Episode 225 — Avoid TOXIC Superfoods
Guest: Sally K. Norton • Date: October 10, 2024
Episode Overview
In this episode, we explore how oxalates, found in many "superfoods," can harm gut and brain health, especially in children on the spectrum. Sally K. Norton, author of Toxic Superfoods, reveals how to spot these foods and make safer choices for your family.
About Sally K. Norton
Sally K. Norton, MPH, holds a nutrition 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. Her personal healing experience inspired years of research that led to her book, Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload is Making You Sick-and How to Get Better, which was released in January 2023 from Rodale Press and is available everywhere books are sold.
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You’ll Discover
What Are Oxalates And How They Emerged (6:00)
Some Surprising Facts About Oxalic Acid (8:54)
What You Need To Know About Kidney Stones (11:53)
The Downside of Gluten-Free and Dairy-Free Diets (15:11)
Testing Options And Their Limitations (22:11)
Why It’s All About The Dosage And A Common Mistake To Avoid (24:05)
The Many Ways Oxalates Wreak Havoc (25:25)
A Key Resource That Demystifies Oxalate Levels In Foods (31:25)
Plants DON’T Want Us To Eat Them (34:17)
Why Almond Milk Is Worse Than Almonds (40:32)
How To Undo Oxalate Poisoning, Including Kidney Stones (42:07)
A Case To Address Oxalates Now (48:19)
Referenced in This Episode
Data Companion to Toxic Superfoods by Sally K. Norton
Full Transcript
Sally K. Norton | 00:00
It's so fundamental to minimize toxins and understand oxalate as a toxin, not an allergy. Don't call it like, I'm sensitive about everyone's sensitive to toxins. It's really about dose with toxins. We're upping the dose in modern eating.
So it's way past what the body can handle. You can probably handle about 15 leaves of spinach if you don't eat any peanuts or almonds or chocolate or other things during the day. But 15 leaves of spinach, I mean, if you're having a smoothie or one of these hide the health foods in the kids food thing where you're jamming it into pancakes and cakes and other things like that, meatballs full of spinach, like you could really poison a kid by, you know, going keto with the almonds and the peanuts or whatever. Going all greens and stuffing it into foods. It's the dose of oxalate can really blow out your kidneys capacity, your bloodstreams capacity, your poor liver is being bombarded with oxalic acid after your meals. And guess what? The liver can't do anything about it.
Cass Arcuri | 01:00
Want to truly be the best parent you can be and help your child thrive after their autism diagnosis? This podcast is for all in parents like you who know more is possible for your child.
Len Arcuri | 01:10
With each episode, we reveal a secret that empowers you to be the parent your child needs now. Saving you time, energy, and money and helping you focus on what truly matters most, your child.
Cass Arcuri | 01:22
I'm Cass. And I'm Len. Welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets.
Len Arcuri | 01:37
Hello and welcome to Autism Parenting Secrets. In this episode, we're going to dive into the hidden health threat that could be affecting you and your child on the spectrum. Oxalates. These compounds found in many so-called superfoods can really increase inflammation and wreak havoc on the gut and brain health. Today, my guest is Sally K. Norton. She's the author of Toxic Superfoods. And she's going to reveal what you need to know about oxalates and how to make safer choices for you and your family. If you've been wondering why some healthy foods are making things worse, this is the episode for you. The secret this week is... Avoid toxic superfoods. Welcome, Sally.
Sally K. Norton | 02:25
Thank you. It's lovely to be with you.
Len Arcuri | 02:27
Great to see you. And yes, we met a couple of months ago at the Southeast Regional Integrative Medical Conference in Asheville. And yeah, you were the marquee lead speaker on day one. I was actually an exhibitor there as part of a not-for-profit that I'm a part of, Safe Tech NC, which is all about helping to promote awareness of EMFs and how to reduce exposure. But I left my booth to make sure I was front and center for your talk because oxalates are something that's been on my radar in order to help my son for 12, 13, 14 years. And that's when I first heard about the issue here. And it's amazing how And all that time, no one's really talking about it until you came along and you gave a dynamite talk. And I said, my listeners really need to hear your voice.
So thank you for joining. It's.
Sally K. Norton | 03:22
A lovely opportunity to meet you and your listeners because, you know, we don't get a chance to learn about this. It's just been way off the radar. And here it is front and center on our plates. And is this big character on our health? And we don't even know about.
Len Arcuri | 03:38
It. Right. And so. To your point and to what I just said, it's been known for a while.
So before you dive into explaining what oxalates are, but Why do you think this is something that just doesn't get the attention it deserves?
Sally K. Norton | 03:53
Yeah, that's a bit of a speculative question, but I suppose it's worthy because that is the thing that starts really bothering people as they're reading my book. They're like, what? They knew about this then and they knew about it then and this people knew about it and this profession knew about it and it's here and here all in the medical literature. And they're like, How come my doctor and the medical people don't know about this?
So that is one of the annoying little things in your head when you start learning this. Like, Hey, people. And, you know, there's a lot of reasons. And one of them is that we have a system that's pursued. Kind of premium style and healthcare that's become a more of a disease management system because in order to keep those salaries and keep it exclusive and keep it a, you know, it's kind of a monopoly really the standard MD world of healthcare is meant to be a monopoly because we want to use, extensive preparation for the profession, lots of education and so on, which is costly. And so you have to keep the salaries high enough to justify all that education and you have to keep the technology exclusive.
So there's only so many MRIs and only doctors can let you use the MRI machine and so on. So there's a huge infrastructure that involves technologies and surgeries and all this. And your entry point is to become an MD and be part of that world.
So there's very little room for prevention and even the root cause of things. There's very little interest in asking what you put on your salads and what you put in your sandwiches. That just isn't something that you need 18 years of schooling for. And, you know, heavily, you don't need to be mentored by six surgeons to do that.
So it doesn't really suit that high tech mindset. Model of healthcare and we don't have an intermediate system of lifestyle wisdom that used to be done in our cultures back in the day, but that has been getting lost as we've professionalized our thinking, like we're deferring to professionals rather than human tradition and human wisdom. And the oxalates really weren't part of human wisdom For several reasons. One of them is because we didn't start adding these high oxalate foods as staples until about 150 years ago. Many of them, they started with potatoes about 400 years ago. But even the common vegetables that are in the produce department, many of them were developed through plant breeding, just selective breeding.
So you turned a nasty plant. Inedible, tough, bitter root. The carrot root, the wild carrot into something sweet and fat and crispy and orange and red and whatever. That was human innovation and human engineering. As is so much of the produce department who came through human innovation.
So a lot of foods we think of like peanut butter and chocolate and potatoes and French fries and all the stuff we think is normal. They're actually very novel in the human diet. They don't make a lot of sense from a historical perspective.
Len Arcuri | 06:45
Interesting. Yeah. And because no one was around that long ago, it's easy to normalize these foods.
Sally K. Norton | 06:53
What's true for the last 15 years has always been true in our minds. It's really sad. And that's, again, because the grandparent wisdom and the elders wisdom, the seven generations of wisdom that is to be gifted us as new beings. Has been just cut off. We've been cut off from that. And that makes us vulnerable to all kinds of charlatanism that is disguised as professional advice.
Len Arcuri | 07:19
Interesting. Okay.
Well, so yeah, you've opened up a lot of doors. So maybe let's start. Before we talk about the foods that are high in oxalate, so if you could do a little bit 101 on what oxalate is and feel free to explain to our listeners, you know, what even brought you to this place in terms of wanting to evangelize this important concept. I know you have a personal history that's very relevant that informed, you know, what you learned and now how you're paying it forward.
So I'll hand it off to you.
Sally K. Norton | 07:51
Yes. Well, in school at Cornell, where I got my nutrition degree, I saw just a couple little tiny paragraphs in my textbooks about oxalates and learned in class and so on that anybody with a kidney disorder, particularly kidney stones, should be on a low oxalate diet.
So we knew to restrict spinach and tea and these things for that reason. We knew that eating oxalate reduces calcium and mineral availability in food. And so you wouldn't have a high oxalate food like tea or spinach with a food that you expect to absorb nutrients from, especially the minerals.
So I knew that general stuff. So what is the oxalate? It's this Tiny compound, it's made of two carbons. It has four oxygens on it, which is really interesting that it's so heavily, it's the weirdest ratio in nature. Two carbons, four oxygens. This is a tiny molecule and it comes with a negative charge, sometimes two negative charges, which gives it this power to grab minerals because minerals have positive charges.
So in chemistry, you're negative and you're positive. Opposites attract. And so it's kind of this cleaning agent. In fact, oxalic acid, which is the parent compound. That's the one with the charge on it. Can grab these minerals and has this bleaching effect. It pulls rust out of engines. It pulls materials out of fabrics. It bleaches copper. It takes the, it, Polishes, brass, and so on. It's quite amazing that it's been used in industry, especially the textile mills, since the very late 1700s. And it was a household cleaner, and it still is. It's in Barkeeper's Friend. Really? On their website, they'll say how natural Barkeeper's Friend is because the main active ingredient in the powder is... The same thing that's in spinach. And therefore, it must be wonderful. But if you keep using Bar Keeper's Friend with oxalic acid, you can end up with difficulty with the circulation in your hands and fingers. You can end up with knobby arthritis and all kinds of damage to the connective tissue and the nervous tissue in your hands and the blood and the circulation of the blood.
So the capillaries, the nerves, the connective tissue in this area where you're connecting, you're holding onto or getting contact with the oxalic acid is a problem. It turns out that If you eat a lot of the foods that have a lot of oxalate, which are things like spinach, sweet potatoes, white potatoes, chocolate, almonds, cashews, peanuts, kiwi, buckwheat, quinoa, teff.
So a lot of the foods that we think are good for us, like I thought sweet potatoes were so great because they're low allergy foods. So I developed problems with sensitivities to soy and to wheat and to some other grains. And I was running out of, I couldn't eat beans anymore. And I was running out of starchy things without bread and beans. I needed to start, so I was relying on sweet potatoes heavily, and my health problems got worse.
So like you're saying, sometimes you're doing the best you can to select a healthy food based on the advice and information we have, which is a benefits-focused information with never the downside. There's never the fine print. There's never the side effects. This is 100% good because, hey, it's orange.
Right? Well, nature doesn't work that way. The plant kingdom uses lots of chemistry for lots of reasons for their own purposes.
Some of the purposes include self-defense. So plants deliberately make oxalic acid and they kind of accidentally make it because vitamin C and other compounds can degenerate into oxalate.
So plants will make vitamin C specifically to make oxalic acid and then they'll specifically build crystals of calcium oxalate because oxalic acid and calcium adore each other. And that's the most common direction oxalic acid goes is into this calcium oxalate Molecule which then precipitates out into crystals and forms nanocrystals and plants deliberately build these microcrystals.
Well, lo and behold, your supposed calcifications in your body, particularly your calcium kidney stone, is actually an oxalate stone. But your doctor fails to tell you that part.
So you won't know that the main source of oxalate in your kidneys is coming from your diet. Over 50% or more of the oxalate that gets in your kidneys is coming from your potatoes, your peanuts, your dark chocolate, your quinoa, your tap, your spinach, your beet greens, your blackberries, And Wait, that's like health food.
And then the rest of it, most of the rest of it is coming from vitamin C and you're taking it in supplements and you're eating C fortified foods and vitamin C degenerates in the cells and the tissues into oxalate and the kidneys help your body remove most of it. And so when you get a kidney stone. Your doctor says, that's a calcium stone, whatever.
You know, you'll be fine. Get over it. And they don't say, you know what, there's some dietary aspects to this problem. They just don't. It could be that the people writing the rules for the doctors about what's the next move when a person has a kidney stone. Has a lot of investments in the diagnostic companies and other things that may shade their judgment. And they're not nutritionists. They don't put nutritionists on the protocol committee that writes the suggestions for doctors for kidney stone patient, these are the things you do. There's never a nutritionist on that committee.
So this is another example of why we don't hear about it from our doctors.
Len Arcuri | 13:19
Right. Right.
Yeah. No, the whole system is about just helping people to deal with and manage these symptoms as opposed to getting rid of them and actually reducing and getting to the root cause of what's going on, which is why this discussion is pretty powerful. And I think.
Sally K. Norton | 13:36
Patients get sick of management. Like, hello?
I mean, I have to keep taking this drug. I have to keep checking my blood sugar. I have to keep doing this over and over again. When do I get to be better?
Len Arcuri | 13:45
Right. But a lot of people have just normalized it. That's just how it is. Right.
So that's where it's a very different world to look at things in terms of, okay, well, what's at the root? What can I do? And that's gets to a lot of what is in your book, right? In terms of wealth. Changing your diet is absolutely one huge way that you have 100% control over, but it's inconvenient. It's inconvenient. It takes some effort. And, you know, I think for, Parents who are listening, especially if your child may be a picky eater, is only eating some kind of processed food, maybe a handful of foods, maybe the diet already is poor and you aspire to eating the foods that Sally mentioned because they seem like they're healthier. That's the irony here is that There are superfoods that actually may truly set your child back as opposed to providing more nourishment.
That's why understanding, you know, your child, what their needs are, And then tailoring the food choices for what's going to help them the most is really important. And oxalates are just something that aren't on a lot of people's radar because they're more focused on, let's say, gluten. Which is inflammatory or dairy and casein, which is inflammatory. It doesn't take much to say eating organic is probably better if you're not eating chemicals and pesticides. But lost in all this, I think is the That's exactly it, right?
Sally K. Norton | 15:03
Natural pesticides in the plants themselves.
Len Arcuri | 15:07
And the.
Sally K. Norton | 15:08
Fact that gluten-free diet and dairy-free diet adds more oxalates to your body. When you cut out the dairy and cut out the gluten, you automatically up the toxicity of the diet. From an Oxlade perspective.
Len Arcuri | 15:21
Can you expand on that a little bit?
Sally K. Norton | 15:24
Yes. So you know how oxalic acid with its charges connects with calcium.
Well, when you have a lot of dairy in the diet, you can connect with that oxalate and calcium. In the stomach and so less oxalic acid gets into your bloodstream. Because the oxalic acid is that free little individual molecule that floats in on the water and comes in on in your stomach and your intestines and so on. Very quickly, it can get into your bloodstream.
Well, with calcium in the diet, it lowers it by at least 20 to 35% how much of the oxalic acid will get into your bloodstream. So calcium is incredibly protective as the binder that protects us from oxalate. It doesn't work 100%. It can't get all of it. It's not like it has this magic power to get all the oxalate, but it's a really important protector. Calcium is a critical nutrient. And when you are deficient in calcium, you have growth problems, you have behavioral problems, you have calcifications. When you're deficient in calcium, you end up with calcifications in the body. That is fact in science is lost on your doctor. They have no idea. People are even afraid of calcium supplements when it's incredibly important nutrient.
So you have that with the no dairy, which has become almost universal advice. You're inflamed. Get rid of inflammatory dairy.
Well, in some cases, that's completely the wrong choice. And I have found with my clients and followers that if they get rid of the oxalates, they get to have their dairy back and their bread back and like life is better. And the gluten, the real problem with getting off gluten is that the gluten-free products full of arrowroot, potatoes, Fuck weed. Kef, quinoa, these substitutes... Protein law is so preferred these days because it's got some protein in it. Very high in oxalate and quinoa is full of saponins and other plant toxins. There's many toxins in plants that can be harmful to our digestion. And fundamentally, your nervous system and your immune system are so reliant on a healthy gut. And these compounds in these gluten-free things are quite damaging to gut health, neurological health, and immune health. It's quite striking. Cells require nutrition, and low toxicity. If you're giving toxins that reduce your nutrition, you have both the two evil heads of disease and that's toxicity and the lack of proper nutrients in your system. And you can do a lot when someone's well nourished and there's no better time to be well nourished than when you're a fetus and a newborn and a nursing child or a school-aged child who's learning and growing. The most critical times of life to be well-nourished and protected from toxins. And yet we're letting children have potato chips and French fries and chocolate and giving them chocolate cake and pureed beets and sweet potatoes. And now the fancier the baby food has, quinoa and these things that are supposedly so good. And yet we're completely ignoring the toxicity side of natural compounds in.
Len Arcuri | 18:24
Plants. Well, I think you boiled it down quite beautifully in terms of The game, if there is a game in terms of how do you help your child the most and yourself is by not eating toxic food.
Sally K. Norton | 18:37
Not forcing spinach down their throats, not having that spinach sweet potatoes.
Len Arcuri | 18:40
Argument. Right. You don't like.
Sally K. Norton | 18:43
You don't like dark chocolate. You don't like spinach. Good. It's like, okay, it's actually in some cases it becomes easier. Because you'd be more comfortable with them having the cheeseburger with extra meat than the fries. And if you can get them to fill up on that, you don't have to give up on the McDonald's trip. You don't have to be that weird. You can just help the children know in order for you to go strong and big and smart in school and be good at your baseball or whatever you need, that protein and that stuff in that French fries could get in the way of your future life as a pitcher and a Or whatever it is, it turns a kid on, you can help them learn to like defend their own goals by knowing how to live. And that's exactly what you're trying to do for yourselves as a family. It's just, Prioritize your real priorities in life, which have to include the wealth of good health, because there's nothing more draining than having chronic health problems.
Len Arcuri | 19:43
Right. And for every single person, what's uniquely a superfood or for them and what's uniquely their kryptonite?
I mean, it's going to vary from person to person. I mean, my son has true IgE allergies to gluten, dairy, all these things.
Sally K. Norton | 19:59
Yeah. I do with gluten and wheat. It's actually glitian for me. It shows up really bad. But the problem is It's probably because of my high oxalate diet that I got there. With that.
Len Arcuri | 20:13
Interesting, because when I think about gluten especially and you think about, okay, well, what's the issue with gluten? Why is it a problem now versus way back when? Clearly, yes, a lot of it's genetically modified. Now that's an issue. The glyphosate that's that it's doused with that might be the bigger issue.
Sally K. Norton | 20:30
Antibiotics, the other shots, the emulsifiers, the poor nutrient value of the foods. And then we're. Bribing Kids, okay, you can have your deep dark chocolate cake if you eat your spinach. It's like the worst combination of it. Or have your salad full of toxic salad dressing and spinach.
And then you can have your. Candy.
Len Arcuri | 20:58
Yeah. So a lot of this comes down to critical thinking now in terms of what seems healthy or what Society is telling you is healthy. That's worth taking a second look at. And that's where looking at it from the standpoint of what might be toxic to me or to my child, you know, in addition to the. Culprits that might be out there, whether it's gluten, dairy, for some people that may be an issue, pesticides, chemicals, but this Looking at the world through this oxalate lens is very new for a lot of people. And again, it seems to fly through in the face of what everyone else is recommending.
So if parents were to embrace it and say, okay, oxalates are an issue. Potentially. I know there's a lot of tests that are out there that can help indicate whether or not oxalate levels are high, you know, for myself, for my son. And there's a number of tests out there, the big, the more popular one that you hear a lot within the autism communities, the organic acids test that will tell you a lot of things about what's going on, including oxalate levels. And I think some labs and information can sometimes be useful, but my guess is you would recommend, you know, this isn't even something that's worth testing on. If you could just minimize these foods, you could save yourself a lot of money and just promote health for you and your family. Is that accurate? Pretty.
Sally K. Norton | 22:21
Much because the organic acid test is a urine test. And the urine is a reflection of what's going on that week, that day, and the body's really cleaning itself up and doing various maintenance things that affect the urine quality.
So you can have a hyoxate problem and it doesn't necessarily show up in the urine. Because the urine is reflecting of what's showing up in the bloodstream. And if the body can't tolerate a lot of oxalate in the bloodstream, if it's busy holding onto it, because what happens when you have a chronic diet of high oxalates is you're sequestering and the body's holding onto it and it's building up in your brain. In your thyroid gland, in other glands of the body, in your tendons and joints and so on, and building up even in your kidneys because it's not tolerable in the bloodstream. You can't have something that takes calcium out of your blood riding around in the blood because you will have a heart attack. The pacemaker of the heart requires a certain level of calcium in the blood. You could create a stroke. You will destroy your capillaries that feed your eyeballs and your other tissues.
So oxalate is literally collecting in your eyeballs and your brain and your thyroid gland And it looks, it's not in the blood. And therefore, it's not necessarily in the urine either. It can be. If you get an OATS test that says you're high oxalate, you should pay attention to that. But if you get an OATS test result that says you're low in oxalate, that doesn't mean anything. It means maybe your kidneys aren't good enough to release oxalate into the urine. Maybe your system is so toxic that it's holding on to it and can't afford to have any of it in the blood or the urine right now. Or maybe it's just taking a break and taking a rest period.
So there's lots of other things going on that we don't understand. So testing can be a big profit center for people, but not necessarily a real point of power for you to really make good decisions. It's so fundamental to minimize toxins and understand oxalate as a toxin, not an allergy. Don't call it like, I'm sensitive about everyone's sensitive to toxins. It's really about dose with toxins. We're upping the dose in modern... Eating.
So it's way past what the body can handle. You can probably handle about 15 leaves of spinach if you don't eat any peanuts or almonds or chocolate or other things during the day. But 15 leaves of spinach, I mean, if you're having a smoothie or one of these hide the health foods in the kids food thing where you're jamming it into pancakes and cakes and other things like that, meatballs full of spinach, like You could really poison a kid by, you know, going keto with the almonds and the peanuts or going all greens and stuffing it into foods. It's the dose of oxalate can really blow out your kidneys capacity, your bloodstreams capacity, your poor liver is being bombarded with oxalic acid after your meals. And guess what? The liver can't do anything about it. The liver can only defend itself. It doesn't detox oxalate, even though it is a toxin. It's such a little compound. We don't have the enzymes to break it up. In fact, the liver is where the body makes oxalate. With the breakdown of connective tissue.
So hydroxyproline, one of these amino acids, becomes oxalate. So the oxalates come from your spinach, go straight to your liver, Through the bloodstream affecting your immune cells and your red blood cells and the vascular tissue itself, and the liver releases that oxalic acid with more in it, into the heart.
So it goes from the liver up to your heart, then into your lungs for oxygen. This is the pathway of blood flow in the body. Then back into the heart.
So now you've hit your digestive tract, your vascular system, your immune cells, your liver, your heart and your lungs, before you've even gotten it out into the rest of the tissues where it starts collecting in your thyroid glands and your teeth and eyes and brain. And eventually the kidneys clean it out.
So does the saliva and then maybe the tissues of the eyes. The skin, but it's primarily coming out through the kidneys. But before it does that, it's causing distress in cells throughout the body.
So now it's interfering with not just your brain, but every other tissue in the body, the blood vessels, the membranes of all the cells, the mitochondria that give you energy. And it interferes with the cell's self-management because the cell runs itself on calcium ions. It uses little calcium ions to decide what to do in life. And at every moment, especially with nerves, it's so critical that cells have control over calcium. And yet when oxalates around, it messes up the control that cells have and it interferes with their function. The neurons are the most sensitive cells to toxins and because of that interference with their energy production and mostly their interference with the ability to control a signal, and they get stuck in this spastic on position and they're causing all kinds of hyperness that makes it hard to sleep, it makes it hard to think and settle down, it makes it hard to stay motivated, it promotes anxiety and depression. And really makes it hard to learn and remember things. And I've seen people In fact, on my YouTube channel, there's a lovely story of a woman Christy, who says that as a child, she was in real trouble learning to read because even three-letter words, she couldn't remember them long enough to learn them. And now she's reading fine now that she's on a low-oxalate diet. But as a kid, she struggled with a severe learning disorder, and she credits the oxalates for that.
Len Arcuri | 27:40
- Wow, no, you covered a lot of ground there and I just can imagine a lot of listeners panicking a little bit as you were sharing about well-intentioned parents who are trying to sneak in those health foods, particularly spinach, sweet potato, and all those things. So again, this is kind of a lot to kind of get your mind around in terms of it being a very different way of looking at what a superfood is. And again, that's why it's so unique to what's going on with your child or with your diet, right? To look at this and say, is this something that's that requires action. And that's where I know many people who are listening are probably wondering, well, what are the things to look for to know whether oxalates are wreaking havoc? And I'll ask you to answer that question. But my guess is there's probably no visible symptoms.
Sally K. Norton | 28:32
Often. Yeah. It's surprisingly how asymptomatic disease can be.
I mean, you see that in cancer where people don't have a lot of disease. Symptoms or don't notice them until they're six months before they're dead.
So you know that like with hypertension, even glucose management problems, sometimes there isn't that many symptoms until you really get tuned into it. And the body does its best to pretend it's all well. And this is not really a time to panic and freak out. It is a time to take a deep breath and go, you know what, maybe I've been trying too hard. Maybe it's easier than I thought. And once you get the knowledge, and that's a difficult thing to do, to learn which foods are high oxalate, which foods are low oxalate, which are safe, how to cook them and all that. There is a whole... Lifelong process of refining your understanding and you don't really arrive at like some magic I know it all. There's no way to know it all in biology and health and there's no way to remember it well, but you can get real clear real fast about what are the top foods that your family leans to and your kids lean to that are problematic from the oxalate perspective and how can you find the other ways to eat and other things to eat so that you're not missing them so much, how to fill those in with some safer alternatives. And that's a lovely journey that doesn't have to be immediate. You can take your time with it and expect that everybody's ability to learn what to do and what to buy and how to prepare it and to find satisfaction in it and to eat a nourishing diet takes time. And it takes a lot of patience because all these different personalities in a family always complicates things.
Len Arcuri | 30:12
Indeed. And yeah, no, I think the, I probably am like a lot of people you've talked to where When I first really started taking this seriously, I realized that my diet was super high oxalate, like it was as if I was intentionally trying to consume oxalates, right?
So almond butter, I was shoveling into my mouth whenever I could thinking that was healthy and better than peanut butter and other things. Sweet potatoes, as much as possible. And spinach, you know, I grew up I'm older, but when I grew up, the Popeye thing and that's what you ate, spinach was the healthy food. I was looked at as a model kid because I always ate my spinach. And so now- you know, with this knowledge, I've had to shift my diet and my son his oat test popped up high oxalate.
So, you know, we've been trying to minimize. And I think one of the things about, I believe what you recommend is, you know, wherever you are, The goal is to minimize and to reduce your consumption. You can't go to zero.
Sally K. Norton | 31:14
Don't need to and don't.
Len Arcuri | 31:15
Want to. Yeah, you wouldn't want to go cold turkey, right? And to change your diet upside down. And that's why, by the way, Sally, in addition to her book, has a data companion that's behind me as well.
Sally K. Norton | 31:26
Yeah. Like this on the website. There you go. You can't get this on Amazon, but you have to come to my website.
Len Arcuri | 31:32
And I would recommend people do that because that will demystify exactly what the oxalate content is in a whole variety of foods where, you know, it's hard to know.
Sally K. Norton | 31:43
It's got handy color coding that gives you a quick reference where white and green are really like perfect, really low and the darker reds and so on are not something to take casually, so you got to know about Basically, the ones that are chocolate flavored are the dark ones.
Len Arcuri | 32:01
Yeah, no, your data companion really does demystify it. Very comprehensive. And I buy it for clients, by the way, and I share it with parent clients because, again, once they know, they want to take action. But again, there's a lot of misleading information online in terms of oxalate levels and different foods. And I think yours is extremely well researched and very comprehensive.
So, yeah, if this is something that you're wanting to really make better decisions, you got to get to those specific foods first. That you're serving your family. And again, as Sally mentioned, if there's some go-to foods that your family really loves, there's definitely going to be some swaps, some things that you can move to that can significantly reduce the oxalate level.
Like I love spinach, but now I buy bok choy all the time, which is a much better option. Much.
Sally K. Norton | 32:48
Better. Much better. And you know, you really can, depending on your style, the entirely superfoods, we have the high and low list in here like four or five times and a list in a back that gives you some more numbers and numbers scattered through the book. If you want to know things like why we don't know about this and where it is in the foods and how come this and that and what about the testing and what other aspects of this and what is this about the accumulation and the purging and deaccumulation process, this is all answering every question. With the data guide, I've got a shorter description of what to do with the data, how to understand the weaknesses in the data, and it covers enough there.
Some people find that they can get started with Just that part kind of depends on what you're interested in doing. But having all of this information is the only way to protect yourself is to really become knowledgeable.
Len Arcuri | 33:43
Yeah, no doubt. And unlike other areas which we talked about, right, gluten-free, if you have a gluten intolerance or a sensitivity, okay, it makes sense to eliminate gluten.
Some people, it may not make a big difference. And you can go on and on about these different kind of compounds, but it seems to me that oxalates are a little bit unique in that Everyone would benefit from reducing the consumption of oxalates and this kind of gets more to even what Dr. Stephen Gundry talks about, plant paradox, where a lot of plant foods are toxic to humans. They don't want us to eat.
Sally K. Norton | 34:15
Them. Yeah. And it's hard for us to get our heads around that at first because we have this Disney World version of like, all plants are so good. They just want us to eat them and they just love us and they're here for us to eat them. Are you kidding? Have you ever hiked in the woods or been out in nature and gotten a little hungry and looked around and see what nature was wanting you to eat? None of it.
Like you're going to eat pine cones and pine needles. Are you going to eat, you know, jack in the pulpits and like random weeds under the trees? There's very little nutrition there unless you've got a, you know, a shot put or, you know, little gun or something.
So you can have a squirrel or a deer or antelope or buffalo like fish, Real food for humans is really not pine cones. If your little kid was eating the yew berries on your Bushes out front. Are you going to let them continue to do that? Have a lovely berry snack? No, you're going to grab them, make them spit it out, give them some water to spit it out.
And then you would call the poison control center and ask if you need to bring the kid in for a stomach pump. Because That's very dangerous. Dewberries are very toxic, as is most plants. We have a special bunch of them corralled in the produce department. We've tried to make them as safe as we can to make them edible. But the average plant is not very edible.
Len Arcuri | 35:35
Yeah, and again, not just the concept that's I'd ask all listeners just Sit with that a little bit. It flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom.
Sally K. Norton | 35:45
Is it wise to imagine plants want us to eat them? Are you kidding? That's very egocentric of us as a species to think that everybody's just here so we can eat them.
Len Arcuri | 35:56
Yes, that is a very powerful way of looking at it. And again, it just takes an openness. To rethinking health, to rethinking what nourishment is, what it entails. And again, this is not meant to be another episode to give you more things to worry about as a parent. But if you're trying to make a diet that's less toxic and more nourishing, this is definitely something to be considering. And again, the moves here to make aren't incredibly costly or incredibly difficult. But it does take a desire to move in a different direction if you believe it's something that's going to help your family.
So again, from that standpoint, this is definitely something to consider. So Sally, I know we kind of dove right in, but your own personal journey, would you care to dive a little bit more into your own, how you basically evolved, your thinking evolved in this to really be able to share it with other people why this is something that's so often overlooked? I.
Sally K. Norton | 36:56
Had no clue for years that oxalate, oxalic acid was a general poison. That poisons all the basic cells when there's too much of it around. I just didn't know that. They taught us that it was kidney stones and lowering your mineral absorption. And that was all I knew about it. And so I blithely didn't really know what foods were high oxalate because you get these little tiny lists in your textbook, you know, spinach. And you're a little vague on the other things. You're pretty sure chocolate's not so good. And so in one part of the textbook, you get these five foods and the other part, you get these 10 foods and they don't even match.
Like even in the textbooks, they don't match the nursing textbook. Has a list that's from the American Dietetics Association now called something else. That list has, what are the high oxalate foods? Eight or nine of them aren't high oxalate at all.
So even the dieticians and the nurses and all of us in the profession, we don't even know where the oxalate is in the food anyway. So even if I knew that it was such a profound toxin. That would ruin my life in so many ways. I wouldn't have really known how to do it. And we owe a lot of credit to Joanne Yont from the Volver Pain Foundation in North Carolina. She's based in Mebane. She founded the Balmer Pain Foundation because she found That oxalates were the cause of her severe or somebody's severe suffering.
You know, these women who have this intense pain in their genitals end up being having surgeries where they remove the glands from the opening of the vagina and then they get these laser surgeries that lasers off the vulva. Multiple times and it doesn't really lead to real serious relief. And with the help of a independent scientist, They figured out that the urine was high in oxalate with these vulva sufferers and that by getting them on a low oxalate diet, they got symptom relief. And over time, they started to see they got relief from their fibromyalgia and their connective tissue disorders. And they got relief. All kinds of autoimmune issues would start to settle down and kind of recede into, you know, not a problem for them.
So it's really interesting that they saw the pain syndromes that was involving pelvic problems. And then they saw the connective tissue syndromes and the autoimmune syndromes all connected to oxalate.
So that was Pretty innovative stuff here in modern life. Now, she was actually rediscovering something that we knew in the 1840s. In the 1840s, we knew well that if you had too much rhubarb and high oxalate foods, that you would become neurotic and gloomy and start to predict your future would just be awful. And you would have kidney stones and you would have aches and pains and you would get gout. We've known this. For a long time, nearly 200 years. Because we all had oxalic acid in the household back then because it was the cleaning agent of choice in the early 1800s, people would accidentally consume it by mouth because it looks just like Epsom salts.
So the standard remedy for a stomachache is a spoonful of Epsom salts. So people take a spoonful of Epsom salts and turn out it wasn't Epsom salts at all, and they'd be dead two hours later.
So the very first experimental, extensive experimental study on toxicology in Newfield was published in 1823, demonstrating that the more dilute forms of oxalic acid are more toxic. So a great example of a dilute form of well-dissolved with lots of water in it is T. And spinach juice, and maybe even smoothies if you add a lot of Water like almond milk is a great, very dilute drink.
Source of oxalates. It's only like, you know, 10 almonds in that bottle of water and gums and fillers. And yet it's pretty toxic form of oxalate because all that water facilitates its absorption into your bloodstream.
So more of it comes in your bloodstream than it would if it was just a hot whole almond chewed. When you turn it into almond milk.
So the modern processing using juicing technologies and milking almonds actually makes it more toxic.
Len Arcuri | 41:06
Wow. No, I mean, it's just so sobering as you're talking about it, because I'm just visualizing the typical smoothie I would have, which would be almond milk, spinach, Right.
Sally K. Norton | 41:15
Boomerang. Some people like peanut butter and Turmeric is another high oxalate food, the whole root healthy.
Len Arcuri | 41:23
Turmeric. I can't tell you how much up until recently we were adding turmeric to a lot of things because yeah, it's a bit... Butas are very Anti-inflammatory. Anti-inflammatory spice, which again.
Sally K. Norton | 41:33
And yet oxalate creates inflammation diseases. It creates inflammation of the gut. It creates damage to the circulating immune cells. They put out pro-inflammatory cytokines. They lose their ability to fight infections.
And then you end up with crystalline deposits in your tissues that inspire autoimmune diseases.
Len Arcuri | 41:52
So now a selfish question. So if you have oxalate issues and potential kidney stones that have been forming because of overconsumption of oxalate, if one does reduce and make the dietary changes and lifestyle changes, over time, It's not like the oxalate damage is permanent. You can slowly, right?
Sally K. Norton | 42:18
Absolutely. Yeah, your body is ready to get rid of this stuff and will.
So if you have kidney stones or bladder stones, it's very important to not let the rest of the body overly purge the oxalates out of your thyroid gland and your eyeballs and your shoulder. In your jaw and your teeth. You really don't want that. That's one reason we want to go slow because the body needs to prioritize the kidneys and the bladder so the exit routes are safely functional and you won't blow out your kidneys. If you try to go too fast, you can do that.
So we very effectively Get rid of kidney stones when you add lemon juice or citrate supplements. So citric acid helps to dissolve down the kidney stones. And so calcium citrate, very helpful. Juicing three lemons a day. Proven to reduce kidney stones and bladder stones.
So the low-oxalate diet plus the lemon juice or a citrate supplement, either calcium citrate, magnesium citrate, potassium citrate, and all three are really great at letting your body dissolve and release them safely. So you can do it. You can undo the Soxley poisoning safely. Unfortunately, because it is a poison. And because eventually you have to break out these crystals from your teeth or wherever and put them back into the bloodstream sometimes. That's raising your oxalate level again.
So you're not over the toxicity aspect of this in the short run. In fact, you get a little relief in the beginning.
And then as the body starts trying to purge this stuff out, you get more inflammation attacking crystals and you get more oxalate damage from the oxalate coming out. So this is not a quick turnaround.
So don't be in a big hurry. You really just want to protect the kidneys and the excretion routes and not Continue to consume the toxic levels that enhances that buildup, but bring it down to a level where the body is not really too eager to purge.
So literally you don't need to go to zero because if you do, you could purge. Poison yourself just from the old leftovers. And even children, I mean, they're getting oxalate from breast milk. If you're eating a very high oxalate diet, During pregnancy and while breastfeeding, your breast milk is likely to be filling up with oxalate, especially if you go low oxalate.
So if you were a keto. While you're pregnant and then you went more diverse, you know, maybe you were keto because you had gestational diabetes and you're eating almond milk. Muffins and pancakes. Now you're better and now you're not eating them. It could come out in the breast milk.
And then you could have a fussy baby with diaper rash and rashes and a baby that's hard to settle down and sleep and a kid who has tantrums and has learning disabilities. And it could be just because they got so much oxalate in the breast milk. And there is very little research paying attention to this.
So we're discovering accidentally.
Len Arcuri | 45:03
Right. And you discovered personally by making all the mistakes that you're trying to advise other people.
Sally K. Norton | 45:08
I grew up on Swiss chard and beet greens and love tea after school and high school. And I love the citric, the citrus peel, the citron that you put in the like Christmas breads, like fruitcake, the Christmas, the German and Swiss schollen, the Christmas, like everywhere I go, I love food and ate too much natural food. Gardener is a nine year old.
And then when I got off being a vegan and vegetarian, I went on sweet potatoes because of the bean allergy and the weed allergy. And that sweet potato just made everything worse.
So I started to eat better. It's getting better protein, but I was getting... I got wrinkles and age spots and Pain in my rhomboids and more aches and pains, more fatigue. I was having so much fatigue from the vegetarian diet. And not knowing about oxalate and then adding in a sweet potato.
So if it didn't really fix it, I had to take a partial salary. And before that at Cornell, I kind of got there with foot problems. It just got worse. And I had to leave school. For four year leave of absence. I was put on ibuprofen, 3,600 milligrams a day for five years. I used crutches and wheelchairs for years. I haven't had good feet for 30 years until I went seriously on a low oxalate diet at age 49. About four or five months before I turned 50. And by the time, I was in the early stage of my 50s. Decade. I was suddenly fine. My feet, I could go barefoot again. I could run, jump and play. I can literally run barefoot on pavement. In my 50s and 60s, I'm now 60 and a half, and I can do all those things that I couldn't do for my entire adulthood.
Len Arcuri | 46:47
Amazing. Amazing.
Yeah. So more information, it's all in Sally's book. You can learn more about her personal journey. And again, this is alarming in terms of like hearing this and being aware of this, you know, as a parent, you know, especially if you're well-intentioned and especially if you're second guessing some of the things you've done up until now. But again, the knowledge truly is power, more awareness on what is really true in terms of nutrition can only help you make better choices. And again, Here, the actions are pretty straightforward. Your book's super helpful. The Data Companion especially can really help you upgrade and improve what you're serving. And, you know, again, as we think about this podcast and you have a child who's likely on the spectrum, we talk a lot about root cause on this podcast. And Oxalates are not necessarily the root cause of autism or anything of that nature, but oxalates, if they're high and if there's something that are prevalent for you and your child, they may definitely be a root cause of why your child may stay stuck and not improve, which is why taking action here, whatever feels right for you and use Sally's book as a guide, can be a real powerful move. And again, it doesn't have to freak you out. And you don't have to turn things upside down, And you don't have to go cold turkey because even as Sally's saying, you don't want to do that. It's about making better choices over time and really letting the body's healing. Potential really kick in. Is that right?
Sally K. Norton | 48:17
Absolutely. And it is exciting to see an autistic child take on more responsibility, be capable of doing more things, be happier about going to their school. It is a beautiful thing. And I'm It's heartbreaking that parents don't learn it until their child is 19 versus when they're one.
You know, this is a really significant a compound affecting our health and nobody's talking about it. So thank you so much for sharing it with your audience, because I know that the families who picked this up will be happy they did.
Len Arcuri | 48:50
Fantastic. Well, thank you for the gift of your perspective. And we will look forward to having you on again down the road. This has been a dynamite conversation.
Sally K. Norton | 48:56
That's going to be fun.
Len Arcuri | 48:59
Your child wants you to transform now. And the fastest way to do that is with personalized support. To learn more, go to allinparentcoaching.com/intensive.
