Okay, welcome back. This is the renal section of our module, and we're talking about the kidneys. So what is the function of the renal system? Because your muscles are always breaking down amino acids, because it's one of the major fuels, it will break down itself. So this is the reason why you need the renal system. The body has been breaking down proteins, it has been breaking down your muscles. How do you know you broke down those proteins? Because the first thing you did every morning is to get up and you urinated. What is in that urine? It is nitrogenous waste. That nitrogenous came from breaking down of amino acids. So the body has built in a brand new system called the renal system to get rid of this nitrogenous wastes. So the nitrogenous waste is filtered by your kidneys, and the kidneys get their blood directly from the main artery supply. It gets it directly from the aorta, and the blood goes to directly into the kidneys using what's called renal portal system. So basically, if you don't have good cardiovascular health, or in other words, if your blood pressure constantly fluctuates, the first one to understand that and to damage is your renal system. So hence, people that have high blood pressures usually have kidney disease later on in life. You need good kidneys to have proper health, because they need to get rid of those extra nitrogenous wastes. So the kidneys, made up of the exterior lighter sections called the renal cortex. Cortex just means outside, and lightened, so don't get so flustered about these terminologies. Medulla just means whatever's in the inside. So the Medulla [COUGH] .Is made up of what's called the renal pyramids. And the little tubes that formed those renal pyramids will eventually come together in what's called the minor calyx. The minor calyx will take all the fluid that has filtered and put it into a larger tube called the major calyx, and they will come out of your kidney through what's called the ureter, and then it will be collected and kept in your bladder. So the kidneys, for their proper function, the nephrons require proper pressure. So this is the reason why the body constantly has what's called the diastolic rate. So in your cardiovascular section we might have talked about, or you might remember about blood pressure. You have the systolic pressure when the ventricle is actually contracting and putting out the maximum amount of force into an artery. And you have the resting state of the ventricle, which gives it the diastolic pressure. So both of these pressures are very important to the nephron, because when extra pressure comes, the nephron has to deal with it. When there is less pressure, that means the nephron cannot really filter enough of the waste. So who really regulates your blood pressure? Your kidney does. Your kidney is one of the major regulators of your blood pressure. But when the blood pressure is too high, the kidney does not understand how to regulate that, that is done by the brain. So this is the reason why yoga's very important, because when you're doing yoga, you're learning to control your parasympathetic nervous system, which will bring down your blood pressure. When your blood pressure is too low, who brings the blood pressure back up again because they want to filter the blood effectively? It is the nephrons and the kidneys. So again, the brain controls high blood pressure, the nephrons and the kidneys control low blood pressure. But of course, if it's too high, the kidneys will just blow out. Think about when you're taking some fluid, and the kidneys or the Bowman's capsule, which is the beginning parts of the nephron, is just being pounded [SOUND] by fluid. So when you're constantly pounding on these things, the kidneys will eventually get damaged. When they get damaged, they don't know how to control low blood pressure, and in fact it will inverse this and contribute to higher blood pressure as well. So this is the reason why, if you have high stress levels when you're a child or in your 20s, you might have started to have high blood pressure, even though you're not overweight, or you didn't have a family history of high blood pressure. So be careful when you're stressed out. Take yoga and relax. So the glomerulus is the part of the blood supply that comes directly from the aorta and enters your kidneys, and that's the part that the nephron is actually utilizing to filter all of your waste. So all the waste comes through, and your kidney is basically, it's an interesting concept that it does not know what its job really is, it just understands that certain things are good for you. It will reabsorb those things and put it back into your blood, and anything it doesn't understand, it considers waste. It takes everything that the body has, throws it out first, and starts to ask the question, is this part good for me, is that part good for me, and is that part good for me? But if it has identified those things, and of course the identification of these things are done evolutionarily, so it does not understand something that is good for you in the last ten years or even the last year. It understands that it's only good for you when you have understood it for millions of years. So if you are thinking about this kind of analogy, think about if you ate a rack, a full rack, let's say you are so rich and you can get strawberries, a trailer full of strawberries. And you decide to eat the whole trailer full of strawberries. 20 minutes later, you probably want to go to the bathroom as well. Does it smell like strawberries? Does it come out pink? No, because all of those strawberries will be making, because it's a natural form, it's a cell, it will only make one type of amino acid. It will make the proper form, the left side form of the amino acid and therefore your body will consider that to be only good food. So therefore there's no waste in this. And this is what's the whole kind of concept what the kidney really does. It will throw out things that does not understand, and it will only keep the things that your body for years have known, for millions of years have known to be good for you. So again the kidneys function is based on the pressure it gets from the systemic circulation. So blood pressure is rather important. Again, we said to you before that the high blood pressure is controlled by the brain, and this is where yoga comes in, your meditation and your constant thinking of lowering your heart. Just thinking about it will tell the brain to start hitting the vagal reflex, and the vagal reflex will start to tell the heart to start to calm down. When it calms down, of course, the blood pressure will start to decrease. So when you look at most textbooks or if you look at most concepts about blood pressure, they always talk about that 120 millimeters of mercury, over 80 millimeters of mercury. So this is an average number, so don't go crazy about trying to hit that 120 or the 80 as a diastolic number. There's a range of what's good and what's bad, and it's actually, really, you have to understand yourself. So you should really be in tune to try to keep a blood pressure record of yourself. Your blood pressure will change from your teenage life from your early days of your childhoo,d and as you get older it will change as well, so you need a good record of your blood pressure. So what is bad? Of course, high systolic pressure is bad. When high systolic pressure exists, this is supposed to be done by your brain, your brain's not very good at controlling high blood pressure, and this is the reason why so many people suffer from high blood pressure all the time. One of the best ways to do it is just to calm yourself down or get out of stressful situations. So high blood pressure, what does it do? It will put too much pressure onto those nephrons, and the nephrons will basically explode. When they explode, they will cause blood, and then therefore it will make the whole kidney structure start to degrade. So hence, when you have high blood pressure you will always have kidney disease. And on top of that, if you're tying in all the concepts of what causes high blood pressures as well, too much sugar in your circulatory system or in your cardiovascular tract will also attribute to high blood pressure. Because if you're taking a bottle full of water and squeezing that or bottle full of honey and squeezing that, which is harder to do? Of course, the bottle full of honey will be harder to push out. And this is exactly what the heart has to do for you, so heart and renal health goes hand in hand. Don't put too much sugar into it, so don't drink so much soda, don't drink too much sugary water. When you do this, the kidneys will be very thankful to you, and they'll be very happy to keep and filtering out the useless things that you don't want in your body.
