Why is drinking more water good for your kidneys if it makes them “work” harder to remove the excess liquid?
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The kidneys don’t work ‘harder’ with more water, they work ‘smoother’. A bit like more (clean) oil makes a car engine run smoother.
The kidneys function is to filter out waste in our blood. They do this whether or not we are sufficiently hydrated.
Imagine kidneys as a kitchen sieve and you pour some thick curry over them, sure the bits will filter through eventually but it will be slow. Add a lot of water over the curry and the bits will be filtered out much much faster.
**Please note that ‘more’ water does not mean excessive water!
Processing more blood isn’t what makes your kidneys work harder. Thicker blood (that is, blood with a lower percentage of water) is harder to filter. Think of trying to put something through a sieve; it’ll clog up the sieve if it’s too big, but if you diluted it with more water, it would go through. It’s similar to that in kidneys. Water helps them clear the filters they use to clean our blood, and some of the water becomes urine. When they don’t get enough water to clear the waste into urine, it remains in your system and makes you ill.
The filtering part isn’t that hard … think pouring liquid through a strainer. The hard work for the kidney is actually trying to recoup things like water back out of the urine so you don’t lose too much and die from electrolyte imbalance. The less water you drink, the harder the kidneys try to work to reclaim it from the urine.
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