Anyone who has ever had a kidney stone never wants a repeat of the blinding pain that comes when it passes. Now, a new study maps out a diet that can help guard against that.

The cornerstones of that diet include eating plenty of foods that contain potassium, as well as a few servings of low-fat dairy daily, to get enough calcium. High-potassium fruits and veggies that could help include bananas, oranges, grapefruits, apricots, mushrooms, peas, cucumbers, zucchini, and melons such as cantaloupe and honeydew.

To arrive at those recommendations, researchers from the Mayo Clinic used data from questionnaires completed by kidney stone patients between 2009 and 2018. The team compared the diets of 411 people who had already had their first kidney stone and a control group of 384 individuals.

“We had this information and then we, number one, could look at things that … differed between controls and kidney stone formers, but then we’ve also been following these people forward in time,” said study author Dr. John Lieske, director of the O’Brien Urology Research Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.

During a median of just over four years of follow-up, 73 patients in the study had recurrent kidney stones.

Lower levels of calcium and potassium predicted that recurrence. After adjustments for non-dietary factors, lower calcium continued to be a predictor. So did lower potassium, but only among those who weren’t already taking certain types of diuretics and calcium supplements.

Read more at Health Day