---------- Originally Aired on the Good Foods Podcast ----------
Have you ever heard of oxalate in food? I hadn't until recently when Rebekah Heishman mentioned it and then two days later when I was interviewing Dr. Bill Schindler, he mentioned it as well. So of course, I had to go searching for the oxalate expert.
And I found her! 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.
You'll hear about 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.
One of the many things that come with doing a podcast like this is when you receive little gems that make the time spent with special people like Sally, just a little more special. And you'll hear what that moment is towards the end of the interview.
Buy Sally's book ➡️ https://rb.gy/p7d1h3
Website ➡️ SallyKNorton.com
IG ➡️ @sknorton and @toxicsuperfoods_oxalate_book
Facebook ➡️ @BeFreeToThrive
YouTube ➡️ Better with Sally K. Norton
Twitter (X) ➡️ @BetterLowOx
LinkedIn ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyknorton/
You’ll hear Sally and I talk about another oxalate educator, Victoria from @Recovering_OXaholics and she was so excited about this interview that all of our Good Foods followers and fans can use code GOODFOODS and get extra 10% off already reduced prices on T-shirts and other oxalate aware merchandise starting January 23, 2024.
Victoria’s Website ➡️ RecoveringOXaholics.com
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
Have you ever heard of oxalate in food? I hadn't until recently when Rebekah Heishman mentioned it and then two days later when I was interviewing Dr. Bill Schindler, he mentioned it as well. So of course, I had to go searching for the oxalate expert.
And I found her! 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.
You'll hear about 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.
One of the many things that come with doing a podcast like this is when you receive little gems that make the time spent with special people like Sally, just a little more special. And you'll hear what that moment is towards the end of the interview.
Buy Sally's book ➡️ https://rb.gy/p7d1h3
Website ➡️ SallyKNorton.com
IG ➡️ @sknorton and @toxicsuperfoods_oxalate_book
Facebook ➡️ @BeFreeToThrive
YouTube ➡️ Better with Sally K. Norton
Twitter (X) ➡️ @BetterLowOx
LinkedIn ➡️ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sallyknorton/
You’ll hear Sally and I talk about another oxalate educator, Victoria from @Recovering_OXaholics and she was so excited about this interview that all of our Good Foods followers and fans can use code GOODFOODS and get extra 10% off already reduced prices on T-shirts and other oxalate aware merchandise starting January 23, 2024.
Victoria’s Website ➡️ RecoveringOXaholics.com
The Good Foods podcast was created and hosted by Shardan Sandoval in March of 2023 and was active until September of 2024.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello, This is Sally Kaye Norton, author of Toxic Superfoods,
How oxalate overload is making you sick and how to
get better. I'm an oxolate educator and consultant, and this
is the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
In this episode, once I got off My Sweet Potatoes
and switch starred for real, my feet were fine, and
all of a sudden, like I can wear heels For
the first time in my life.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
When I was age fifty, I went to a family
wedding in war heels for seven hours, serious heels for
seven hours. That had never happened in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
This is the Good Foods Podcast and now here's your
host show Dan.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Sally.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's so exciting to be with you today.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Thank you so the health issues that you went through,
did you have them growing up?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah? Probably. You don't realize this until retrospect, but as
a little kid, they were dishing up liquid penicillin a
lot on a spoon, which is a memorable nightmare for
a kid. It tastes so nasty. And by age five,
they took out my tonsils and myself and my younger sister,
who was a year and a half younger, we both
(01:22):
got our tonsils out at the same time. We had
both had chronic problems with I guess strep, throat and
ear infections. I was banned from the swimming pool often
as a kid, even after they took my tounsils out,
of course, So yeah. And then when I was twelve,
by start getting back pain and arthritis. And in college,
I went to Cornell University for my nutrition degree after
(01:43):
deciding to do that in seventh grade, and I had
to drop out for four year leave of absence for
foot surgery that I didn't recover well from. And before
that I had developed gout and arthritis and fatigue and
brain fog and all kinds of problems that I didn't resolve.
It took me thirty five years to figure out why
my health was terrible.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
So this started your health quest, as it were. You
didn't start to kind of connect the dots till you
were well passed all the bad part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I guess, yeah, right. My big revelation came when I
was forty nine.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
My initial revelation was at seventh grade when the science
teachers showed a film strip that said, you know, the
way you eat affects whether you get cancer or not,
and probably heart disease and all these health things. And
I was immediately tuned into you mean you can control
your health. That would be cool. So I'm going to
go to school for that. I'm going to learn nutrition
so I can help people not be sick, because being
(02:41):
sick is bad. That's what I want.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
That's amazing to me. Yeah, in seventh grade, and you're
now charting your path.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I think I had my path before kindergarten. I remember
coming home from kindergarten and telling my mother what they
told us we were supposed to eat that day, that
we were supposed to have six or eight classes of milk,
And I wanted my mother to know this important news.
You know, she wasn't buying it. But I was already
interested in how to eat healthy by kindergarten.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
In the middle of the journey, did you think back
to your previous self and be amazed at the transformation
that was happening the whole thing?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
When I realized that my efforts to be healthy were
the things making me worse, and my love of gardening
and fresh vegetables were working against me. Is quite disturbing.
You go through a sort of traumatic period of mourning
and grief and you can't fit in all your old wants,
(03:41):
things you wanted to believe in. So it's very unsettling.
And I stopped gardening for a year, which is jocking.
I mean, I bought my property where I lived so
I could garden it, and because I felt that as
a nutritionist you had to know what it takes to
grow and to develop food. You're not an honest nutritionist
if you don't know what it takes to at least
(04:01):
produce a garden full of food. If you don't understand
agriculture and the whole system that brings you food, you're
not really understanding food either. So I've been committed to growing.
I've been a gardener since I was nine. But when
we moved to where I live now in Virginia, part
of the selection process of what property to buy was
can I garden on this property? And I had to
(04:24):
stop gardening. It was a heartbreak.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Are you passed the worst part of it as far
as health wise, goes as far as how you react
to foods.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yes, well, yes, and no, I have the remnants of
this problem. What I did is I created a chronic
disease that is a bioaccumulation of a toxin in my
bones and tendons. It destroyed my spine vetebral bodies. The
bones in the spine have pits and holes in them,
the discs are flattened and bulging. We have stenosis and
(04:53):
bone spurs and the set joined arthritis and pretty much
any diagnostic thing you could have other than cancer in
my spine. And I'm still struggling with a spine that struggles.
I also have a tendency to reactivity to things and
still have lots of strange reactions to foods and other things.
So I have to limit my diet based on what
(05:16):
creates inflammation. And I can tell because it makes my
back hurt. So anything that makes my back hurt or
messes up my sleep, I just don't eat because I
can't function if I'm in pain and can't sleep. So
it's fundamental to functioning and having great life. So I
do still have a limited diet, but I have a
life which I didn't have before I was so disabled.
(05:38):
At the height of this, three years before I figured
out what was going on with me, I had to
quit my faculty job at the local university here in
downtown Richmond and have a hysterectomy and didn't recover well.
And I was so hired and so unfunctioning that I
couldn't even read the mail. I couldn't exercise. I was
(05:59):
basically stuck on the couch.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
And if you started eating the way you were eating,
let's say in your twenties, and the worst part of it,
everything would come back right.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Yeah, Well, you know, I got different degrees of information
and ideas about what to eat when I was just
leaving high school. I think it was that first year
in college I read Francis mor Lapey's book Diet for
a Small Planet that said that you're a good person
if you're a vegetarian, and that you know not eating
meat is better for you, and if you just combine
(06:29):
your soy and your grains, you're good and you can
live at this vegetarian thing. So I started getting the
Vegetarian Journal and becoming a vegetarian, and then John Robbins
came out with this tom about veganism called Diet for
a New America, and he taught me that milk is
all puss and eggs are terrible. So I had to
give up my yogurt and went at a low calcium,
(06:50):
dairy free vegan diet for another eight years. So I
had sixteen years of vegetarianism, half vegan, and during my
twenties I suffered so greatly from arthritis. I had days
where my hands were so swollen and weak I could
not unlock a door and I'm nineteen years old. And
(07:10):
it just was terrible. Through my twenties and later on
I had to move past the vegetarianism, but not because
I wanted to. I was very mentally committed to that
idea that this was the right way to live, and
it turned out to be a path to self destruction.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Soon I was running on pavement in bare feet, No problem, Sally.
I felt pain in my feet when I read that.
Can you share that story with us?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Oh my gosh. I started having foot pain problems when
I first started college. I started limping around and it
took me a while to finally refer myself to an
orthopedic doctor because my family doctor just gave me a
sample pain medication, patted me on my head and sent
me on my way. Well, turned out I had a
broken bone in my foot. But it's a little bone.
(07:57):
It's the size of the lentil, but it's right there
where you step. It's the stock absorber that's underneath your
big toe, and that thing was cracked big time. And
so the orthopedic could do an X ray and say, yeah,
you got this cracked broken bone, and we'll just put
you on this little plank of wood. Well, the little
plank of wood was supposed to keep my toes still,
which it didn't because my toes were hanging out over
(08:18):
the edge of it. Nobody bothered to notice that you
can't stop toes from growling when they're already hanging out
like so much already. The incompetence in the clinical world
that I was encountering with, you know, what do you
do when you're nineteen and you're busy in college trying
to get a's How do you tell these doctors what
to do?
Speaker 4 (08:36):
You don't.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And so I limped around campus at Cornell, missing dinners,
really struggling, ended up needing carpet and crutches, and if
I would go anywhere that was flat. I would need
a wheelchair to go grocery shopping or something like that.
I got permission to drive on campus, and none of
that was gonna work. Eventually, I just had to get
(08:57):
a leave of absence. I was put on huge amounts
of ibuprofen thirty six hundred milligrams a day by the
best orthopedic surgeon who worked for a university. He was
the football coach orthopedic surgeon, putting me on tons of
painkillers and telling me just suck it up and stay
in school. He's poisoning me with his ivy profen and saying, no,
you can't go get your feet taken care of. So
(09:19):
I had to go to another state to a ballet
dancer surgeon to have this surgery. Both feet needed surgery,
and I didn't recover from that either. I didn't really
get pain free. So I'm back on ibuprofen again, and
the physical therapy doesn't work, and I have eight more
years of pain problems. I'm swimming a mile every day
(09:43):
to get some blood flow in my feet, trying to
get my feet to heal and let them, you know,
try to recover. After all, I've had all my medical
care and I went back to Cornell in the meantime
and still had driving privileges and was still using crutches
and painkillers, but managed to finish my nutrition degree. And
when I left campus, I was in a distressed situation
(10:04):
where I was having to pay my bills on a
very low salary job teaching weight loss at nutri System,
and I didn't have time to garden and cook vegetables.
So I accidentally cut out my Swiss chart which I
was still growing on campus at Cornell, and my vegetable
diet became, you know, a poor person's diet, so I
(10:27):
cut off a spot of vegetables. I never noticed that
change could have been the reason why now I got
off the painkillers. But I got off the painkillers, got
off the orthotics. I had four different sets of orthotics
built by the various physical therapists over the years, each
of them costing well over two hundred and fifty dollars.
And then we're talking about nineteen eighty eight, you know,
(10:48):
two hundred fifty dollars with a lot of money. So
long story short, even when I got off the orthotics
and painkillers, my feet required shoes all the time. I
could shower bare foot, but I couldn't do the dishes barefoot.
I needed support. What I realize now is that the
connected tissue that are supposed to hold your foot together
and have it do all these amazing things was too weak,
(11:09):
and that sort of stretching and incompetent connective tissue was
causing pain. Once I got off my sweet potatoes and
swisch start for real, my feet were fine, and all
of a sudden, like I can wear heels. For the
first time in my life. When I was age fifty,
I went to a family wedding in war heels for
seven hours, serious heels for seven hours. That had never
(11:32):
happened in my entire life.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
So why are oxalates in plants? What's their purpose?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Oxalates are naturally part of nature. I mean, clouds rain
oxalates down in acid rain and the soil. Funguses and
make oxalate, and plants make oxalate for lots of different
purposes in their physiology. They just need to do that.
And if you think about plants and nature, you can't
just go out in the woods and camp all weekend
(12:00):
and snack on pine cones and pine needles and have
a good life. A lot of plants out there in
nature you wouldn't eat. But we forget that because our
current idea is that everything in nature is great and
wonderful and it's all here for our enjoyment and our
well being. But honestly, if you let loose some children
in your yard, would you permit them to eat the
(12:21):
foods in your yard? I don't think so. But plants,
they aren't being eaten by us because they generally have
to be toxic, otherwise they would have been made extinct
by any critter that decided they were hungry. There's lots
of critters who are designed to eat plants, which we
probably are not. I mean, our place in the web
(12:42):
of life is not down there eating pond scum. If
we were down there, we would mess up the whole
ecostructure of things. We're an apex predator eating animals that
eat other animals and other critters. So the idea that
we can get by on just plant material is a
new idea. It's come out of philosophy that got kicked
off I think by the Greeks and that early philosophy
(13:05):
and then the whole Renaissance and the rights of man
philosophy about getting out from under tyranny and tyrants and
having a more meritocracy where anyone can advance in life,
not just because you're born on royalty or special families.
And that whole philosophy got extended out with other kinds
(13:25):
of reform movements trying to deal with alcoholism and domestic
violence and all the problems that humans have struggled with
for a long time. Came this idea that we shouldn't
eat animals. So the avoiding of eating animals and relying
more heavily on plant foods moved us out of our
eco niche into a more philosophical state with food, and
(13:47):
we've moved that philosophical state to its nth degree in
current culture.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
We've seen or read about people claiming that their health improved,
their sleep, they lost weight, all through a plant based lifestyle.
Certain people, are they just immune to oxalates?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, this is a wonderful question. Is perplexing, And one
of the big problems with oxalate toxicity is that you
can be eating high oxalate foods and not have any
symptoms that it's causing problems, and you have no mental
structures to connect any symptoms you might be having to
your food. I've been looking to my food for answers
for feeling well for a long long time. It could
(14:26):
never put together the fact that it was my sweet
potatoes and Swiss chart that were tearing me down and
really making my life difficult. It could not tell. And
those of us who funny realize that oxalates are a
problem for us, could not tell. So it's not something
where symptoms always give you a clue. And are there
(14:47):
people that are immune to oxalates? I doubt it. I
think that there's a lot of variability in our tolerance
for them, and it takes more oxalates for longer periods
of time for some people to get or detectable effects.
But it's pretty hard to detect the effects of oxalate.
So there's a chicken and egg problem with trying to
(15:07):
even answer that question. The truth is you need to
think about oxalate like you would think about mercury and
other toxins you're more familiar with. Is that the more
of it in your body, the harder it is for
your body to work well. And we have the basic
science that shows preliminary and hasn't been really pursued in
clinical research, which is a big problem. We're working under
(15:29):
a giant umbrella of ignorance about this topic. So I
was surprised initially that it was hard to find the
information I wanted to find to explain why we get
better without oxalates in our diet, and then how much
I could find, but how scattered it is around science,
and how unpursued it is and unappreciated it is. But
(15:49):
the truth is, you're not immune to the effects of oxalate.
A lot of the effects of oxalate are things we
take for granted. Stomach aches, osteop urosis, memory problems, mood problems, arthritis, dementia.
These things that we think of as aging can really
(16:10):
just be oxalate damage. And maybe the aging we're experiencing
isn't aging at all, it's oxalate damage. And truthfully, maybe
we should all stay forty in our capacity for work productivity,
pain free living until we're ninety. Maybe there isn't this
long tail of illness, twenty years of struggling in doctors
(16:30):
visits and nine prescriptions and all of that.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Do you think it's better to get that almost instant
reaction to a food as opposed to thirty forty years later. Hey,
you know you ate this for forty years and now
boom heart attack. Do you think that the checks and
balances that you received kind of put you on this
path like I must solve this.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Well, it is kind of too bad that your body
is such a trooper that you can be abusing it
with food you think are okay, and it doesn't complain.
It carries on boldly, bravely, not telling you, Hey, don't
eat so much sweet potato, con quit doing us. It
would be easier for the body to tell you if
(17:10):
you knew enough to ask it, Hey, how do you
like in the fact that eat sweet potatoes every night
for dinner? Is this okay? And then I would notice
when I go to bed at night, No, you're restless,
your legs are jumping around, You've got hiccups. Now you're belching.
You're fired the next day, Hey, that was the sweet
potatoes you ate for dinner? Doing that for you? We
don't have that information to even imagine that. So whatever
(17:34):
amount of complaining the body's doing, we're incapable of connecting that.
And then the sad part now is that we're so
devoted to our present ideas of what is food for humans,
things like peanut butter and dark chocolate and things that
we've just invented very very recently. We think these are
our god given right to eat these foods. And I
(17:55):
don't want to hear anything pet about my favored smoothie
or right now, there's this insane love of chia pudding.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Like no, So I want to talk about almond milk
and specifically what a high speed blender does to almonds
when we make almond milk.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Right, So, any whole food is a package of layers
of plant materials, including cell walls and vacuoles that hold
contents inside, and you can't really break those down very
well with your teeth and your digesto tracts. So when
you're eating plant, foods are difficult to digest because those
cell walls are made of cell you lose, which you
don't digest at all. Even cows don't digest it well,
(18:36):
it's the bacteria they have growing in their bellies. They
ferment cellulose for the cow, so the cow can eat
bacteria and build a big muscular body. But we don't
have that kind of digestion, so we can't break down
that material very well. And when the plant is whole,
you break it up somewhat, but you leave some of
(18:56):
these oxalate crystals oxalic acid in the material, and you
don't necessarily get it from your gut into your bloodstream,
but the jumping of material from your gut to your
bloodstream we call that absorption. When that gets into your blood,
Now you have oxalic acid in your bloodstream where it's
causing trouble. Now the parts you don't absorb, the fiber,
(19:20):
the oxleate crystals and other plant antiinutrients can still cause
inflammation and trouble in the gut, and you can start
developing gut problems, which creates a leaky gut situation where
you have higher absorption of toxins and lower absorption of
nutrients because a lot of the toxins can just float
in between the cells, and the little gaps between the
cells grow wider, and the cells ability to prevent those
(19:44):
toxins from getting in grows less, and your ability to
actively transport in and select vitamins and so on becomes compromised,
so you get this terrible situation of being more toxic
and less nourished.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Well, you mentioned smoothies I used to juice a lo
and like many of us do, and I know you
know Victoria had low oxalate inspiration. And she posted something
from the Cleveland Clinic website and that is quote many
of the food products used in juicing mixtures or high
oxalate containing foods end quote Sally, are we just ramping
these foods up when we juice?
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Oh my gosh, for sure. Now you're taking soluble oxalic
acid and diluting it in the fluids, getting rid of
all those things that interfere with absorption, and giving it
complete entry into your bloodstream, and so your absorption rate
can go way up. And that means more quickly and
more of the fraction of the oxalates gets into your blood,
(20:40):
and immediately it can be harming the vascular walls and
the circulating blood cells, including your immune cells, which can
go rapidly into a distress mode because their mitochondria, their
cell membranes are distressed, they go into pro inflammation. They're
putting out pro inflammatory cytokinds, and they're no longer good
at protecting you from infection. It's very clear that a
(21:02):
hioxy diet would set you up for higher rates of
propensity towards infectious problems, chronic infections, things like sinus infections,
yeast infections, UTIs and so on.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Yeah, is spinach one of the biggest culprits. Spinach is
so revered.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Is a fabulous food that you'd got to have to
be nourished, even though it's a pretty novel food that's
very seasonal that you should probably if you're eating a
natural life, you'd be eating it three weeks in the
summer until it got too hot. Spinach is kind of
a cool weather crop, and you'd have to have a
special way to keep the heat off of it, or
get it from northern places, which requires transport. And if
(21:42):
it's not kept cold right after it's pipped, it loses
its lutine and it's folid and these kinds of things.
It has to be eating pretty quickly as a supposed,
you know, superfood. It's pretty impractical food, but because of
modern technology, it's available at Costco and Giant patches year
round and it's being like crazy, and it is the
highest Oxley food that is popular. And the second ones
(22:06):
that are a little worse than spinach would be beat
green Swiss chart and rhubarb. But those would be like
the tops of the worst defenders in terms of a
great way to supercharge the toxicity of your diet.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
It's interesting you say that about the I guess the
growing season of spinach, because doctor Bil Schindler said, listen,
if you would eat spinach when spinach has grown and available,
you'd probably be okay.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Depends on the rest of your diet. True, because you
can go from spinach season to something else, because your
beat greens and your Swiss charred become available after the
spinach is done, you.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Know, right, But if you eat it, you know a
year round, which we can might not be so good.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Well, it's particularly bad. That's where you get into the
kidney stones and the arthritis and the autoimmune diseases, and
the breakdown of your digestice system and mood changes and
depression and connective tissue problems and other years nary tract
problems like irritable bladder and waking up all night to
pee and painful bladder. There's so many ways that this
(23:07):
can start affecting your health. And having a high oxley
food like spinach in your routine diet is really quite dangerous.
We've seen it in the old days and the old research.
In the nineteen thirties, it was very clear, based on
feeding infants and feeding animals that giving spinach to young children,
human children, and young animal babies causes severe depletion of
(23:31):
calcium and iron and recharge their growth and development, gives
them smaller, weaker bones, and so on. It was considered
quite dangerous. But already in the nineteen thirties people in
the medical field were dismissing it and say, well, it's
a green. Well, just we won't pay attention to that,
and they never called it out, even though we had
the science there, and it's over and over again in
(23:53):
the literature. You can pick out different studies that say, hey,
spinach is terrible for calcium and iron and causes anemia
and causes mineral disruptions depleting of mineral nutrition. And this
is also happening even before you eat the food. Because
if the food is high in these minerals in a test,
if it's also high in oxalate, none of those minerals
(24:15):
are actually functioning as nutritional minerals. You might be able
to measure them and claim that if food has high
calcium or something, but if it's also high inoxalate. None
of that is functional calcium. It's probably calcium oxalate, which
is a toxic.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
What about spices, should we use less of them? Close
to zero?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
A lot of spices come from seeds, and a lot
of the seed based spices are pretty high. Black pepper
is high. Tumeric is not a seed, it's a rhizome,
rooty kind of thing, and that's very high inoxalate. Some
of the plastic spices, like dried ginger frush ginger is
not as bad. But yeah, many of the things that
like season spicy food, except for the red pepper, is
(24:53):
pretty high in oxylate. And I've had several clients and
followers say it wasn't until I realized I had to
really cut back some of my spices that I saw
the full advantage of paying attention to oxalates in my
diet and suddenly felt better.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
Salt wouldn't fall in there, right, Nope, it's.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Just sodium and chloride, and it's a healthy thing that
you need.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
But I'm thinking maybe my hot sauce and jalapenos on
my egg is probably not good.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Hell being it on your eggs and hot sauce are
really not that bad because the red pepper is so
strong that you're ultimately not using that much of it.
But the black pepper can get really a problem. People
get into certain things like black pepper on potato chips,
and potato chips are very high in cybal oxlate, very
high source of oxalate, and you put a lot of
black pepper on it and it just can be a disaster.
(25:40):
So things like more like the Ethiopian food some of
the Indian curries, those kinds of foods are very high.
I would say the Indian style of spicing would be
where you definitely take your high oxalate spices and create problems.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
What if someone tells you that this way of eating
is just too restrictive for them, a Sali, how do
you try to edge them or make sure that they
still honor their body versus thinking of it as a
restrictive diet.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I have a hard time thinking of something that's going
to bring me in good sleep and pain free living
is restrictive, considering like whoa a geek to happiness? But
you're right, most people initially go oh oh no, I'm
not going to change the way I live that's ridiculous.
Everybody eats this stuff, so they have a really hard
time emotionally even considering trying it, which is unfortunate because
(26:28):
if you don't really give this a try, you don't
understand it. So it's really important to realize that it's
just not being creative. You don't realize there's many more
foods that are low and ox late to have that
are can you can build an interesting life and diet
around those foods. It's just that they're not as popular.
They're not as like widely used, so people don't know
what a route bag is or a turn up is
(26:51):
or some of these lower oxlate alternatives, or they're not like, wait,
I always use black beans? Why do I have to
use black eyed peas instead of black beans? You know
I'm used to and planteen? Why do I have to
change to something else? Just the habits we have and
the attachments we have. For some people, it's like asking
them to give up their youngest child. Emotionally, there's druggling
(27:12):
with that. But the honest truth is from a more
rational point of view, is the list of low oxley
foods is pretty darn long, and the gift you get
is your own health and independence.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Do you think we'll ever see oxalant levels or measurements
in the ingredients list of packages?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I sure hope we do. I think that's the least
thing we could ask for, is at least get some information,
because right now we're all working in the dark. Your
clinicians don't know, your friends don't know. The guy who
runs your store you purchase at has no idea. They
don't put little labels by the spinach and say, hey,
if you have kidney stones, arthritis, scout, headaches, and depression,
(27:49):
don't buy spinach. That is what we need. We need
companies who prepare boxed and canned foods to measure their
foods for O slate and add that to the well.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
We've all heard the term apple st oranges, but I've
never heard about the muffin comparison. Sally, can you elaborate
on that?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Sounds like you've been reading Toxic Superfers.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
I have been reading that book also.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yes, back in the seventies and eighties, the brand muffin
was the thing in Callogg's. I think is a company
with this all brand cereal and they were selling you know,
brand muffins with our cereal and a lot of us
grew up in the seventies making brand muffins and that
was a big thing. So there's this classic brand muffin
for health. Fiber was going to be the thing, and
nowadays you're going to throw in extra superfoods with that.
(28:39):
And did the gluten free brand muffin. And you can
take a brand muffin and quadruple the amount of oxalate
in it by using the chia seeds and the almond flower.
A lot of people who are going on gluten free
and wheat free diets are using almond flower. Almonds are
ridiculously high in oxalate in other toxins, and they're now
being used like water, available everywhere, fairly affordable, and people
(29:03):
who are into the health thing tend to be into
the almond flower. And so any kind of bake goods,
whether it's a muffin, a cake, a pancake, whatever, people
are stacking almonds and almond butter and sweet potatoes and
cacao powder and they're creating these oxalate bombs.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Can you tell us anything about the data companion that
you're rolling out this.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Year, Yes, hopefully it's coming out very soon. The Data
Companion is four and a half years of working on
a database and culling through all available testing we have
about oxalate content of food, which is pretty dicey area
because even a seemingly respectable university can put out articles
of terrible techniques and terrible conclusions about where the oxalate
(29:46):
is in food. So you'll find things online that comes
from medical journals that say coffee is high in oxalate.
It is very low in oxalate. Coffee maybe two miligrams
of oxleate, which is fairly inconsequential, whereas tea as twenty
miligrams of oxley and that is consequential. So t is
high oxalate. It seems to be a very bioavailable oxalate
(30:08):
even though it's not the highest oxley food because it's
liquid and so on, and it's all soluble, and we
often drink it slowly in between meals without fiber, and
most people don't put milk in it, so it's pretty
good way to get oxley. It's where coffee isn't. But
you can find data that claims that coffee's high dates
are high, and listen, there's so much misinformation out there.
(30:28):
When you try to start a low Oxley diet. If
you go online just looking for lists of what tie
and what's low on Oxley, you will want to give
up because the lists don't agree. So this Data Companion
is a electronic and a physical book that you'll be
able to get that has one hundred pages of data
and food where we've checked the data as best we can,
(30:49):
the methodology used best we can. It's not always available,
and we've averaged things out. So we have seventeen tests
of spinach, but I'm not giving you the seventeen tests
of spinach, giving you an average, plus all the information
where it came from, and you can look up all
the original data sources yourself. So it's the first time
anyone's put out data that's got so much transparency that
(31:11):
you know exactly where it came from and how we
came to our numbers, and it's all color coded and
meant to be easy for the user, but enough detail
for those who really need to get into the weeds,
they can have that. But you really don't need one
hundred pages of data to succeed on a low oxleyde diet,
especially if you're not really sick with oxlades. Yet, if
you're preventing your oxleay problem, all you need is a
(31:33):
simple list of these are the worst defenders. Do not
build your diet around them if they're in your life.
Be very aware how much you're eating. And here are
all the safe bets that really don't have much oxley.
You don't have to think about them. You have all
you want of those, And you can use this as
a guard rail. So you can think of each side,
the low and the high, as this guardrail. And inside
this roadway you're protected from falling off the edge of
(31:56):
the road and tumbling down a cliff side by that
basic high and low information. And in the middle, where
you're navigating your health, you can refine your diet according
to your needs.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
Well, you call it a companion, So is it a
companion to the book or can you just get the
app and start your journey there. What if someone has
dyslexia and they just can't read and they have to
go maybe audio or visual? Is that a pathway for
them to take well?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
In my Beginner's Guide on my website, I have a
visual representation of how this all works with pictures of
high oxleate foods, and low oxalate foods is not comprehensive,
but it gives you the general idea and toxic superfoods.
The book is available as an audiobook, although all the
charts and tables have not been read out. But nowadays
you have various forms of AI that can help you
(32:43):
read through material, help you get it. But it's really true,
the more oxlely toxic you are, the harder time you
have to read, harder time you have making sense of information.
You can't retain information very well with oxley. It is
such a confusing topic. You have to come back to
it over and over again. It took me years to
realize I was never going to memorize data well. I
would always have to double check and look it up.
(33:04):
And people ask me all the time how much oxalate
is in a teaspoon of sa tahini or something, and
I'm like, I am not a walking encyclopedia of numbers.
That's my worst side of my brain. I'll have to
go look that up for you and put down what
I'm doing. Go turn on my computer and look that up.
But we're hoping to make it more and more convenient
with time. We will eventually have an app and so on.
(33:26):
But basically, we don't have to make it that hard
the high offenders. If you start steering clear of them,
you will protect your health and that's the place to start.
And as you start feeling better, you can keep refining
your skill with understanding how to navigate around the hyoxaline
minefields that we're surrounded with, because literally you can hardly
(33:47):
go out to a retail store and not be invited
to eat nuts and dark chocolate and chips made of
roots and these high oxyleyt foods, like some of the
trends right now, not just the chia seed and the
chiese seed pudding, which please don't do, but snack chips
are made with beets, sweet potatoes, taro, roots, cassava, plantain,
(34:07):
leg yumes, and nuts seem to always come with chocolate.
Every ice cream flavor out there has some form of
chocolate in it, and you know, it's just everywhere. And
if you start seeing that with box late eyeglasses, you
can be like, hmm, I can resist that through your
healing journey.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
What are you most thankful for?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Well, I would say Joanne jon who founded the Volver
Or Pain Foundation. If it wasn't for her, she was
the true pioneer who brought the idea of low oxleate
diet curing chronic pain, addressing chronic pain that couldn't be
handled any other way. She put that out there thirty
something years ago with the Volver Pain Foundation, which is
(34:47):
in North Carolina, which is very near to where I
lived and worked in North Carolina, in only three and
a half hours from where I am now. I didn't
know about her work until two thousand and nine and
I had a attack of volvar pain and that's what
her foundation specializes in as genital pain both for men
and women, but she started off with women's pain because
(35:08):
of her experience. And that was the first time I
had heard that this kidney stone diet is low oxley
diet that we're put kidney stone patients on is good
for pain syndromes. And she described in her work with
a guy named Clive Solomon who's now passed, but he
did initial neurine analyses and did a study looking at
(35:29):
almost four thousand women in their urine excretion of oxley.
Because this is how the body removes oxylead is through
the urine. That's why it ends up hanging up as
kidney stones and some people. But they were describing a
connective tissue syndrome, which I really hadn't heard much about
in my holistic healing circles or in my program at
(35:49):
the nutrition school. That there's things called connective tissues syndromes
and diseases, and all the things she's describing fit me.
You know, my arthritis and my back problem and my
foot problems, and my thin skin and my inability to
handle ditch soap without getting you know, shredding my cuticles
on my fingers and all this kind of icky stuff.
(36:10):
I had no idea. So that was a revelation to me,
but I couldn't understand the science behind it. I bought
her stuff. It wasn't making a lot of sense, but
I learned about oxalates, and this is the key thing.
Her work primarily has been to test foods because the
testing is unreliable and inadequate and just poultry and the people,
the way people are handling the data is not good either.
(36:33):
So she made a point of making oxlate testing of
foods one of her major missions. So they've put out
over the years newsletters with information of oxlate content, and
so she taught me with my sick brain. It took
me a while with carrot tie or Kiwi high, like
what do I do? But I learned that I shouldn't
be eating sweet potatoes all the time. I quit my
(36:53):
organic growing of sweet potatoes. I used to buy some
from Mongal who grows them locally, too. Gave up my
precious sweet potatoes. But then I would eat them again
and I wouldn't feel worse. I'd feel fine on them.
I thought, well, I'm done with my ox sleep problems,
so I don't have to be so strict about it.
So I started using Kiwi to try to heal my
(37:13):
constipation problem because I developed a very evil sleep problem
where my brain was waking up twenty nine times an hour,
so I wasn't sleeping at all, and I was so exhausted.
I didn't know I wasn't sleeping. I was in a
sort of semi conscious state all my long with my
brain not being able to stay settled down. And didn't
even know it, but my indercinologists, I had to have
(37:35):
a hysterectomy. I've had so many issues. It don't make
sense someone who's been so committed to organic food and
vegetables and eating right and living right and going to
the gym, going to bed and going to church and
everything you could do to be good. It wasn't working.
So I tried this Kiwi experiment because I didn't have
all our pain and I'm fine now and so I'm
got to fix the sleep problem by fixing my constipation.
(37:57):
But that's fixing my dys biosis, I thought. And by
adding Kiwi to my diet, my arthritis came back, which
I had so badly when I was a vegan and
was kind of not so bad for the last fifteen years.
But when I started doing Kiwi a couple times a
day after a couple of years of basically low oxalate,
it brought back an arthritis, and it made me stiffer
(38:19):
and stiffer and stiffer, and I was starting to feel
eighty again like I did when I was a vegan,
and I was like, holy cow, the oxalate in those
Kiwi were causing my arthritis, which is like holy cow.
I've had arthritis since I was twelve, and here I'm
forty nine and I'm finally connecting my food to my arthritis.
(38:40):
It took me from age twelve to forty nine to
figure this out. And I was sort of mad because, hey,
I have to fix my sleep disorder because I can't work,
and to do that, I have to fix my gut.
But now I have to fix my arthritis too. And
I was so resembful because I thought all these things
were separate problems. So regrettingly, I get serious again, truly
doing the Loxley. No, I'm functioning better and I'm better
(39:02):
at it. I know more about it, and lo and behold,
in a week, I could tell I'm sleeping again and
everything's feeling better. I'm like, wait a minute, the sleep
was not dyspiosis. The sleep was not the constipation. The
sleep problem was oxolate wrecking my brain. Oh wait, it
wrecked my joints. Oh no, I wrecked my brain. No,
Kajuer has directed me. My feet got bet like. It
(39:24):
was so weird to me because I had been taught
in our culture each problem is from a different source.
Not one set of poisons will cause many problems in
the body.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
So today's a pretty special day right for you?
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yes, it certainly is. Today is the first birthday of
Toxic Superfoods. It was published on January third, twenty twenty three,
and here we are January third, twenty twenty four, my
first podcast discussion of the year, on the birthday of
Toxic Superfoods, and we've had fifty thousand books sold. We've
had hundreds and hundreds of people sharing their stories on Amazon,
(40:03):
on Instagram, all over the internet. There's a whole development
of community. The word ox late is starting to become
shared and discussed and taught to people. And so it's
pretty cool that we're talking here in Richmond through my
favorite little health food store that started me off on
my oxolate educating journey on its birthday.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Sally, finally, can you give us the best course of
action to take till someone comes to you and they say,
I need to heal this. I think this is what
is going on. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Well, for one thing, take a deep breath and recognize
that now you're on a decade's long healing journey, and
it's going to be both beautiful and difficult, and it's
going to be a bit of a truck sort of
a mountain climb. You might say, that's a little bit challenging.
So you need to know that you need to get
support and reach out and get some good information and
(40:55):
then look at your diet and based on my Beginner's
Guide or some of them. Listen in the book Toxic Superfoods,
find out what are the top five things you're eating
that are on that worst Offenders list, and pick one
like the almonds or the spinach, and start reducing that
right away, and do that for a couple of weeks,
(41:15):
and then look at the other ones and find replacement
for those. So if you've been eating a lot of spinach,
you can switch down to masculine mix, which has some
oxlaate still in it, so you could shage a spinach
salad from five hundred milligrams of oxlead down to fifty. Right,
that's a big reduction. So the reason you want to
do this in a sort of systematic way is because
if you suddenly go from eating a very high oxylay diet,
(41:38):
which can have a thousand milligrams of oxlad or fifteen
hundred or two thousand, you can really be up there
and you go down to ten or fifteen milligrams of oxleate,
your body's like, wow, we's a break and it's ready
to unload this bioaccumulation. You have oxolates and your kidneys
and your bladder and your tendons and your thyrogland and
your eyeballs, your bones and bone marrow, and that turns
(41:59):
on inflammation. Immune cells are like whoa, We can get
rid of crystals, and it turns on a process that
is toxic, and you could repoison your blood and your
body and your kidneys and so on by unloading oxley
from matsue. You don't want to do that. You want
to stop the acute poisoning by getting off these really
high doses of oxlead in your diet and start cutting
(42:19):
back doses and cutting back to these foods one at
a time, and give yourself five six months to learn
this process, so there's no reason to like, oh tomorrow,
I have to know everything. Give yourself time to learn.
Get rid of almonds, spinach, cheese, seeds, sweet potatoes, chips
and so on, and then eventually the dark chocolate and
you will be amazed.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
Sally, thank you so much for coming on the podcast
and just enlightening us, blowing my mind with every answer.
It's been a joy.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
It's so great to be able to share a story
with you. And I'm hoping We'll do this again.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
The Good Foods podcast is that entertainment purposes only. The
gleams comments, opinions, or information heard should never be used
in place of your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction.
Thank you for listening, Follow us on social media and
wherever you get your podcasts. Good health through good food,
Good Foods Grocery
Hello, This is Sally Kaye Norton, author of Toxic Superfoods,
How oxalate overload is making you sick and how to
get better. I'm an oxolate educator and consultant, and this
is the Good Foods Podcast.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
All of us are on a journey towards better health,
and we're grateful that you've allowed us to join you
on your quest.
Speaker 3 (00:26):
In this episode, once I got off My Sweet Potatoes
and switch starred for real, my feet were fine, and
all of a sudden, like I can wear heels For
the first time in my life.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
When I was age fifty, I went to a family
wedding in war heels for seven hours, serious heels for
seven hours. That had never happened in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
This is the Good Foods Podcast and now here's your
host show Dan.
Speaker 4 (00:53):
Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, Sally.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
It's so exciting to be with you today.
Speaker 4 (00:57):
Thank you so the health issues that you went through,
did you have them growing up?
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Yeah? Probably. You don't realize this until retrospect, but as
a little kid, they were dishing up liquid penicillin a
lot on a spoon, which is a memorable nightmare for
a kid. It tastes so nasty. And by age five,
they took out my tonsils and myself and my younger sister,
who was a year and a half younger, we both
(01:22):
got our tonsils out at the same time. We had
both had chronic problems with I guess strep, throat and
ear infections. I was banned from the swimming pool often
as a kid, even after they took my tounsils out,
of course, So yeah. And then when I was twelve,
by start getting back pain and arthritis. And in college,
I went to Cornell University for my nutrition degree after
(01:43):
deciding to do that in seventh grade, and I had
to drop out for four year leave of absence for
foot surgery that I didn't recover well from. And before
that I had developed gout and arthritis and fatigue and
brain fog and all kinds of problems that I didn't resolve.
It took me thirty five years to figure out why
my health was terrible.
Speaker 4 (02:04):
So this started your health quest, as it were. You
didn't start to kind of connect the dots till you
were well passed all the bad part of it.
Speaker 1 (02:14):
I guess, yeah, right. My big revelation came when I
was forty nine.
Speaker 4 (02:18):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
My initial revelation was at seventh grade when the science
teachers showed a film strip that said, you know, the
way you eat affects whether you get cancer or not,
and probably heart disease and all these health things. And
I was immediately tuned into you mean you can control
your health. That would be cool. So I'm going to
go to school for that. I'm going to learn nutrition
so I can help people not be sick, because being
(02:41):
sick is bad. That's what I want.
Speaker 4 (02:44):
That's amazing to me. Yeah, in seventh grade, and you're
now charting your path.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I think I had my path before kindergarten. I remember
coming home from kindergarten and telling my mother what they
told us we were supposed to eat that day, that
we were supposed to have six or eight classes of milk,
And I wanted my mother to know this important news.
You know, she wasn't buying it. But I was already
interested in how to eat healthy by kindergarten.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
In the middle of the journey, did you think back
to your previous self and be amazed at the transformation
that was happening the whole thing?
Speaker 1 (03:19):
When I realized that my efforts to be healthy were
the things making me worse, and my love of gardening
and fresh vegetables were working against me. Is quite disturbing.
You go through a sort of traumatic period of mourning
and grief and you can't fit in all your old wants,
(03:41):
things you wanted to believe in. So it's very unsettling.
And I stopped gardening for a year, which is jocking.
I mean, I bought my property where I lived so
I could garden it, and because I felt that as
a nutritionist you had to know what it takes to
grow and to develop food. You're not an honest nutritionist
if you don't know what it takes to at least
(04:01):
produce a garden full of food. If you don't understand
agriculture and the whole system that brings you food, you're
not really understanding food either. So I've been committed to growing.
I've been a gardener since I was nine. But when
we moved to where I live now in Virginia, part
of the selection process of what property to buy was
can I garden on this property? And I had to
(04:24):
stop gardening. It was a heartbreak.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Are you passed the worst part of it as far
as health wise, goes as far as how you react
to foods.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yes, well, yes, and no, I have the remnants of
this problem. What I did is I created a chronic
disease that is a bioaccumulation of a toxin in my
bones and tendons. It destroyed my spine vetebral bodies. The
bones in the spine have pits and holes in them,
the discs are flattened and bulging. We have stenosis and
(04:53):
bone spurs and the set joined arthritis and pretty much
any diagnostic thing you could have other than cancer in
my spine. And I'm still struggling with a spine that struggles.
I also have a tendency to reactivity to things and
still have lots of strange reactions to foods and other things.
So I have to limit my diet based on what
(05:16):
creates inflammation. And I can tell because it makes my
back hurt. So anything that makes my back hurt or
messes up my sleep, I just don't eat because I
can't function if I'm in pain and can't sleep. So
it's fundamental to functioning and having great life. So I
do still have a limited diet, but I have a
life which I didn't have before I was so disabled.
(05:38):
At the height of this, three years before I figured
out what was going on with me, I had to
quit my faculty job at the local university here in
downtown Richmond and have a hysterectomy and didn't recover well.
And I was so hired and so unfunctioning that I
couldn't even read the mail. I couldn't exercise. I was
(05:59):
basically stuck on the couch.
Speaker 4 (06:01):
And if you started eating the way you were eating,
let's say in your twenties, and the worst part of it,
everything would come back right.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
Yeah, Well, you know, I got different degrees of information
and ideas about what to eat when I was just
leaving high school. I think it was that first year
in college I read Francis mor Lapey's book Diet for
a Small Planet that said that you're a good person
if you're a vegetarian, and that you know not eating
meat is better for you, and if you just combine
(06:29):
your soy and your grains, you're good and you can
live at this vegetarian thing. So I started getting the
Vegetarian Journal and becoming a vegetarian, and then John Robbins
came out with this tom about veganism called Diet for
a New America, and he taught me that milk is
all puss and eggs are terrible. So I had to
give up my yogurt and went at a low calcium,
(06:50):
dairy free vegan diet for another eight years. So I
had sixteen years of vegetarianism, half vegan, and during my
twenties I suffered so greatly from arthritis. I had days
where my hands were so swollen and weak I could
not unlock a door and I'm nineteen years old. And
(07:10):
it just was terrible. Through my twenties and later on
I had to move past the vegetarianism, but not because
I wanted to. I was very mentally committed to that
idea that this was the right way to live, and
it turned out to be a path to self destruction.
Speaker 4 (07:27):
Soon I was running on pavement in bare feet, No problem, Sally.
I felt pain in my feet when I read that.
Can you share that story with us?
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Oh my gosh. I started having foot pain problems when
I first started college. I started limping around and it
took me a while to finally refer myself to an
orthopedic doctor because my family doctor just gave me a
sample pain medication, patted me on my head and sent
me on my way. Well, turned out I had a
broken bone in my foot. But it's a little bone.
(07:57):
It's the size of the lentil, but it's right there
where you step. It's the stock absorber that's underneath your
big toe, and that thing was cracked big time. And
so the orthopedic could do an X ray and say, yeah,
you got this cracked broken bone, and we'll just put
you on this little plank of wood. Well, the little
plank of wood was supposed to keep my toes still,
which it didn't because my toes were hanging out over
(08:18):
the edge of it. Nobody bothered to notice that you
can't stop toes from growling when they're already hanging out
like so much already. The incompetence in the clinical world
that I was encountering with, you know, what do you
do when you're nineteen and you're busy in college trying
to get a's How do you tell these doctors what
to do?
Speaker 4 (08:36):
You don't.
Speaker 1 (08:37):
And so I limped around campus at Cornell, missing dinners,
really struggling, ended up needing carpet and crutches, and if
I would go anywhere that was flat. I would need
a wheelchair to go grocery shopping or something like that.
I got permission to drive on campus, and none of
that was gonna work. Eventually, I just had to get
(08:57):
a leave of absence. I was put on huge amounts
of ibuprofen thirty six hundred milligrams a day by the
best orthopedic surgeon who worked for a university. He was
the football coach orthopedic surgeon, putting me on tons of
painkillers and telling me just suck it up and stay
in school. He's poisoning me with his ivy profen and saying, no,
you can't go get your feet taken care of. So
(09:19):
I had to go to another state to a ballet
dancer surgeon to have this surgery. Both feet needed surgery,
and I didn't recover from that either. I didn't really
get pain free. So I'm back on ibuprofen again, and
the physical therapy doesn't work, and I have eight more
years of pain problems. I'm swimming a mile every day
(09:43):
to get some blood flow in my feet, trying to
get my feet to heal and let them, you know,
try to recover. After all, I've had all my medical
care and I went back to Cornell in the meantime
and still had driving privileges and was still using crutches
and painkillers, but managed to finish my nutrition degree. And
when I left campus, I was in a distressed situation
(10:04):
where I was having to pay my bills on a
very low salary job teaching weight loss at nutri System,
and I didn't have time to garden and cook vegetables.
So I accidentally cut out my Swiss chart which I
was still growing on campus at Cornell, and my vegetable
diet became, you know, a poor person's diet, so I
(10:27):
cut off a spot of vegetables. I never noticed that
change could have been the reason why now I got
off the painkillers. But I got off the painkillers, got
off the orthotics. I had four different sets of orthotics
built by the various physical therapists over the years, each
of them costing well over two hundred and fifty dollars.
And then we're talking about nineteen eighty eight, you know,
(10:48):
two hundred fifty dollars with a lot of money. So
long story short, even when I got off the orthotics
and painkillers, my feet required shoes all the time. I
could shower bare foot, but I couldn't do the dishes barefoot.
I needed support. What I realize now is that the
connected tissue that are supposed to hold your foot together
and have it do all these amazing things was too weak,
(11:09):
and that sort of stretching and incompetent connective tissue was
causing pain. Once I got off my sweet potatoes and
swisch start for real, my feet were fine, and all
of a sudden, like I can wear heels. For the
first time in my life. When I was age fifty,
I went to a family wedding in war heels for
seven hours, serious heels for seven hours. That had never
(11:32):
happened in my entire life.
Speaker 4 (11:34):
So why are oxalates in plants? What's their purpose?
Speaker 1 (11:38):
Oxalates are naturally part of nature. I mean, clouds rain
oxalates down in acid rain and the soil. Funguses and
make oxalate, and plants make oxalate for lots of different
purposes in their physiology. They just need to do that.
And if you think about plants and nature, you can't
just go out in the woods and camp all weekend
(12:00):
and snack on pine cones and pine needles and have
a good life. A lot of plants out there in
nature you wouldn't eat. But we forget that because our
current idea is that everything in nature is great and
wonderful and it's all here for our enjoyment and our
well being. But honestly, if you let loose some children
in your yard, would you permit them to eat the
(12:21):
foods in your yard? I don't think so. But plants,
they aren't being eaten by us because they generally have
to be toxic, otherwise they would have been made extinct
by any critter that decided they were hungry. There's lots
of critters who are designed to eat plants, which we
probably are not. I mean, our place in the web
(12:42):
of life is not down there eating pond scum. If
we were down there, we would mess up the whole
ecostructure of things. We're an apex predator eating animals that
eat other animals and other critters. So the idea that
we can get by on just plant material is a
new idea. It's come out of philosophy that got kicked
off I think by the Greeks and that early philosophy
(13:05):
and then the whole Renaissance and the rights of man
philosophy about getting out from under tyranny and tyrants and
having a more meritocracy where anyone can advance in life,
not just because you're born on royalty or special families.
And that whole philosophy got extended out with other kinds
(13:25):
of reform movements trying to deal with alcoholism and domestic
violence and all the problems that humans have struggled with
for a long time. Came this idea that we shouldn't
eat animals. So the avoiding of eating animals and relying
more heavily on plant foods moved us out of our
eco niche into a more philosophical state with food, and
(13:47):
we've moved that philosophical state to its nth degree in
current culture.
Speaker 4 (13:51):
We've seen or read about people claiming that their health improved,
their sleep, they lost weight, all through a plant based lifestyle.
Certain people, are they just immune to oxalates?
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, this is a wonderful question. Is perplexing, And one
of the big problems with oxalate toxicity is that you
can be eating high oxalate foods and not have any
symptoms that it's causing problems, and you have no mental
structures to connect any symptoms you might be having to
your food. I've been looking to my food for answers
for feeling well for a long long time. It could
(14:26):
never put together the fact that it was my sweet
potatoes and Swiss chart that were tearing me down and
really making my life difficult. It could not tell. And
those of us who funny realize that oxalates are a
problem for us, could not tell. So it's not something
where symptoms always give you a clue. And are there
(14:47):
people that are immune to oxalates? I doubt it. I
think that there's a lot of variability in our tolerance
for them, and it takes more oxalates for longer periods
of time for some people to get or detectable effects.
But it's pretty hard to detect the effects of oxalate.
So there's a chicken and egg problem with trying to
(15:07):
even answer that question. The truth is you need to
think about oxalate like you would think about mercury and
other toxins you're more familiar with. Is that the more
of it in your body, the harder it is for
your body to work well. And we have the basic
science that shows preliminary and hasn't been really pursued in
clinical research, which is a big problem. We're working under
(15:29):
a giant umbrella of ignorance about this topic. So I
was surprised initially that it was hard to find the
information I wanted to find to explain why we get
better without oxalates in our diet, and then how much
I could find, but how scattered it is around science,
and how unpursued it is and unappreciated it is. But
(15:49):
the truth is, you're not immune to the effects of oxalate.
A lot of the effects of oxalate are things we
take for granted. Stomach aches, osteop urosis, memory problems, mood problems, arthritis, dementia.
These things that we think of as aging can really
(16:10):
just be oxalate damage. And maybe the aging we're experiencing
isn't aging at all, it's oxalate damage. And truthfully, maybe
we should all stay forty in our capacity for work productivity,
pain free living until we're ninety. Maybe there isn't this
long tail of illness, twenty years of struggling in doctors
(16:30):
visits and nine prescriptions and all of that.
Speaker 4 (16:33):
Do you think it's better to get that almost instant
reaction to a food as opposed to thirty forty years later. Hey,
you know you ate this for forty years and now
boom heart attack. Do you think that the checks and
balances that you received kind of put you on this
path like I must solve this.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
Well, it is kind of too bad that your body
is such a trooper that you can be abusing it
with food you think are okay, and it doesn't complain.
It carries on boldly, bravely, not telling you, Hey, don't
eat so much sweet potato, con quit doing us. It
would be easier for the body to tell you if
(17:10):
you knew enough to ask it, Hey, how do you
like in the fact that eat sweet potatoes every night
for dinner? Is this okay? And then I would notice
when I go to bed at night, No, you're restless,
your legs are jumping around, You've got hiccups. Now you're belching.
You're fired the next day, Hey, that was the sweet
potatoes you ate for dinner? Doing that for you? We
don't have that information to even imagine that. So whatever
(17:34):
amount of complaining the body's doing, we're incapable of connecting that.
And then the sad part now is that we're so
devoted to our present ideas of what is food for humans,
things like peanut butter and dark chocolate and things that
we've just invented very very recently. We think these are
our god given right to eat these foods. And I
(17:55):
don't want to hear anything pet about my favored smoothie
or right now, there's this insane love of chia pudding.
Speaker 4 (18:03):
Like no, So I want to talk about almond milk
and specifically what a high speed blender does to almonds
when we make almond milk.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
Right, So, any whole food is a package of layers
of plant materials, including cell walls and vacuoles that hold
contents inside, and you can't really break those down very
well with your teeth and your digesto tracts. So when
you're eating plant, foods are difficult to digest because those
cell walls are made of cell you lose, which you
don't digest at all. Even cows don't digest it well,
(18:36):
it's the bacteria they have growing in their bellies. They
ferment cellulose for the cow, so the cow can eat
bacteria and build a big muscular body. But we don't
have that kind of digestion, so we can't break down
that material very well. And when the plant is whole,
you break it up somewhat, but you leave some of
(18:56):
these oxalate crystals oxalic acid in the material, and you
don't necessarily get it from your gut into your bloodstream,
but the jumping of material from your gut to your
bloodstream we call that absorption. When that gets into your blood,
Now you have oxalic acid in your bloodstream where it's
causing trouble. Now the parts you don't absorb, the fiber,
(19:20):
the oxleate crystals and other plant antiinutrients can still cause
inflammation and trouble in the gut, and you can start
developing gut problems, which creates a leaky gut situation where
you have higher absorption of toxins and lower absorption of
nutrients because a lot of the toxins can just float
in between the cells, and the little gaps between the
cells grow wider, and the cells ability to prevent those
(19:44):
toxins from getting in grows less, and your ability to
actively transport in and select vitamins and so on becomes compromised,
so you get this terrible situation of being more toxic
and less nourished.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Well, you mentioned smoothies I used to juice a lo
and like many of us do, and I know you
know Victoria had low oxalate inspiration. And she posted something
from the Cleveland Clinic website and that is quote many
of the food products used in juicing mixtures or high
oxalate containing foods end quote Sally, are we just ramping
these foods up when we juice?
Speaker 1 (20:18):
Oh my gosh, for sure. Now you're taking soluble oxalic
acid and diluting it in the fluids, getting rid of
all those things that interfere with absorption, and giving it
complete entry into your bloodstream, and so your absorption rate
can go way up. And that means more quickly and
more of the fraction of the oxalates gets into your blood,
(20:40):
and immediately it can be harming the vascular walls and
the circulating blood cells, including your immune cells, which can
go rapidly into a distress mode because their mitochondria, their
cell membranes are distressed, they go into pro inflammation. They're
putting out pro inflammatory cytokinds, and they're no longer good
at protecting you from infection. It's very clear that a
(21:02):
hioxy diet would set you up for higher rates of
propensity towards infectious problems, chronic infections, things like sinus infections,
yeast infections, UTIs and so on.
Speaker 4 (21:13):
Yeah, is spinach one of the biggest culprits. Spinach is
so revered.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
Is a fabulous food that you'd got to have to
be nourished, even though it's a pretty novel food that's
very seasonal that you should probably if you're eating a
natural life, you'd be eating it three weeks in the
summer until it got too hot. Spinach is kind of
a cool weather crop, and you'd have to have a
special way to keep the heat off of it, or
get it from northern places, which requires transport. And if
(21:42):
it's not kept cold right after it's pipped, it loses
its lutine and it's folid and these kinds of things.
It has to be eating pretty quickly as a supposed,
you know, superfood. It's pretty impractical food, but because of
modern technology, it's available at Costco and Giant patches year
round and it's being like crazy, and it is the
highest Oxley food that is popular. And the second ones
(22:06):
that are a little worse than spinach would be beat
green Swiss chart and rhubarb. But those would be like
the tops of the worst defenders in terms of a
great way to supercharge the toxicity of your diet.
Speaker 4 (22:18):
It's interesting you say that about the I guess the
growing season of spinach, because doctor Bil Schindler said, listen,
if you would eat spinach when spinach has grown and available,
you'd probably be okay.
Speaker 1 (22:30):
Depends on the rest of your diet. True, because you
can go from spinach season to something else, because your
beat greens and your Swiss charred become available after the
spinach is done, you.
Speaker 4 (22:41):
Know, right, But if you eat it, you know a
year round, which we can might not be so good.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
Well, it's particularly bad. That's where you get into the
kidney stones and the arthritis and the autoimmune diseases, and
the breakdown of your digestice system and mood changes and
depression and connective tissue problems and other years nary tract
problems like irritable bladder and waking up all night to
pee and painful bladder. There's so many ways that this
(23:07):
can start affecting your health. And having a high oxley
food like spinach in your routine diet is really quite dangerous.
We've seen it in the old days and the old research.
In the nineteen thirties, it was very clear, based on
feeding infants and feeding animals that giving spinach to young children,
human children, and young animal babies causes severe depletion of
(23:31):
calcium and iron and recharge their growth and development, gives
them smaller, weaker bones, and so on. It was considered
quite dangerous. But already in the nineteen thirties people in
the medical field were dismissing it and say, well, it's
a green. Well, just we won't pay attention to that,
and they never called it out, even though we had
the science there, and it's over and over again in
(23:53):
the literature. You can pick out different studies that say, hey,
spinach is terrible for calcium and iron and causes anemia
and causes mineral disruptions depleting of mineral nutrition. And this
is also happening even before you eat the food. Because
if the food is high in these minerals in a test,
if it's also high in oxalate, none of those minerals
(24:15):
are actually functioning as nutritional minerals. You might be able
to measure them and claim that if food has high
calcium or something, but if it's also high inoxalate. None
of that is functional calcium. It's probably calcium oxalate, which
is a toxic.
Speaker 4 (24:28):
What about spices, should we use less of them? Close
to zero?
Speaker 1 (24:32):
A lot of spices come from seeds, and a lot
of the seed based spices are pretty high. Black pepper
is high. Tumeric is not a seed, it's a rhizome,
rooty kind of thing, and that's very high inoxalate. Some
of the plastic spices, like dried ginger frush ginger is
not as bad. But yeah, many of the things that
like season spicy food, except for the red pepper, is
(24:53):
pretty high in oxylate. And I've had several clients and
followers say it wasn't until I realized I had to
really cut back some of my spices that I saw
the full advantage of paying attention to oxalates in my
diet and suddenly felt better.
Speaker 4 (25:06):
Salt wouldn't fall in there, right, Nope, it's.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Just sodium and chloride, and it's a healthy thing that
you need.
Speaker 4 (25:13):
But I'm thinking maybe my hot sauce and jalapenos on
my egg is probably not good.
Speaker 1 (25:17):
Hell being it on your eggs and hot sauce are
really not that bad because the red pepper is so
strong that you're ultimately not using that much of it.
But the black pepper can get really a problem. People
get into certain things like black pepper on potato chips,
and potato chips are very high in cybal oxlate, very
high source of oxalate, and you put a lot of
black pepper on it and it just can be a disaster.
(25:40):
So things like more like the Ethiopian food some of
the Indian curries, those kinds of foods are very high.
I would say the Indian style of spicing would be
where you definitely take your high oxalate spices and create problems.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
What if someone tells you that this way of eating
is just too restrictive for them, a Sali, how do
you try to edge them or make sure that they
still honor their body versus thinking of it as a
restrictive diet.
Speaker 1 (26:06):
I have a hard time thinking of something that's going
to bring me in good sleep and pain free living
is restrictive, considering like whoa a geek to happiness? But
you're right, most people initially go oh oh no, I'm
not going to change the way I live that's ridiculous.
Everybody eats this stuff, so they have a really hard
time emotionally even considering trying it, which is unfortunate because
(26:28):
if you don't really give this a try, you don't
understand it. So it's really important to realize that it's
just not being creative. You don't realize there's many more
foods that are low and ox late to have that
are can you can build an interesting life and diet
around those foods. It's just that they're not as popular.
They're not as like widely used, so people don't know
what a route bag is or a turn up is
(26:51):
or some of these lower oxlate alternatives, or they're not like, wait,
I always use black beans? Why do I have to
use black eyed peas instead of black beans? You know
I'm used to and planteen? Why do I have to
change to something else? Just the habits we have and
the attachments we have. For some people, it's like asking
them to give up their youngest child. Emotionally, there's druggling
(27:12):
with that. But the honest truth is from a more
rational point of view, is the list of low oxley
foods is pretty darn long, and the gift you get
is your own health and independence.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
Do you think we'll ever see oxalant levels or measurements
in the ingredients list of packages?
Speaker 1 (27:27):
I sure hope we do. I think that's the least
thing we could ask for, is at least get some information,
because right now we're all working in the dark. Your
clinicians don't know, your friends don't know. The guy who
runs your store you purchase at has no idea. They
don't put little labels by the spinach and say, hey,
if you have kidney stones, arthritis, scout, headaches, and depression,
(27:49):
don't buy spinach. That is what we need. We need
companies who prepare boxed and canned foods to measure their
foods for O slate and add that to the well.
Speaker 4 (28:00):
We've all heard the term apple st oranges, but I've
never heard about the muffin comparison. Sally, can you elaborate
on that?
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Sounds like you've been reading Toxic Superfers.
Speaker 4 (28:12):
I have been reading that book also.
Speaker 1 (28:15):
Yes, back in the seventies and eighties, the brand muffin
was the thing in Callogg's. I think is a company
with this all brand cereal and they were selling you know,
brand muffins with our cereal and a lot of us
grew up in the seventies making brand muffins and that
was a big thing. So there's this classic brand muffin
for health. Fiber was going to be the thing, and
nowadays you're going to throw in extra superfoods with that.
(28:39):
And did the gluten free brand muffin. And you can
take a brand muffin and quadruple the amount of oxalate
in it by using the chia seeds and the almond flower.
A lot of people who are going on gluten free
and wheat free diets are using almond flower. Almonds are
ridiculously high in oxalate in other toxins, and they're now
being used like water, available everywhere, fairly affordable, and people
(29:03):
who are into the health thing tend to be into
the almond flower. And so any kind of bake goods,
whether it's a muffin, a cake, a pancake, whatever, people
are stacking almonds and almond butter and sweet potatoes and
cacao powder and they're creating these oxalate bombs.
Speaker 4 (29:20):
Can you tell us anything about the data companion that
you're rolling out this.
Speaker 1 (29:24):
Year, Yes, hopefully it's coming out very soon. The Data
Companion is four and a half years of working on
a database and culling through all available testing we have
about oxalate content of food, which is pretty dicey area
because even a seemingly respectable university can put out articles
of terrible techniques and terrible conclusions about where the oxalate
(29:46):
is in food. So you'll find things online that comes
from medical journals that say coffee is high in oxalate.
It is very low in oxalate. Coffee maybe two miligrams
of oxleate, which is fairly inconsequential, whereas tea as twenty
miligrams of oxley and that is consequential. So t is
high oxalate. It seems to be a very bioavailable oxalate
(30:08):
even though it's not the highest oxley food because it's
liquid and so on, and it's all soluble, and we
often drink it slowly in between meals without fiber, and
most people don't put milk in it, so it's pretty
good way to get oxley. It's where coffee isn't. But
you can find data that claims that coffee's high dates
are high, and listen, there's so much misinformation out there.
(30:28):
When you try to start a low Oxley diet. If
you go online just looking for lists of what tie
and what's low on Oxley, you will want to give
up because the lists don't agree. So this Data Companion
is a electronic and a physical book that you'll be
able to get that has one hundred pages of data
and food where we've checked the data as best we can,
(30:49):
the methodology used best we can. It's not always available,
and we've averaged things out. So we have seventeen tests
of spinach, but I'm not giving you the seventeen tests
of spinach, giving you an average, plus all the information
where it came from, and you can look up all
the original data sources yourself. So it's the first time
anyone's put out data that's got so much transparency that
(31:11):
you know exactly where it came from and how we
came to our numbers, and it's all color coded and
meant to be easy for the user, but enough detail
for those who really need to get into the weeds,
they can have that. But you really don't need one
hundred pages of data to succeed on a low oxleyde diet,
especially if you're not really sick with oxlades. Yet, if
you're preventing your oxleay problem, all you need is a
(31:33):
simple list of these are the worst defenders. Do not
build your diet around them if they're in your life.
Be very aware how much you're eating. And here are
all the safe bets that really don't have much oxley.
You don't have to think about them. You have all
you want of those, And you can use this as
a guard rail. So you can think of each side,
the low and the high, as this guardrail. And inside
this roadway you're protected from falling off the edge of
(31:56):
the road and tumbling down a cliff side by that
basic high and low information. And in the middle, where
you're navigating your health, you can refine your diet according
to your needs.
Speaker 4 (32:07):
Well, you call it a companion, So is it a
companion to the book or can you just get the
app and start your journey there. What if someone has
dyslexia and they just can't read and they have to
go maybe audio or visual? Is that a pathway for
them to take well?
Speaker 1 (32:21):
In my Beginner's Guide on my website, I have a
visual representation of how this all works with pictures of
high oxleate foods, and low oxalate foods is not comprehensive,
but it gives you the general idea and toxic superfoods.
The book is available as an audiobook, although all the
charts and tables have not been read out. But nowadays
you have various forms of AI that can help you
(32:43):
read through material, help you get it. But it's really true,
the more oxlely toxic you are, the harder time you
have to read, harder time you have making sense of information.
You can't retain information very well with oxley. It is
such a confusing topic. You have to come back to
it over and over again. It took me years to
realize I was never going to memorize data well. I
would always have to double check and look it up.
(33:04):
And people ask me all the time how much oxalate
is in a teaspoon of sa tahini or something, and
I'm like, I am not a walking encyclopedia of numbers.
That's my worst side of my brain. I'll have to
go look that up for you and put down what
I'm doing. Go turn on my computer and look that up.
But we're hoping to make it more and more convenient
with time. We will eventually have an app and so on.
(33:26):
But basically, we don't have to make it that hard
the high offenders. If you start steering clear of them,
you will protect your health and that's the place to start.
And as you start feeling better, you can keep refining
your skill with understanding how to navigate around the hyoxaline
minefields that we're surrounded with, because literally you can hardly
(33:47):
go out to a retail store and not be invited
to eat nuts and dark chocolate and chips made of
roots and these high oxyleyt foods, like some of the
trends right now, not just the chia seed and the
chiese seed pudding, which please don't do, but snack chips
are made with beets, sweet potatoes, taro, roots, cassava, plantain,
(34:07):
leg yumes, and nuts seem to always come with chocolate.
Every ice cream flavor out there has some form of
chocolate in it, and you know, it's just everywhere. And
if you start seeing that with box late eyeglasses, you
can be like, hmm, I can resist that through your
healing journey.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
What are you most thankful for?
Speaker 1 (34:26):
Well, I would say Joanne jon who founded the Volver
Or Pain Foundation. If it wasn't for her, she was
the true pioneer who brought the idea of low oxleate
diet curing chronic pain, addressing chronic pain that couldn't be
handled any other way. She put that out there thirty
something years ago with the Volver Pain Foundation, which is
(34:47):
in North Carolina, which is very near to where I
lived and worked in North Carolina, in only three and
a half hours from where I am now. I didn't
know about her work until two thousand and nine and
I had a attack of volvar pain and that's what
her foundation specializes in as genital pain both for men
and women, but she started off with women's pain because
(35:08):
of her experience. And that was the first time I
had heard that this kidney stone diet is low oxley
diet that we're put kidney stone patients on is good
for pain syndromes. And she described in her work with
a guy named Clive Solomon who's now passed, but he
did initial neurine analyses and did a study looking at
(35:29):
almost four thousand women in their urine excretion of oxley.
Because this is how the body removes oxylead is through
the urine. That's why it ends up hanging up as
kidney stones and some people. But they were describing a
connective tissue syndrome, which I really hadn't heard much about
in my holistic healing circles or in my program at
(35:49):
the nutrition school. That there's things called connective tissues syndromes
and diseases, and all the things she's describing fit me.
You know, my arthritis and my back problem and my
foot problems, and my thin skin and my inability to
handle ditch soap without getting you know, shredding my cuticles
on my fingers and all this kind of icky stuff.
(36:10):
I had no idea. So that was a revelation to me,
but I couldn't understand the science behind it. I bought
her stuff. It wasn't making a lot of sense, but
I learned about oxalates, and this is the key thing.
Her work primarily has been to test foods because the
testing is unreliable and inadequate and just poultry and the people,
the way people are handling the data is not good either.
(36:33):
So she made a point of making oxlate testing of
foods one of her major missions. So they've put out
over the years newsletters with information of oxlate content, and
so she taught me with my sick brain. It took
me a while with carrot tie or Kiwi high, like
what do I do? But I learned that I shouldn't
be eating sweet potatoes all the time. I quit my
(36:53):
organic growing of sweet potatoes. I used to buy some
from Mongal who grows them locally, too. Gave up my
precious sweet potatoes. But then I would eat them again
and I wouldn't feel worse. I'd feel fine on them.
I thought, well, I'm done with my ox sleep problems,
so I don't have to be so strict about it.
So I started using Kiwi to try to heal my
(37:13):
constipation problem because I developed a very evil sleep problem
where my brain was waking up twenty nine times an hour,
so I wasn't sleeping at all, and I was so exhausted.
I didn't know I wasn't sleeping. I was in a
sort of semi conscious state all my long with my
brain not being able to stay settled down. And didn't
even know it, but my indercinologists, I had to have
(37:35):
a hysterectomy. I've had so many issues. It don't make
sense someone who's been so committed to organic food and
vegetables and eating right and living right and going to
the gym, going to bed and going to church and
everything you could do to be good. It wasn't working.
So I tried this Kiwi experiment because I didn't have
all our pain and I'm fine now and so I'm
got to fix the sleep problem by fixing my constipation.
(37:57):
But that's fixing my dys biosis, I thought. And by
adding Kiwi to my diet, my arthritis came back, which
I had so badly when I was a vegan and
was kind of not so bad for the last fifteen years.
But when I started doing Kiwi a couple times a
day after a couple of years of basically low oxalate,
it brought back an arthritis, and it made me stiffer
(38:19):
and stiffer and stiffer, and I was starting to feel
eighty again like I did when I was a vegan,
and I was like, holy cow, the oxalate in those
Kiwi were causing my arthritis, which is like holy cow.
I've had arthritis since I was twelve, and here I'm
forty nine and I'm finally connecting my food to my arthritis.
(38:40):
It took me from age twelve to forty nine to
figure this out. And I was sort of mad because, hey,
I have to fix my sleep disorder because I can't work,
and to do that, I have to fix my gut.
But now I have to fix my arthritis too. And
I was so resembful because I thought all these things
were separate problems. So regrettingly, I get serious again, truly
doing the Loxley. No, I'm functioning better and I'm better
(39:02):
at it. I know more about it, and lo and behold,
in a week, I could tell I'm sleeping again and
everything's feeling better. I'm like, wait a minute, the sleep
was not dyspiosis. The sleep was not the constipation. The
sleep problem was oxolate wrecking my brain. Oh wait, it
wrecked my joints. Oh no, I wrecked my brain. No,
Kajuer has directed me. My feet got bet like. It
(39:24):
was so weird to me because I had been taught
in our culture each problem is from a different source.
Not one set of poisons will cause many problems in
the body.
Speaker 4 (39:36):
So today's a pretty special day right for you?
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yes, it certainly is. Today is the first birthday of
Toxic Superfoods. It was published on January third, twenty twenty three,
and here we are January third, twenty twenty four, my
first podcast discussion of the year, on the birthday of
Toxic Superfoods, and we've had fifty thousand books sold. We've
had hundreds and hundreds of people sharing their stories on Amazon,
(40:03):
on Instagram, all over the internet. There's a whole development
of community. The word ox late is starting to become
shared and discussed and taught to people. And so it's
pretty cool that we're talking here in Richmond through my
favorite little health food store that started me off on
my oxolate educating journey on its birthday.
Speaker 4 (40:21):
Sally, finally, can you give us the best course of
action to take till someone comes to you and they say,
I need to heal this. I think this is what
is going on. What advice would you give them?
Speaker 1 (40:34):
Well, for one thing, take a deep breath and recognize
that now you're on a decade's long healing journey, and
it's going to be both beautiful and difficult, and it's
going to be a bit of a truck sort of
a mountain climb. You might say, that's a little bit challenging.
So you need to know that you need to get
support and reach out and get some good information and
(40:55):
then look at your diet and based on my Beginner's
Guide or some of them. Listen in the book Toxic Superfoods,
find out what are the top five things you're eating
that are on that worst Offenders list, and pick one
like the almonds or the spinach, and start reducing that
right away, and do that for a couple of weeks,
(41:15):
and then look at the other ones and find replacement
for those. So if you've been eating a lot of spinach,
you can switch down to masculine mix, which has some
oxlaate still in it, so you could shage a spinach
salad from five hundred milligrams of oxlead down to fifty. Right,
that's a big reduction. So the reason you want to
do this in a sort of systematic way is because
if you suddenly go from eating a very high oxylay diet,
(41:38):
which can have a thousand milligrams of oxlad or fifteen
hundred or two thousand, you can really be up there
and you go down to ten or fifteen milligrams of oxleate,
your body's like, wow, we's a break and it's ready
to unload this bioaccumulation. You have oxolates and your kidneys
and your bladder and your tendons and your thyrogland and
your eyeballs, your bones and bone marrow, and that turns
(41:59):
on inflammation. Immune cells are like whoa, We can get
rid of crystals, and it turns on a process that
is toxic, and you could repoison your blood and your
body and your kidneys and so on by unloading oxley
from matsue. You don't want to do that. You want
to stop the acute poisoning by getting off these really
high doses of oxlead in your diet and start cutting
(42:19):
back doses and cutting back to these foods one at
a time, and give yourself five six months to learn
this process, so there's no reason to like, oh tomorrow,
I have to know everything. Give yourself time to learn.
Get rid of almonds, spinach, cheese, seeds, sweet potatoes, chips
and so on, and then eventually the dark chocolate and
you will be amazed.
Speaker 4 (42:38):
Sally, thank you so much for coming on the podcast
and just enlightening us, blowing my mind with every answer.
It's been a joy.
Speaker 1 (42:46):
It's so great to be able to share a story
with you. And I'm hoping We'll do this again.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
The Good Foods podcast is that entertainment purposes only. The
gleams comments, opinions, or information heard should never be used
in place of your medical provider's advice or your doctor's direction.
Thank you for listening, Follow us on social media and
wherever you get your podcasts. Good health through good food,
Good Foods Grocery
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