Is Apple Cider Vinegar Good For Kidney Creatinine? The Truth

No food or drink lowers creatinine, and apple cider vinegar is not the exception. Creatinine is a waste molecule your muscles produce at a steady daily rate from the creatine stored inside them, and it leaves almost entirely by filtration through the glomeruli. Nothing you swallow speeds that filtration up. If your creatinine is 1.7 mg/dL today and you drink two tablespoons of vinegar in water every morning for a month, the retest will read about 1.7 mg/dL, give or take the ordinary variation any two blood samples produce. There is no trial showing otherwise, no mechanism that would allow it, and no reason to expect one.

So the question worth your time is a different one. Given that it will not move the number, does apple cider vinegar do anything useful for kidneys at all, and is there any way it can harm them? Both halves of that have real answers, and they are more interesting than the folklore. Apple cider vinegar is the clearest example in this whole category of a remedy whose reputation rests on being repeated rather than on being tested. Almost every claim attached to it can be traced back to a theory about body chemistry that was abandoned decades ago, or to a single small study whose conclusion was stretched well past what it said. Before going further it helps to know what creatinine actually is and what pushes it up, because vinegar appears on neither list.

Why no vinegar can move a creatinine reading

Understanding this properly makes every other claim on this page collapse without further argument, so it is worth two minutes.

Creatinine arrives in your blood from one source. Skeletal muscle stores creatine and phosphocreatine as a rapid energy buffer, and roughly one to two percent of that pool degrades spontaneously each day into creatinine. The reaction is non-enzymatic. There is no valve on it, no hormone that regulates it, nothing in the diet that turns it up or down beyond changing how much muscle you carry or how much preformed creatinine you eat in cooked meat. A person with a large muscle mass makes more; a frail person with wasted muscle makes strikingly less.

Removal happens at the glomerulus. Blood is filtered under pressure, creatinine passes freely into the filtrate because it is small and not bound to protein, and the tubule adds a further ten to fifteen percent by actively secreting it. Your serum creatinine is simply the level at which production and removal balance. It rises when production goes up or clearance goes down, and it falls when the opposite happens.

Now put vinegar into that equation and see where it could possibly go. It does not reduce muscle mass, at least not in any way you would want. It contains no creatine, so it does not add to the pool. It does not increase glomerular filtration rate, because filtration is driven by cardiac output, blood pressure and the state of the filtering membrane, none of which respond to acetic acid. It does not open a second exit route, because there isn’t one. The molecule has nowhere to act.

This is why claims about vinegar and creatinine are not merely unproven; they are structurally impossible in the way described. A supplement that increased renal blood flow could plausibly nudge the number. A drug that blocked tubular secretion certainly would, in the wrong direction, which is exactly what trimethoprim and cimetidine do. Vinegar does neither. The full picture of what actually shifts a reading is set out in what causes high creatinine levels, and the honest list of interventions that do help is in how to lower creatinine levels naturally.

Where the kidney reputation came from

Apple cider vinegar has been marketed as a general tonic since at least the 1950s, when a Vermont country doctor published a bestseller recommending it, usually mixed with honey, for arthritis, weight, digestion, energy and most other complaints. That book sold in enormous numbers and established a template that has barely changed since: vinegar is presented as an ancient, natural, whole-body corrective, with the specific conditions swapped in and out according to what the audience is worried about that decade.

Kidneys entered the list relatively late, and by a predictable route. Once a remedy is credited with dissolving things, detoxifying, and rebalancing pH, kidney stones and kidney disease are the obvious targets, because both are widely feared, both are poorly understood by the public, and both involve an organ people imagine as a filter that can be cleaned. The imagery does a lot of work. If the kidney is a filter, then a strong acid poured through it must clean out the clogging, in the way that vinegar descales a kettle. That analogy is where nearly all of this comes from, and it is wrong in a specific way that the next section explains.

What makes apple cider vinegar unusually persistent is the small kernel of real science sitting in the middle of it. Vinegar genuinely does blunt the rise in blood glucose after a starchy meal. That has been measured in proper crossover trials, is reproducible, and has a plausible mechanism. It is the only claim in the whole collection with decent support, and it has nothing to do with kidneys. But its existence gives every other claim a borrowed credibility, because someone reading that “studies show apple cider vinegar works” is rarely told which study, or what it showed.

None of this makes vinegar dangerous in ordinary culinary amounts. It makes it useless for the purpose people are buying it for, which matters mainly because of what it displaces. Someone with a creatinine of 2.1 mg/dL who has decided vinegar is handling it is someone who is not getting their blood pressure controlled, and blood pressure control is the single most effective thing available. If you want the treatments that actually alter the course of kidney disease, the medicines that reduce creatinine covers them, and whether creatinine can be cured deals with the framing directly.

Claim one: apple cider vinegar dissolves kidney stones

This is the most widely repeated version, and it fails at two separate points, either of which would be enough on its own.

The acid never arrives

Vinegar is a dilute solution of acetic acid, usually around five percent by volume. A tablespoon of it, fifteen milliliters, contains roughly 0.75 ml of acetic acid, which works out at about 0.8 grams or 13 millimoles. That is a trivial quantity of a weak acid, and its fate after you swallow it is entirely uninteresting. Acetate is absorbed in the small intestine, taken up by cells, converted to acetyl-CoA and burned in the citric acid cycle to carbon dioxide and water. It is a fuel. Your own gut bacteria produce acetate in far larger amounts every day from fermenting fiber, and your liver and muscle dispose of it without comment.

By the time blood reaches the kidney there is no vinegar in it. There is a slight, transient rise in circulating acetate, indistinguishable from what happens after a bowl of beans. Nothing acidic reaches the renal pelvis, nothing acidic bathes the stone, and the descaling analogy dies right there. Vinegar dissolves limescale in a kettle because you pour it directly onto the limescale at full strength. You cannot pour anything directly onto a kidney stone by drinking it.

Your stomach is already far more acidic than vinegar

The second failure is more damning, because it shows the acid is not even locally impressive. Gastric acid sits at a pH of roughly 1.5 to 3.5. Undiluted five percent vinegar sits at about 2.4 to 3.4, and by the time you have stirred a tablespoon into a large glass of water it is far weaker than that. At pH 1.5 there is about thirty times more free hydrogen ion than at pH 3.0.

Add a small volume of a weak acid to a compartment that already contains a much stronger one and you have changed nothing. Acetic acid is also weak in the technical sense: at pH 3 only about 1.7 percent of it is dissociated into free hydrogen ions, with the rest sitting intact as an uncharged molecule. It is not delivering the acid punch people imagine even in the stomach, let alone anywhere downstream.

What actually affects stone formation

Stones do respond to urine chemistry, which is why the myth is not absurd on its face. But the levers are specific ones. Urine volume matters most, because dilution reduces the concentration of every stone-forming salt at once, and the usual target is around two to two and a half liters of urine a day. Citrate matters, because it binds calcium in solution and prevents crystals nucleating, which is why potassium citrate is a prescribed treatment and why lemon juice, which is genuinely rich in citrate, has some evidence behind it. Sodium intake matters, because high sodium drives calcium into the urine. Oxalate matters for the commonest stone type. Urine pH matters enormously for uric acid stones, which dissolve when urine is made more alkaline, and matters in the opposite direction for calcium phosphate stones.

Vinegar delivers acetate, not citrate. The two are not interchangeable, despite both being small organic acids, because citrate’s stone-inhibiting action comes from its ability to chelate calcium with three carboxyl groups. Acetate has one and does not chelate calcium meaningfully. There is some observational research from large population surveys reporting that people who consume more vinegar have fewer stones, but that is a correlation in people who differ in dozens of other ways, and no interventional trial has tested it. Treating it as evidence of causation would be a mistake.

The whole relationship between stones and kidney function is covered separately in can kidney stones cause high creatinine, which explains when a stone genuinely does raise the number and when it does not.

Claim two: it alkalises the body

This one requires explaining a theory before dismantling it, because the theory is where the confusion lives.

The alkaline-ash idea dates to the early twentieth century and was, at the time, reasonable. Researchers burned foods in a laboratory and measured whether the mineral residue was acidic or alkaline. Meat, cheese and grains, high in sulfur and phosphorus, left an acidic ash. Fruit and vegetables, high in potassium and magnesium salts of organic acids, left an alkaline one. The measurement was accurate. The leap that followed was not: that eating acid-ash foods acidifies your body, that this causes disease, and that consuming alkaline foods corrects it.

Apple cider vinegar got attached to this framework through a further twist. It is obviously acidic in the bottle, so its promoters needed an explanation, and the one supplied is that vinegar is “acidic outside the body but alkalising inside it”. Applied to citrus and to vegetables this has a defensible basis, because their organic acid salts are metabolized leaving a bicarbonate-generating residue. Applied to vinegar it is weaker, because acetic acid arrives largely as the free acid rather than as a potassium or sodium salt, so the acid and the base cancel. In any case the entire argument is irrelevant, for the reason set out next.

Blood pH is not adjustable by diet

Arterial blood is held between pH 7.35 and 7.45. That is not a preference, it is a requirement, because the shape and therefore the function of every enzyme in your body depends on it. Expressed as hydrogen ion concentration, the range runs from about 45 nanomoles per liter at the acid end to about 36 at the alkaline end. Nanomoles. For comparison, sodium is present at around 140 million nanomoles per liter. The body regulates hydrogen ion at a concentration roughly three million times lower than sodium and holds it inside a band of about nine nanomoles.

Three defenses maintain that band, and they operate on different timescales. Chemical buffers act instantly, principally the bicarbonate system, which holds something in the order of three hundred millimoles of bicarbonate across the extracellular fluid, plus hemoglobin, plasma proteins and the vast reservoir of bone. Respiration acts within minutes, because carbon dioxide is an acid in solution and you can blow it off faster or slower simply by breathing differently. The kidney acts over hours to days, excreting hydrogen ion, regenerating bicarbonate and adjusting ammonium production.

Against that, thirteen millimoles of a weak acid, of which under two percent is even dissociated, and which is metabolized to carbon dioxide and water within the hour, is nothing. You would not detect its arrival on an arterial blood gas. The same applies in reverse to alkaline foods, alkaline water and every other product sold on this premise.

When blood pH does move, you are ill

A blood pH that has genuinely shifted is a medical emergency, not a dietary achievement. Diabetic ketoacidosis, severe sepsis, kidney failure, poisoning and respiratory failure all move it, and people in those states are in hospital. Values below about 6.8 or above about 7.8 are generally considered incompatible with survival. Nobody achieves a meaningful pH change with food, and it would be very bad news if they did.

There is one legitimate corner of this territory worth naming, because it gets confused with the folklore. In advanced chronic kidney disease the kidney loses the ability to excrete the daily acid load, and a genuine metabolic acidosis develops, visible as a falling serum bicarbonate. That is treated, effectively, with prescribed oral sodium bicarbonate, and correcting it appears to slow the decline in kidney function. It is a real intervention with real evidence, done under supervision, monitored by blood tests, and it has nothing whatever to do with drinking vinegar. If your bicarbonate is low, your nephrologist will tell you and will prescribe accordingly.

The grain of truth: urine pH really does move

Here is where the story deserves better than a flat denial, because something real is happening and getting the details right is the difference between understanding your body and repeating slogans.

Urine pH varies across roughly 4.5 to 8.0, and it varies for a reason. That variation is the mechanism by which blood pH is held constant. The kidney exports the daily acid load your metabolism generates, mostly from sulfur-containing amino acids in protein, and it does so by pumping hydrogen ions into the urine and reclaiming bicarbonate into the blood. Eat a large steak and your kidney has more acid to export, so your urine becomes more acidic while your blood does not budge. Eat a plate of vegetables and the organic acid salts in them metabolize to bicarbonate, the kidney has surplus base to dispose of, and your urine becomes more alkaline. In both cases the urine changed precisely so the blood would not have to.

Where does vinegar sit in that? Roughly nowhere useful. The acetate is burned to carbon dioxide, the accompanying hydrogen ion is buffered, and the net effect on urine pH from a culinary quantity is small and inconsistent across studies. It is not a reliable urinary alkalinising agent, and it is certainly not a controllable one. If a clinician wants to change your urine pH, for a uric acid stone or before certain treatments, they prescribe potassium citrate or sodium bicarbonate at a measured dose and check the result with test strips. That is what deliberate urinary alkalinisation looks like. It looks like a prescription and a monitoring plan, not a tablespoon in warm water.

The related measurements that actually tell you something about kidney health are covered in creatinine in urine and the urine protein-to-creatinine ratio, and neither of them is affected by what you put on your salad.

Claim three: it detoxifies and flushes the kidneys

Of all the claims this is the emptiest, and also the hardest to argue against, because it never says anything specific enough to be wrong.

Ask which toxin and there is no answer. Detoxification in medicine means something precise: removing a named substance by a known route, as when acetylcysteine is given for acetaminophen overdose or hemodialysis is used to clear lithium or ethylene glycol. A named agent, a named toxin, a measurable clearance. The consumer version names nothing. It offers “toxins” as an undifferentiated category, which is what allows the same product to be sold for every organ simultaneously.

The kidney’s actual job is not to accumulate filth that periodically needs sluicing out. It is a continuous filter with a set of astonishingly selective reabsorption and secretion systems along the tubule, reclaiming glucose, amino acids, bicarbonate, sodium and water while secreting hydrogen ion, potassium, ammonium and a long list of organic anions and cations including several drugs. It processes on the order of 180 liters of filtrate a day and returns nearly all of it. Nothing settles in it. There is no residue. In someone with normal function the system does not need help, and in someone with reduced function what has gone wrong is that nephrons have been lost or damaged, which no drink repairs.

If the detox framing appeals to you because you want to do something active for your kidneys, there is a version of that impulse which pays off. It just looks duller: blood pressure at target, glucose controlled if you are diabetic, salt down, painkillers reviewed, protein sensible rather than extreme, weight and smoking addressed, and regular monitoring so problems are caught while they are still small. That list is unglamorous and it works. The NIDDK overview of chronic kidney disease sets out the same priorities, and how to prevent creatinine rising goes through them one by one.

Claim four: it lowers creatinine directly

Having taken the other three apart, this one needs only a short section, but there are two specific misreadings worth naming because they explain why people believe they have seen it work.

The hydration artefact

The commonest reason someone reports a fall is that they changed two things and credited one. A vinegar regimen means two large glasses of water a day that were not there before. If the baseline test was taken while mildly dehydrated, which is extremely common in people who have been told to fast beforehand and have skipped their morning drink, and the follow-up was taken in a well-hydrated state, the creatinine will genuinely be lower. That is a real change in the reading produced by a real change in renal perfusion, and it has nothing to do with the vinegar. It also reverses the moment the extra fluid stops.

Regression and ordinary variability

People start remedies when a result frightens them, which by definition means they start at a high point. Creatinine varies from day to day with meals, exercise, hydration and analytical variation in the laboratory itself. A second measurement after a high one tends to be lower simply because extremes are followed by less extreme values. Any intervention started at the peak collects the credit for that drift. This is why single-arm before-and-after stories are worthless and why controlled trials exist.

There is a further trap in the other direction that is worth knowing about. If you are also taking creatine, or eating a lot of cooked meat, or training hard, your creatinine can rise while your kidneys are entirely fine, and a vinegar regimen started in response will appear to fail. Both errors come from treating a single number as a verdict rather than as one input. Creatine supplementation and creatinine and foods that raise creatinine cover those confusions properly, and MedlinePlus on the creatinine test explains what the test is measuring in the first place.

What apple cider vinegar genuinely does: post-meal glucose

Now the part where vinegar deserves a fair hearing, because there is a real effect here and dismissing it would be as sloppy as inflating it.

Multiple small crossover trials have measured blood glucose after a standardized starchy meal with and without vinegar, typically around one to two tablespoons taken with or just before the food. The consistent finding is that the post-meal glucose peak is blunted. The effect has been seen in healthy volunteers, in people with insulin resistance and in people with type 2 diabetes. Meta-analyses pooling these small studies report modest reductions in post-meal glucose and, in the longer studies, small reductions in HbA1c. The trials are small, short, and heterogeneous in design, which means the size of the effect should be held loosely, but the direction is reasonably consistent.

How it works, as far as anyone can tell

The honest size of it

Keep the scale in view. This is a modest effect on a single post-meal glucose excursion, not a treatment for diabetes. It is smaller than what you get from a walk after eating, far smaller than what metformin does, and nowhere near what the newer glucose-lowering drugs achieve. Nobody in diabetes care regards it as a therapy, and no guideline recommends it. What it is, at most, is a small favorable nudge available to someone who already likes vinegar on their food and eats a high-carbohydrate meal.

It is also worth noticing that the practical version of this is just eating a vinaigrette with your meal, which is a normal culinary act rather than a protocol. The effect has been demonstrated with vinegar taken alongside food. Drinking it on an empty stomach, which is what most kidney-focused protocols instruct, is the version with the worst harm profile and the least reason behind it.

Why a glucose effect matters for kidneys, and how far that goes

This is the one legitimate thread connecting apple cider vinegar to kidneys, and it needs stating carefully because it is easy to over-claim in either direction.

Diabetes is the leading cause of chronic kidney disease worldwide. The mechanism is well understood. Persistently raised glucose damages the glomerular capillaries, thickening the basement membrane and raising the pressure inside the filtering unit. Elevated intraglomerular pressure is itself injurious, so units scar and drop out, and the survivors take on more load at higher pressure still. The process is self-reinforcing, which is why it accelerates once established and why early glucose control changes the outcome so much more than late control does. Albumin appearing in the urine is usually the first detectable sign, typically years before creatinine moves at all.

So anything that genuinely improves long-term glucose control is, indirectly, kidney protection. The logic is sound. The problem is the size of the step from “blunts one post-meal peak in a small trial” to “slows diabetic kidney disease”. No study has tested vinegar against kidney outcomes. None is likely to, because the effect is too small to be worth powering a trial around when far more effective agents exist.

Set it against what actually works and the comparison is stark. SGLT2 inhibitors reduce progression of kidney disease substantially in both diabetic and non-diabetic patients, ACE inhibitors and ARBs reduce proteinuria and slow decline, blood pressure control is the single largest modifiable factor, and finerenone adds further benefit in diabetic kidney disease. These are established, measurable, guideline-level interventions with outcome data behind them. A tablespoon of vinegar is not in the same conversation, and treating it as an alternative rather than as a salad dressing is where the real harm of this folklore lies. The medicines that reduce creatinine explains how each of those works.

The harms, which are real and under-reported

Because vinegar is a food, it is assumed to be safe at any dose in any pattern. That assumption is where people get hurt. Nothing below applies to vinegar on chips. All of it applies to the daily-dose regimens circulating online, several of which recommend quantities well beyond culinary use, taken neat or barely diluted, on an empty stomach, indefinitely.

Potassium loss

This is the one that connects most directly to kidneys and the one almost nobody mentions. A published case report describes a woman in her late twenties who had been drinking around 250 milliliters of cider vinegar daily for roughly six years. She presented with low blood potassium, raised renin, and osteoporosis unusual for her age. The vinegar was identified as the cause, and the working explanation involved both the potassium losses and the sustained acid load, which the body partly buffers by drawing on bone mineral over long periods.

One case is one case, and it involved an extreme intake sustained for years. But it establishes that the pathway exists, and hypokalemia is not a trivial finding. It causes muscle weakness, cramps and fatigue, and at lower levels it disturbs cardiac rhythm. In someone already on a diuretic that wastes potassium, or someone with a kidney condition affecting potassium handling, the margin is smaller than in a healthy 28-year-old.

The complication specific to kidney disease is that potassium runs in both directions there. Reduced kidney function typically causes potassium to rise, sometimes dangerously, and much of renal dietary advice is about keeping it down. Adding something that pushes it the other way makes an already delicate balance harder to predict, and it means neither you nor your clinician can tell what your baseline actually is.

Tooth enamel erosion

Enamel demineralises below a pH of about 5.5. Neat vinegar sits around 2.4 to 3.4, which is more than a hundred times more acidic than that threshold and comfortably inside the range that dissolves it. Enamel does not regenerate. Once it has gone, it is gone, and the result is sensitivity, yellowing as the darker dentine shows through, and increased decay.

The damage depends less on the total amount than on contact time and frequency. Sipping vinegar water slowly through a morning is far worse than swallowing the same volume at once. Brushing immediately afterward is worse still, because enamel softened by acid is abraded by the brush. Dentists see this pattern often enough to recognize it on sight, and daily vinegar drinkers are a well-known group in that clinic.

Esophageal and gastric injury

Case reports describe apple cider vinegar tablets lodging in the throat and causing chemical burns to the esophagus, with pain on swallowing persisting for weeks afterward. Investigation of tablet products in one such report found the actual acetic acid content differed substantially from the label, which is a reminder that supplements are not manufactured to pharmaceutical standards. Liquid vinegar taken undiluted can produce similar irritation, and anyone with reflux, a hiatus hernia, gastritis or a history of ulcer is likely to find that a daily acid load makes things worse rather than better, despite the folk claim that it treats reflux.

Delayed gastric emptying in diabetic gastroparesis

Here the mechanism behind the benefit becomes the mechanism behind the harm. Vinegar blunts glucose peaks partly by slowing gastric emptying. In someone with diabetic gastroparesis, where nerve damage has already left the stomach emptying too slowly, that is precisely the wrong direction. A small study in people with type 1 diabetes and gastroparesis found vinegar slowed emptying further. The practical consequence is nausea, early fullness, bloating, and unpredictable timing between insulin and the arrival of carbohydrate in the bloodstream, which makes glucose control worse rather than better. Since gastroparesis and diabetic kidney disease often occur in the same person, both being complications of long-standing diabetes, this overlap matters more than its rarity suggests.

Skin and mucosal burns

Undiluted vinegar applied to skin, which appears in various home-remedy protocols for warts, moles and skin tags, has produced chemical burns requiring treatment, including in children. It is a corrosive at full strength. That it is sold in a food aisle does not change the chemistry.

Three drug interactions that matter

These are the ones a pharmacist would flag, and they are the practical reason to tell your clinician you are taking vinegar rather than treating it as too trivial to mention.

If your kidney function is already reduced

Everything above applies with less margin, and a few specific points are added.

Potassium handling is the first. As filtration falls, the kidney’s ability to excrete potassium falls with it, and hyperkalemia becomes a genuine risk, particularly for anyone on an ACE inhibitor, an ARB or a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist. Renal dietary advice therefore concentrates on limiting potassium. A vinegar habit that nudges potassium down might sound convenient in that context. It is not, because the effect is unquantified, uncontrolled, and it obscures the picture your clinician is reading from your blood results. Potassium in kidney disease is managed with measured interventions and repeat testing, not with a condiment.

Acid-base status is the second. Metabolic acidosis genuinely develops in advanced chronic kidney disease and genuinely matters, contributing to bone disease, muscle loss and faster decline in function. It is diagnosed on a blood bicarbonate level and treated with prescribed oral bicarbonate. Adding a daily acid load to someone whose kidneys are already struggling to excrete acid is the opposite of what that situation requires, even if the quantity is small.

Fluid balance is the third. Some people with advanced disease are on a fluid restriction, and the two glasses of water a vinegar regimen adds is not a free addition for them.

There is also a timing question that comes up constantly. People ask whether a burst of vinegar before a blood test will improve the result, sometimes the night before. It will not, and the attempt is self-defeating: the point of the test is to give your clinician an accurate picture, and a distorted one leads to worse decisions about your care. Lowering creatinine overnight deals with that question in full, and the short answer is that the only things that move quickly are hydration and recent muscle activity.

If you are going to use it anyway

Plenty of people will read all of the above and still want vinegar in their routine, either because they like it or because they are not fully convinced. That is a reasonable position to hold about a food, and the sensible version costs you almost nothing.

The verdict

Apple cider vinegar does not lower creatinine, does not dissolve stones, does not alkalise blood and does not detoxify or flush the kidneys. Those four claims are not merely unsupported; each of them contradicts something specific and well established about how the body handles acid, how stones form, or how creatinine is produced and cleared. The reputation is built on a book from the 1950s, a discarded theory about dietary ash, and the general willingness of a well-worded claim to survive without evidence.

What it does have is a modest, reproducible reduction in the glucose peak after a starchy meal. That is real, and it deserves to be stated without sneering, because dismissing the good evidence along with the bad is how people stop trusting any of it. But the effect is small, the trials are short, and no study has connected it to kidney outcomes. It is a reason to enjoy vinaigrette, not a reason to take a daily dose.

The harms are genuine and are systematically under-mentioned in the material promoting it. Potassium loss with sustained high intake, irreversible enamel erosion, esophageal injury from tablets, worsened gastroparesis in people with long-standing diabetes, and interactions with diuretics, insulin and digoxin. Every one of those is more likely in the exact population being targeted by kidney-focused vinegar advice, because that population tends to be older, on more medication, and less physiologically forgiving.

The bottom line is unexciting and true. Use vinegar on your food if you like it. Do not use it as a treatment. If your creatinine is raised, the useful actions are working out the cause, getting your blood pressure to target, controlling glucose if you are diabetic, reviewing every medication you take with someone who knows kidneys, and having your function monitored properly so a decline is caught early. For a fuller comparison of every popular remedy against the evidence, how to lower creatinine naturally works through the whole category, and the other foods in this series, including cranberry juice, beetroot and turmeric, get the same treatment individually.

Related reading across the cluster: what a high creatinine actually means, how to lower creatinine levels, what creatinine clearance measures, how high creatinine is treated, and whether magnesium lowers creatinine, which faces the same evidence problem from a different angle.

Apple cider vinegar and creatinine: frequently asked questions