Sean Hashmi, MD

Your "normal" cholesterol may be missing two numbers. In March 2026, the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, and ten other organizations rewrote the cholesterol guideline your doctor has used since 2018. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi breaks down what changed and the two numbers you actually want to know. The new guideline does two things. It brings back har...

Should you take blood pressure pills at night or in the morning? For years the advice was to dose at night to protect your heart. Then 21,104 patients put that to the test. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through what the trials actually found and what protects your heart and your kidneys. In the TIME trial, published in The Lancet in 2022, evening dosing was no different from morning dosin...

Are seed oils actually bad for you? Seed oils have been blamed for inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, and heart disease. The uncomfortable part is what happens when you test it: when researchers feed people more of the main fat in seed oils and measure inflammation in their blood, it mostly does not go up. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through what dozens of human trials and a brand-new...

Fatty liver: the only thing that truly reverses it. A video with over 100,000 views says a bitter tonic will empty the fat out of your liver. It will not. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi covers what genuinely reverses fatty liver and why the detox drinks sold everywhere do nothing. Fatty liver, now called MASLD, affects about one in three adults. Fat builds up inside liver cells, driven mostly by...

Your creatinine is high, and here is what actually lowers it. Your social media feed is full of teas and morning drinks promising to flush it down. Most do nothing, and some can actually harm your kidneys. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi explains what really moves creatinine, what moves your true kidney function, and the three therapies with hard evidence that slow kidney disease. Creatinine is n...

Creatine isn't just for muscle. A video with millions of views says it shrinks your fat cells by 30%. The evidence does not show that, and the real story runs past muscle into your brain and into your kidney lab results. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi sorts the creatine claims with data behind them from the ones invented for clicks. The muscle story is not in dispute. A 2017 meta-analysis by...

Are your blood pressure pills hurting your kidneys? Your social media feed keeps saying so. For most people, the truth runs the other way: the right medications are the strongest kidney protection we have. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi explains which blood pressure medications protect your kidneys, why one of them raises creatinine on purpose, and the one combination that genuinely causes harm....

You can be thin, eat clean, hit your steps, and still have the kind of belly fat that destroys your kidneys. A 2023 PLOS One cohort followed 11,050 adults for nearly 6 years. The highest visceral fat group had 7.5 times the risk of chronic kidney disease. The most surprising finding: the effect was strongest in normal-weight people. Hazard ratio 2.32 for new kidney disease in adults with a normal...

The 10-second balance test that predicts how long you'll live. If you can't stand on one leg for 10 seconds, one 2022 study found your risk of dying over the next several years was about 1.84 times higher, an 84% jump. That number comes from a 2022 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine by Araujo and colleagues, who followed 1,702 adults ages 51 to 75. Even after adjusting for age...

You can be thin, eat clean, hit your steps, and still have the kind of belly fat that destroys your kidneys. A 2023 PLOS One cohort followed 11,050 adults for nearly 6 years. The highest visceral fat group had 7.5 times the risk of chronic kidney disease. The most surprising finding: the effect was strongest in normal-weight people. Hazard ratio 2.32 for new kidney disease in adults with a normal...

Your creatinine test may be lying to you. The 2021 National Kidney Foundation guidance recommends cystatin C as a second kidney test. Four years later, most labs still default to creatinine alone. By the time creatinine clearly rises on a lab report, you may have already lost a third or more of your kidney function. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through what cystatin C actually measures,...

A new triple-agonist shot, retatrutide, just posted the biggest weight loss we have ever seen from a single injection in a phase 3 obesity trial: 28.3% of body weight at 80 weeks, roughly 70 pounds, and almost double what Ozempic delivered in its pivotal trial. I'm a nephrologist and obesity medicine specialist, and in this episode I break down the TRIUMPH-1 data, how the drug works (GLP-1, GI...

If you have kidney disease, the smoothie your cardiologist told you to drink could be the single biggest reason your numbers are getting worse. The same foods you ate for 30 years without a problem can become a problem the day your kidney function drops. Most of the wellness advice on the internet was not written for you. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through 5 foods sold as healthy that...

People who live to 100 share one quiet pattern that nobody talks about. It is not their cholesterol. It is not their gym routine. It shows up as a single number on a routine blood test, and 9 out of 10 people with abnormal kidney function have no idea theirs is wrong. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through the centenarian kidney pattern researchers have actually found across multiple cohor...

You probably have at least three of these in your bathroom cabinet right now. They cost $10, they feel harmless, and in the wrong person, taken often enough, they can damage kidneys for years without a single warning sign. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through five classes of over-the-counter medications that quietly harm kidneys. NSAIDs (ibuprofen, naproxen, aspirin) block the prostaglan...

A trial of 3,533 people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease was stopped early in late 2023. Not because something went wrong. Because the drug worked so well that leaving anyone on placebo was no longer ethical. That drug was Ozempic. Eight months later, the FDA approved semaglutide for a reason that has nothing to do with weight loss. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi breaks down the F...

Foamy urine has a 1 in 5 chance of meaning your kidneys are leaking protein. Here's what kind of foam matters and the $30 test that catches it years before standard blood work. If you've been Googling foamy urine at midnight, zooming in on toilet bowls and wondering if it means kidney failure, this episode gives you the read your appointment didn't. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Foamy urine has three...

How much water should you actually drink each day? As a board-certified nephrologist, the honest answer is: it depends on your body, your kidneys, your climate, and your activity. The "8 glasses a day" rule was never based on a single scientific study. In this episode, you'll learn why the popular hydration advice has no real evidence behind it, how your kidneys regulate water throug...

Kidney-friendly foods can either slow chronic kidney disease or speed it up, and most people have never heard the one number that explains why. Your body absorbs over 90% of phosphorus additives from processed food, but only 20 to 40% from whole plant foods. That single gap is the starting point for every food on this list. Board-certified nephrologist Dr. Sean Hashmi breaks down 10 evidence-based...

Chronic kidney disease affects more than 1 in 7 US adults, and about 9 in 10 don't even know they have it. Kidneys can lose up to 50% of function before a single number on a routine lab panel looks abnormal. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi walks through the 5 silent signs of kidney damage your body sends years before a diagnosis, plus the 3 lab tests (eGFR, urine albumin to creatinine ratio,...

If you ate chicken this week, there is a real chance you accidentally ate a processed meat without ever knowing it. In this episode, I walk you through the landmark study that changed how I counsel my patients on protein, the one published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology that followed more than 63,000 people for 15 years and found that the highest consumers of red meat had a 4...

Kidney-safe snacks for CKD patients who are afraid to eat between meals. Most people with chronic kidney disease stop snacking entirely out of fear of potassium and phosphorus, but skipping meals can cause blood sugar instability, muscle loss, and malnutrition that accelerate kidney damage faster than the snack ever could. In this episode, Dr. Sean Hashmi explains why two snacks with identical nut...

Your doctor sees a number on a routine blood test and tells you to stop the creatine. You stop it. Nobody explains that the lab result was a false alarm. Creatine raises serum creatinine — the exact molecule physicians measure to estimate kidney function. But raising creatinine is not the same as damaging your kidneys. A 2025 meta-analysis of 21 studies confirmed that creatine supplementation does...

A common dry cleaning chemical called tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, has been linked to a threefold higher risk of significant liver fibrosis. 7% of Americans already have measurable levels of this chemical in their blood. And PCE doesn't stop at the liver. It also damages your kidneys directly by attacking the proximal tubules, the part of the kidney responsible for reabsorbing nutrients and fl...

Should you quit coffee? In this final episode of the Coffee Science Series, Dr. Sean Hashmi breaks down who should be careful with coffee and who can keep drinking it without worry. Your genes play a bigger role than you think. A liver enzyme called CYP1A2 determines whether you're a fast or slow caffeine metabolizer, and that distinction changes everything about how coffee affects your heart,...