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Primal Foundations Podcast
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Primal Foundations Podcast
Episode 51: Toxic Superfoods with Sally K Norton, MPH
Sally K. Norton shares her powerful journey from health-conscious eater to chronically ill patient, and the surprising discovery that changed everything. After decades of unexplained pain, surgeries, and symptoms that baffled doctors, Sally found that the real culprit was oxalates—compounds found in popular “superfoods” like spinach, almonds, and sweet potatoes. These molecules can crystallize in the body, causing inflammation and tissue damage. Ironically, those most committed to eating clean may suffer the most. Sally breaks down how oxalates build up over time, why they affect people differently, and why standard blood tests usually miss them.
This episode offers practical advice on identifying high-oxalate foods, transitioning to a lower-oxalate diet, and rethinking common beliefs around food. From fruit and coffee to why milk chocolate may be a better choice than dark, Sally offers a science-backed perspective that could be the missing piece in your health puzzle.
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Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick--and How to Get Better
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Today's guest is Sally K Norton, an Ivy League nutritionist and renowned expert in the field of oxalates. She holds a bachelor's of science in nutrition at Cornell University, a master's in public health from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Sally has emerged as a leading voice on the impact of oxalates and shares her extensive research and insights in her book Toxic Superfoods. Sally, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's fun to be with you today. Thank you, Tony.
Speaker 1:I have to say I'm super excited to have you on and, you know, with this podcast I've had a bunch of different people on talking about you know their individual stories, about you know finding their own health path and health journey and I come from a plant based background that got into some, some health issues and found my way into keto and then eventually carnivore. But, uh, you know you provide a lot of science, kind of a low carb space and carnivore and just with all of your expertise. I just want to again start this out by thanking you for all your efforts and the information and the resource you put out and it's it's really affecting people all over the globe. So thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks for tuning in. I felt compelled to do this research because I destroyed my life, every aspect of my life, trying to eat healthy and missing the mark terribly Like. It was amazing how I would have so much knowledge, deciding to pursue nutrition, to do health promotion, in like 1977, when I was 12, and working so hard to do the right thing. You know, you would say, your plant base. It's been a big thing, the whole veggie movement since the 70s.
Speaker 2:And when I finally realized, despite working in medical schools, working with integrative practitioners, working with alternative practitioners, never none of us knew what was wrong with me. None of us could figure this out. And it turned out I was poisoning myself with my healthy, organic diet loaded with vegetables and I'm like, ah, like how could? If I couldn't figure it out with all the resources, who could? And so I felt compelled to really get some answers and figure out how to explain what the science really says. And I'm so honored that people are picking up on this message. And the reason it's happening is because this is a very common problem and a lot of us are at the end of our ropes about what the heck we're trying so hard to eat well and we're not getting the results we deserve.
Speaker 1:And you know, before we jump into oxalates and some of the information that you have in your book, you know you mentioned some things, but if you could share some of your backstory and the challenges you know you had, and then what led you to that investigating of oxalates?
Speaker 2:I had what seemed like a lemon of a body. I was having issues I mean, if I think about it way back and it was became real obvious in college. First of all, I needed really strong prescription lenses when I went to college, and then I needed bifocals. I needed both distance and close correction in college. So I'm in my I'm like 20, 21, 21 and I already need old people glasses what's up with that? But at the same time I wasn't able to walk to dinner. My feet were hurting so bad. I was really struggling on Cornell's campus to cope and function and get to class. I was in a tremendous amount of pain with my feet and eventually I had to leave and have foot surgery on both feet both feet at the same time, which is quite a big deal and I didn't recover well from that surgery. I, before the surgery and after, I swam a mile a day trying to get some blood flow in there and trying to help them heal.
Speaker 2:I was given all these orthotics and medications, especially beforehand, over five years of super, super high dose ibuprofen, because that's all I can tell you. This is ridiculous. And I eventually got off the orthotics and accidentally in retrospect I realized I quit eating Swiss chard and I was able to get in normal shoes and kind of look normal, but I was never able to exercise in ways that use your feet Like you know. Some ultimate Frisbee or anything like that Court sports, forget it. Even the sport of washing your dishes required shoes. So if I'm going to stand in my house or be in my house I had to wear shoes with side support. I couldn't go barefoot for 30 years. And then I also had all this arthritis. During those vegetarian years through the 20s I had so much arthritis that there was a couple of times when I didn't have the strength in my hands to turn the key in the lock at age 19 and all kinds of weird stuff that was happening. That was unexplained.
Speaker 2:And if I think back, you know when I was 12, I started having severe back pain issues. I would sometimes wake up with glitches in my back that would leave me like just for a second, as I was waking up in the morning, paralyzed, like I literally couldn't move my body. So there's something really weird neurologically going on there, like I literally couldn't move my body. So there's something really weird neurologically going on there. And as a little kid I was put on penicillin a lot for strep, throat and ear infections, to the point where they took out my tonsils at age five. So I actually think you know there's a lot to the story where that's often that's part of the story. Often you see these early childhood struggles with infections and later, when I was old enough to be a babysitter, we had an epidemic of ear tubes and all the kids were having ear problems all the time. What is that? Is that the soy formula and the early baby foods, I would now ask? Probably so.
Speaker 2:So I eventually had to give up my career completely. I had really bad bleeding, with hemorrhagic uterus, with fibroids, and needed a hysterectomy, and my back was so bad I was kneeling on my knees half the day because I couldn't sit in a chair. You know, 50 hours a week writing research grants and submitting them and ministering research grants and I had a hysterectomy. I'm like whoa, miss healthy needs hysterectomy. And they got in there loose blood scarring on the colon, endometriosis ovaries that were completely trashed and he's like he's gotta go to go. And I'm like, yeah, they've been having trouble the last few years. This has been bad like four years. He goes no, like forever. How could someone who's tried so hard to live a healthy life be such a mess? And I didn't recover well from that surgery and my doctor's like well, you look great, your numbers are perfect, and this is the thing about poisoning yourself with healthy foods is your blood work, of course, looks pretty good because you live in a good lifestyle, your blood pressure is low, everything's great, you're fine, except you're not. So we'll send you to the sleep doctor because we have no idea what's wrong with you.
Speaker 2:Well, that was a stroke of genius in a way, because the sleep lab that puts all the wires all over your head and your arms and legs and looks for like weird stuff showed that my brain couldn't stay asleep and it was waking up every well 29 times every hour, so that's like every two minutes. No wonder I wasn't able to read. Well, I wasn't able to do much. I had no mental energy, real difficulty focusing. You know they use this lack of sleep as a torture and it's probably a great way to make someone crazy. It was completely stopping my life and it took three years of research to figure out what's going on, because you know, in the literature they say that this sleep disorder, most sleep disorders are a form of toxicity and the most likely cause is endotoxemia from something like SIBO. We have bacterial overgrowth and you have too many bacteria dying and putting out toxins and you're poisoning your nervous system with too much fermentation basically going on, and that I thought for sure, well, that must be it, because I'm bloated and I just my digestion is terrible, so I've got to have it. So I'm treating that, even though the test showed I didn't have SIBO.
Speaker 2:And somehow, in the course of trying to fix my sleep disorder, thinking that I had to fix my gut so I could sleep, so I could live I experimented with oxalates in a way that gave me this breakthrough insight that my arthritis because it started coming back as I was adding in kiwi and things to my diet that I now understood were high oxalate now understood were high oxalate. So anyway, I had to do this darn like avoid oxalates, enough to get on a low oxalate diet because my arthritis was so bad and I really didn't want to do it because I have a sleep disorder and a digestive problem to fix. I'm trying to fix that, but the arthritis is, you just can't deal with it, you can't live like that and I went on this diet. I quit my Swiss chard, which a couple times a week't live like that and I went on this diet. I quit my Swiss chard, which a couple times a week, daily sweet potatoes and at that time it was mostly daily kiwi Quit that and within less less than 10 days probably about a week my brain was coming back. All kinds of things are coming back. My pain level was way down and within seven or eight months of that time when I started, I was now able to wear high heels for over seven hours at a wedding in a way that I had never done in my whole life. My feet were finally acting like normal people's feet people's feet. Here I am 50 years old at that time. Finally, I have feet that work.
Speaker 2:I was doing this for arthritis but it turned out the neurotoxicity, the connective tissue problems, the inflammation in the body, the connective tissue problem being foot pain can be a connective tissue disorder. Any kind of pain can be If the connective tissues aren't having their normal strength and elasticity. Elasticity has limits, appropriate limits. That maintains the shape, structure and function of that tissue. And the foot has particular structures for its function. It has multiple arches that give it this strength, elasticity and toughness to be able to take impact over and over again and maintain their shape and their function. Well, if your connective tissue is loose and weak and too stretchy, that causes pain and I realize now it was connective tissue perpetual damage from the diet just a few kiwi every day is enough to make that connective tissue not function well. And as I got off the oxalates now the normal activity, the proper stretch and strength and structure maintenance in the foot, was restored.
Speaker 1:This could be wrong. I don't know if this is true, but you do speeches when you do like keynotes. You actually do it barefoot.
Speaker 2:I have yes.
Speaker 1:That's badass.
Speaker 2:I love that do it barefoot I have. Yes, that's badass, I love that. Yeah, I do love barefoot living. I do love my little toe shoes and way, way back in the day Marxist, you know, has keyed me off on that and it just makes sense for me completely. I never liked the structure. The shoes I always wore were Sebago moccasins that have no arch. All it has is that side support of that nice moccasin structure which is a classic shoe. Right, the classic structure of a shoe is a moccasin. But to let your toes function is so exciting and let your feet function and to kind of Corvette-like to have road feel right. Your feet function into kind of Corvette, like to have road feel right. Why are you up on a big bouncy Mercury shoe that's just squishy, soft and taking away your structure and disabling your foot and thus your knees and your hips and your alignment. Yeah, I won't preach anymore about that. Not everybody loves the barefoot thing, but I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it. I just got a pair of. I've never had earth runners. Uh, I just got a pair, but I'm a big advocate. I work out barefoot. Uh, I know we're supposed to be talking about vegetables and stuff, but like this is important.
Speaker 2:Like the gym does not throw me out for throwing off my shoes and sometimes my socks, I can go, they don't care, they're cool.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Uh yeah, barefoot's the best. And for context, for the listeners, you start to kick out some of these different foods. Some of that might not be familiar.
Speaker 2:What are oxalates and what foods are they commonly in? Oxalates? Is this plural term oxalate, oxalates, oxalates? Is this plural term oxalate, oxalates, oxalic acid. The mother compound is oxalic acid, which is a little tiny two carbon molecule with four oxygens on it that has a charge, a positive, a negative charge, and it can drop another proton and have a double negative charge. So this is an ion, that an ion has this charge of polarity. I don't know if anybody remembers chemistry in high school, but water is a polar molecule, right? So it's water soluble. Because it has charges, it has different sides that have different plus minus tendencies. So it's an important thing to remember because if you start thinking about the foods that this acid can be in, it's not going to be in a polar and non-polar molecule like a fat, so you can take a food that has high oxalic acid and the oxalates. So, because it has a charge, it connects with things with positive charge Minerals and when it's connected with a mineral, that's an oxalate. And the oxalates are calcium oxalate, which is the most prominent one in nature.
Speaker 2:Calcium oxalate is the main ingredient in almost all kidney stones. Something like 80 percent of kidney stones are built from calcium oxalate and your doctor will call it a calcium stone, but calcium is an innocent bystander that's been robbed from some tissue like your urine while you're forming urine in your kidneys and starts to crystallize. So you get the calcium oxalate coming together and it has this charge and it's prone to crystallizing. You get pairs of them lining up. You get about eight or 12 pairs and they can precipitate out, which is a chemical term for things dissolved suddenly become solids. So dissolved ions become solids and they form these little nano crystals that start growing into bigger crystals and they can get. For some people their kidneys aren't handling that crystallization as well as others there's 12 percent of the population or so don't quite have all the redundant systems completely awesome enough to handle that crystallization and they're prone to kidney stones.
Speaker 2:So too much oxalate in the diet sometimes the first sign you have that's causing you problems is a kidney stone, but in fact that's a late stage sign. It means you have been overdoing oxalate in your diet for too long and there's probably a whole bunch of other things going on in your body because really this soluble oxalic acid is leaving the body through the water exit routes. Right the kidneys get rid of toxins in the blood that are water soluble, versus the bile and the stuff that's happening in the colon. You're excreting toxins that are more fat soluble through liver and bile, but the kidneys are taking, cleaning out the watery substance of the blood. That takes out this oxalic acid, where you get this crystal formation. That's the end of the line of something that came into your body through your mouth, because most of the oxalate in your diet despite all the mythology and denial out there that likes to claim otherwise, most all the oxalate in your diet is coming from your diet and from your oxalate in your food is providing what's in your body. So let's get this straight because I said that wrong. Most of the oxalate that's in your bloodstream and in your organs and ending up in your urine is coming from your food. And, number two, your vitamin c the vitamin c that's fortified in foods and in your supplements. So you have complete control over how much oxalic acid you consume once you know what foods are in. So what the heck foods are they in? Spinach, chard, beet, greens, sorrel, quinoa, bran, beets, sweet potatoes, almonds, cashews, peanuts, potatoes, dark chocolate, tea. You know, listen to them. And most of those foods are considered really great, except they're not, and this is this fantasy that's never been proven.
Speaker 2:That was a concept in nutrition, in research circles, of this sort of phytonutrients that plants have special planty things that have potentially beneficial qualities and we call them nutrients which they're not, because they're not essentially necessary for cell life to have these phyto things that are only in plants polyphenols and tannins and this kind of thing properties interacting with your digestive system, your body, your microbiome, and as they get processed by the bacteria in your gut, sometimes they can do some beneficial things for some people if they have the right genetics and the right bacteria. The rest of the time they're pretty questionable and usually considered toxins, these planty phytonutrients. So we? But we've been sold the spill of goods because it sells supplements, it sells magazine covers, it sells products. It's really great for the whole economic machinery of the food industry because produce is one of these perishable items that bring you out for retail activity because it's so perishable you have to go back and get your lettuce supply every four days or so to have fresh foods. And we built a whole economy based on sort of california as the veggie basket of the world kind of thing and the nut basket and all this transportation, big system of refrigeration and so on that the produce based idea for nutrition is built on. So you know, we've been told we've got to have all these vegetables, based on a concept that was really internal for the researchers but got picked up for marketing, and so we've been told so long, veggies are good for you. Good for you.
Speaker 2:It goes back way long If you think about World War I and World War II. There was this whole victory garden thing, which was propaganda to kind of say get busy because you're helping the war effort, you're desperately. Your son just was killed or whatever. Just keep growing vegetables, it's good for the war effort. You know, people are really struggling economically and culturally and personally over the devastation of world war, one which is just awful, especially in in england and britain. Boy were they getting their asses whipped.
Speaker 2:You know, and it was, uh, government propaganda they did this whole fake thing about we have a special diet for the english pilots so they can see better at night and bomb german targets better, and we're giving them carrots. And this was to disguise the, the new technologies that was allowing some success with nighttime raids, with bombing. But we didn't want to reveal the technology so that the government created this fake thing about carrots and vision and so on. So we've been promoting vegetables just for government propaganda, for war secrets. You know it wasn't really for health. So we're saturated and in garbage information and in the oxalate world there's so much garbage information out there and so much I mean even in the medical literature, you're gonna see titles and headlines are just nonsense.
Speaker 1:I mean I've heard of the Victory Gardens thing but I didn't know that's the carrot piece of fighter pilots. It's very interesting and the guidelines right. It seems like people are putting you know, eat the rainbow type stuff in the guidelines for health. Is that just kind of like misguided or, you think, very purposeful?
Speaker 2:Well, it's hard to read into the motives of the guidelines or any individual person, but we have universally accepted, really since the dawn of defining vitamins in the early, you know, over a hundred years ago, we were chemically finding vitamins and figuring out where they were and why they were necessary for health.
Speaker 2:And in these early studies they could use, you know, turnip greens and things like this and see a benefit to growing animals in the lab and we're able to justify the idea that vegetables were providing important nutrients. And in that time we were a rural country and people didn't have the affluence we have now and home gardens was pretty standard. So this was considered, from the elite's point of view, a way to keep the poor nourished and letting them know they could grow some of their own foods and they could be vegetables and you can can them yourself. And if you use vegetables, that's a way to stay, keep the population decently healthy, hopefully, and have the poor be able to live on bad salaries, because the elites were not so interested in the poor getting good salaries as they were making sure that they didn't waste their money on beef when they could grow turnip greens yeah, yeah, it's.
Speaker 1:Uh, it's very interesting what the the guidelines have ever been. I feel like the old school food pyramid to my plates, to a couple of other things. Now that I just saw the other day there's a ketogenic pyramid that's like peer reviewed and that's been out there. Yeah, it just like started popping up on my feet in the past couple of days of some research.
Speaker 2:So it's just like this ongoing endeavor of when I started school at Cornell, there was a big wave of oh, you know, now vegetarian is considered okay. In the early 80s was the first time the American Dietetics Association, which now has a different name, was willing to concede that a vegetarian diet could be nutritionally adequate concede because we always knew that animal foods were. And this was kind of finally, a propaganda wave was winning and invading that profession, and that's because many professors were doing vegetarian diets and wanted this to occur. A lot of people come into the field of nutrition already believing vegetables are the better way to eat. I mean, that's how we've been raised for a long time. You know, each parents have been telling their poor little children around the dinner table to eat their vegetables for a long, long, long time, and so we grow up with this bias that vegetables are a requirement and they're more moral, and so there's a lot of moralism that can drive nutrition. You can see how they would go together. You know eat right, be good, do good, and then you would connect this kind of don't eat animals as kind of a negative idea, because there's obvious death there, where, with the vegetable foods and the grains, the death is hidden under the combines and the other destruction of the soil and the chemicals involved and all of that where the death of the animals we can pretend isn't happening, where the death of the animals we can pretend isn't happening. So I really think it was right.
Speaker 2:Actually, from the dawn, with the whole Seventh-day Adventist thing, there was many movements way back, way back when there was no knowledge of nutrition anywhere, we didn't know about vitamins yet, and there was this moralism because we had problems with alcoholism and we tended to turn to God and preachers for guidance, and so the puritanical kind of approach was you're beating your wife, you're drunk all the time, you need to quit eating meat because you're sleeping around and the meat is making you bad and the meat is making you masturbate.
Speaker 2:Stop eating meat and be good. You know there was really this preaching going on and there was people like graham, with the graham crackers named after, trying to live on just bran and apples, and some real elites trying to do that way back. And so there's been this long history of making associating meatating with carnal pleasures and immorality and associating denial and partial starvation as something good, because in many traditions fasting is a form of getting closer to God. So if you self-denial a form of getting closer to God. So there's lots of angles where the culture's been infused with the idea that plant foods are superior.
Speaker 1:If I'm not mistaken, it's also a piece of Dr Kellogg's, if I'm not mistaken, where they did want people lusting, so they gave them the cereal and then today it's on every shelf and it's even labeled, you know, like this is the healthy version. Remember New Kellogg's with berries or what have you? It's so interesting just to go in through this.
Speaker 2:He was a Seventh-day Adventist and he was setting tight for Ellen White when he was 12. So he was traumatized by her writings and very afraid of sex and never consummated his marriage and adopted all his children.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow it felt that nobody should touch their genitals, and that was really the driver, and he and his brother developed these. Well, he actually hired a woman who was sort of a nursing student to help him develop these moral foods, where you'd replace meat with ground up nuts and they used nuts and created the nut meats and created these grain based things that became breakfast cereal and the whole thing is really designed to sort of castrate you.
Speaker 1:This timeline is insane. It's very insane.
Speaker 2:It's fun, interesting stuff, and if people stop and see that we're not thinking straight because we've been saturated in cultural messages and we don't know where they're coming from. We don't know where they came from, we just know their cultural truisms and you do not want to give up your cultural truisms. This gives you a sense of security. Your kindergarten teacher told you this. Your grandma told you this, your mom told you this. It's got to be right.
Speaker 1:This is the scary part, and you can speak to this a lot more than I can but the effects of oxalates on the body with the short and the long term. There are people that have these short term kind of side effects versus. You might not be seeing some of this stuff until 20, 30 years down the road. So for myself I've kicked. I had a lot of like health issues like belphritis and the eyes was a big one for me, and then once I kicked out Vegetables basically and went carnivore and keto, like it. I haven't had a flare-up at all and for me it's like, oh my god, like I'm so glad that that flare-up happened for me. But I can see why people are like you don't eat vegetables. Oh, that's unhealthy. I eat vegetables all the time. I'm super healthy, I feel great, but today, right. So can you speak about the short-term versus the long-term and where things get misconstrued a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and we could go into the details about how the body ends up accumulating, and maybe we'll get there in a second. But I think just first and foremost looking at the principle of cause and effect in disease, your body does not show often that you have a disease, going on until things are really bad. So you often don't get a cancer diagnosis till you're stage four and you're within six months of death. And you don't know you have hypertension until someone measures it. You may not know for a long time that your liver is fatty or that you're getting a form of cirrhosis, sometimes with the eyes. You can tell because they're burning, itching, driving you crazy. You need glasses, they're putting out gunk, they're getting ice dyes, you're getting whatever, but the doctor has no idea what's causing it. Right, so you can even have symptoms. But since there's never been a connection between a, say, swiss chard lifestyle and your eye issues, you're not gonna connect them. And that's the point of my work is that there is a connection.
Speaker 2:There is stress right away in the body because when you eat your high oxalate foods, like sweet potatoes for example, you're getting both crystals that the plants make of calcium, oxalate crystals, and you're getting oxalic acid. The crystals are so hard that they're harder than teeth and you can literally wear your teeth down. That's how tough those are. They're microscopic, like really invisible glass dust. In your food. There's also the oxalic acid invisible glass dust in your food. There's also the oxalic acid. So the two of them together are pretty abusive to your mucosal lining of your mouth, throat, stomach intestines and so on. Elementary canal is all like oh great glass, not lovely. Acid that's messing up my membrane structures and my cells oh lovely. And the acid gets into the bloodstream from the stomach and upper small intestine. It goes between the cells and starts acid gets into the bloodstream from the stomach and upper small intestine. It goes between the cells and starts riding around in the bloodstream affecting the walls of your capillaries, arteries and veins, affecting the function of the red blood cells and the white blood cells. And within 40 minutes of, say, a spinach smoothie, the circulating monocytes in the white blood cell system are putting out pro-inflammatory chemicals and they themselves are not able to fight infection. So you may not notice that your healthy vegetarian diet is giving you sinus infections, yeast infections, repeated bladder infections and that you struggle and you're the guy who's got to have a Kleenex box nearby or something and you're always like wondering if you should call the doctor for the next round of antibiotics, because your immune system isn't working well.
Speaker 2:And you're also your barrier function, so we use this term barrier function the, the, the linings of mucosal membranes are providing a barrier between the outside world and your inner world. So the mucosal membranes are providing a barrier between the outside world and your inner world. So the mucosal membranes of your nose and your eyes and your stomach and so on, that's all protecting you. Your bladder lining, those are important tissues that have to have integrity and health. They have qualities that allows you to interface with toxins and bacteria and so on and successfully carry on.
Speaker 2:But the damage from the crystals and the oxalic acid exposure every meal, day in and day out, because you had hash browns for breakfast and you put spinach on your subway sandwich and then you had sweet potatoes for dinner and then you had some chocolate and some snacks of the almonds or something, you're exposing that bloodstream for hours. The worst peak is probably at four hours, but already at 40 minutes your blood cells are damaged and it's going to continue that exposure in the bloodstream for hours, maybe eight or ten hours. After breakfast, after lunch, after dinner, you get a little break. By morning you finally got a little break because you've had 12 or 13 hours without food and right away you're back at it with some like chia bowl or some foolish modern food. Oh no, so you're basically creating a what's considered transient and very hard to measure almost impossible measure high oxalate levels in your bloodstream.
Speaker 2:And that bloodstream is delivering it not just in the capillaries and the arteries, but it's going straight into the cells of the liver and then, through the bloodstream it passes from there up into the heart and is infusing the heart tissue and then going into the lungs infusing the lung tissue. Coming back to the heart again. This is just the path that blood takes as it goes past your intestines and this is the route it takes and then it gets pumped out from that last chamber of the heart into the peripheral circulation and eventually gets picked up by the kidneys and a lot of it is getting peed out. But in the meantime it's all over the body and it can get anywhere and it starts to collect in tissues. Certain tissues are more prone than others. It will collect there, especially if there's any kind of cell death or cell regeneration.
Speaker 2:So if your cells are just naturally reproducing and healing, they're prone to collecting oxalate. If they're injured, if there's little bits of cell debris around, that helps that precipitation process where the acid starts becoming crystallized and then it sticks to the dead material that can't defend itself and you can start getting these accumulations. And the eye is one of the most common areas for accumulations to occur. The bones, the bone marrow, the kidneys, the eyes, that's like the top four, but it's in your brain, it's messing up your nervous system potentially, and where it's collecting is pretty unique to each individual person. So there's a little idiosyncratic kind of tendency here where each person ends up with a different picture of what kinds of problems show up, when they show up, how many show up, where they are in the body is very individual, which makes it hard, under our typical style of thinking about symptoms and causes and diagnoses, to see it.
Speaker 1:When you mentioned the antibiotics thing, it hits me home so much because, again, with the flare-ups in my eyes, they could not figure it out. Basically, I got put on doxycycline multiple. I'm talking every month. I was on doxycycline, so I'm still having my spinach smoothie with my chia seeds and all that stuff and eating plant-based thinking. I'm doing well or eating right, and I'm on antibiotics. I'm doing this. I'm just perpetuating this over and over again. I say it all the time.
Speaker 1:To me it wasn't like the most craziest like health issue in the world, but it was affecting my life. It was literally affecting my life, because it looked like I got punched in the face once a month in my eyes. So, um, but yeah, just that was the big thing for me. I mean, I'm so lucky I found this path and kind of went to the keto and carnivore space. But I think I was lucky because if I didn't take the leap of faith and try it out, I don't know where I would be right now. I don't know how my health or how I would feel, how my eyes would have been. You know, at some point I was actually getting pretty big bald spots in my head too as well.
Speaker 2:So Did your hair come back.
Speaker 1:It did I wish it. I mean every guy thinks wishes it was a little fuller in my mid to late 30s here. But no, I was getting like a little almost like quarter size bald spots in my head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, patchy hair.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I actually had it. I got it when I was plant-based. It was more prevalent, but I actually had it when I was a kid and they're like, oh, it's alopecia. He's got alopecia and so they were in. Jack, I forgot what they ejected me with, but then they said, oh, it's either alopecia or he's really stressed out. I'm like I'm 10. I don't know how much stress I could have in my life at 10, but uh, I just remember going to the doctor, getting shots in the back of my head and eventually.
Speaker 2:I came back. Oh, that's dramatic. Yeah, that's not what you want to be doing at 10.
Speaker 1:No, not at all yeah and this chronic doxy.
Speaker 2:This is a real sign and we shouldn't settle for. You just need antibiotics, like that's what the system's willing to do, and the consumer or the sick person has very little other choice. And this information is so empowering empowering and it's so easy like to pick five or six foods that you don't need and just set them aside, because it does end up getting very serious if you let this go over time. So you can go along feeling fine, nothing's wrong, but you're putting up with normal stuff and you're kind of like pretending it's not really a thing, because, after all, you don't want to open yourself up to the idea that you need to change what you do. So you're just going to pretend everything's okay until it's really not, or you're going to keep trying.
Speaker 2:This is the worst case than the common case. You start having issues with brain fog, fatigue, aches and pains, whatever. You've got tendonitis, you've got plantar fasciitis, you've got carpal tunnel, you've got whatever. And you can't hike anymore and you're no fun and you're talking about your symptoms and you're trying hard. So you get a blender and you start making spinach smoothies and having more chia bubbles because this healthy stuff is going to be great for me and I got to stop eating all that bacon and fat and butter. And you're going all healthy and it's getting worse. And this is just gets me in my moral core, like if you're making an effort to change your life, change your diet, eat better, try to be healthy so you can win at life, and and it's having the opposite effect. It's just so unfair because those people who are proactive and making, trying to make a difference for themselves and their families by eating well are being punished for doing so in the long run.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. And when people either people get symptoms early on or get this information like, okay, I want to make a change right. What are some first steps that they should be looking at? Because I get the question a lot from my family members, from people on the podcast, of do I go carnivore right away, carnivore right away? I'm like, I'm like I don't know if that's the best. They want to go carnivore, like you know, cold turkey.
Speaker 2:Or is it a slow trickle effect of like start slowly taking things out Right? So for for people who are just not quite symptomatic yet with the oxalate problems and you're just trying to like really improve your diet, you want to start with getting enough protein, you know. So get used to getting animal proteins at every meal. It's just start getting comfortable with that. And in the meantime, let's look at these high oxalate foods in your diet. So what are they? Pick your top five things and it may only be potatoes, spinach, salads and blackberries. You know it could only be a short list. And then you what you need to know about all the other high-oxid foods. You don't adopt them by mistake and just trade one bad high-oxid food for another. So the first thing you want to do is get like my worst offenders list. You can get that on my website. You can in toxic superfoods the book there's. It's like listed three times at least in there. You can get the beginner's guide from my website. Tons of tables in there, right?
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:With lists over and over again to try to get you know. It's very hard to learn this new information. You need to rely on a reliable source and don't expect yourself to memorize anything and don't just go out there on the internet, because the internet has no good idea about what's high oxalate and what isn't. Your average dietitian has no idea either. Like the level of foolish ignorance on even where the oxalate and food is really shocking. I was my innocence was over when I started like just looking for like usda and so on. Usda numbers are horrible numbers put out by the american. Uh, what do we call them now? The dietitians? The dietitian organization of america is putting out tables in textbooks that are completely full of garbage data. So it takes a real looking at primary literature and looking at how they tested the food and the quality of those tests to really pull out testing to know what foods are high and what the numbers are. And that's what I've done with the data companion and in my book is try to get it right. And that doesn't mean it's 100% perfect. But knowing what foods are high oxalate would be kind of like learning high fat, low fat, high protein, no protein, like just getting to know your food with a slightly more important angle. Your macros don't begin to matter as much as your toxicity embedded in natural foods. So that learning process, patience, patience, patience and come back to the well. Come back. Come back and let it soak in and get this knowledge as part of who you are, because the culture won't reinforce it, you're just going to be out in the world. It's like, oh, that stuff is so good for you. You got to have spinach, you got a vegetable and you're getting disabled by contradictory messages and the new information doesn't hang in your brain that well. So the biggest thing is like accept that this is valuable information for your well-being. If not today, you're going to age a lot better. You're going to do a lot better. You're going to have better bones, better tendons, happier kidneys, better teeth. You're not going to have tooth pain. You're not going to lose your teeth and have dental caries.
Speaker 2:So many good things can happen if you stop poisoning yourself with this stuff. So many good things can happen if you stop poisoning yourself with this stuff and so pick the things, like if you're doing Swiss chard, I promise you, if you never eat Swiss chard again, you're not going to miss it, you won't. And almond milk? Just coconut milk instead. So those are two things you can do real fast. No more chard and no more almond milk. Use something else. Dairy milk would be best. If you can't do the dairy milk, try a coconut milk.
Speaker 2:You know spinach most all the greens are low oxalate. All the lettuces, watercress, arugula, all the stuff from the cabbage family, cabbage itself, turnip greens, kale collard that stuff is pretty low. Even kale is pretty low. So spinach, chard and beet greens three little tiny things you can live without in the dark leafy green family. The problem is prevention messages are saying dark leafy greens and those are the ones people pick. So let's go for, like, medium leafy greens and have some nice romaine lettuce and have a good time. Those little swaps are pretty easy. And instead of the almonds and the nuts like crazy, why not some cheese or some salami or some pumpkin seeds?
Speaker 2:If you want to go with the plant-based, you can literally stay vegan or vegetarian and lower your oxalate level and save your body.
Speaker 2:You don't have to go carnivore necessarily to benefit from the oxalate information. And this is lovely, because people who are resistant to the idea of a meat-centric diet can gradually over time, get comfortable with the idea that vegetables aren't all they're cracked up to be and once they've done this low oxalate long enough, that makes them realize that we're actually intended to eat animal foods and they'll start to relax and you can convince them to have some bacon, scrambled eggs and cheese souffle and things that are more animal based and kind of relax. It's actually easier to not force yourself to have 11 servings of this or that, like vegetables are a little bit optional people and you can just relax a little. So, taking time to move your mindset, which is moving away from the culture, take some patience and some people are quick changers and other people just you know they maybe need support someone in their family who's like, yeah, bacon's okay yeah, I, I, I get things all the time.
Speaker 1:I went through a huge like weight, like my weight would go up and down, up and down, like big yo-yo type stuff. And then I finally in a place where I've I love the way that I look right now I, I perform well, my strength is good, like everything is great. And people come up to me and they ask me if they haven't seen me in a very long time and they'll be like oh my god, you look great. You look, you look kind of the same as you did in high school, a little bit like you look like what do you do? And I'll tell them yeah, I kind of just, you know real low carb and I just do kind of carnivore. And they're like immediately the switch of like, oh, like you're gonna have a heart attack kind of thing. It's like immediately shut off.
Speaker 1:But you mentioned it like we've been taught this since we've been knee high to the ground. Our parents have taught us this. And again, like reward system of eating your vegetables, to like you can't have the rest of this until you eat your, your vegetables. You're like OK, I guess. And then I had Courtney Luna on.
Speaker 1:She's a lovely individual you know, courtney, and uh, yeah she's great and she talks about salads, because I've mentioned I. Go in your cookbook. It says you have salads like people get a little, a little concerned, like the carnivore community. She's like yeah, it's a meat salad. She goes people, if you really look at the salads, people are only putting the lettuce and stuff in there because they think they need that. But what do you really want? You want, look at the salads, people are only putting the lettuce and stuff in there because they think they need that. But what do you really want? You want the bacon, the hard boiled eggs, like the dressing, and all the cheese. That's what you go for and then like there's. You just like finish the lettuce because I feel like I'm supposed to do that. Well, you don't need to do that.
Speaker 2:Like it's not a big thing, but I think the of the lettuce is kind of like the taco shell, what you want is the taco filling right, exactly, yeah, it's the holder, I mean nice parmesan cheese and like the classic caesar salad tons of cheese in there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anchovies interesting, I'm all for that. Yeah, I've had, uh, I've had her cookbook and I I've actually given it to my sister. I have a twin sister who's going on carnivore and low, low carb and she's lost tons of weight. It looks phenomenal. She'll send me stuff from the cookbook. But we're affecting I know I'm going on a tangent of affecting people but people in my inner circle or my circle around me have been affected by my changes and asking me questions. And this is the piece why I do the podcast and this is why I love sharing these stories, because it really only takes a few people just to kind of start making a little bit of a difference.
Speaker 2:So it's very exciting in the oxalate aware sort of community you might call it where people who are learning this are seeing it in the grocery store or someone might. They might meet someone in an elevator who's saying I've got this severe thing. I'm here to see the doctor and I'm really afraid. I think they're gonna tell me I only have so many months to live and my people will recognize it. Oh, you have fibrosis. Do you also have thyroid problems? Do you have arthritis? Have you had a kidney stone? Have this, that? And they're like yeah, yeah, yeah, what. Yeah, what do you eat? It's like you need to check out Sally's book. Like, so this is going on, this sort of doctoring. It goes on in checkout aisles, it goes on in the produce aisle. Like people really really care when they see what this has done to their health and they see other people around doing it and actually it's much easier to affect a stranger than your sister typically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I want to touch base on this before we start to wrap up. Is oxalate dumping right? Somebody that has gotten these symptoms and whatever they showcase and they want to go into a low-carb space or at least eliminate oxalates? What's a worry or concern about oxalate dumping and what is it?
Speaker 2:Right. So there is this accumulation of eating at every meal for years and years and it's too much for the bloodstream to hold on to, too much for the bloodstream delivered to the kidneys and the body's protecting the kidneys and having to hold on to it. It's in your bone marrow, your bones, your eyes, your teeth, your jaw, your organs, your brain you name it your liver, your heart. There is oxley deposits potentially anywhere in your body and that is a workaround. That is a waiting and holding pattern, waiting for the moment where the tissues can deaccumulate this stuff and clean it out. They're just doing it because they have to, because you keep eating it, eating and eating it. But if you stop eating enough oxalate to really make the rest of the tissues concerned, if they put it into the bloodstream or give it to the kidneys right now, it could kill everybody, like they're.
Speaker 2:This is wise thinking on the part of the teeth or whatever like. Let's just leave it here. So there's a change in your whole metabolism from this holding mode or sequestration mode to a recovery, deaccumulation mode, and if it all turns on at once because you went low really fast and now you're not eating any oxalates at all, within three days, the cells can outfit themselves and turn around and start putting it out of them and putting it into the bloodstream. Now, putting oxalic acid into your bloodstream from your thyroid gland or your teeth or your shoulder joint could start to affect the calcium levels in your blood. You see, because oxalic acid does what Grabs minerals, it loves calcium, calcium loves it. So right there in the blood stream you could start lowering your calcium available, calcium ions in the blood.
Speaker 2:This is a terrible idea that calcium level, these ions in your blood, the blood has to be just so. If not, the pacemaker in the heart isn't working right and you start getting arrhythmias, you get hypertension, you get heart pounding, you get a stroke. You can you'll end up in the emergency room. If this, if your calcium levels are are dipping so low. And when the calcium levels are low, what does the body got to do? It's got to turn on a hormone that tells the bones give me some calcium, I need calcium so we keep the heart running, we need this now. So you start again mining calcium out of your blood. Every time you oxalates, you're mining calcium and you're ending up peeing out calcium. You're wasting potassium, you're becoming mineral deficient. Now you're so mineral deficient because you've eaten these high oxalate foods for long. Now you're putting it back into the bloodstream in a mineral deficient body and you're messing with your electrolytes and you're messing with the cell function throughout the body and it can get really toxic for many reasons beyond that.
Speaker 2:The immune system is the one turning on, lighting up, attacking and eating crystals, and this is all pro-inflammatory cytokines. And these cytokines and chemicals that go involved with the monocytes trying to phagocytize or eat these crystals can change tissues and literally change their DNA. It causes energy crises in cells. You get aberrant expression, expression meaning you've got this DNA in yourself, which is a giant cookbook of recipes about how to be a cell. And there's you can be a bone cell, you can be a tendon cell, you can be all those things. Well, if you're like breast cell, you can learn to become a bone cell and start producing calcium. And so oxalate causes calcification of the body because it's damaging the DNA and damaging the genetic expression, and cells are changing over from normal to some weird bone-like cell. They're also becoming cancerous. So this thumping involves your immune system attacking crystals and creating a very sort of immune, toxic body where the whole reversal of this toxicity that you now have a body overloaded with oxalate and now you have to get rid of it. But the getting rid of it is a bit of a dangerous process.
Speaker 2:So this is why I'm often telling people well, how is your beet juice going? We need to put back. If you say you're carnivore, you're zero oxalate diet, and that's giving carte blanche to this body deaccumulation, dumping it out all over the place and you want to slow that down. So you tell the body. No, that's too much all at once. Let's calm everybody down. You're much better just leaving it there instead of moving it around. Hazmat materials need to stay in place until you have a proper way of handling it and moving it out of the site. You don't just whip up hazmat materials and just stir up a pot. You have to be very careful. So you tell the body be more careful and you take some tea or some sweet potato or some beet juice or some dark chocolate and you can slow that decumulate, because you will sometimes you'll get quite sick with this dumping. You can.
Speaker 2:It's more than just arrhythmias, it's misery and you can see it sometimes with the urine because the you'd be peeing out enough oxalate that. Sometimes that's crystallizing and you see cloudy urine.
Speaker 1:That's a sign for also helping the binding of the oxalates is is it preferable to have more of like a dairy or like a hard cheese as well?
Speaker 2:yes, you want, we need to up. The calcium is the number one binder. You don't need other binders. Calcium is the binder and we need calcium happening like four times a day and usually you need to add a supplement.
Speaker 2:Really, if you're really sick with oxalates, you're going to need to add calcium as a supplement, usually starting at bedtime. You need to match that up with magnesium for balance and for gut function, because sometimes too much cheese or too many forms of calcium can be a little bit constipating for some people and usually some trace minerals to kind of balance out the effects of more calcium which you need in the gut. We're mostly taking it to keep it in the gut because you only absorb maybe 20 percent of calcium that you consume. It's mostly staying as a binder in the gut but also affecting absorption of other things, so adding trace minerals, and so we get into supplements often to manage this mess. Because you're electrolyte deficient, you need more potassium, you need that, you need the calcium as a binder, you need more magnesium, you need the trace minerals as well. So often there's supports and I talk about a lot of that in toxic superfoods.
Speaker 1:I think that's super important to let people know about, like that is could be the potential of oxalate dumping if you kind of cut cold turkey. But I kind of also want to transition to leaving some hot takes into this fruit coffee, uh, and dark chocolate, all right, those are the three things I always get asked about as well. Uh, what's your stance on fruit? Is it the same as just finding the low oxalates or it's something to? It's a little bit more acceptable than vegetables?
Speaker 2:Fruit is way less soluble, it's more the crystals. So the crystals stick to the fibers and the things in the fruit and you're not getting as much oxalate from those fruits. But the fruits that are bad are starfruit kiwis of whole pomegranate, not so good when you turn it to juice. Most of them are much lower in oxalate. So if you, if you can handle the sugars of fruit, juice would be the lowest oxalate form of fruit. But generally, except for those ones I mentioned, fruits are mostly okay unless you're doing tons of grapefruit and tons of certain like the clementines and tangelos tend to be high. But fruits are a much better deal and I think some people really, especially us middle aged women, cannot stick with a. What I think is a therapeutic approach of pure keto, ultra low carb is short-term therapy, long-term stress. So I encourage people, if they feel they're sleeping better, not getting leg cramps and generally have more energy and are happier, that carbs like fruits are probably a good idea for those people.
Speaker 2:Coffee I've never been a coffee person. I think life is okay without it, but it is the number one acceptable addiction out there and people are so bonded with it. But it is the number one acceptable addiction out there and people are so bonded with it it's part of the ritual of their day. It's a great comfy teddy bear for an adult you know little security blanket kind of thing and it's something you can save for later when you want to be really up in your game. I don't think you want to tell yourself you can't have coffee.
Speaker 2:If you're doing all these other great changes, you really should get credit for any positive change. You know and say I'm going to sell the coffee question until I'm ready to tackle it, but be honest with the fact that that coffee's kind of a crutch and then dark chocolate is high oxalate, full of cadmium, lead and theobromide and problems. But you, if you get a nice clean one that's been tested, that's low in cadmium and lead, I actually encourage people you can use it as an oxalate dosing tool and have some hot cocoa or some, because it's convenient. You know you can be traveling. Except for the low lead ones are very rare. Most of the commercial chocolates are loaded with contaminants of heavy metals so you want to really moderate that as much as you dare would uh, would uh milk.
Speaker 1:If you're gonna go the route of having chocolate, is milk chocolate the better option, and it's just like, contrary to like. Oh, dark chocolate's way better for you, but right guess not.
Speaker 2:The oxalate part in the chocolate is the dark part, it's the white part, the fat. You know the white Easter bunny that's got none of the cocoa in it, that doesn't have any oxalate in it, because, remember, we started early on saying oxalate is water soluble and it doesn't stay in the fatty part. So dark chocolate is using heavy the cocoa part. The cacao darkness darker the higher the oxalate. So go down on your percent, dark all the way to milk and you're better off.
Speaker 1:And ending with some upcoming new things that are happening. We kind of talked to Offair about your. Is it the Data Companion book that's going to be available?
Speaker 2:Well, the Data Companion came out in 2024 in May, and that's very popular. I'm surprised. I thought this reference, with all this information and a bunch in the front, was really for the professionals like yourself who have clients and you want to know the resources for them, or a dietician or a doctor's office. But people have told me that this book is working as like an easier, simple, quick, quick dive into oxalate versus this book, which is intended to explain all the questions like why do we know about this? Why is your doctor not know about it? Aren't plants good for me? And how, what is this accumulation thing like? This explains all your questions. This one tells you this is what you need to know to do it.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people just want to dive to doing and they like this. So I have a pdf cookbook that's got about 185 recipes in it. That's not that convenient because it's a pdf and I'm getting it converted to a print on demand so you can have one that looks just like this. That's a cookbook for 188 recipes at least it's going to have, and that has that's for your family members who are still eating vegetables. There's lots of ways how to do cabbage, what to do with the turnip and rutabaga, and how to cook an egg properly like some really basic skills, how to cook organ meats, proper salad dressings, uh, you know. There's just really a lot of learning. For those of you who are remembering that cooking at home is one of the key things you can do to start improving your health, Absolutely, and then any big events, anything you're looking forward to coming up.
Speaker 2:Well, we got meat stock coming up this spring in Gatlinburg. That's going to be a much bigger party than it's been the last couple of years, so it's a whole different scene every year. I think that's going to be hugely exciting and even though it's sold out, there are a handful of people who can't go and you can do a ticket exchange and join us there. And you know, sometimes the future is not always known, but we're seeing more and more opportunities for getting together and hopefully more of that's going to be happening opportunities for getting together and hopefully more of that's going to be happening.
Speaker 1:I'm a little upset. I'm not going to make meat stock. I've already booked a certification for that weekend and it's my father's birthday too. But 2026, the next one, not this one, the next one, Wow are we almost at 2026? I'm so futuristic 2026, I'm definitely going to go. But if anybody is interested in that, I saw the lineup I've talked about it on the podcast a bunch of just like the who's who of everybody and just rubbing elbows and getting together. Yeah and it's.
Speaker 2:East Coast-y, because most of these parties nutrition parties have been happening in Texas and California.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And the East Coast has been getting neglected, and so what I love about it is this down home East thing, and we're right from the get go. We're very Oxlade conscious in that world with the guys who put it together Scott mainly has been. He interviewed me multiple times and he's quite sensitive to the Oxlade topic and Oxlade gets its due respect. That's nice too.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate that. Scott's the man. But thank you so much and for coming on. I really, really appreciate it. It's definitely a pleasure to have you on and I will also put any of Sally's recommendations or and or links in the show notes so people have access as well. So again, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:This in the show notes, so people have access as well. So again, thank you so much for coming on the show, tony.
Speaker 1:This was really fun to be with you today. Thank you, thank you and thanks to everybody listening to another episode of the Primal Foundations podcast.