Recently I interviewed Sally K. Norton, and we talked about the prevalence of oxalate crystals in the thyroid gland. If you would prefer to listen the interview you can access it by Clicking Here.
Dr. Eric Osansky:
I am super excited to chat with today’s guest, Sally K. Norton. We are going to be talking about toxic superfoods with an emphasis on oxalates. I’m going to give Sally’s bio here, and then we will start our conversation.
Sally K. Norton holds a nutrition degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree in public health. Her path to becoming a leading expert on dietary oxalates includes a prior career working at major medical schools and in medical education and public health research. Her personal healing experience inspired years of research that led to her book Toxic Superfoods, which was released in January 2023 from Rodale Books, and it’s available everywhere books are sold.
As an expert on oxalates in foods, Sally’s work has been featured by podcasters, radio shows, and several online and print journals. For more information, you can visit SallyKNorton.com or follow Sally on YouTube and social media. Thank you so much for joining us, Sally.
Sally Norton:
Thank you for having me. This is going to be fun.
Dr. Eric:
I agree. We were chatting a little bit before, and I told you I found you when you were presenting at a recent conference. You mentioned your book, and I purchased the audio version, going through it quickly. I was already familiar with oxalates, but the book was so comprehensive. Still, I learned so much, and I’m excited for you to share with my audience the impact of these toxic superfoods.
Sally:
It’s shocking to those of us who have been health geeks a long time and happily gobbling up plants we trusted, and then find out that that’s a problem. I really felt like I needed to put together my life’s tragedy in a book because I was so interested in understanding why I didn’t know this. I’m supposed to know stuff. How come I’m stupid? This is the book about why I’m stupid. Trying to share this with others because I realized more folks than just me need to know about this.
Dr. Eric:
I’m very thankful you put this book together. If you could start off by briefly explaining what are oxalates? Why did you start focusing on oxalates? What led you to write this book?
Sally:
Oxalates are a set of chemicals that are made by nature. We eat it in plant foods primarily because plants like to make it. We use the term “oxalates” in plural to refer to oxalic acid, an acidic ion, and the oxalate crystals that it makes with calcium oxalate is typical. Plants build calcium oxalate crystals. They make oxalic acid and Vitamin D and turn it into oxalic acid. It’s plants like spinach and trees that make nuts and seeds and root vegetables like potatoes and sweet potatoes. They are all loaded with this stuff.
Also, oxalic acid and oxalic crystals can come not just from the foods we eat, but a little bit every day is produced in our metabolism. It’s a natural metabolic waste product that we pee out. That is the main exit route for oxalates out of the body.
Also, you can breathe them in from polluted air. It naturally forms in polluted air. Major cities like Beijing and LA have a fair amount of oxalic acid in them probably. In fact, oxalic acid is a major component of acid rain. You can even have it in the air if you have lots of black mold growing in the house because it’s an end product of mold.
The way most people heard about oxalates is they have heard of the idea, and hopefully never had, of kidney stones. That is made of calcium oxalate. Your doctor usually just says, “That’s calcium stones.” They forget to mention oxalates and where they come from.
Dr. Eric:
Unfortunately, people eat those foods and don’t eliminate the source. Maybe they’ll get lucky and not get future kidney stones. Some of them do get recurring stones.
Sally:
The nice thing about a kidney stone is it is a possible path for you to learn about oxalates and learn you shouldn’t be eating so many. That wasn’t my path. I’ve never had a kidney stone. I don’t think I ever will. I’ve peed out a lot of oxalates. You can tell because you get cloudy urine. You get the little crystals that build up into stones without getting the stones. If you have a lot of those crystals that are big enough, the light bounces off them, and it makes your urine look cloudy, opaqueish, a little white, as if there is a little milk in there or something. That’s extra crystals in the urine, which is not a good thing to have. I’ve had that most of my life.
I’m finally getting over that now that I have stopped eating oxalates for 9.5 years. I don’t see that cloudy urine very often at all anymore. Just about in my 10th year of getting over oxalate poisoning that I had.
When I figured out that oxalate was affecting my arthritis, and I went on this diet, and all these other things happened. I got over a sleep disorder. I realized all my health problems, which had been numerous and have been going on since I was about 12 years old, had a connection to the healthy diet I had been eating. Healthy, organic vegetables I had been growing in my own garden. This wholesome, organic diet. Holy crap, how could this be?
I started sharing it publicly in free little talks at the local health food store. It was really fascinated by how many people need to hear this because how many people I’m seeing it in around me. I started to learn from talking to people about how this plays with your whole sense of reality. We are so hung up on believing that plants are so wonderful and benign and safe and in fact superheroes that it’s a difficult message to convey. I have been trying to figure out how to explain it, so the book was a real effort to do that.
Dr. Eric:
I was telling you before we started recording that it was 2016 when I did a urinary oxalate test, and it tested positive. At the time, I was loading my smoothie with spinach and other high oxalate foods. I eliminated the spinach after seeing that.
At that time, I also was thinking just kidney stones. I wasn’t thinking about the impact it has on other areas of the body. Of course, one of those areas is the thyroid gland. Just because the audience happens to be people with hyperthyroidism and Hashimoto’s and other thyroid conditions, can you dive a little bit into the research and what you found as far as the impact of oxalates on the thyroid?
Sally:
The thyroid is fascinating with oxalates. It’s so common to have oxalate crystals, which are essentially like kidney stones, building up in the thyroid gland. I was eating my high oxalate sweet potatoes every day for years, and I had a big, swollen lump in my throat that I hadn’t noticed, but my physical examiner actually looked at and touched me. He had to send me for a scan because my thyroid was swollen. I had multiple scans. I had been on and off taking thyroid hormone, and going on a low oxalate diet reduced my Hashimoto’s look. I was equivocally with Hashimoto’s. Different doctors said yes or no. Nobody could figure out if I had it or not. All that Hashimoto’s-like bloodwork disappeared after I quit the oxalates. We saw that a lot. Hashimoto’s disappears, and thyroid numbers improve.
The literature is a little bit weak on it. Other than the fact that we keep seeing in thyroid studies that are looking for oxalates, a very high prevalence of oxalate in the thyroid gland that gets worse with time. The older you are, the more likely it is you have crystals forming that are big enough in the thyroid gland to be seen in microscopic examination of tissue sampling.
The thyroid gland tissues degenerate quickly though. If you’re taking a biopsy or piece out of the cadaver for an autopsy or some other type of medical study, you have to examine that tissue within two hours. Or else the dissolving acidity of the tissues can cause a loss of the crystals. Either they dissolve, or they float away. When you cut the sample to make a thin enough sample to put on a slide to see if there are crystals in the thyroid tissue, you can slice the crystals out of them, so you don’t see them.
Despite the difficulty in seeing the bigger crystals, they find it in 85% of thyroid glands in people over age 50. That number is a more recent number versus one that had been done 20 years earlier, where they saw a lower number. It seems as if there is not enough data points to really say this for sure, but it seems as if the prevalence in oxalate crystals is getting worse with time, which makes sense because they have added the French fry, potato chip, or baked potato to every meal these days with the addition of McDonald’s and potato chips. These are fairly new foods. Other high oxalate foods are being eaten more and more, too.
There are questions about how much these crystals are interfering with function, but wherever you see those crystals, those tissues that are immediately adjacent are not functioning. You lose thyroid function wherever you have those crystals. You see inflammation and damage occurring because the crystals draw more inflammatory action and create inflammatory problems in tissues the more the oxalate collects.
That’s another reason why with age it gets worse. You’ve had more years of inflammation there and more years of attracting and having tissues that are sticky now. Wherever you have inflammation in the body, the way the molecules line up makes it more sticky to oxalates, so the oxalates acid precipitates out into crystals and sticks in those tissues. Because of inflammation, it’s hard to get rid of them.
Dr. Eric:
Do oxalates ever show up on a thyroid ultrasound?
Sally:
It’s really difficult to say there is oxalate there from any of these scans, whether it’s ultrasound, MRI, or a CT scan. Sometimes, you can find crystals with MRI, but it’s probably only at most a third of the time, where it actually tells you there is something there that could be oxalate. That’s why we don’t know about oxalate. That’s why this isn’t common knowledge because it’s not easy to detect it.
Dr. Eric:
It’s not just a direct impact on the thyroid, but I’m sure you know most thyroid conditions are autoimmune. The impact of oxalates on the gut, which if you have an increase in intestinal permeability, that could be a factor with autoimmunity. It also could have that indirect effect when it comes to Graves’ or Hashimoto’s and other autoimmune conditions.
Sally:
No question about it. It’s a major provocateur in the tissue, and tissue damage that oxalates cause to tissues turns on inflammation. The acid and the crystals that you’re eating in your smoothie because you’re putting chia seeds and spinach and chard and turmeric, these things that are high in oxalates. That’s entering the cells that line the entire digestive tract for the full 24 hours it’s roaming around. Those bigger crystals that the plant makes aren’t absorbed necessarily, but the crystals are even worse than the acid, especially the smaller crystals that are invisible, the nanosize ones. The smaller the crystal, the more injurious it is to cells.
It is then designated in many different studies that it probably causes dysfunction of what we call the epithelial banner function. Epithelium is the cells that line the services of the body that interact with the outer world: your mouth, throat, stomach, lungs, bladder, etc. Epithelial cells, one single layer that has to be continuous, and they’re all hooked together with these tight junctions through this continuous layer of cells.
Especially the nano particles have a very strong affinity for the fats and membranes. It can wrap themselves in the fats or membranes and be put in a pocket, which are lipid crystals. The crystals often have these electromagnetic charges, which messes up the electromagnetic structures of membranes because membranes are like a battery with a positive charge on one side and a negative charge on the other. Life itself is very sensitive to electromagnetics. That disrupts the cell membranes, too.
The whole structure, which fatty acids are on the inside versus the outside of the leaflet, as we call the double layered fatty membrane, gets scrambled. Between the scrambling of the membrane and the lipid crystals, you lose the healthy tight junctions. The tight junctions are now what we call the lateral side of the membranes, or the hooking together as they’re lined up side by side. Those sides are hooked together with this Velcro-like tight junction. These are protein molecules in the membrane that all hook together. But now you have scrambled the membrane. The part that should be on the face is all messed up. Now, you lose that tight barrier function on a cell-to-cell basis.
The bigger questions can cause punctures. You can lose 50 cells in a smash if one of the big crystals causes a puncture in the digestive lining. The damaged membranes, the loss of the tight junctions, and the ripping apart and busting through the cell membranes and the cells is enough to turn on inflammation.
Your immune system and related tissues are busy looking for danger. This is dangerous. I am injured and leaking my parts as a cell. When you have this damage and leaking cells and dropping of vacuoles, and parts and pieces are dying off, you have this debris forming. Debris promotes precipitation. The oxalic acid continues to precipitate out into more nanocrystals or microcrystals, and you get more stickiness. You have this vicious cycle of cellular destruction, which requires the immune system to come in and say, “I have to deal with this mess.” You can be creating all kinds of issues, including granuloma disease as the main cells deal with these big crystals, these phagocytes that eat them and break them apart.
There is definite evidence that all of this can lead to Crohn’s, ulcerative colitis, IBS, all kinds of frank diseases, but it can also lead to food allergies and inflammation and poor digestion and dysbiosis. Crystals and acid and mayhem promotes dysbiosis. The oxalate causes nerve toxicity. The nerves are what help to control the sphincters that control the movement of foods, so you don’t have reflux if you have a working sphincter. If it’s not working properly, then you get acid reflux or leaks elsewhere through the system.
You have nerves misfiring, nerves that are turned on by the toxicity of oxalates because what they are doing is stealing electrolytes in ways that mess up their ability to manage their electrolytes in the nerves. You get nerves turned on and muscles turned on in spastic ways. You can get peristalsis that is moving in the wrong direction. You have paralysis and fibromyalgia of the muscles of the gut. You get motility problems, problems with constipation and diarrhea and reflux and even fecal incontinence. It’s not good.
Dr. Eric:
It definitely disrupts the gut barrier from what you said, the intestinal barrier. Is there any evidence that it can affect the blood brain barrier?
Sally:
It can affect any cell it gets to. The cell membranes are delicate, complicated structures. If you start scrambling the cell membrane structure, you will scramble those tight junctions. It’s a slightly different structure in the blood brain barrier than it is in the epithelial in the gut lining. The principles apply. Cells need to maintain their structure. When you start doing things, it messes up their structure, and function falls apart because function depends on structure.
Dr. Eric:
Can you talk about some of the foods higher in oxalates? I know you go deep into this in your book. A lot of people know that spinach is probably #1. If you could maybe give some of the main ones that you would definitely avoid.
Sally:
The only thing worse than spinach is B greens and chard. Unfortunately, they tend to come together in these leafy salad mixes. Chard and B greens are basically the same thing. The red stem is even worse than the white stem. Chard and both of those is worse than spinach. Sorel is terrible. If you’re a gardener and doing a lot of sorel, that’s not so good. A lot of people can’t buy it in the store, so that’s not a big deal. It’s only a big deal if you eat it. If you don’t eat it, you’re fine.
The popular food right now is almonds. They’re everywhere, in everything. It could be donuts covered in almonds. Almonds are the worst. They’re very toxic, not just from oxalates, but other toxins as well.
Cashews are not good. Peanuts and pine nuts are all high oxalate. They’re tough on the gut for many other reasons, too.
Seeds, like nuts, are designed to be indigestible. The plant toxins that are toxic to us have major effects on gut damage. There are other problems in these same high oxalate foods. There are other plant foods that may not be good but aren’t high in oxalates if you have inflammatory problems.
Then there are the beans, which is another type of seed. Black beans and white beans and Great Northerns are very high in oxalates. Peas are not so bad, so chickpeas and black-eyed peas are much lower.
If you are going gluten free, then you have heard of quinoa, teff, buckwheat. Those are uber high in oxalates and other plant chemicals. If you’re going gluten-free, you’re probably doing high oxalates with them.
There is the chia, hemp, cumin seeds. There is turmeric.
In the fruit world, starfruit, which we don’t eat in the U.S., but is like a spinach in Brazil and southeast Asia, they use it like we do superfoods. It’s terrible. Blackberries, pomegranates, and kiwi are all high in oxalates. Those are pretty popular, trusted foods, and we’re being encouraged to eat them.
This is the real reason why oxalates are dangerous. We’re ignorant about it, and we’re being told by trusted authorities to eat those foods because they are supposedly so great for us without any warning whatsoever that if you’re a frail child, elderly, have kidney stones or inflammatory diseases, you need to be aware of oxalates. You never see that on the labels anywhere.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned sweet potatoes in your experience earlier. How bad are those?
Sally:
I trusted that puppy because I had to be on a wheat-free diet and was using sweet potatoes every day and still eating Swiss chard. A boiled sweet potato. Boiling helps you leech out some fat soluble oxalates, so you remove some of that oxalate. It’s mostly the insoluble, which is particles and crystals. The standard six-ounce portion is over 100mg of oxalates. That’s a lot. If you get over 70 in any meal, that’s really setting up a toxic condition post-meal for the next six, eight, ten hours.
If you’re baking a sweet potato, you have 30% solubility. The amount in that serving will be 150mg of oxalates, which is even worse. Sweet potatoes, delicious, versatile, holds a lot of butter and salt with elegance. I wouldn’t go there.
I had trouble giving up my sweet potatoes. I grew organic sweet potatoes. I used them every day. When I started the diet, the first time I actually tried this diet was back in 2009. I didn’t see the benefits necessarily. I went back on sweet potatoes and didn’t see a problem with them. If you go back on oxalates when you have gotten rid of them from your diet, it can help you feel better temporarily. Whatever oxalates are in sweet potatoes, they don’t bother me. That kind of oxalate is okay. I didn’t know. Based on the information I had at the time, I didn’t understand it. Sweet potatoes, sorry, bud.
Dr. Eric:
I’ve been recommending them for years because a lot of my patients with Hashimoto’s and Graves’ follow AIP.
Sally:
Supposedly, it’s this low allergy food. That’s why I was relying on it as a staple because I couldn’t trust grains or beans anymore. It was clear to me that was causing inflammation for me. I was relying on sweet potatoes for that reason. I was thinking it was the lowest allergy starch you could possibly eat. I was relying on it as a staple. Not a good idea.
Dr. Eric:
Getting back to cooking not just sweet potatoes, but spinach or roasting almonds or cashews. Those really don’t significantly reduce the oxalates then?
Sally:
Heat doesn’t do anything to oxalates. You have to incinerate them for hours in a 400-degree fire to transform oxalates into something else. Heated stuff does you no good. Boiling can help leech some out in broccoli and sweet potatoes and a few other foods. We don’t have a lot of testing to know.
I noticed it in the few tests we have of asparagus. The boiled is exactly the same amount of oxalates as the non-boiled, roasted, or raw. It doesn’t change it at all. Some foods will leech out.
Leeching out is asking you to throw away the water. If you’re in a habit of saving the vegetable liquids or using them in your smoothies or soups, then you’re not achieving anything except now that the soluble oxalate is floating in a water solution, it has more power to pass through those tight junctions on a healthy gut and get into the body more easily. If you drink the liquid from boiling vegetables, you put that oxalate on steroids in terms of its toxicity.
Same with smoothies and juicing. You’re liberating the oxalates that are originally contained in cells behind cell walls and vacuoles in cells. The protection with your teeth doesn’t always get through cell walls. You don’t digest vegetables that well in the world of chewing. In the new world of smoothies and juicing, you can liberate crystals and expose them. They can bust out of the vacuoles, and now you have sharp, pointy arrows and other sick crystals, irritating your gut. You have the acid free to float in the water right into the body.
Dr. Eric:
I definitely want to talk more about smoothies, but I feel the need to bring up dark chocolate because that’s something else a lot of people like to eat. A little square of dark chocolate, is that okay, or is it still not acceptable?
Sally:
It always depends on dose with toxicity. A lot of the studies are done with milk chocolate because it’s bioavailable, and it’s a simple thing to get volunteers to eat. “Eat this half a chocolate bar. We’ll take your urine and give you $10.” “Sure, I’ll do that. No problem. Free chocolate.” We know the oxalated chocolate is very bioavailable. It gets into the kidneys pretty quickly, but it’s a long journey to get there. We tend to measure it on the exit. We don’t know much about the black box between your teeth and your kidneys.
Just two ounces, probably actually an ounce of dark chocolate is enough to create a toxic situation in the body. What is that? Two squares? I don’t know.
Dr. Eric:
I’m not sure. Still, that’s scary when you mention that.
Sally:
We’re being told this is so great for us. Sadly, chocolate has many other black marks, so to say. It’s contaminated with lead and other contaminants like heavy metals, and it has other problems, too. When we eliminate the sugar, somehow, it’s healthy for us.
The darker the chocolate, the more oxalate it has. Where the oxalate is hanging out is the cocoa fraction that makes it brown. The part you take out with milk chocolate is the fat. The cocoa butter, the fat, has no oxalate in it really.
That’s true in nature. The peanut oil has no fat. The peanut has no oxalate because it’s just the fat fraction. The peanut themselves and nut butters are loaded with oxalate. That’s one way where you isolate components of something. When you go out to eat, you go to a Vietnamese or other Asian restaurants that use peanut oil in cooking. That’s fine. There is no oxalate in oil. There are other reasons to worry about seed oils and their contaminants, but not from the oxalate standpoint.
Dr. Eric:
How many mg a day is considered to be high oxalate? You talk about different levels, like high, super high, moderately high. What do you recommend to other people as far as mg? I think you said 70mg?
Sally:
In a meal, ideally, you don’t want to go over 70mg. Chances are, if you’re doing a spinach smoothie, you’re getting close to 1,000mg. Or a spinach salad would be 450mg, maybe 500mg. A decent portion of Swiss chard can nearly have 1,000mg as well.
They define a high oxalate guide as 250mg a day or more. They define a super high oxalate diet as 600mg a day. You can actually exceed a whole day’s extraordinary high diet in one spinach smoothie, which could have 50% more than that even. The new trend of a spinach smoothie is really toxic.
The keto trend, which we are using almond flour all the time, can really add up. Unfortunately, in a smoothie, people can pack in other high oxalate ingredients like chia seed, turmeric, or cocoa powder.
Right now, there is a really big trend on Instagram of people making desserts with sweet potatoes, chia seeds, and chocolate all rolled into one, or almond butter and sweet potatoes and chocolate, or chocolate and sweet potatoes and some other high oxalate food plus turmeric for good luck. They are giving this stuff to children. The children don’t have the kidneys to handle it. Their bodies shouldn’t be poisoned.
Dr. Eric:
That’s important to know. Before we dive into smoothies further, just want to let everyone know that in Sally’s book, she actually goes over the mg, as far as determining the number of mg of oxalates in certain foods. There is a handy PDF that comes with the audio book, so that’s helpful. Definitely check out her book.
Let’s talk more about smoothies. I admitted to you before we started chatting that I am a smoothie person, and I have been a smoothie person for quite a while. In 2016, when I did a urinary oxalate test, which I want to talk about that, too, that came back positive, so I cut out at that point spinach to my smoothies.
I don’t know if we could put together a low oxalate smoothie, but for those who might not be willing to give up their smoothies. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I’m willing to give up my smoothie at this point. Maybe we could try to construct one that is not super low, but not crazy high.
One thing I have been doing is replacing the spinach, and this was even before reading your book, with lettuces, like green leaf lettuce, red leaf lettuce, Romaine lettuce. Those seem to be on the lower side when it comes to oxalates, correct?
Sally:
They’re very low in oxalates. You’d have to eat a heck of a lot of lettuce to get too many oxalates. You can safely concentrate lettuce and not have too much oxalate. It doesn’t mean everyone can tolerate lettuce if they have an overactive immune system in their gut. They could be developing food sensitivities. There are enough unknown chemicals in plants.
I’d also like to preface this discussion about the smoothie with the fact that you yourself have really only started to have this message soak in and what its implications are. Now I have to change my behavior. It’s brand new for you. It’s only been in the last few months. You should all be patient with yourselves. Give yourself a year to rewrite how you eat and relearn how you eat and make it normal. If you’re trying to completely upheave your entire life at one time, you’re adding stress to your life. The recovery from too many oxalates in your body will take 10 years anyway.
So a brilliant place to begin is to replace spinach with lettuce. That’s pretty easy. You go to the same place to get spinach versus lettuce, and lettuce lasts longer. It keeps better in the fridge. It’s more versatile and a lot safer. That’s a great place to start.
I do have a low oxalate smoothie recipe on my website. I made that seven years ago maybe. It relies on Romaine lettuce, pineapple, and lime juice as the main flavor ingredients. With a smoothie, if you can do dairy products, you want to use kefir, yogurt, milk, half and half, and heavy cream, things like that. Maybe even egg yolks. They’re really good for the liver, brain, and bile. It’s really nice if you can do egg yolks. That’s a possibility. Put a little protein in there if you tolerate those things. If not, you can use coconut milk and coconut yogurt.
Low oxalate foods, there are many out there, especially if you like green stuff. If you like a bitter green, then arugula, watercress, all of those other greens are low. The cabbage family, the kale stuff, are better cooked, not raw. If you want to use cooked greens and put them in your smoothie, people do that.
Papaya is really interesting. It tends to gel up. It has this sticky, gummy thing going on. You can make a nice thick smoothie with papaya. If you like thickness and are having trouble making it thick, you can use a little trace of flax seed that’s all ground up or a tiny bit of cilium husk. Those things will give it a binding, thickening effect to the smoothie.
Grape juice. Melons are all low in oxalates. Cucumbers are delicious in smoothies and juicing. That’s a great base to start with as well.
Dr. Eric:
Celery is high, right? I have been adding celery. A lot of people are making celery juice these days. You label that as high?
Sally:
Celery is high. If you’re using a small amount, like half a stick, or even one whole stalk, you can probably get rid of it. You don’t need to be going to zero oxalates. You’re better off keeping some of these foods around. You can use small amounts of high oxalate foods.
Celery is an example that you can use in culinary amounts. But you wouldn’t want to eat one head of celery in one smoothie or one juice, which is often recommended. That’s toxic. That’s a dose problem. Your grandmother is rolling her eyes that you are eating a whole head of celery in one meal. That’s not food. You can use a little celery in there.
As you get going on this, eventually you may find you don’t want to do that anymore. Some of these high oxalate foods, you can use bits of it here and there. It becomes flavor enhancers instead of entrees.
Dr. Eric:
How about collard greens?
Sally:
That’s one of the cabbage family vegetables along with kale and mustard greens. These are all in the cabbage family. They’re all low in oxalates for the most part. Collards are a little higher, more like a kale, which is about 3x higher than lettuce. Lettuce is so little, it’s still not that much.
If you’re overdoing raw cabbage family vegetables, eventually it’s also hard on the gut. They’re hard to digest. Some people think raw enzymes in cabbage family is hard on the thyroid gland as well. It’s not unusual to hear if you’re going to eat cabbage family vegetables, and you have a thyroid problem, cook them. If you steam or blanch them and add them to your smoothie, no problem. If you like the flavor. You’re only eating this because culinarily, you’re finding this a pleasure, not because you think you need to or because you forgot how to chew.
Dr. Eric:
How about steaming broccoli and then cooling it down and putting it in a smoothie? Or is that considered higher in oxalates?
Sally:
Broccoli is good if you boil it, but you need to boil it a solid three minutes. That’s perfect for a smoothie. It turns it into baby food. That’s a good thing to do. Throw out the water. Don’t put the water in the smoothie, and that’s fine. That’s a good idea, if you like it.
Again, I’m sure that this is a bigger stretch for people, so I take an entire chapter to talk about how we are in love with plants and trust them and think we need to have them and use them as an insurance policy that we will be healthy if we get enough vegetables. Sadly, we are saying this to ourselves, but it doesn’t hold up. We’re overtrusting with plants. If you don’t super love them, then don’t make yourself eat them. If you love them, then this is a great opportunity to figure out how to curate which vegetables are safer to eat and dose them in reasonable quantities.
The boiling is beneficial, not just because of the oxalates. You’re breaking down those cell walls enough so that it improves nutrient availability in all vegetables. You can get more minerals and nutrients in them into your body because you have broken down cell walls and the other barriers that make it hard for you to digest them.
Still, there are other antinutrient effects of polyphenols and compounds in plants that interrupt the enzymes that get the protein out of your foods and fats and carbohydrates. Those basic enzymes are inhibited by polyphenols, so you can overdo plants. Use them because you love them, not because you must have them. Don’t force your kids to eat green vegetables if they’re not willing to eat them. I don’t think it’s worth the fight.
Dr. Eric:
Based on what you just said, if someone wanted to add a protein powder, something like hydrolyzed beef would be a better option compared to a vegan protein powder, like a pea protein.
Sally:
For sure. The amino acid profile of animal proteins is much more suited to what we need because we’re animals, too. We need the same profile that are in the flesh of animal foods. All the dairy foods are better protein powders, as are meat-based protein powders. They are also much lower in lead and other contaminants. Even glyphosate and other chemicals that are prone to be in these protein powders. Chickpeas for example concentrate glyphosate. With plant foods, it’s particularly important to go organic and selective. From a protein powder standpoint, if you can find a nice beef or something like that, not necessarily collagen.
Dr. Eric:
I was just about to bring that up.
Sally:
The collagen is just a few of the amino acids, not a full gamut of amino acids that you need to build bones and muscles, which is the best use for protein: tell your body to get some muscle going, make some bone. Collagen is hydroxy proline and glycine. Hydroxyproline is prone to being converted to oxalate in the liver. By pushing more than 2.5 teaspoons of gelatin or collagen powder, you’re upping the amount of oxalate that forms inside the body. You can create an oxalate problem by overpushing collagen. Don’t be dumping collagen into everything you make. That’s not helping anything.
Dr. Eric:
Good to know. Berries, people want to stay away from blackberries, raspberries. Blueberries and cranberries aren’t as high?
Sally:
Cranberries are very low in oxalates. Blueberries are low in oxalate. Strawberries, we don’t really know. They seem to be all over the map in terms of testing.
We didn’t talk about that. Plants vary from one species to another, one field to another, one season to another, one set of molds attacking another. Plants are making oxalic acid and oxalate crystals in response to their growing conditions and genetic densities. We grow different genetic forms of strawberries in different parts of the country at different times of the year.
There is a lot of mold pressure on a strawberry because the gland lays on the ground. It’s muddy spring, and there is mold everywhere. Plants have crystals and acid in their leaves because they can convert oxalic acid into hydrogen peroxide, which helps them beat off mold.
We see this in tomatoes when they are grown in high calcium soils in high humid summer. They make so much oxalate that they get crystals of oxalate in their shoulders. It causes tissue damage in the tomatoes, which makes them not commercially viable because the tomato looks bad and spoils quickly. It’s not even good for the plant to have to make too much oxalate.
Dr. Eric:
One more question regarding smoothies: You mentioned chia seeds, hemp seeds as being high, but flax seed is okay. If someone were to grind their own flax seeds, and they add a tablespoon to a smoothie, that’s not too bad.
Sally:
Flax is very low in oxalates. It’s one of the lowest oxalate seeds along with pumpkin seeds. You can buy sprouted pumpkin seed butter. It’s more expensive than some of the other seeds. You can probably make your own nut milk from pumpkin seeds. They’re low in oxalate. If they’re not giving you gut damage, so some people with really inflamed guts, a pumpkin seed or a flax seed can be irritating. They’re low in oxalate, which generally is good for most of us, but not everything works for every person. I want to keep reminding people that you have to customize what you eat according to your health and tolerance.
Dr. Eric:
Always listen to your body. That’s good advice.
Getting back to testing. I mentioned how I did a urinary test for oxalates earlier that was positive. In your book, you mention that the tests aren’t perfect. If someone does an organic acids test that looks at oxalates, if it’s negative, that doesn’t necessarily rule out oxalates.
Sally:
That’s for sure. I had a couple organic acids test that had no oxalate problem. That’s the opposite of the truth. I had a big oxalate problem, which explained a lot of problems that I had.
The thing about oxalate is you are measuring it in your urine as your kidneys are excreting it. Your body is not just something. It’s a living, intelligent being, and it’s making decisions in the background. It has different Circadian pathways for releasing oxalate. It tends to clear oxalate out in the system when it’s doing its overnight housekeeping. Your first morning pee might be high in oxalate, but your next pee might not be. That next pee is the one you use when you do that test. That’s the lowest oxalate level for the whole day. From a day pattern, you’re not necessarily going to see a high oxalate problem based on how we do the testing.
That’s also true in blood testing. We never test after a high oxalate meal. We test when you’re fasted in the morning after the body has cleared it out.
Urine and blood tests are notoriously terrible at documenting an oxalate problem. If you had high oxalate in either one, that’s a truth worth listening to. That’s telling you there is too much oxalate. That is not a false positive. But if you have a test that says no oxalate problem, that doesn’t mean you don’t have an oxalate problem. The test cannot tell you if you don’t. It can’t eliminate the possibility. Does that make sense?
Dr. Eric:
Yes. If someone has really high oxalates, then they really do have high oxalates. If it looks good or on the lower side, it’s probably not completely accurate. You can assume that most people, if not everyone, has high oxalates regardless of what it shows on the test.
Sally:
That’s why I have this symptom and exposure inventory on my website. I use it with my own clients. What’s better is the art of thinking about a person’s vulnerability. Do you have leaky gut? Do you have inflammatory tendencies, arthritis tendencies, or allergy tendencies? Do you eat a high oxalate diet? Did you ever? Do you use a lot of Vitamin C? Those are high exposures.
It’s ultimately over your human capacity, so you have been eating out of bounds for some amount of time. It might be two years, five, or 30. That’s a risk factor that’s for real. You’re probably overloaded with oxalate. Then you can see the symptom patterns and say, “You have a lot of problems that often show up with oxalate problems.” That’s more helpful.
Doing the diet itself can be a form of a test. A way of seeing what’s going on with the body. If you get low enough, sometimes the body will tell you things are changing around here. Some odd things might happen. Or you can be mostly low and then suddenly eat a big slab of keto chocolate birthday cake with almonds and sweet potatoes and chocolate and get really sick. Suddenly you are able to see that connection.
Dr. Eric:
You mentioned briefly Vitamin C. That’s another problem that you mention in your book, taking higher doses of Vitamin C. Anything that’s 1,000mg or higher is what you said. You don’t recommend regular Vitamin C supplementation?
Sally:
No, not at all. If you’re used to using a lot, you want to come down by halves and work your way out of high Vitamin C. Excess Vitamin C degenerates into oxalate in the body. It’s a major source of oxalate poisoning. The supplements are all 500mg or 1,000mg or more. That’s way beyond what you need. We’ve stretched the RDA all the way up to 90mg.
You don’t need a huge amount of Vitamin C unless you’re living on pure sugar. The higher the carbs in your diet, the more you need Vitamin C to deal with the oxidation and inflammatory stress. Vitamin C, you’re trying to feed your immune cells and take care of them and give them what they need. There’s a lot of them, but they only need so much. If you exceed what they need, the rest of it just can become poisonous to you.
It is a chemo toxic drug when you take these beyond our physiology doses. The body can barely handle 400mg a day. 250mg would be the upward bounds. Even when you’re sick or experiencing allergies, 250mg is usually enough for a day. Even that, I would spread it out into four doses. You can use foods like lemon juice and maybe a cherry to get smaller doses. It’s hard to find small doses.
Vitamin C supplementation is too common. It’s really sad that we think we’re helping our health yet again with Vitamin C and collagen and spinach, and it’s actually causing a poison in the background.
Dr. Eric:
When it comes to reducing oxalates, obviously you want to reduce the food and get rid of other sources such as mold. You did mention a few times that you don’t want to completely get rid of all oxalates, but you don’t want to make a dramatic decrease in the oxalates right away. It sounds like you want it to be a gradual process.
Sally:
We don’t know whose system is so overready to get rid of the oxalate. Remember, it collects in the thyroid gland. 85% of us, if you’re up to 50, you got oxalate in your thyroid gland. Your body doesn’t want it there. You have oxalate in your bone marrow, tendons, bones, kidneys. Your body may be queueing up to try to get rid of it, and it’s been trying in the background here and there. Now that you have stopped eating it, that gives the body total permission.
The reason it’s building up is because we’re eating it over and over. If you’re eating a high oxalate meal every four or five days, you’re maintaining oxalate deposits on the body. When you stop doing those high oxalate meals consistently for 3-5 days, that is enough space to give the body permission. “Okay, you’re not eating this junk anymore, so let’s clean house.”
You start cleaning house too fast if you go too fast. Some people’s systems start what I call vomiting oxalates out of tissues. That’s dangerous. Again, it’s the dose that makes the poison that can be toxic and dangerous. Some people get arrythmias and hypertension and all kinds of problems that cause them to end up in the emergency room after they stop eating spinach smoothies because their system is now in a toxic, cleaned up crisis.
You can avoid the crises pretty much if you get my book, which will help guide you through the complexities of this. Yes, it’s poisonous, but you still need a little bit of it to keep from having this autointoxication that is coming from the decumulation process that will take a long time and start and stop in vigorous ways that can be rough.
Dr. Eric:
How about calcium, magnesium citrate? Is that something people can take to benefit? As long as they are gradually reducing the oxalates in foods, they don’t need to supplement with those?
Sally:
Supplementation with citrates is helpful in many ways. Oxalates have been creating mineral deficiencies because it’s a mineral chelator. Oxalic acid is grabbing calcium and other minerals and disturbing the cells, so they’re losing minerals. You’re running on a mineral deficiency and a potential of a metabolic acidosis. As you’re clearing, you get into acidosis as well.
The citrates are so helpful. Calcium is a chalk. It’s the main binder that removes oxalate from the body. Calcium supports the body’s wish to get rid of oxalate. It hangs out in the gut because you don’t absorb a lot of it; you absorb 20% of the calcium in your food or a supplement. It stays there as it’s passing through the colon. You want the calcium in the colon.
The citrate molecule comes off as easily absorbed. You need that citrate molecule to protect your body, especially the kidneys. The molecule breaks down oxalate crystals. It softens them and protects the kidney and urinary tract. If you tolerate it, calcium citrate is the #1 therapeutic adjunct to the diet.
Magnesium, likewise. Often, you need to be taking some thiamine to help with magnesium use. Thiamine deficiency creates an endogenous production of oxalates with the hydroxyproline and so on, so you want to make sure you’re not thiamine deficient.
Potassium is another one. All of these citrates help to lower acidity, and that improves your chances of not getting kidney stones. As you’re releasing oxalate, you could create kidney stones when you stop eating oxalate because you have decumulation traffic that could be worse than your diet was on your kidneys.
That has always confused researchers. The oxalate diet doesn’t work because you get kidney stones after you go on a low oxalate diet. That’s because the low oxalate diet will trigger the decumulation process, which overwhelms the kidneys yet again.
The citrates will protect you from kidney stones and support the release process. It also helps to lower the acidosis, which can make you feel ill. The acidity is terrible for your long-term health. It can make you feel bad in the short-term in weird ways you don’t realize is acidity. In the long run, this mineral leaching and acidity creates osteoporosis and cancer, especially metastases of cancer, when you have acidic metabolism. The clearing turns on more inflammation. These crystals hanging around in your thyroid gland is turning on inflammation. Inflammation itself creates acidity and acidic stress.
Minerals are super helpful. You need them as binders. You need them to get rid of oxalates and improve your nutritional status and manage acidic and other disruptions of your homeostasis in the body. I highly encourage you playing around with them. They’re safe to use. The main thing is to try to get the diet right and use the adjuncts to support it so the decumulation process goes well and is safe.
Dr. Eric:
For those listening who have oxalates or oxalic acid deposited in the bones and glands such as the thyroid, which describes most people listening to this, if not everyone, can that be reversed? It sounds like it takes time, like years. It’s something that can be done, but it’s not something that will happen in six months or a year. I think you said it could take nine years in your case.
Sally:
It can take a very long time because the volume your bones hold is phenomenal compared to the kidneys or your vascular system and your skin. Everybody is trying to help get rid of it, including your gut.
Yes, there is no question your body will take on this housekeeping and try to get rid of the junk. It doesn’t want it there. Your body is doing it. You don’t need a special program or magic herb. You don’t have to tell your body to do its work. It wants to do its work. You just have to stop getting in the way. You have been blocking the body’s intent to get rid of this junk that it’s been holding on to because you have been eating it so much, so it hasn’t had room. If it was allowing this stuff to float around as you were eating more of it, you would have dropped dead of a heart attack or stroke. The body’s done this to protect you from a heart attack and kidney stones and vascular damage and a stroke.
Now that it’s clearing it out, it will have to take its time. If it all went quickly, you would drop dead. You would have a heart attack. Literally, it’s good that it takes 10 years to clean out. But it’s not good because it takes immune activity and inflammation to dig these crystals out of your tissues. That is stressful on the tissues. Even that can generate cancer cells and keep this autoimmunity stuff going.
The slower you can go, the less you will have this overactive immune system that leads to autoimmunity and continued problems with allergies or malaise that comes with being sensitive to everything. Yes, it’s reversible, but prevention is what is really- We don’t want to wait to get sick before we recognize that eating too much oxalate, more than we can handle, is eventually going to be bad news.
If we pay attention to the toxic effects of oxalates, we could prevent having all this inflammatory tissue damage and find out what human beings are supposed to be like. How much less pain we’re supposed to be in. All this aging we’re doing—this dementia, arthritis, osteoporosis, loss of mental acuity, loss of energy—is the kind of things that oxalate creates. Chances are you don’t have to be a feeble old person who needs a nursing home if you learn early enough in life not to eat so much oxalate.
This sounds so radical, but it’s just there in the science. Not to the level of funding where everybody is agreeing about that, but it’s pretty obvious when you start looking at it and living it. Living it is pretty convincing. I don’t want anyone to live my life. I would rather they not go through all the stuff I’ve been through.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you so much, Sally. You shared a lot of great information. If this excited you, like I never thought I’d be so excited to talk about oxalates, definitely check out Sally’s book Toxic Superfoods, which you can find on Amazon as well as other places books are sold. Can you remind people where else they can learn more about you?
Sally:
Come visit me on my website, SallyKNorton.com. There is a lot of free information there, some downloads. You can sign up for a group class and see some presentation slides. I’m on Instagram here and there. LinkedIn as well. Don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook, but I do have a Facebook page. If you need to reach out to me, my website is the best place to find me.
Dr. Eric:
Thank you again. It was great chatting with you about toxic superfoods.
Sally:
Thanks for your interest, Dr. Eric. It’s been great to get to know you a little bit. See you on the other side of the smoothie.
Dr. Eric:
Sounds good, thank you.
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