#37 Oxalates: Farewell to pain, fatigue, and insomnia!
Click here to go to episode #37
Sally K. Norton suffered for decades from chronic health problems including arthritis, brain fog, severe back pain and eventually had to quit her job because of the extreme fatigue and inability to read.
She then discovered the culprit of her 'healthy diet' (spoiler alert: oxalates!).
This episode is brought to you by my favorite fish oil!
We also discuss her book: Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick and How to Get Better. Join us as we say Goodbye to back pain, brain fog, arthritis, infertility, UTIs, sinus infections, C. Diff, neck pain, headaches, anxiety and more!
6:36: Sally's horrible and debilitating arthritis
8:23: How she found relief within 10 days of cutting out oxalates and actually slept better
12:00: Beans and zits that lasted for two years
12:31: Her vegan diet
13:49: Age spots
14:09: Stabbing back pain
14:40: What are oxalates?
18:11: Getting up to pee at night?
21:33: Chronic sinus infections, UTIs, bladder infections, digestive function, headaches, anxiety, seizures, and neurotoxicity
21:33: Clostridium Difficile (C. Diff)
23:23: Neck pain
33:23: Where to start?
34:15: Top Oxalates Culprits:
Cashews
Almonds
Spinach
Chard
Beet Greens
Chocolate
Sweet Potato
Plantains
Turmeric
Quinoa
Buckwheat
Whole Grains
Chia
36:04: Arrowroot, Almond + Almond Flour (thumbs down)
36:20: Kiwi, Blackberries, Raspberries (are these foods your favorite?? They are high in oxalates and not kind to your body)
36:26: Tea
This episode is brought to you by my favorite fish oil!
48:40: Michael Mathieu Vibrant Health
49:09: Almond farm
51:24: PUFAs + Oxalates = Detrimental Outcomes (great way to destroy you health)
Lemon juice benefits (citric acid is alkalizing / helps dissolve oxalate crystals)
When I became a temporary vegan (The China Study)Struggling to get pregnant? Fertility issues? (quality of sperm as well as hormonal health for both men and women)
Her Book: Toxic Superfoods
HOW to remember what we CAN eat (cabbage family = thumbs up! Peeled and cooked, never eaten raw. Broccoli, Cauliflower, Radishes, Chinese cabbage, Rutabaga, Watercress. Cucumber family = thumbs up! Squash, yes! Watermelon, yes! Little red potatoes are OK)
What are lectins?
Should you go strict carnivore now?
Supplements high in oxalates (turmeric, slippery elm, olive leaf, powdered greens, anything with 'bran' or 'rice bran')
Baby food / 'kid friendly food'
Avocado, sweet potato, quinoa
Sally's Website
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Website: https://sallyknorton.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sknorton/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sally.norton.311
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BetterLowOx
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/SallyKNorton/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFpmJtV19QCyjzaC5U691-A
If you're vegan, vegetarian, or pescatarian, you may find this episode offensive and extremely eye opening. If these topics offend you, you are not encouraged to listen.
Full Transcript
Short snippet intro from Sally:
If you're really into what's gonna work well for you and really be healthy, this is something like a secret hack don't use the stuff they say is good for you.
Ashley:
Welcome to wellness. Your ultimate guide to unlocking your full human potential through biohacking. I'm your host, Ashley Deeley. I'm a former personal trainer, Pilates instructor, and nutrition expert. With a degree in kinesiology, I'm here to guide and support you in elevating the quality of your life can I ask you a favor? When you leave a review for me, it helps listeners like yourself, find an access, this information faster. So if you have five minutes, I would love if you could log on to apple, iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave me a review.
Today's guest is Sally Norton. She holds a degree from Cornell university and a master's degree in public health. Her path to becoming a leading expert on dietary oxalate includes a prior career working at major medical schools in medical education and public health research. Sally has quite the experience of a healing journey along with years of research, which led her to write her book. Toxic super foods, how oxalate overload is making you sick and how to get better. Sally's book was released in january 2023. and she's been featured on over 75 different podcasts If you love your morning smoothie and chock full of spinach and blackberries. You're going to be in for quite the surprise today. Sally Norton discusses how your aches, pains, gout, kidney stones, and other symptoms. Could be getting worse instead of better because of the food you're eating.
Today, we're going to discuss what low oxalate foods are. . And what kind of foods you should be eating to give you more energy, promote healing as well as promote optimal health. I think you're really going to enjoy the show today. And I can't wait for you to meet Sally. Sally, welcome to the show.
Sally: It's so good to be here. Thank you.
Ashley: I've done so much research on you and I've let my listeners know a bit about your background, but I want to hear your story. So can you give us a bit of your background?
Sally: I have been a nutrition geek since I was a little kid. I grew up in Syracuse, New York with Rhubarb growing behind the shed and or the garage and Apple and And cherry trees and a family likes to cook from scratch. And everybody liked fruit and vegetables. And I was a vegetable eater as a kid. I have three sisters and a brother, and they would get their finger wagging at them by my mother because Sally would eat their veg, her vegetables, and they didn't. And I decided as a, as a seventh grader that I would study nutrition because. It turns out, I, I discovered in seventh grade that if you know how to live and how to eat, you don't have to get cancer and heart disease. You can be healthy and productive and not be sick. And and I already knew by the time I was five, I knew not being sick was better than being sick. I was really into not being sick, and I thought, well, Wouldn't it be good to know how to not be sick and how to help others who wanna avoid that too? So I was sending myself for up for a career in health promotion and health prevention stuff and tried to know it, and I did all the right things and trashed my health in the process by being perfect at a low salt, low fat, scratch cooked organic, plant centric diet.
Ashley: So walk me through what happened when you trashed your health.
Sally: Well, it was already happening, I think. When I was 12, I was already getting back pain. I would work in the garden. I'm a gardener by nine and, and at 12 I, we moved and I was putting in a garden late in the season, had big weeds and I was wrecking my back. And I'd have to go into the house and take a hot bath. And I'd wake up in the mornings with like, almost like paralysis, really momentary like nerve. Neurological problems already. And so I was, and I was developing, um, some arthritis. I started developing a little bit of concentration and brain foggy stuff where it's having trouble. Studying already. And then in college I developed pain in my foot, which turned out to be a little broken bone and limped around and ended up having to leave Cornell where I was getting my nutrition degree for surgery. Didn't really come back from that well, so I ended up spending about eight years on some various degrees of high dose ibuprofen, crutches. Wheelchairs, orthotics, um, in general, inability to stand and walk and do stuff on my feet, and that never completely went away. I, I did get off the Drugs and the crutches and the orthotics.
Actually getting rid of the orthotics was a big help and I accidentally got off vegetables on unaware, and my feet got better enough that I didn't need all that, but I, I forever had feet that needed to be in shoes and couldn't run or couldn't do heels until I turned 49 and I had to go on this oxalate avoidance, oxalate awareness diet. To deal with the arthritis that I had developed. I was getting arthritis already as a teenager and it was horrible all through my twenties when I was a vegetarian and vegan. Um, and it got better for no good reason other than the fact that I added more meats and stuff. And probably, I dunno, don't these things come and go?
And you still have the problem? Like even if the symptoms go away, it doesn't mean you've necessarily solved the problem. It turns out that's confusing. But later on at age 49, I finally recognized thanks to the Joanne Yon. I learned three years prior to this that oxalates and pain have some connection, which I never learned in school, that I've never heard before, but I should be aware of when I'm meeting oxalates.
And I developed this awareness and three years later it became abundantly clear that there's a connection between the arthritis and my healthy food and that. Really was a problem. Like, are you kidding? I suffered so much with arthritis and it was because I was into beat greens and stuff like that, that, that, that, that can't be true.
Right? That was the feeling like, holy crap. So then I was kind of mad too because I had these other problems at this stage. I had had had a hysterectomy and I didn't get well from that. And went to the sleep lab because the doctor's like, I don't know what's wrong with you, so we'll go send you the sleep doctor.
That was his, that's always his like, I don't know what to do thing. And thank God he did that because it turned out my brain wasn't sleeping at all. It was waking up 29 times an hour.
Ashley: Wow.
Sally: And you, you know, it's like, holy cow, it's like 150, wake up all night long that that's not sleep. So I was worried about the sleep problem because this is why I was completely disabled.
I had many years with zero income because of this. Um, and then when I finally solved it, I had more years of zero income 'cause I ended up writing a book. But we'll get to that that was like, I'm trying to solve the sleep problem, which is probably related to my gut problem. So please let me do this, but now I have to do this. Arthritis diet. Like I was a little not into like, shit, I really have to do this oxalate thing for the arthritis because I was getting all stiff and cranky and old again. 'cause I, I felt like I was in my eighties, most of my adulthood because I had all this aches and pains and stiffness and fatigue. Lots of fatigue, memory issues. Energy was not there for anything. Mental, emotional, physical. So I was pro. Again, shocked that within 10 days of going on the low oxalate diet to deal with the stiffness and pain and inflammation of the joints. I was suddenly perkier, my brain was waking up, and I was able to read the mail and do stuff with my brain.
It was clear that I was starting to sleep again, and then a few months later, my feet, I managed to put myself in serious heels. Serious for one who can't wear heels, like over three inch heels for seven and a half hours at a wedding. That has never happened in my life and all kind like, wait a minute, everything that's been wrong with me over the years and the list is long, seems to be related to not eating sweet potatoes.
Like if I don't eat these high oxalate foods, which at the time was sweet potatoes every day and Swiss chard minimum of once a week, and those are really what was left back in my diet or had been in the recent past. That like that's all I needed to do to solve all these unsolvable, evil, low quality of life tortures that I've been living through was about eliminating just a couple of foods from my diet.
It's pretty incredible. Wow.
boy when you've made your whole life about being healthy and you've done everything you can to be healthy and you get punished for it, and you finally learn at the bitter end, that You did it all wrong and you were misguided by fancy people at fancy universities. That sets a little energy into your life of Yeah.
Ashley: There's so much to unpack here, I'm curious to hear what did it feel like to have arthritis so young thinking, what am I doing to cause this arthritis?
Sally: Yeah. You didn't, it's. It's hard to imagine that you're doing anything wrong when you live the perfect life of trying to go to the gym and go to bed on time and study and eat perfectly, and just be a good girl all the time. Like, what did I do? You, you have to assume there's something that you're just a flawed physical specimen, you know, that you, you're a lemon of a body and you inherited some bad genes or something, you know?
I used to try to explain to my dad, because most of my family would just think if I were to share my suffering with them, that I'm just whining, you know, like nobody wants to hear about it. But my dad was somebody I could talk to and and we, we talked about stuff, so I felt a little supported by him and, and, uh, still like all that does is frustrate the parent who's like, I don't know how to help my child not be in pain. He doesn't, he's an insurance agent. What does he know? But um, yeah, you just sort of think there's some medical problem that some medical person should be able to tell you what to do about it, or, you know, you are, you spend all the time looking for all the dietary approaches, so, You know, maybe you need no dairy and no gluten and all this.
And so I was, but I had gotten to the point where I was no, no, no. On all these things and had done every single diet there was. And in fact, when I got off the vegan diet, it was because I was no longer tolerating whole wheat bread. And wasn't tolerating the beans. It was clear that when I was eating this whole wheat bread, my fatigue would be intense, and when I was eating the beans, I had like zits on my face that lasted for two years, like that.
Then I got off the beans and they started clearing up and I was like, Hmm. It was just a couple of 'em, but they were these big, hard, reddish zits basically that sat there for years. And nothing would get them to go away until I got off the beans and I realized I was basically, the whole legume family was probably out the door and I was relying on them because I was vegan and doing, you know, soaking and cooking beans and doing all kinds of stuff that was supposed to be perfect. And I replaced the starch that was in the bread and the beans with sweet potatoes because sweet potatoes are supposed to be low allergy, the most low allergy food out there. So now that I'm quote allergic to these foods, I need the most safe sort of detoxy, low allergy. So now in my head, I was on this low allergy diet, avoiding things that would give me fatigue and inflammation or gut problems. So that was a sweet potato. So I was relying on it as Breakfast, lunch and dinner starch. Like I would have brown rice and sweet potatoes and some chicken. Now that I'm not a vegan for lunch, and sometimes I would have sweet potato fries, especially on a Sunday brunch, and often have a little bit of sweet potatoes with dinner. And so I was pretty much relying on this perfect low allergy, low toxin food to fill in for some carbs and calories. It holds butter and salt beautifully, so why not? It's delicious. I really like sweet potatoes, so I was okay with that. I wasn't complaining, but I was ignorant to the fact that it's a high oxalate food. So right away when I went on the switch from veganism to not vegan and and sweet potatoes instead of beans and bread, I started getting wrinkles in my face all around the eyes and started looking older. I started getting little brown specks everywhere in my skin. It turns out those were age spots, but in my mid thirties, I had no idea what age spots were.
I wasn't expecting them at age 34 or whatever I was, and I developed pain in my back that would show up at bedtime. It would feel like somebody stuck a knife right near the shoulder blades between the spine and the shoulder blades and it, the big Charlie horse knot there would make it virtually impossible to fall asleep. I never connected that to, oh, you're eating sweet potatoes every day. Who would've in a million years had that thought?
Ashley: You've mentioned sweet potatoes, beans. A few other foods that are high in oxalates, but for listeners who don't know, what are oxalates?
Sally: Oxalates is a natural. Naturally occurring toxin and plants, and it's in a lot of the plants that we eat and trust. And it comes as this oxalic acid molecule, which is a tiny little molecule that ionizes and has this negative charge. It can be two po, two negative charges, and it likes to hook up with positive charges.
So this oxalic acid is a chelator, as we say, it grabs metals. It loves calcium. Calcium loves it, and it forms. Oxalates, which is calcium, oxalate, magnesium, oxalate, iron, oxalate, copper, oxalate, like any mineral, pretty much can become an oxalate with, with, with oxalic acid plus a mineral. So in nature it's often in the acid form and comes also with the calcium oxalate form in the foods you're getting, both the acid and calcium oxalate and These crystals that are built from the calcium oxalate, the plants deliberately make various shapes of crystals of calcium oxalate for all kinds of reasons for their health, wealth, survival, and they're quite harsh for us now. We absorb the acid fraction from the foods. The crystals tend to just be abrasive and inflammatory in the mucosal lining of the mouse stomach, esophagus. Duodenum and small intestine, large intestine, anus, rectum, all the way out, those crystals have the potential to be causing abrasive and mechanical damage and even electromagnetic damage to the cells in the digestive tract. And the acid gets in as it floats in just dissolved in the watery part of your food and of the sort of the kind of digestion and that floating in just like a little bit of sodium and. Other electrolytes and minerals and nutrients can just float between the cells into the bloodstream, and we absorb no less than 5%, usually on average, 10 to 15% of it, but some people that have various states of inflammation will absorb over 50% of the oxalic acid and dissolved oxalates in their food. So at 50% absorption rate, you don't even need sweet potatoes and Swiss char in these high oxalate foods to be ultimately eating something that's not supposed to be in your body. The body doesn't like this. This is a toxin that starts forming crystals. Once the acid gets in there, it grabs the calcium and minerals at some point in your tissues from the blood or from other tissues, and can become these crystals that start. Collecting in your tissues, and now you've got oxalate crystals, calcium oxalate crystals, typically forming little particulate pollution forming all over the body, which becomes a real irritant to the immune system and creates a problem. Big one.
Ashley: Oh, so you had mentioned wrinkles, age spots. What are some other symptoms of consuming oxalates?
Sally: For some people they get so they have to run to the bathroom a lot. They get a. Jumpy, irritable bladder that doesn't like to hold urine, and you're like maybe even leaking a little bit so you can get urinary tract symptoms, burning pee, nighttime urination. If you have to get up to pee, that's because your bladder is irritated with something. And see the, the urine is the prime way. The body releases the stuff and removes it from the body. So it's gotta go through your kidneys. And if If you're prone to kidney stones, eventually you can form kidney stones from this. So kidney stone is considered the classic oxalate problem. It's the one that's well recognized in medicine that still isn't well understood how this really works, even though it's clear how it works, you have too much oxalate in the body.
It's too much for the kidneys, and some people's kidneys aren't that good at like preventing it from clumping when it's trying to pass through the passages that are Removing urine. You know, urine fluids are forming and flowing out of the kidneys in these little tubules, and those tubules have to be free flowing.
But if you can't do all the back flips you need to do as a healthy kidney to prevent the crystals from clumping in those little tubules, then it can get stuck there. And that's a kidney stone.
We can pee out way, way too much oxalate and eat way much too much sweet potatoes for years and get away with it without a kidney stone.
So everybody thinks, well, you're fine, which is completely not how it works because the kidney is the last tissue that it wrecks, not the first.
Ashley: Because it's on its way out of the body. Is that right?
Sally: Yeah, that's the last stop. So oxalates first gonna be in your mouth and teeth can wreck both. And it can harm the digestive tract and then it goes into the bloodstream immediately affecting the the blood cells. That's the immune cells monocytes, and the red blood cells are both affected within 40 minutes of a spinach smoothie. Most of us get inflammation in our immune cells. Immune cells are now damaged. They're putting out inflammatory signals, and they're now no longer really strong enough to fight infection. They themselves are creating inflammation. They're crying in pain, and so you got that going on in your bloodstream and your immune cells are ready. You've already done whatever damage to the digestive tract and then it's going straight to the liver and all the oxalate you absorb flows through the liver and these open sinusoidal style cells and the liver makes more oxalate so it adds to the oxalate load in your body. It doesn't take the oxalates out of your blood. Most people think of the liver as detoxing stuff, and this is a toxin, so therefore all you need is good detox pathways and methylation and sulfation and conjugation, and you're fine. No, no, no. That is not what happens with oxalate. Oxalate is not a toxin that the liver deals with. Oxalate is a toxin that the liver makes. So you've eaten your sweet potato or spinach smoothie or other high oxalate food. And now the liver is a wash in oxalate that raises inflammation in the liver and increases the amount of oxalate the liver has to make because now the liver is stressed out. It consumes glutathione. It consumes the antioxidants of the liver, and probably makes it harder for your liver to do its detox work on other chemicals. So over time, you could develop chemical sensitivity. That can be a sign, uh uh, Another collateral kind of symptom of oxalate toxicity. Chronic infections can be a symptom of oxalate toxicity, so things like sinus infections every year, and yeast infections and UTIs. That's bladder and urinary tract infections, even digestive infections, you name it.
Vaginal problems, even like chronic Even c-diff. I've seen people get better from c-diff by just getting off their oxalates and even viral infections and so on. So if you have bladder problems, urinary problems, pain problems, rheumatoid problems, arthritis, infections, chemical sensitivity, if you have weird heart things going on, tooth pain, sinus pain, headaches, anxiety. Mood problems, anger, despondency, despair, depression, thus can be brain inflammation 'cause it's a neurotoxin, uh, little seizures and hiccups and the other kinds of, uh, muscle spasms can be a sign of the neurotoxicity of it. You over time, because of the loss of calcium and minerals and the acidity that oxalate creates over time, you end up borrowing the chalky alkaline. Calcium and minerals from your bones to keep your pH good. And you also borrow the calcium to replace the missing calcium that is now turned into this toxic form of calcium, the calcium oxalate deposits. So you might have an early diagnosis of osteopenia in your thirties or forties or whenever, or osteoporosis later because people aren't checking for this early in life.
So if you Easily break a bone or snap a joint or pull a tendon if you have a lot of tightness or looseness in the joints. Neck pain is a very common symptom and all kinds of dental problems. Poor teeth, tartar on the teeth, cavities and tooth pain, T M J, eye issues, vision problems. If you're losing your night vision, these, these all can be. Tissue problems because of the toxicity.
Ashley: It sounds like there's a whole host, top to bottom of things that can be wrong. I wanted to go back and touch on where there can be problems within the pelvic region. So I've heard you describe not just only the kidney stones, but how people can experience painful urination. How is that also related to oxalates?
Sally: So you're, excreting this .Toxic acid that can be in crystal form. In fact, every time we pee we're excreting some degree of oxalate and oxalate crystals. It's just a normal part of your body. 'cause your body will, the liver will make some oxalate regardless. A lot of what it's making it from, by the way, is vitamin C. But anyway, the kidneys are being asked to traffic and oxalate routinely on a daily basis, and so is your bladder. And this stuff, if you, especially if you have concentrated urine where there's a lot of oxalate in it and not enough fluid. The, the urine becomes pretty caustic to the bladder and the urethra and irritating to it, and you can sort of train the immune cells that are protecting the bladder.
There's a whole lining there of interesting tissue that's keeping you from having bladder infections and. Giving your body information and and defending you. It, they will start to be irritated and you get this mast cell activation and develop sort of a rash tendency in the bladder, which is interstitial cystitis where you have bladder pain a lot and you have to pee a lot. But the whole tract, uh, from the kidneys on down can be in a state of irritation, and that when that turns on inflammation, it often feels like burning. You get this burning feeling with peeing. You might even get prostatitis in men where they, the stream strength is, gets lost periodically, even in a young age. You could get blood in the urine, which you may not see, but if it picks it up in a standard physical, some, sometimes they're still doing urine analysis with the standard physical and they say, ah, blood in the urine, that's a sign of kidney stress. And this whole pelvic reason, it's another thing that people report, and it's in the literature, is this heaviness in the loins and people start talking about pelvic heaviness back in the 1840s and earlier when this was first a diagnosis where foods, the oxalate in foods could bring on all kinds of symptoms, which were often characterized as. Stomach problems plus your personality getting haywire, and you're becoming anxious and worried and despairing. And negative. And pessimistic, and also complaining of aches and pains and trouble sleeping, and they're examining the urine and seeing the crystals in the urine, so that whole pelvic region. Seems to be, um, in harm's way in some people, and some people end up with a pelvic syndrome of issues, which might start off as like candida problems and later be feels like UTIs and later feels like incontinence or interstitial cystitis or nighttime urination or like massive amounts of urine because you, when you are excreting a lot of oxalate, the kidneys like to Put more water in the urine if it can. So if you've got enough fluids in the body, you could produce a massive amount of urine. Other people not producing enough urine, which is much more dangerous. It's a sign of kidneys that can't hack it anymore.
Ashley: I appreciate you explaining that, giving a very good deep dive. I heard you mention mast cell activation syndrome. Does this go hand in hand with oxalates and can you give us a description of what the relationship looks like?
Sally: Well, the immune system is there looking for problems and, and protecting you from danger. So the immune cells. Detect danger, that's what they do. And little nanoparticles are dangerous to tissues, whether it's in your urine, whether it's in your bones, whether it's in your thyroid gland or your teeth, your jaw. And the this, the oxalate itself and the crystals that it becomes in the body are this underlying stimulus that incites a reaction from the immune system. And you can get yourself going with these immune reactivities, and it can be Like fireworks catching on with each other and like, wait, you blew up the whole box of fireworks.
When are we gonna do these one at a time? Like you can start like bouncing off each other when you're in this chronic cycle of inflammation and that's where you get this like chronic inflammatory diseases and mast cell activation, and now you're overwhelmed with histamine and all of that. And those are symptoms that something is bothering your immune system. People are treating that as if it's a disease. That's the symptom of something else going on. And if as long as you're trying to treat those things, you're just trying to treat the symptoms and not understanding what's the underlying problem, that's sort of a root cause idea, which people give lip service to root cause. But if you're gonna ignore oxalate, then you're giving just lip service to root cause. 'cause this ends up being a root cause for all kinds of inflammatory conditions that can lead to. A whole host of inflammatory problems that are often called autoimmune saying, oh, now your immune system's attacking X tissue.
That's a special syndrome. No, your poor immune system is fighting hard and has this impossible situation where you keep giving it too much to do all the time.
Ashley: Last summer I diagnosed myself with mast cell activation because I was itching my legs until they bled. I just couldn't get any relief until they were bleeding. So I was wondering is there any kind of relationship between that mast cell activation and oxalate?
Sally: So what you're describing is an immune system that's going bananas and creating this sort of rash and inflammation to try to deal with something. And what it might be dealing with is oxalate deposits or oxalate related damage in the subcutaneous or the skin area on your legs or the vascular system because it gets, it's messing with the vascular system too.
And when you're now not eating oxalates sometimes, this is when the symptoms show up. Later as the body's, oh, now that it's like coast is clear, it's the immune cells that have to come get these little crystals. So you've filled your body up with this little nano and other particles of oxalate crystals and so on.
Now your immune cells have to come over and try to deal with this stuff. And that creates all kinds of mayhem. And sometimes if it's oxalate related, you can sometimes tell, because it will also give you. Restless legs at night or bad sleep at night, or you're waking up at night or your bladder's irritated or your urine is cloudy, or you're getting grit in the eyes or tartar on the teeth, or digestive problems like diarrhea or constipation or burning rectum or hemorrhoids.
Those might be other signs of other skin, other areas of the body that are now pushing out oxalates, or it could just be your skin working on it. So one thing to do, there are topical things you can do to calm it down, but you wanna find out if your body would do better, if you increased oxalate that you're eating.
Which tells the body, oh, the coast is not clear. Sorry, this is not time to do this hard work of getting rid of the crystals. And if you get enough oxalate back in the dot, you'll find some metabolically meaningful amount, adding strong tea. You could even make a tea with some spinach leaves, adding some of those, a few bites of potato or a whole serving of the red skin.
Potatoes, like add in some foods that have oxalate in them. See if that helps. Like usually at dinner, you want a big chunk of them, not just a few bites of a, of some low oxalate vegetable. Like in the cabbage family, you don't get to call a plate of cauliflower, an oxalate dose. You wanna. Get something that's really got oxalate in it.
Some people like to use dark chocolate. Tea works a lot. Pomegranate juice is about 10 milligrams. Well, we're probably wanting to do something like three times stronger than that. So there's room to add some of these foods in. So it's not like zero of these foods. You might actually need them as medicine.
And if that works, if you do that three nights in a row and you get better, less symptoms and it starts to go away, that pretty much tells you that that symptom was from oxalate clearing.
Ashley: I'm so glad that you explained that because I felt like I was all on my own doing different experiments and when I saw the doctor, she was bamboozled, didn't know what to say, and she just said, well, it must be systemic, and prescribed me some topical lotion. But, I just knew it wasn't something that was going to be solved topically.
Sally: Right, and the other solution she would have would be some very harsh drug that would try to suppress your immune system and have problems. So she would see the systemic immune activation and provide immune suppressant, which wouldn't be a good answer.
Ashley: Because we don't want to suppress the immune system, do we?
Sally: So we want it to be free to do the work it's supposed to do. We just wanna quit giving it so much work. And one way you can do that is like use oxalate as a throttle so that it isn't overworking if you let your body overwork on this oxalate release from the tissues, that does continue this kind of path towards autoimmune related problems.
So it's best to try to release oxalate from tissues and recover from this in a slow measured manner. Going fast doesn't really shorten it. It just makes it more toxic
Ashley: When it comes to oxalates, it can feel like this information can be really overwhelming. So where do you recommend people start if they're going to start slow and improve their immune system?
Sally: Probably there's a food that you're relying on like almond butter or almonds or spinach, something or other. Find out what is that one food that you're really overdoing? You're, you're doing it, me and my sweet potatoes every day. If you can start there, if you're willing to let go of your precious baby, you'll bring yourself out of danger zone easily with just a couple of minor changes.
But for some people, that's non-negotiable. I'm not ready to give up my almond butter. Well, . You need to study the book. You need to listen to podcasts. You need to let this soak in and start elsewhere. But just doing a quick survey of the food you're eating, how much cashews, peanuts, and almonds, and chocolate and sweet potatoes and plantain, and turmeric, and quinoa, and buckwheat and chia, and like hello.
If you're doing a lot of those, just getting rid of half of them might be a good start. There's something other than to eat. You probably would do fine if you could come up with a more pro tenacious breakfast instead of spinach smoothies or chia bowls, like fix breakfast. I would say fix breakfast first.
If you can work on putting real food back into your breakfast. Eggs, cheese, meat, fish. Slap a ham, a steak, whatever, like put something solid protein that will make you satisfied so that your desire for almond butter goes away. You get into the habit of wanting something a little fatty and a little hefty probably, because that spinach smoothie doesn't have any real nutrition in it.
It doesn't hold you.
Ashley: I couldn't have said it better myself. Fix breakfast. It's the most important meal of the day, right?
Sally: Yeah, and the smoothie is not a good breakfast.
Ashley: So can I just take a calcium supplement and that'll knock out the dangers from the oxalates?
Sally: Well, it certainly doesn't hurt to have calcium because you can lower the absorption of what you're eating to a certain degree, but it's very limited in what it can do, and even if it is binding, it, sometimes even whole calcium oxalate can enter the body anyway, so it, it's definitely, if you're eating a modest amount of oxalate, Which is rare these days if you're into health foods, you're eating a lot of the high oxalate foods, which are all the nuts, the almonds, cashews, and peanuts that are everywhere.
The dark chocolate that's everywhere, the spinach chard, and bee greens, which is everywhere. The gluten-free grains, which includes quinoa, buckwheat, taf, a root cassava. Almond flour again. And then you're gonna put on top of that, you're gonna put more almond butter. And on top of that you're gonna put some chocolate, this or that.
And then why not throw in some chia seeds and some hemp seed And why not sesame and everything bagel. And then how about some kiwi on that? Or some blackberries, like you can just layer this stuff in and, oh, some turmeric. Gotta have that tea. You know, there's, so these, all these things are things people layer in intending them to have health benefits. Not being informed that they're not only high oxalate, but oxalate is, is a problem and none of the promised benefits of those foods can any way cancel that out in any kind of magical synergy. It's like, oh, sure, sprinkle Heavy metals on your food, you can have it 'cause it's on spinach, it doesn't matter.
Heavy metals on your brown rice, it doesn't matter. You can have all the arsenic you want because it's brown rice. That's good for you. That's the mentality that helps people not take this seriously and, and, and deeply think about it's a natural toxin and natural foods. We think it has all these other good things in it. So we're confused.
Ashley: I think you described that so beautifully and the front of your book makes me think that I'm so healthy. Just looking at it, the Swiss chards, the almonds, the beet, the star fruit, because. People think that if it comes from the ground, that it must be healthy. And I remember when I first heard about oxalates, it was about three years ago on a podcast.
This guy said he and his wife were trying to get healthy and they were making these beautiful spinach salads every day. And then he learned what oxalates were from his functional medicine doctor. And my mind just literally escaped me. Like I could not believe that like someone was questioning the health validity of spinach.
I was like, this spinach is something that I was always putting in my smoothies, eating every day. And I think maybe because I wasn't aware of the symptoms that I thought, well, there's no way that spinach isn't healthy for me and my body. But I'll tell you what. Once I swapped out that spinach and stopped having spinach for lunch, I didn't feel that 3:00 PM crash where then I would wanna have a green tea pick me up or something later in the afternoon.
Sally: But a little dark chocolate. Pick me up.
Ashley: So I'd love to hear one of your most heartfelt success stories, either your own or someone who had found you, found your work, and had great symptom relief.
Did you guys know? I record each one of these intros separately. I used to just skip by when I heard ads or breaks during the middle of a podcast, but I hope you're sticking around to listen to mine. This is where all throw in a bit of my 2 cents or some studies and things that I just want to share with you guys. And since we're speaking about the immune system today, one of the things that I'm going to promote, that there is no coupon code for, and you can't find it on my website. Is propolis. Propolis is a product made by bees and the reason you're not going to find a product to purchase on my website. Is because the best propolis you can buy. Is local. Local products made by bees can help fight allergies and boost your immune system specifically because the bees are working locally.
I would use caution when buying propolis to make sure that it is local and always stored in glass. I think you guys know that I'm not a fan of anything stored in plastic. So when you're doing your research on propolis, I try to make sure that you can get it in a glass container and that it's local. I buy mine from the farmer's market and I usually buy two at a time because I never want to run out. Propolis has been around for thousands of years. They even found it in ancient Egyptian tombs. So what propolis is, if you're not aware, it's a mixture of pollen and bees wax collected from the bees. And it's benefits are that it's anti-inflammatory, it's an antioxidant. It can be anti-cancer antibacterial and it has wound healing qualities as well. It's actually my first go-to. If I hear someone has the sniffles or a sore throat, it's literally my first line of defense.
If you don't have access to propolis, I would recommend raw honey again, local raw honey, because there's bound to be a bit of propolis mixed into it and make sure that honey comes from a glass jar. And his local, should I already say the word local?
So after propolis, another supplement that I'm going to move on to today is called P three O M. This is a product you can find on Amazon.
I thought this is something you would really resonate with. Again, I never. Or promote anything. I don't personally use myself and P three O. Em by bio optimizers is a probiotic that I use myself. In fact it can actually stop food poisoning, which is one of the reasons I always travel with it always, always, always. So P three. Three O M is made with lactobacillus plantarum O M, which is a great immune system booster, which helps provide your body with the optimal good bacteria, which can help put your body back into balance. If you're wanting to learn more about this product. You can go to my website, Ashley daily.com/p three O M.
It enhances immune support. It improves gut health. It can help tackle the toughest digestive issues boost your energy, and it's also shelf stable. It doesn't require refrigeration, which I'm not a big proponent of using any probiotics that require refrigeration.
It's Gluten-free soy-free it can help even promote better sleep. You can take about 10 capsules at night before sleep,
and it's also made by a company. I trust I've been following bio optimizers for years and you can even use it to control gas. There was a testimonial on their website where it helps someone's migraines go away. So although I never give out medical advice, this is a supplement that I can stand behind.
I don't have a coupon code for you. This is just how much I believe in the product. You can go on to Amazon and get it. Or you can support my business by using my affiliate link, which is found on www.AshleyDeeley.com/P3OM
Okay before this break started I just asked Sally if she could share a success story of someone reaching out to her who had learned about oxalates so let's pick up from there
Sally: Well, there isn't just one. I, I find many people bring me to tears and I, I hear this on social media. People share with me through Instagram and Facebook and send things to my website. People come to me to come to my group classes and they'll share amazing things there, and usually crying the whole time and getting everybody crying and, Then they become clients and I hear even deeper pieces of their story and it's quite amazing depending on what your focus is though. You know, I think one area to wonder about is why so many people or, or just notice with a certain degree of humility and honoring them. How many people come to me and say, this is really, really helping my brain and my mood and my outlook on life. One example was just a simple statement from somebody through Instagram who said, I have been in counseling for anxiety every single week for 30 years, and now I don't need it at all to be tortured with anxiety for 30 years because you didn't know about this. That is just wrong.
I have several people who've been, who are severely depressed, who are still trying to walk their way out of it, who have been to fancy psychiatrists for over 17 years and not a single person, and not a single session. Did anyone say, what do you eat? Here's one here. So she said, her message to me, she says, you are a tremendous help to me and the only healthcare person who has ever asked me what I ate. For years, I had tremendous anxiety and depression. I've been jittery and couldn't even do eye contact and usually feeling completely overwhelmed like I was going to explode. So much inner turmoil. Could never feel inner calm, just turning, turning all the time, just in this distress pattern, feeling bleak and hopeless in life, like life wasn't worth living. And she's saying here, thanks to the diet changes you recommend, Sally. I have many more days of feeling normal. What a relief to feel happiness again.
Ashley: Oh.
Sally: This is huge, and Michael has interviewed me many times. He's developed his own channel. He developed osteoporosis in his thirties. He was very happy as a young man, new in his career to find the co-op in his town, and the freshly made nut butters and freshly made whole grain, whole wheat breads, and was just loving this fantastic, rich, homey, you know, earthy food that was supposed to be so healthy. But he didn't ever feel great, and by the time he was in his late thirties, he had a frank diagnosis of osteoporosis. In his late forties, he was out on a mountain bike ride by himself at dusk, took a spill, and crushed his neck bones.
The neck tissues were all unstable, the bones were weak, and he was laying there in pain waiting to be rescued. Probably semi-conscious. Has been quadriplegic ever since. So it's now been, I don't know, 11 or 12 years since this accident. But two, three years ago he discovered, you know, a basically a plant free diet with carnivore, and then quickly discovered oxalates and quickly discovered that he's sick with oxalates because his body started purging them. And the cool thing for Michael is that he went from over nine years of wondering, why am I alive? With nothing but uncomfortable, buzzing and just kind of a horrendous life to a man who is seeing physical improvements, who has impossible physical improvements, amazing. He's getting diaphragm function back.
He can, has a stronger voice. He can now spit. He's getting some feeling on one of his arms down by his wrists, his wrist, where he can actually sense the, a gentle kind touch of a blanket or a person versus this. Unpleasantries, but most importantly, he has access to joy. He didn't have that, that was taken from his life for over nine years, and now he's undoing this toxicity that was making life a living hell.
And so, you know, I, there's so many stories of people suffering with Horrendous things that get better because they switch a few foods around and it astonishes them that not everybody is like excited that they could feel better if they just knew which food.
So like, be careful of
Ashley: Who is Michael? I'll definitely make sure to link to him in the show notes.
Sally: Michael Matthew and his YouTube channel. He's done a series with me where we're going in deep hour long conversations about different aspects of this topic and the diet.
Ashley: Okay we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes thank you I'm so interested in these personal success stories and I love what you share on Instagram. Can you share another success story?
Sally: One of my followers, she owned an almond farm. And she was really picking out on almonds in every way. And she got very sick. And later on when she realized the almonds were doing it and she learned a low oxalate diet, she had a, she's had a, just a tremendous skin thing, was really quite something.
And so she's selling the almond farm like we are not staying in the almond business 'cause that's not gonna work. And another person who's a client of mine, she came to me. Having several years as a juice store owner. She's got a juicing shop, and she decided very quickly after she realized about oxalates and how it's affected her health to close her business down.
Ashley: Wow. That's saying something.
Sally: Yes, it is. That's a true testimonial of like, I'm willing to change my entire life structure of my business because it's wrong.
And oxalates have been around since the beginning of time, right? If they're in vegetables or whenever vegetables came onto this planet, that's how long they've been around because they have that fighting mechanism that says, don't eat us.
Yeah. Most plants are so toxic with oxalate that they have no available calcium in them. Over 90% of the plants on the planet have so much oxalate that there's zero calcium there and they're many. If you were to spend a day in the woods, you would have a hard time. Finding a salad
That's a good way to put it. There's almost nothing edible there. You'd have to get a slingshot and hit a rabbit or a squirrel to find food in the forest. There's almost nothing there to eat.
Ashley: I used to spend all my money on almond flour. My shelves in the cupboard, in the kitchen. Would literally be stocked every time that the grocery store had a sale on almond flour. I bought all of it, every bag because I was baking so much with it. And then I learned about oxalates and the double whammy that I learned because when you bake with almond flour, it actually mutates into a polyunsaturated fatty acid.
So now you're eating an oxalate that has become a PUFA and just damaging yourself beyond belief.
Sally: The combination of the PUFA oils and oxalate is a great way to destroy your health. It's just a deadly, deadly combination and that's why these nuts and using nuts and even flaxie, which are not high in oxalate, in a lot of baking and a lot of heat treatments to them just adds fuel to their toxicity. And really someone who's picking out an almond flour is destined to have skin breakouts and some really serious stuff, and probably for a long time after they changed their diet, you're gonna see a bunch of weird stuff because that is so toxic.
Ashley: It just, I feel like it goes back to that same age old thinking while it comes from the. Ground. So surely it must be good for me.
Sally: Well, what we're not realizing is that this is a novel idea. It's just a modern experiment. Human beings never bothered breaking all those nuts to have almonds that are not easy to, to harvest and break open. They've never been high on the human menu. They're strictly for California squirrels, and really in my own lifetime, you would only see them sliver almonds as a garnish on the beans at Easter dinner.
You just didn't have them. On the daily menu, the idea that you can turn this, this seed of a tree that grows in a very limited place on the planet into a general human entree on its face should be concerning to us, but it isn't. Somehow we're able to accept this as good and not question.
Ashley: I'm really glad you put it that way because so many people aren't questioning, and I remember learning ages ago that if your grandmother . Or eat it that if your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. But I think a lot of us have forgotten that.
Sally: It conveniences us to forget it because the cool kids say, this is fun to do, and everyone's struggling with digestive problems and they think they need to be off gluten. They don't realize that nuts are more damaging to your gut than the gluten.
Ashley: Wow. That's a statement. Why? Why Sally? Why are nuts more damaging than gluten?
Sally: Oh my gosh. They're, first of all, they're designed to be indigestible. Because they're a seed. Seeds are designed to go through the one who dared try to eat them and come out the other side fertilized somewhere distant from the tree sort of planted. They're designed for that, so you have to do a lot to take them out of that dormant stage and get rid of the phytates and all kinds of things.
And there's the oxalate, there's heavy metals. It's scary like cyanide and other things that are quite toxic. All of it is hard on the gut. I, I really think that all kinds of nuts and seeds, anything that's a nut and seed, that's a plant's effort to have a future generation. Those things are all designed to get you in the gut.
And that was my conclusion from the research I did. As I was writing the book and the book proposal, I looked at s Saponins and all kinds of other plant toxins and the effects according to the researchers who look at the effects of eating these plants. Always gut damage, which I imagine leads into leaky gut, which is where a lot of those autoimmune disorders stem from.
Right? The gut houses the nervous system, the immune system, your nutrition system. It's a whole sensory organ where your body's reading the outside world, and it's just a single. Layer of cells hooked together with proteins that hang in the cells, the sides of the cells. So they're like, the proteins in the cell membrane are the two sides of Velcro, right?
So they hook together in these tight junctions as Velcro, but proteins shaped depends on pH and other things, especially pH, because of the folding of the molecule and if you get inflammation, you get acidity, and then those protein shapes are wrong and the Velcro hooks break and it, that's leaky gut because now the tight junctions are no longer tight enough, they're messed up from that inflammation.
Ashley: I've heard you talk about the benefits of lemon juice. What does lemon juice do in the body?
Sally: Lemon juice provide citric acid, a little bit of reasonable amount of vitamin C and probably some other benefits, but we're mostly interested in its citric acid, which is a mild acid that is literally alkalizing. So it's a, what we call a conjugate base, which is alkaline, and it also gets turned into bicarbonate in the liver, adding more alkalinity to it.
And if you have an abundance of citrate in the body, that helps you dissolve oxalate crystals. When citric acid sits on an oxalate crystal, it softens it because it forms a little bond with a calcium that's even stronger than the bond between the oxalate and the calcium. So you take glass or quartz like hard, nasty oxalate.
Crystals and you turn 'em into a chalkier texture that's softer, so it's much easier to break them up and dissolve them down. And then you have more alkalinity and more citric acid in the body. You have more of it in the urine, so more citric acid in the urine means you're not gonna get the kidney stone.
So citrate levels, the very most important risk factor for kidney stones is low citrate in the urine. And so by having a more alkaline metabolism, the kidney can release more citrate into the urine.
Ashley: I've been waiting to ask you this question all day: what does your diet look like? What do you eat on a typical day?
Sally: Well, this is kind of a trick question, which I really don't love getting into because I have to modify what I choose to eat because I've done so much damage to my gut and immune system. That my immune system, my system gets inflamed if I eat certain foods, including beef and goat and lamb, things that I would love to be eating.
It does not like the cabbage family. It doesn't like lettuce, which is a nice low oxalate food. It doesn't like the melons, which are a nice low oxalate food. So I, I live on a lot of fish and coconut, some lemon here and there, some winter squash. , but a lot of pork, fish, duck, and some other kinds of meats because I'm limited with the meat.
So I experiment with rabbits and even frog's, legs and emu and ostrich and just real variety of, of meats and play around with those. And really enjoy fish and have a beautiful fish store nearby. We'll probably have fish tonight for dinner and just loving it with lots of butter. We get raw butter from our local Amish farmer, and I do a lot with butter sauces and so on.
Ashley: That sounds lovely. Now you're speaking my language. I don't know about the rabbit, but if you've messed up your system so much, I can see why it would be so helpful to be experimental
Sally: Puts the fun back in the kitchen. Like, explore, try, do new things. There's, there's always something else to eat. If you think there's nothing left to eat, that's because. You are not wanting to make an effort to find what else there is to eat and you, you just wanna do what you've always done.
And I don't recommend Rabbit. I find it sort of dry and somewhat boring, but I'm still intrigued about how to make rabbit really taste good so that people who need that, there's a lot of people with Alpha G problems and so on, they may not be able to do rabbit either because Alpha Gail is a mammal protein allergy where they might need to know how to do something with a frog leg or with emu or ostrich or.
These other poultries, because if you have Alpha G, you're only eating fish and poultry. Mostly
Ashley: Oh, okay. Well, as long as you're not vegan,
Sally: Exactly. Yeah. That's a malnourishing diet that will definitely land badly in the long run.
Ashley: I couldn't agree more. I read, what was it called? The China study. And after I read it, I was like, I'm a vegan. I'm a vegan now, everyone and I just felt like I couldn't stick with it. I was eating fruit for breakfast and having salads that just weren't, you know, sticking to my bones. Um, so even though I declared it, it didn't last more than a couple weeks.
Sally: Oh yeah, good for you, because you really were feeling that protein starvation, fat starvation that comes with that.
But that's pretty sad that a professor from Cornell would promote veganism with probably very skewed science.
Ashley: Well, it's very similar to the study with biotin. I think one of the studies they did in biotin was in a developing country where these kids were malnourished and they gave them biotin and They had taken the results of measuring their hair and nails, which had grown, and I feel like if you're going to take any supplement to a developing country, you're probably gonna see some helpful, significant results.
So then everybody jumped on the bandwagon of biotin, which I'm always cautious of recommending supplements as an umbrella to anyone because I feel like it's very individualized.
Sally: For sure.
Ashley: Beyond the immune system, I think 50% of couples are struggling to get pregnant right now. Can you weigh in on why that might be?
Sally: There are real problems with the level, the quality of the sperm that men are producing and real problems with women and their hormonal cycles and the health of their tissues. An oxalate can be a major contributor on both sides. For women and men, this is not widely known, but a man who has a high oxalate diet is very likely.
Looking like he has an adequate sperm count, and yet the sperm he is producing are not healthy and not energetic and not great. You can read about that on my Instagram post that asks about fatherhood, and there's a series of slides on that post that explain what happens to the poor sperm. You can end up with oxalate crystals in your testicles and your prostate gland and really mess up your plumbing as a guy and also the women.
I thoroughly believe that. Oxalate is why I ended up with endometriosis and my ovaries were destroyed. I didn't know I had any of those issues until I had a full abdominal cut and they had to pull everything outta me At age 48, was it no younger than that? Maybe 46, I don't know. But they got in there and they were surprised, a, that I had loose blood, endometrial scarring on my colon and that my ovaries looked like they've been shot for decades.
Ashley: Wow, that must have been quite the surprise.
Sally: Yeah, because here I'm the healthy one. I was gonna, how could I possibly have these problems? And I didn't have the pain of endometriosis. People don't realize that only about a third of cases of endometriosis are painful. It's a notoriously painful problem to have, but you can have asymptomatic endometriosis, you can have asymptomatic anything.
Ashley: Wow. So oxalates are more than just toxins in our food. They're actually really messing up our fertility and our chances to be parents.
Sally: It's so tragic.
Ashley: Oh, so Sally, why do you think this isn't more commonly diagnosed? Why are people having to go to the therapist for years and years and visit different doctors to finally learn, what's making them sick and having the root cause be their food?
Sally: Well, the reason I'm doing this work is because none of us in the field of nutrition and public health and medicine have been taught this in school. It's not part of our practice. Generally what, you know, the dietician knows how to handle it for kidney stone patients and for a few other situations, but it just hasn't been there, and that's. Part of why I am doing my work, I'm hoping that the nutrition and health world will start to take this subject seriously. Which is one reason I insisted on looking for a mainstream publisher for my book. So there's that, guarantee of some professional filter. This is, this is science that we're handing over basically for free to the public to take and run with it. Luckily very quickly now we have this mode of communication with the internet and podcasts, and people are looking for information, are picking up on this information and finding it. And some of those people are in clinical practices of all types. And so now it's more of a conversation. The the word oxalate is a little less foreign than it was a few years back.
It used to be that no one had heard that word before, so at least we're putting it into the. Conversation and that's really helping people have a chance to discover it.
Ashley: And I so admire your work because when I first heard about you, I was like, yes, I'm not the only one who's preaching about the dangers of oxalates, so I wanna bring up your book because I feel like it can just be. So torturous to try to change your diet again, try to remember which foods you're allowed and you can't have.
So how do people remember what they can and can't buy at the grocery store?
Sally: Well, that is the really hard thing and trying to remember it and thinking relying on your memory is never a great thing. So I have tools like the book's got lists and I'm coming out with the data product on my website that's more detailed, but you don't need that. Just the beginner's guide lists of the worst offenders. The safe bets are foods that we know are consistently low and have been tested enough to be basically trustworthy. 'cause foods have vari variations just for the same reason you and your sister are not identical twins. You know, there's just variation in the way the environment shapes. Plants and foods and people, and the way genetics play out interacting with that environment.
So there's not a hard and fast number, but it's a fairly small list and we were able to rattle them off earlier like the, it's kind of like the popular kids right now. The nuts, the three dark leafy greens, the sweet potatoes, the quinoa, the buckwheat, the gluten-free stuff and the chia bowls. Gotta go. Uh, you know, you've never seen rutabaga heralded as the thing to eat, but it just might be that's in the cabbage family, those cabbage.
So one easy way to remember this is that the cabbage family is a huge portion of the grocery store. If you know what a cabbage family vegetable is, you can know generally if it's from that family, you're fine with it. So that's cabbage, Chinese, cabbage, mustard, greens, collards, the tops of the radishes, the radishes themselves, the rutabaga, the turnips, the, did I say watercress already? Um, let's see, collards, broccoli, cauliflower. It's a huge number of fairly popular vegetables. Broccoli and cauliflower are quite luminary, right?
We like them. So all that is pretty good. And it's best if you cook those though. That whole cabbage family is best if it's peeled and cooked and, and properly prepared and not just eaten raw all the time, which is people are thinking raw is healthier, but it's really not in the vegetable world, especially in the cabbage family. So those are low. Also, there's the cucumber family. These are Fruits that are used as vegetables and fruits that are fruits. So the fruit vegetable qubits are the squashes. Winter squash, the summer squashes are not as low as the winter squashes, but you can get away with reasonable portions of zucchini for sure, and a little bit of yellow squash. Then there's the cucumber. Peel it and seed it. Get rid of those lectins. These fruits tend to have lectins in their skins and seeds, and so again, really nicely cooked, but you can eat raw cucumber, just take the skin off of it and you're good to go in terms of, it should be a safe food. And the other thing in the in the cucumber family are the melons, watermelon, cassava, honeydew. Cantaloupe, that kind of thing. So those are all, those are two families. So you can, you can remember those as families and that some people, that's a stretch, like knowing what's in the cabbage family and knowing what's in the cucumber family, but it's really not that hard. And then the root vegetables that are in a cabbage family, turnips, ru big and so on, are good.
But the beets you gotta be careful of and the potatoes. So white potatoes, especially the big baking potatoes. but it turns out the little ones, the little new red skin potatoes, if you boil those, they're not too bad. So a reasonable portion is fine, but when the way people mostly are eating potatoes now are tater tots, hash browns, french fries, potato chips, and occasionally the baked potato. None of that is the little red little ones. It's always the big baking potato. And when you seal in the. Soluble oxalic acid by frying it in oil and making a chip or a fry with it, you're preserving that oxalic acid and making sure that it's very toxic form of oxalate. Whereas if you boiled your red skin potatoes at home, a little bit of that oxalate would leach into the water and you could throw out the water. And so E uh, A lower vegetable becomes even a little bit lower. That's true with broccoli too. If you boil your broccoli, you can lower it by as much as 50% of the oxalate ‘cause broccoli's got a little bit of oxalate there, so you have to have a reasonable portion or boil it or both.
Ashley: So many good tips here. You mentioned a hot topic, lectins, which I learned about from Dr. Gundry, but if people aren't aware, especially in potatoes, can you walk us through what lectins are?
Sally: Lectins are very different than oxalates. They're ginormous protein molecules. Whereas an oxalate is this like dewdrop tiny molecule and lectins have some problems of grabbing these natural carbs that are on your cells and start wrecking your cells and doing some terrible things. You want to disarm this protein, so it's not an active protein. The way to do that is with soaking any seeds that lectins are in seeds. Primarily, and so in the fruit kind of foods, the highest lectin food out there are lentils. Lentils would need to be soaked for three days or more, and pressure cooked, you know, for three minutes. 'cause they turn to mush pretty fast.
So basically in India they eat a lot of lentils and it's always mushy. It's almost like a soup consistency. It's not in a pasta. This, this lentil pastas aren't properly soaked for three days and not pressure cooked heat. So that would be a very unsafe way to eat. Lentils would be in these pastas and other things that people are now giving to their children.
And I think that's dangerous because you will. That's how I ruined my digestive tract, was eating slow cooked beans, not lentils, just the beans. The beans are also high in oxalate, but all beans tend to be high in lectins, so you want to properly prepare anything in the legume family. I think you can get away with peas, the green peas better than you can these mature dry beans.
Ashley: Now if someone is really amped up hearing this information and going, great, I'm don't have to eat. Finish anymore, I can toss out those beets that I have in the fridge. You know what? I'm just gonna go straight carnivore. Tell me if that's a good idea or potentially what kind of harm or symptoms they should watch out for.
Sally: Well, you know, in fact, we're talking about. Moderating the amount of oxalate you eat, so you get out of what I call the danger zone because the, the math on this is crazy. Like the spinach is so high. You're at this level when you're using spinach a lot and you, and layering these foods in your life on a daily basis where you're just off the charts crazy with oxalate.
And what we wanna do initially is get out of this danger area and bring it down. It's, you don't have to completely jump ship. That's a very abrupt change from a highly toxic, high ate diet. To a zero oxalate diet, and some people do okay with that for a while, but usually at some point it might be a week, a month, a year, a year and a half, three years, six years.
At some point, your body may start releasing the old spinach you used to eat, the old oxalates that are collected in your thyroid gland and bones and tendons, and suddenly make you sick on oxalate. So you need to be aware if you're gonna do this leap. You could trigger an abrupt desire and real strong urge from the body to get it out of the tissues.
'Cause the body has been hanging onto it, waiting for you to stop this overeating of oxalate. And now you're giving it this open window. So you don't know if this open window will be overly taken advantage of. If it is, you're gonna release more oxalate into the bloodstream at a level that's very toxic.
You could end up in the emergency room with arrhythmias and hypertension and. What looks like a stroke or heart attack, and that's really scary and your doctor won't know. They don't know about this and they may not even know enough to give you enough potassium and sodium and minerals to re recur. Calcium. You probably need some calcium. That's part of what gives you the arrhythmia and the AFib and so on. It tends to go along with when you have too much oxalate in the bloodstream, you can mess up the whole balance of electrolytes in too low. Calcium and low electrolytes causes the heart to fail.
Ashley: We don't want that.
Sally: That wouldn't be a desired outcome at all, so it's better to. Just get off like the crazy smoothies and the almond flour and the almond, everything, and, and keep some of these oxalates in your diet. A little bit of a small portion of a buckwheat cracker, a few bites of sweet potato, uh, you know, a little bit of something that you like the blackberry or something for a while so that your body can adjust. For some people, if you know that you're sick with oxalate and you know that you're really toxic and not feeling well, you're especially needing to be careful and kind of just gradually lower it down in a gentle sort of way. The analogy I like to. It's like you don't wanna wake up the baby of all this old oxalate in your body and get it all screaming, right?
So if you're trying to get the baby to sleep, your technique will be to carefully, slowly tiptoe backwards out of the bedroom and carefully shut the door so nobody notices. You're lowering oxalate, like you really don't want your tissues to be too highly alerted. Like, ding, dinging, ding, dinging, ding. No more oxalates.
Here's your chance everybody. Yay. Let's dump. And the tissues will be going crazy. So don't let them have a party of, thank God we get to release this stuff. You want them to just hold their horses so you don't get sick on oxalates that are in your tissues.
Ashley: I like that analogy very much. Are there any supplements that contain oxalates that we should watch out for?
Turmeric straight, whole root turmeric is used in all kinds of ways as a supplement in other ways, so you wanna be aware that you can overdo whole root turmeric. But if you use the curcumin extract, that's very low in oxalate, so you can still have that if you feel there's a reason for it. Slippery elm though, is pretty high in oxalate, and I don't think there's an extract, a slippery elm usually.
Usually just taking that. That's a high one. So those are the two that come off the top of my head. There's a few others that tend to be high, like olive leaf and so on, but a lot of times when we're making tinctures and extracts of herbs or even tea from herbs, it's not very high in oxalate. So that's generally not too big a problem. Butnowadays, I guess the one place it is, is this kind of whole food concept and supplements where there's a lot of dehydrated beets and dehydrated spinach and everything and dehydrated this and that.
And a lot of those are high oxalate ingredients. So these kind of whole food vitamin, supposed vitamin supplements and so on and powdered greens. Those are the things to look out for. And any kind of like smoothie mix and protein powder that has bran in it. Rice bran, oat bran bran is where they oxalates heavily concentrated in these outer layers of these seeds known as greens. Um, so that can sneak. There's little places where you can be using products and not really thinking about the ingredients.
Ashley: I'm so glad you told me that. I actually use Slippery Elm in my gravy, in my bone broth based gravy, so I won't be using that anymore. And I was just shopping a couple days ago for a green powder, and it was specifically labeled low oxalate green powder. And of course there were beets in it, some chard, and I just thought, would Sally approve of this?
Sally: I wanna see the actual testing they've done because, Yeah, so that's good that low oxalate has become a marketing buzz term, but I don't know how to trust the companies to actually know what they're doing and really test their products and be sincere about that.
Ashley: Do we need to watch out for collagen or glycine, which could have oxalates?
Sally: Well, they don't have oxalate. What they do is they can be broken down into oxalate in our metabolism. So there's no amount of oxalate n glycine or bone broth or collagen, but the, it's the hydroxyproline amino acid and a couple other of these connected tissue amino acids that are in these supplements and in gelatin and so on. That adds to what the liver ends up making more oxalates in the body. So it can be significant in people who are already toxic with oxalate. The amount, if you take more than a tablespoon of these collagen powders, Or more than a cup and a half a broth. On a routine day, you're, you're probably overdoing it, but a little bit of gelatin in your capsules or even a little bit of glycinate in some of your supplements is probably okay.
But if it's multiple supplements and you're taking a lot of 'em, that also has the potential to add up. But if your liver's not inflamed, you should only be converting a fairly small amount of that into oxalate. But we see. It makes difference in people's symptoms. If they take out the collagen, they feel better.
Ashley: Sally, what haven't I asked you that you'd like my listeners to know?
Sally: Well, we've got the book now and I was hoping that this durable form of information would survive me. That you know, the world needs the message, but a lot of people are not ready to hear it. And that might include the public health field, that might include the average dietician. But I'm hoping that at some point this will become commonly known and it's okay to join us in being part of this oxalate awareness and feeling a little bit like a fish out of water because everybody says These foods are so great for you.
And they, they really struggle with this cognitive dissonance of well sadly, and these interviewers think oxalates a thing, but everyone else doesn't. And so if you count up, the numbers we're outnumbered. So if you're gonna do it as a popularity contest and you don't belong here, like, this is not the popular street. This is the aisle where sincere seekers of health feel amazingly better, not poisoning ourselves all the time. And if you're really into what's gonna work well for you and really be healthy, this is something. It's like a secret hack almost, of not how to not poison yourself like don't use the stuff they say is good for you.
Ashley: I love that you said that, especially since the focus of my podcast is biohacking. So what is the name of your book? Where can people find you if they want to learn more?
Sally: The book is called Toxic Superfoods, and it comes in a paperback, in a Amazon Kindle electronic form and in an audiobook. And you can buy that anywhere Books are sold. You can find more information on my website. The website has a sort of hidden store where you can find a cookbook. That's a PDF with 180 recipes. You can sign up for a group class there. There's lots of free information. If you sign up for my newsletter, I will occasionally try really hard to get you one as often as I can pull it off, which is uneven these days. But in there you'll also get a couple of more automated messages that will give you the beginner's guide for free.
You can get the beginner's guide there as well for two 50 straight up if you need it now, but, and you can, you can see things on Instagram as well, and sometimes Facebook.
Ashley: And are you still seeing patients or clients? Can someone work with you today?
Sally: Well, I do work with individual, clients, but it's a wait. It's usually a two to four month wait to get into my calendar, and that's expedited and also made more affordable if you come to one of my group classes first and get my handouts and get a kind of overview of how this works, so that when we get to working together, you're ready to hit the ground and really make, make some deeper advances in what you're doing.
Ashley: That's wonderful. I'm so glad that you are sharing this message that hopefully it can get into different medical schools, different nutrition programs all across the globe. We need your work. So thank you so much for your time today for your book. I'm so sorry to hear about the chronic pain you had, the arthritis, but I'm so glad that you came out on the other side to make this world a better place.
Sally: Thank you so much for helping people discover this topic. It's really fun to say, Hey, it's easy to feel better.
Ashley: I love that. Oh, so good. Thank you so much, Sally. We appreciate your time today.
Sally: Cool. That's fantastic. Thank you. Thanks for covering oxalates.
Ashley: Thanks. Bye Sally.
Thank you so much for listening today. I really appreciate your support. One of the things that Sally and I didn't get into on the show today, but I'm keen to bring her back on is to discuss the oxalates that are found in baby food and food friendly, air quotes, food friendly, kid food.
Which has a ton of oxalates in it, which we're starting to introduce to children earlier and earlier where sometimes their first food is sweet potato or avocado .
As well as quinoa and how these foods can start wreaking havoc on kids systems at a really early age. So I'd love to bring Sally back on so that we can take a deep dive into this. But if this information is new to you, I recommend doing a bit of research so that you're not consuming the oxalates that we spoke about in today's show, and definitely not feeding them to your kids , as often so if you found this information helpful today, I would love if you shared it with someone important to you. Or if you wanted to do a shout out to me on Instagram or Facebook, I would love to hear from my listeners.
And lastly, if you have any questions or health challenges that you're struggling with, reach out to me on social media and I will do my best to bring on experts who can help tackle those health challenges. Thank you again for listening today.
Where to find Ashley Deeley:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Twitter/X
Hello@ashleydeeley.com
Disclaimer:
