its own for many, but planning nutrition for chronic kidney disease (CKD) may be more difficult while critical to your health. Whether you need to watch your sodium, potassium, or phosphorus, MyNetDiary can help.

Use MyNetDiary Premium to optimize your nutrition for kidney disease

Let's face it; planning good nutrition for chronic kidney disease (CKD) is not simple. If you have CKD, you may have to limit such nutrients as potassium and sodium. If you also have diabetes, then you may be counting carbs. That's a lot to track! While MyNetDiary's free membership has many valuable features, Premium Membership offers additional useful tools for managing CKD. Check them out below.

• Nutrient target customization. Set nutrient targets recommended by your kidney-care team, as your nutrient requirements may differ from the MyNet Diary's default targets. For instance, you may have lower potassium, phosphorus, or sodium targets.
• Access to all reporting features, including a customizable diet dashboard, allowing you to quickly monitor nutrients essential to your plan.
• Diabetes tracking to monitor your blood sugar, medications, and carbohydrate intake.
• Ability to tap Copy & Customize foods and recipes-useful if you adjust recipes to meet your nutritional needs.
• A web recipe import feature, allowing you to bring in recipes, modify them to suit your needs, and save them to your account. You can import kidney-friendly recipes from the National Kidney Foundation, DaVita, and more.

Try these tips for using MyNetDiary's robust nutrition database

Find and log generic and staple foods

Food labels require only a limited number of nutrients to be displayed, so some of the nutrients you need to track may be missing from brand-name foods. If you only log brand-name foods, your daily totals for these nutrients may contain underestimations. That is, your actual intake will be higher than what appears on your daily reports.

MyNetDiary's generic foods have complete nutrient data from the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference. For example, "Generic oats rolled regular dried uncooked" has total nutrition data, whereas "Bob's Red Mill regular rolled oats" only provides the nutrients required on the food label. Fortunately, U.S. food labels must now include potassium values. You will begin to see more brand-name foods in our database with potassium information.

MyNetDiary has almost 1000 staple foods with complete nutrient data to make food searching easier. Search from our staple foods by selecting the Staples tab when inputting foods. Staples are arranged by food categories, making it easy to explore common food choices and compare their nutrient content.

Create custom foods or copy and customize foods

In addition to logging food items from the database, you have the option of tapping Custom Foods, which allows you to enter your own nutrition values.

With a Premium membership, you can also copy and customize existing database foods. This feature saves you time if you want to update brand-name foods to include such detailed nutrition data as phosphorus content (found from USDA generic food item data).

Find and log basic recipes

MyNetDiary also provides complete nutrition information for basic "recipes" from USDA. Find these items by including "homemade" in your food item search. For example, search for "homemade spaghetti and meatballs."

You can also find complete nutrition information for common restaurant menu items in our database. For instance, there are many popular Chinese-American restaurant dishes with complete nutrition information in the database. You can find them by including "restaurant Chinese" in your food item search. If you use "fast food" in your search, you will find many standard fast foods with more complete nutrient data than what you might find on a restaurant website. If you eat restaurant fare often, contact the restaurant chain to request more detailed nutrient information.

You can also create custom recipes for food you make at home. When tapping Create New Recipe, use generic items or choose Add from Staples to get the most detailed nutrient content. You can learn more about how to enter custom recipes here.

Tracking water (fluid) intake

If your body retains too much water, your doctor may ask you to limit your fluid intake.

Track fluid intake by tapping the water glass icons on Dashboard. The default water glass size is eight fluid ounces or one cup. You can customize your water glass size and water goal in Water Settings. Remember to save your changes.

Look for the water glass icon on the dashboard to see a running total of your water intake. Track all beverages and foods that count towards your fluid intake, tapping the water glass icon anytime they're consumed. If you drink a cup of tea, tap the water glass icon. Generally, anything liquid at room temperature, like soup or popsicles, counts as a fluid. Follow your kidney-care team's advice on your daily fluid limit and what counts as a fluid.

With a little bit of planning and customization, MyNetDiary will help you meet your CKD diet goals. You are worth it!

Reviewed and updated on January 12, 2021 by Sue Heikkinen MS, RDN, CDCES

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Diabetes->Health Tracking & MyNetDiary->Tracking Tips Other Health Issues->Chronic Kidney Disease