Did you know that your chances of developing a kidney stone in your lifetime are one in 10? Approximately twenty thousand people die due to kidney failure every year before time. Hundreds of thousands of people suffer from renal failure each year and undergo dialysis or await a kidney transplant.

There are two kidneys, each about the size of a fist, located on either side of the spine at the lowest level of the rib cage. Each kidney contains up to a million functioning units called nephrons. A nephron consists of a filtering unit of tiny blood vessels called a glomerulus attached to a tubule. When blood enters the glomerulus, it is filtered and the remaining fluid then passes along the tubule. In the tubule, chemicals and water are either added to or removed from this filtered fluid according to the body’s needs, the final product being the urine we excrete.

The kidneys perform their life-sustaining job of filtering and returning to the bloodstream about 200 quarts of fluid every 24 hours. About two quarts are removed from the body in the form of urine, and about 198 quarts are recovered. The urine, we excrete, has been stored in the bladder for anywhere from 1 to 8 hours.

But what do your kidneys do? Why are they so important? Don’t they just produce urine? In this article, we will take a close look at our kidneys and find out exactly what they do.

Your kidneys are two bean-shaped organs, each about the size of your fist. They are located in the middle of your back, just below your rib cage, on either side of your spine. Your kidneys weigh about 0.5 percent of your total body weight. Although the kidneys are small organs by weight, they receive a huge amount — 20 percent — of the blood pumped by the heart. The large blood supply to your kidneys enables them to do the following tasks:

Regulate the composition of your blood

• keep the concentrations of various ions and other important   substances constant

• keep the volume of water in your body constant

• remove wastes from your body (urea, ammonia, drugs, toxic   substances)

• keep the acid/base concentration of your blood constant

• Help regulate your blood pressure

• Stimulate the making of red blood cells

• Maintain your body’s calcium levels

Your kidneys receive the blood from the renal artery, process it, return the processed blood to the body through the renal vein and remove the wastes and other unwanted substances in the urine. Urine flows from the kidneys through the ureters to the bladder. In the bladder, the urine is stored until it is excreted from the body through the urethra.