Sally K. Norton | The Dangers of Plants & Oxalates | August 13, 2025 Ep. 16 - The Low Carb Consultant

Episode Transcript
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(00:11):
All right guys, we're rolling. So today on the Low Carb
Consultant podcast, I'm joined by Sally K Norton, a Cornell and
University of North Carolina trained nutritionist, public
health veteran, and leading authority on dietary oxalates.
After overcoming chronic pain and fatigue, Sally's personal

(00:33):
healing journey inspired her to write the groundbreaking book
Toxic Superfoods, uncovering howour beloved healthy foods like
spinach, almonds, sweet potatoescan actually harm our health.
And we're going to be talking a lot about data back strategies
to reduce oxalate overload and reclaim vitality.

(00:55):
We'll chat a lot about that on today's podcast.
So rally, it's an absolute pleasure to meet you and and
finally get you on here. Yeah, we're going to have a good
time. I'm glad we're here.
Yeah, absolutely. We are going to have a good
time. And maybe before we jump into
you know what oxalate is, why wedon't want to eat it, how to
avoid it swaps, we'll get into all that type of stuff so the

(01:17):
listeners understand. But before we jump into a lot of
that, I know that your personal story is pretty compelling.
Can you give the listeners just a real brief background on
yourself and then what ultimately LED you down this
specific Oxalate route? Well, I was sort of tied to some
wagon. I didn't know what it was.

(01:37):
Being dragged across rocks for 20-30.
Forty years of suffering with noidea how to fix that, despite my
devotion to like, taking care ofmyself and trying to be healthy
really since I was before entering school.
Once I got past all this ear infections and strep stuff as a

(01:58):
little kid, lost my tonsils at age 5, and a pretty traumatic
experience to get surgery at age5 and be in that much pain.
And it, you know. I just nodded.
And you don't have fun if you'resick.
That is very clear even to a three-year old.
You don't want to be barred fromthe swimming pool of life.
And unfortunately, I was gettingthat treatment early in life.

(02:20):
And so it made me this health geek.
I decided in 7th grade to study nutrition so I can help others
and myself prevent heart diseaseand cancer and all the big scary
diseases. So I've been in the center of
public health prevention oriented scientific background
forever. Yet I was a lemon.

(02:41):
My body was a lemon. It suffered greatly.
I've had to drop out of Cornell for years.
I was on crutches, wheelchairs, and painkillers.
All of my 20s was a bust. I don't know how to dance
because my feet don't work. I couldn't go barefoot for most
of my life and had it just kept adding more and more things.
Arthritis was so bad I didn't have the strength in my hands to
do much. I couldn't unlock a door

(03:02):
sometimes when it would swell upso bad.
And I'm 19 years old, so and I'mbecoming more and more plant
based and become vegetarian whenFrancis Marla pays book Diet for
New Planet was current back in 1982 when I read it.
And then I read a vegan trope that pushed me all the way to

(03:23):
dropping my yogurt and my eggs from my diet.
And that's when I got pneumonia and got all kinds of of my
arthritis. I couldn't walk upstairs.
I'm in my late 20s, so 49. You were you Sounds like you
were dealing with all the issues, yeah.
Oh yeah, fatigue, mental fatigue, struggling, but still,
like trooping on, finishing my degrees, attempting to figure

(03:47):
out a career when you can't. I couldn't do like a Dietetic
internship in a hospital floor when you're on crutches and
painkillers. It's just not going to happen.
In that era especially. I mean, I couldn't even get a
job as a telephone operator because they wanted me to wear
pumps. It was like it was so much
discrimination on a not able bodied people.
I've spent too much time in wheelchairs as a 20 year old.

(04:09):
I can tell you that. Oh my gosh, that really, you
know, changes your life in so many ways.
I live in a ranch house because I'm afraid of stairs.
But now I could live in the Eiffel Tower because I figured
out it was my healthy diet that has destroyed me.
But in the meantime, things progress.
I had this sleeping disorder where my brain was waking up 29
times an hour. Sheer neurotoxicity and you

(04:33):
know, like sticky arthritis was peeking back again.
And then I got a clue about the oxalates and, and really
seriously changed my diet and all this stuff started improving
and my feet are fine now. Like within well about six
months of quitting Kiwi and celery and high oxalate foods.
I am like wearing heels and running around barefoot.

(04:58):
Decades of not being able to usemy feet, sleeping again and
amazing. That is amazing.
So before we get into, you know,what an oxalate actually is, you
know, all the types of components around, how do we
want to avoid them? Top food, we'll talk about the
top foods. Top three to five foods we kind

(05:19):
of want to avoid. We'll talk about your book that
recommends the swaps and all that.
What exactly is for the listeners?
What exactly is an oxalate? Why are they so bad?
Why do we hear nothing about them?
We hear plenty about other, you know, food or plant compounds
that are bad for us. But I, I feel like we don't
necessarily hear enough about oxalates.

(05:41):
What's an oxalate? Why is it bad?
Why did we hear nothing about it?
Right, so you know what? I'm, I've never explained it
this way, but think about makingsalad dressing.
We're going to make salad dressing with three ingredients,
salt, vinegar and oil. OK, so salt is a compound that
dissolves in the water part. And vinegar is basically a water

(06:03):
compound, right? It's 3% acetic acid in water.
So the salt is going to dissolvebecause you're going to shake
this up and you're going to it'sgoing to disappear.
You're going to put crystals in this vinegar and it's going to
disappear, but it's going to stay in the part where the
vinegar is. And if you shake up your salad
dressing and you set it on the counter?
So what happens after, say, in two hours?

(06:23):
Things kind of settle, settle, and the sediment kind of goes to
the bottom, oil rises, that typeof stuff.
Oil rises in water. So because water and oil don't
stay mixed together, one's considered polar and one is is
not right. Yeah.
So the the salt, it dissolves into ions.
So oxalate is a tiny little ionic acid, oxalic acid that

(06:46):
dissolves in the vinegar fraction of the of the dressing
and is repelled by the fat fraction.
So this is important to know because it goes back to a salt
form. It's considered a salt because
it it has this negative charge that allows it to have that
polarity that makes it water as a polar molecule.
Remember chemistry guys? I know that it seemed irrelevant

(07:06):
at the time, but you need to be able to think for yourself.
So, So oxalic acid dissolves in water but forms crystals.
And when it see it's got one or two negative charges and it
loves things with positive charges.
So the thing it loves the most and it loves it the most is
calcium. So calcium and oxalic acid get
together and they start forming these little molecules that will

(07:29):
form crystals. They come back together into the
crystalline like the salt beforeit was dissolved, but it can
turn into salt and stay there and not dissolve properly.
Because calcium and oxalate, oxalic acid love each other so
much, they don't come back into the dissolved form.
So oxalic acid is A2 carbon molecule with four oxygens on

(07:50):
it, Uber tiny. I mean we're talking miniscule
molecule here that can grab minerals.
Now minerals like calcium, magnesium, copper and all the
toxic minerals too are real important to life itself.
You see, salt and potassium is the electricity of life because
a cell, a living cell which you are made of gazillions of them

(08:13):
is a battery basically. So it keeps, it's keeping a
positive and negative charge andopposite sides of membranes.
And whether it's a membrane that's making up a mitochondria
or a cell suborganelle or the cell itself, these membranes are
where all of the action of life occurs.
Without a membrane, you don't have life.
Without water, you don't have life without a a charge

(08:36):
differential across that membrane.
You don't have that battery power, that electricity.
So you are this electricity kindof being in your liveliness.
So to be alive you have to control where your calcium is,
exactly where your potassium andyour sodium is.
And that's real important work. Well, this little bugger called

(08:56):
oxalic acid starts mucking with these electrolytes, calcium and
other things, and that causes havoc and cell function and in
the electricity of life, part ofhow you run your heart is with
the pacemaker that requires calcium and blood.
Oxalic acid is causing your blood calcium to wobble down and
up and down and up and messing it up.

(09:18):
Your pacemaker and your heart doesn't work so well.
So messing with a little tiny bugger that grabs your
electrolytes and does other things because it's direct
damage to the membrane structureitself and all kinds of other
issues with because it's grabbing these minerals, it can
make you nutrient deficient. So you could be losing your

(09:42):
basic fundamental needs for these elements and causing
deficiencies, but then you causea lot of effects on the cell
function directly. So you have potentially a less
adequate diet in terms of nutritional value because in the
food and in your digestive tract, it can be binding calcium

(10:03):
and other minerals, which is a good thing because you know, it
might, you might less of it might get across into the body,
into the blood, but it can contribute like other plant
compounds to nutritional inadequacy problems.
And we've had that documentationin the 1930s with young
children, babies, if you gave them too much spinach, the

(10:23):
babies would become iron and calcium deficient, which is a
terrible thing. It affects their growth and
their bone development. If you don't get your bone
development at the right stage, it's hard to make it up later
when you're 40, like you got to do your bones when you're
growing and but in the meantime,your whole electrolyte, your
electrical system and the way cell function are potentially

(10:43):
compromised if they're overexposed to this, which
seriously effects energy production and cells.
So you can create sort of a brownout, low energy stage and
cells because the mitochondria start struggling and the ability
of cells to like manage all thisas a group, the way they
communicate is also interfered with.
You get this acidity going on and then functions like what we

(11:07):
call the barrier function of your mucosal membranes in your
mouth and your nose and your bladder and your gesture tract
in your your general euro genital system.
All of those things can be compromised because of the
stress in the cells system and the increased inflammation.
So now you have low energy and you have more damage to cells

(11:27):
and without the energy, how do you fix the cells?
So now your maintenance and repair processes are retarded.
So your ability to stay young and youthful and vital and
maintain your your heft and yourhealing powers get compromised
in subtle ways behind the scenes.
You may not even notice. Interesting.
And I want to get into the symptoms here in a quick second,

(11:47):
but going back to your, your personal journey here, when like
at what point did you realize like oxalates were behind your
health struggles? I know you were going into a lot
of the issues that you were running into like wheelchair
bound when you're going and whenyou were in school in Cornell on
crutches, all those types of things.

(12:08):
When, when and when did you cometo find out that it was oxalates
that were causing you a lot of these issues specifically?
Well, it wasn't at Cornell. It wasn't for my textbooks, it
wasn't for my professors. It wasn't from the fact that
here I'm eating this perfectly clean, organic, plant based diet
and thinking, Oh yeah, this isn't working.
I should think, rethink that. No, no, no.

(12:30):
Luckily there's this sainted person who founded something
called the VP Foundation in North Carolina, the Vulvar Pain
Foundation over 30 years ago andshe has a little website that if
you look up Vulvar Pain you willfind her.
And I had an attack of that in 2009.
Enough so for just 2-3 days. Three days of like this is

(12:52):
horrible. I had an outburst at home that
caused my husband to do a Googlesearch and find her and the VP
Foundation clued me in and I'm like cocking my head going, are
you kidding? That's the stuff that causes
kidney stones and maybe some other calcifications, but that's
like kidney stones, maybe arthritis.

(13:12):
But what does this have to do with pain syndrome, skin
problems, brain problems, digestive issues?
Like I didn't learn any of that at school and I needed to know
how this worked. I'm this really logical person.
I couldn't make sense out of it based on what I learned at
school, but I started learning about the oxalates in food

(13:35):
through her. That was her biggest
contribution to the world, whichis a hefty 1, is that she
started getting her members to help fund testing of foods.
Interesting. So why do you think we hear
nothing about about these specific plant compounds?
I'm kind of disturbed, but we don't because I in multiple ways

(13:59):
I damaged my health since ages ago from not knowing this.
At Cornell, to get a nutrition degree you have to take foods
one and foods 2. Foods 1 is about foods and you
don't learn a darn thing about these things in plants.
You learn how to turn flour intorolls in an hour and less than

(14:22):
an hour and a half. You learn and not put acids or
baking soda when you're cooking vegetables.
You know, you learn some of the aesthetics of food.
You learn what gluten is, but you don't learn a gluten is a
lectin that is potentially really damaging.
And if there's a whole family oflectins and if you don't disarm
them in your preparation. We didn't learn anything about
safe preparation or where foods come from or how the growing

(14:46):
conditions affect foods and their quality and safety.
We didn't learn anything about contamination.
I mean, we didn't learn anythingabout natural compounds or
synthetic human applied compounds that make certain
foods potentially a health eroding kind of risk factor that
we should be considering. It's shameful how little you

(15:07):
learn in school. So the like, why don't we learn
this? I have different theories and I
talk about it in toxic superfoods.
I have a whole chapter on not just plants aren't as great as
we're told they are, but how nutrition and other health
professionals drop this topic and it's it's partly because of

(15:32):
the professional grab of needinga monopoly in your profession.
I I agree with that. And I also think, you know, we
were talking about this before we started recording.
I also just think people just don't want to come to terms that
some of the compounds and vegetables are just not good for

(15:52):
us. I, I, I, I don't think a lot of
doctors want to come to terms with that.
People want to grasp on to eat your fruits and vegetables,
right? Simple.
Yeah. Real.
And we want to dumb it down. I mean, even in nutrition, we've
been taught to dumb things down like and that was the original
decision in the 1930s. Well, let's not call out

(16:14):
spinach, given that mustard greens and turnip greens and
these other vegetables don't have oxalate and they're safe
and they don't cause this nutritional deficiency in
babies. We could just call out the few,
the charred and B tops and spinach that are bad for babies
and worn maternal and child experts to to keep these things
out of the diets of pregnant women and babies.

(16:37):
But they they literally was the medical profession said, let's
not bother. Let's just call greens, OK?
I mean, they literally made thatdecision on their own and in
consult us. But whether that's really OK or
not, maybe there are some peoplewho care enough about their
health to want to know more. Not everybody does.
I mean, people want to be fed a real simple picture, eat a

(16:57):
rainbow. Done I'm sorry, but there's more
to life than these slogans thesebumper sticker mentality and we
it's a world now that's complicated and people maybe
even have less stomach for more detail than they right because
there's so much coming at you all the time.
We're sort of fatigued, but Cal Newport has this concept of

(17:19):
benefits only mindset with everything.
The new technology is one of thewhere he is warning people look
you can bring all this new technology these apps and the
cell phone and and all these layering on from e-mail on up to
you're overwhelmed and you've ruined your life in the long run
by having those things be too predominant and dominating in

(17:40):
your life. We seeing only the upside and
we're willing to be sold the upside and buy into things that
ultimately take us astray from truly a happy and optimal
living. And that's certainly true in
nutrition. And we the you can make a very
beautiful picture and magazine cover out of these vegetables

(18:00):
and say that they're wonderful. And people want to believe that.
And we've been saying to ourselves really since the whole
revolution that that brought us to democracy.
And that is, you know, everyone should have kind of freedom to
express their full potential andbe nice to each other.

(18:21):
And we shouldn't dominate each other.
And that philosophy brought us to this thing while eating
animals is a form of dominance, and we probably shouldn't do
that. So to be really moral, we should
just not kill animals. And so we walked away from our
basic heritage as hunter gatherers out on the savannas of
Africa and so on, exploring the whole world and living up in the

(18:43):
the ice caps of the of the planet.
And we walked away from that on behalf of an ideal without
really questioning it and, and putting it forward is moral.
So we've been thinking that eating plants is a more moral
way to live for 304 hundred something years, and I think
that's really infected or made us vulnerable to messages that

(19:06):
are not based on anything that'sreally not completely thought
through. IA 100% agree with you when
we'll get into I would do want to get into, you know, the
different diets, the worst diets, the best diets in your
opinion in terms of oxalates. But going back to our basic
evolution, like I, I totally respect someone that doesn't
want to eat animals, whether it's a moral or ethical

(19:27):
standpoint. That's that's your business.
You can choose to do whatever you want to do, but it's like to
completely disregard the way that we have evolved for, you
know, 10s of thousands, hundredsof thousands of years and to say
we can we should be eating all these plants and no animals at
all. It's like that, that it's not,
it's not healthy like not. Healthy.
And it's also a bit of a disingenuous argument.

(19:49):
Sure, because you can't raise pasta and beans and on these
plant staples in the vegetarian diet without killing animals.
Every plate of spaghetti has plenty of dead critters in it.
What's that? The combine and the plows just
trashed? The ones that the chemicals that
are used trashed and the whole ecosystem of a monoculture

(20:12):
versus a diverse area that whereyou can raise pasture based
ruminants. There's just not a good
environmental or even necessarily immoral argument
that holds up to true scrutiny. But we don't true scrutiny.
We want Disney fied versions of reality.
Yeah, IA 100% agree. I want to talk to you real quick

(20:37):
before we kind of go into the top five high oxalate foods that
we don't want to eat and we can go into the swaps and stuff.
So let's talk about symptoms here, maybe like the top
symptoms, because the reason whyI wanted to hold this up was
there are a lot of symptoms herethat someone could be noticing
that could be coming from high oxalate overload basically.
So when oxalates are high or present, what are the typical

(21:02):
symptoms or issues we might be seeing?
What signs should people be looking for?
Digestive issues of any kind. Pain syndromes, rheumatic
problems, Arthritic kind of fibromyalgia stuff.
Achiness, neurological, which means a lot of things because

(21:23):
nerves run your muscles, so something that might look like a
muscle spasm is probably a nerveproblem where the nerves are
causing muscles to spasm. My sleep disorder is an example
of a neurological problem. Poor eye hand coordination,
moodiness, lost motivation, lostaffect, even anxiety.

(21:45):
An awful lot of people have cometo me and said, you know, doing
what you said, it's cured my lifetime of anxiety.
I'm free of it. It's like, it's so great.
And even depression, I'm so people came to me and said my
depression is because of oxalates.
I'm like, what are you talking about it really?
And so people had to convince me, but the numbers will
convince you. And then the science holds up
because remember what I said about electrolyte problems?

(22:08):
A nerve needs very careful control over its calcium, let me
tell you. And when it doesn't have control
over these electrolytes and it starts getting inflammation
because of the cellular damage, all heck grows, becomes quite
possible. So the nerves are the most toxic
sensitive cells we have in the body.
So you're going to often see some kind of moodiness, in fact,

(22:29):
in the old literature from the 1850s, because they were well
aware that you can make yourselfsick on oxalates and food.
It's pretty obvious if you're willing to see it.
And one of the major symptoms ofoxalate poisoning in the 1850s
was anticipation of impending doom.
It really messes. They would call it a neurosis.

(22:50):
You know, you would become neurotic from too much rhubarb.
That was the in England where people would go crazy during
rhubarb season, which was started early because they had
these greenhouses growing rhubarb in England, fed by horse
manure from the streets, right. So they could have it in time
for Christmas because normally it would be a May or June thing,

(23:10):
but they could force it in a greenhouse and make these fancy
rhubarb based tarts and crisps so people who could afford it
could start having rhubarb treats.
And just like we do now, like Halloween to New Year's is like
sugar season. We've had that for a while.
But back then not everyone couldafford sugar.
It was considered quite the luxury item.
Now sugar is given to you practically for free.

(23:32):
So nerve stuff, digestive stuff,aches and pains, those are like
the three big pillars. But infection is a really
surprising one. It's affecting the circulating
blood cells. You don't really have good white
cells after you eat a spinach smoothie, which spinach, by the
way, is this major oxalate food.And so you can get chronic sinus
infections, which I had for years, every single right after

(23:55):
Christmas, right before New Year's Eve, usually the day
before New Year's, I would come down with this brutal sinus
infection from age 17 till oxalate.
Once I got off oxalates at 49, Ihaven't had one since, but every
year chronic sinus or if you have other kinds of thrush or
UTI's or you know, like vaginal yeast overgrowth, these things

(24:17):
can be oxalate because this problem because there's a
acidity that's created by the inflammation.
And then there's the weak immunecells that aren't really doing
such a good job with infection. And you also have mucosal
membranes struggling to to maintain themselves
osteoporosis, because of course,if you eat something that takes
calcium out of your blood, the blood requires exact amounts of

(24:39):
calcium for the heart's sake. And so the bones have to donate
way too much. So you end up with osteopenia
and osteoporosis too early in life.
And urinary tract, that's the classic one.
Everybody knows that oxalates are the major ingredient in a
kidney stone. You can't make a kidney stone
without its key ingredient. The key ingredient to 80% of all

(25:00):
kidney stones is oxalate. So no one can really honestly
with a straight face they try pretend that you can build a
kidney stone without putting oxalate in your body.
Well the only the main way you get oxalate in your body.
Over half of the oxalate that you pee out is coming straight
from your foods and a huge amount of it, maybe 1/4 is
coming from vitamin C supplements, which is something

(25:21):
you put in your mouth. So you can't really create a
kidney stone if you don't eat inthis modern way with these foods
that are high in oxalate. But some people are like, oh,
but, but, but, but, and they're off saying differently, but it
doesn't make any sense. You cannot in a physical world
build a physical thing without the right ingredient.
Period. Yeah.

(25:41):
And I think if I remember in your book somewhere in your,
because it just popped up, popped up into my mind, I think
you said like basically 50% of the oxalates that we get into
our body that come in through the diet.
And then a lot of the other oxalates.
Oxalates are basically metabolicbreakdown, like the breakdown of
amino acids and things like that, correct?
Yeah, the hydroxyproline is the primary amino acid as far as it

(26:04):
can tell. Now, this is tricky science to
figure out. It's taken a while.
They've been struggling with thequestion of where does metabolic
oxalate come from? And it turns out that most of it
comes from vitamin C, which is not an endogenous compound.
But we still call that endogenous production metabolic
production, even though vitamin C can just become oxalate
without any metabolism involved at all.

(26:25):
All it has to do is get into your body and into your cells
and it can degenerate into Oxley, especially if there's
nothing better to do. If you're have too much vitamin
C hanging around in your brain, then eventually that's just
going to turn into Oxley and become crystals in your brain.
Not a great idea. Yeah, not a great idea.

(26:45):
I I had a quick question here. Can some people consume a lot of
these things and see like no issues at all?
Is some of this genetic? Is some of this hormonal?
Yeah, this is a really great question.
And the first of all, to be a little picky on terminology, I
prefer the term tolerance versussensitivity.
Tolerance, sensitivity and kind of engenders this idea of an

(27:08):
allergy. And this is a toxin.
So toxins are toxins to everybody.
It's it's some level you get enough and it's toxic to
everyone. How soon it starts causing
degenerative problems, how well your body can just sequester it
and throw it somewhere And so keeps it out of trouble and move
it way fast out of your vascularsystem.
So you're not ruining your bloodvessels and keeping it out of

(27:29):
your brain and not messing with your brain function and not
eroding your bones. But who knows how good your
bones are. I mean, most people don't check
their bone health until they're old anyway.
So if it's happening while you're younger, you don't.
Most diseases like hypertension and cancer and osteoporosis have
very little symptoms. It's after you're falling apart

(27:50):
when you find out that you have these things or you go get your
blood pressure checked routinely.
And that's how you know, So someit can be happening without
symptoms, right? You can be sick without any
symptoms. So how do we gauge how much
we're being affected in our day-to-day performance and our
mood and our achievements in ouraging line, how fast we're just

(28:14):
falling apart? How do we measure all that if
we're not willing to ask the question?
And science hasn't really asked this question.
But what we do know is how much will kill you, which is, you
know, not my favorite measure oftoxicity.
It ranges anywhere from maybe 4Gwhich is 4 spinach smoothies to

(28:35):
15 spinach smoothies to kill a person in acute quick way.
No way. Yeah, somewhere in there.
Now, the four is more for the person who's probably weakened
with, you know, poor microbiome and poor vascular health and so
on. But yeah, and anywhere from 4 to
15 spinach smoothies will kill you, so even the boldest of us

(28:59):
all can be taken down by the 15.Where you sit on that range of 4
to 15, I don't know. I wouldn't want to try.
And from what I understand too, right, it's, it's kind of like
an accumulation type of deal, right?
Let's say you, let's say you've historically eaten just
naturally for whatever reason, maybe you got lucky and you just
ate a low oxalate diet, right? And you have all those, all

(29:23):
those spinach smoothies, it's likely not going to kill you,
right? But but it but if you are eating
like this, over time it's the accumulation of oxalates and
then a big oxalate dump from like a meal or a series of meals
that you're saying can actually kill us.
It can actually kill you in a kind of way.

(29:44):
And I think it is killing us in a slow kind of way.
I think we're slowly poisoning ourselves, our love of potatoes,
peanuts and chocolate, which starts getting in our diet
before we turn 1. Usually the first birthday party
has chocolate in it, you know, so and then potato products are
very easy to give to children and babies.
So you're starting early and often.
So early and often can slowly erode your health and really

(30:05):
potentially undermine your braindevelopment.
And so we don't really know whatit would be human optimization
if we could raise people withouttoxic levels of oxalate.
Now, the best science we have issomething called the trigger and
maintenance theory. So this guy put out this very
cool, they're looking at kidney stones, but found that in order

(30:26):
to start this bio accumulation and accumulation of oxalates,
you needed this trigger level ofconsumption.
And it, it's hard to say what trigger level is in human
beings, but it looks like a trigger level is, let's see if I
can remember right. It's in the book.
Everybody go look at your books.Check me.
But I'm going to say the triggerlevel is about 100 to 200

(30:49):
milligrams of oxalate. And it's going to differ based
on Physiology. It's not like you're not a,
you're not a dish, you're a living thing, which is a
brilliant, brilliant thing. So let's call it 200 just for
argument's sake. So if you once in a while, maybe
once a week, eat 200 milligrams of oxalate, which is 1/2 a
spinach salad, what if you did that once a week to look good

(31:12):
with your girlfriends on Friday after work, Right.
Because it's the cool thing to do.
Yeah. Goes out and has a spinach salad
and then they order martinis andit's very cool.
But it trigger dose. You do that once a week.
You've started this accumulation.
Now if you have a maintenance dose in between, which would
mean a handful of knots, small handful knots, a cup of tea,

(31:33):
maybe on Tuesdays you go out fortea, iced tea, and after work
you have either a small Snickersbar or some chocolate or some
nuts. Now you're maintaining that
trigger dose. So whatever accumulation got
started with that half a spin ofsalad is being maintained by
average normal eating of modern of modern eating.
So this trigger and maintenance process, how much triggering and

(31:56):
how much maintaining you're doing, it's going to affect the
accumulation. Interesting.
And we'll get into, we'll get into later on the fixing of the
issues, the clearing. And I know you've got like a
specific protocol here. So I have to ask you this
question then based off all yourresearch because I know
obviously now you know, after reading the book, having a

(32:17):
better understanding of oxalatesand also now knowing that there
are a lot of other compounds in plants that just might not be
great for us. Do you subscribe to the notion
that vegetables are trying to kill us?
That plants are trying to kill us like some other like
carnivore doctors in the space are.
Well, I mean, it's, it's one of those bumper sticker things.

(32:39):
I would say plants are smart andthey have their own viciousness.
Try to grab a rose. If you grab the Rose and say,
darling, you're going to be bleeding because the thorns on a
rose, you forget when you buy them at the grocery store,
they've stripped off those thorns.
But it a rose is stay away from a rose.

(33:00):
And many plants are like that. They will.
They have little barbs and little things to keep you away.
What is a cactus but nothing buta bunch of obvious thorns that
says all you birds and other creatures get off, Quit trying
to eat me. The plants have to be a little
vicious because they're sitting there like a lamppost waiting to
be, you know, pursued by those who would have them, and they

(33:24):
need a way to defend themselves.Yeah, they're like defense
mechanisms that they have evolved overtime to protect
themselves. Yeah.
He hadn't have these toxic and some of them toxicity is this
mechanical stuff. But literally, if you get enough
little tiny bookies from a plantinto your skin, your immune
system could go bananas and you could even start getting
infections from that and you could die from that.

(33:46):
Like, they could kill you. Yeah, very mechanical way.
But they can also kill you in a chemical way because if you went
out into the woods and just started picking things, what are
the odds that the things you could eat would either be
digestible or even not poisonous?
Yeah, if your, if your babies oryour nephews and nieces were in

(34:06):
your yard and eating EU bushes, would you let them continue to
do that or would you like say hey, hey, put that down right
now, spit that out. No, no, no, don't because we
know that plants are toxic. Why do we think that all plants
that we put in our mouths are just 0 toxicity when we know
outdoors almost all plants are toxic?

(34:28):
We know this inherently. You would not create tell the 2
year old. Go grab some stuff from the
yard, honey, and we'll have a cheap dinner, no?
Yeah. Do that so we can hold opposite
ideas in our head at the same time and think we're perfectly
rational. It's not rational.
Yeah, let's talk about and 100% agree with you.
And one thing that even popped up into my mind was even just

(34:51):
grass. If you've ever just, you know,
gone out and laid in the grass in your bathing suit, you're
itchy. You're you're itchy all over the
place. Yeah, the.
Edges of the blades of the grassare not only sharp, they have
these little fibers that will penetrate your beautiful skin
and make you horrible. I was just thinking about that.
All right, so let's talk about let's talk about some of the the

(35:13):
things that we want to avoid here.
What are the top killers in youropinion?
I know it's in the book, but maybe for the listeners who
haven't read it yet, what are like the top five things that we
just want to stay away from and why?
Well, I do not like nuts, almonds, cashews and peanuts,
especially the almonds and the almond milk.
Those are unnecessary. They were, they're a brand new

(35:35):
thing in the diet because back in my day, no one could afford
them, right? They become ubiquitous and and
affordable based on today's economy where they were not
before. And nuts in general have lots of
other now. I mean, we talked about plants
like the grass being so unpleasant you don't even want
to touch it. But with the almonds, this is

(35:56):
even a more precious part of theplant because you're just
talking green stems versus the future of the plant.
So that the knots are the the babies.
And the babies are not only precious to the plant and need
to be moved around and happily have squirrels or anyone else
swallow it and poop it out with some fertilizer or somewhere
else. That's very helpful.
Help me distribute my babies. However, they also have this

(36:19):
dormancy property to wait for the right moment where the
season is right, the sun is right, the water is right, the
nutrients are right, and now youcan germinate with hopes of
becoming a future tree. Well, there's a lot of chemistry
involved in that that makes themindigestible.
There's phytates and lectins andoxalates and you name it.
And heavy metals like a poisonous stuff.

(36:42):
Cyanide, for example, that, you know, new truck to turn these
into almond milk and you're liberating oxalic acid and
cyanide in these chemicals in a watery solution that makes them
even more bioavailable, which means it moves from the lumen of
your gut into your bloodstream quite readily just floating
around in the water fraction of that food.

(37:03):
And you're exposing yourself to something that's on, you know,
like almost on steroids in termsof toxicity.
So, you know, the use of the blender and making juices and
smoothies and turning almonds into almond juice and charging a
lot for it in a big plastic container may not be the
smartest thing. Imagine it's profitable enough

(37:24):
to be in every convenience store.
I mean, anybody of any walk of life now can walk in and use
almond milk and potentially feedit to pregnant women or even
babies because they call it milk.
It is not milk. It is almond juice.
And it is something that is an untested thing.
But we just today whatever is going fat, we're not stopping to

(37:45):
really think is this OK? And we need to rethink that.
So almonds and, and I would start with almonds and cashews
and spinach, Chard and beet greens.
Those are unnecessary. They're they're promoted.
The dark leafy green is supposedto save you.
You're supposed to do it multiple times a week.
This is the public health message.
I think that is a dangerous message.
I'm from the world of public health and I actually care about

(38:07):
public health and the individuals who are trying to
follow the advice of our profession, and I'm very
concerned that this dark leafy green thing has translated into
a love of Chard. Chard is worse than spinach in
terms of oxalate and tannins andother junky stuff.
It doesn't even taste that good.You have to put vinegar and salt
and butter on it and things to kind of eat it.

(38:27):
It's a good point. Yeah, so I grew up on Chard and
my family, I think my parents did and they because it's a cut
and come vegetable where you plant it once and you can
harvest all season long. So it's very inexpensive.
It's quite pretty in the garden.So it's back in the day when
people grew vegetables to extendtheir food budget.

(38:48):
We were using it too much and weneed to get And so these salads
too, they use the little bee greens, little BB ones, little
baby Swiss charge with a little little cute spinaches and it's
so cute. It's taking lettuce, which is
almost no oxalate and turning itinto something that's, you know,
10/20/30 times more oxalate in the mixes.

(39:12):
But then if you go pure spinach,you're at outer space in terms
of how much oxalate is in it. So the main ones to me are nuts
in those greens. But you can get into trouble
with things like quinoa, Taf, these gluten free grains.
You can overdo the dark chocolate.
You start doing turmeric way toomuch.

(39:32):
That's a big thing. People get into tea where
they're buying tea by the gallonbecause they work outside and
it's better than soda, but it's full of tannins and full of
oxalates. And now?
I was, I was bummed about the turmeric if I if because I know
we, I know we were chatting about spices here, but I'm like

(39:53):
such a big cook And one of the reasons why I was using so much
turmeric was because, you know, it's supposed to have these
anti-inflammatory properties, like saying that, you know,
that's why people drink turmerictea.
I put turmeric on, I was puttingturmeric on my vegetables.
I just put in turmeric on my, you know, baked chicken to give
it some sort of like anti-inflammatory property.

(40:15):
I don't know. I thought I was being healthy,
but that was I was kind of bummed on that one too.
Yeah, it's the spices for those.I had two drawers of spices and
I had, when I had my kitchen designed, I took my jars to the
kitchen designer and said make sure that these bottles fit in
these two middle drawers of the stack of four drawers.
I want the middle ones exactly the height because I was into,

(40:36):
you know, being able to do each cuisine and having the full
full. Now I'm using really mostly just
4 spices and I'm done. It's salt being one of them.
Salt, white pepper, Rosemary andand paprika.
That's like my whole. Thing So those are the so so so
I want to pause there because I'm a big cook and I know you

(40:58):
know people. I I know a lot of my listeners,
they're carnivore people. They like to like prepare meat
and stuff like that. So what are the spices we want
to avoid real quick? And then I think you just
dropped the four right there that are OK, right?
Yeah and there's others are OK too.
You just I think like Dill and tarragon are better fresh.

(41:19):
I do use dried dill on some things, but you can really get
some cool effects with fresh tarragon, fresh dill and you can
use any high oxy food in moderation.
It just seems like if you're eating these cuisines like
Indian cuisine and say Ethiopiancuisine that are just layers and
layers of spices, that combination of spices can really

(41:40):
add up to trouble. I, I like to use a little pinch
of cumin in like my greens. I used to make, you know what I
call my, what did I call them? Anyway, a great recipe for
greens and a little bit of cuminin there.
And I stopped using it out of fear.
But some of us can tolerate someof these spices in small amounts
and there's okay. But other people, literally if

(42:03):
you have a health problem, I think spices have more than just
the oxalates causing potential irritation, inflammation of the
gut. They can, they can keep a pain
syndrome or other kind of neurotoxicity going.
And I see with my clients that once they get over the spicy
foods and they've already gottenrid of this, the high oxalate

(42:23):
worst offenders, except they're still liking to eat out and
doing like the Ethiopian and Indian foods.
And once they get away from those foods, they are so much
better. So I mean, it's like, work your
way there, learning to have simpler foods and learning to
cook in ways where you're not sodependent on spices to really
drive it home. And there's ways to get there.

(42:44):
The interesting thing is I thinkyou can have, I mean, it looks
like from people's anecdotal andscientific evidence that using
turmeric can help people with symptoms in the short run.
The problem is that the short run is not exposing this
invisible problem with the oxalate in the background.
So it's kind of a deal with the devil where you get some

(43:04):
apparent short term benefits, but you're you're going to pay a
longer term price. So the way to get around that is
to use extract curcumin extract.Which is still.
Looking yellow, you can use thatin cooking and you've eliminated
all the oxalate. So these compound whenever you
see on a label when it's an extract, then you don't have
oxalates anymore. You can remove oxalates from

(43:25):
foods. Potatoes are high oxalate, but
potato starch doesn't have any oxalate and it's an extract of
just the starchy part and you'veseparated out the oxalate.
So even when you take brown riceand you turn into white rice,
you've removed most of the oxalate and the problematic
compounds that are in the bran layer.
Yeah, interesting. OK.

(43:45):
So that's good to know. Like moving towards using a lot
of extracts for cooking, can a give us the flavor that we're
looking for, but B remove all the oxalates that we don't want
in the body? Yeah.
And you don't need a lot of extracts, but like with
turmeric, which is the worst spice, that would be a way to
still get the color and some of that flavor.

(44:06):
And maybe some of those, you know, if those benefits are
there in the short run, I don't know if they're there in the
long run. I'm really not in favor of
forcing these compounds that thebody prefers to not have.
People are combining black pepper and turmeric to force it
past the bodies, trying to not absorb it on purpose or damaging
the liver and so on the intestinal tract in order to get

(44:29):
past your own defenses, as if you know better.
I like to think of myself as a servant of the body, a humble
student of the body, and let thebody lead me to Nirvana versus
to force it into something it's not meant to do.
Yeah, yeah. And I think I was telling you,
before we started recording, I was basically cooking carne

(44:51):
asada on Sunday. I mean I used more Cuban and
black pepper than I even want towould bet to be honest with you,
but. A client who was ordering black
pepper potato chips, and those were just potato.
Yeah. Very toxic with oxalate and have
no nutritional value. And that combination of black

(45:11):
pepper is a high oxalate spice, you know, So it's really easy to
switch to white pepper if you find a good one.
I like the Penzies. Ethiopian or Indonesian.
Excuse me Penzies makes an indiethat I like, but some people
takes a while to get used to these changes.
It's not important to fuss with those.
If you're still doing dark chocolate and doing smoothies
and insisting on spinach on everything, like start with a

(45:33):
few of those things and see if you can find something like
coconut milk, which is get rid of that almond milk, like some
of these obvious easy swaps. And then you can start messing
with your culinary creativity and really getting your
technique right. So your food is not dependent on
a lot of zim and vigor from spices.
If you really don't overcook it and get the right crust and

(45:56):
texture and the right fats and salt mix.
And if you do that right, the right food is delicious and it
doesn't need all the bells and whistles.
Yeah. And one thing to just go back on
touch on here in your book, if, if people end up getting this
thing, which I highly suggest they do, you have a lot of good
resources like the swap chart, right, where it's all broken

(46:17):
down and like, hey, these are the high oxalate foods you want
to avoid, try instead. And so it's all laid out to you
in terms of what we want to avoid, what we want to have
instead. And so this this stuff is
really, really useful. That's well done, Sally.
Let's just talk about real quickthen just so people have an
understanding of like what dietswe ultimately want to avoid and

(46:37):
then we can kind of talk about maybe and what in your opinion
is just the best overall diet for us to be consuming.
So the worst diets, I'm going togo ahead and assume here, it's
basically like raw vegan, vegetarian, correct?
And I'm sure there's some swaps.If people want to be vegan, you
can make some swaps and get better choices, but I have a
feeling here you're going to sayit's ultimately going to be more

(47:00):
of like an animal based diet that's going to take the cake
here in terms of oxalate intake and where we want to be and how
we want to be eating. Right, essentially raw vegan
would probably be the most diminishing, damaging, useless
diet in terms of health and longevity that that's A and then
second, of course, is the junk food diet where you're living on

(47:21):
oatmeal pies and and diet doctorPepper and whatever you know
that that's not so good to potato chip diet.
That's a real bad one. Literally there I had as
somebody come to me, he was rebelling against his parents
and the world in general and living on nothing but Pringles
and that is so deficient and so toxic with oxalates and other
things. He was had severe chronic

(47:42):
fatigue and so in tremendous pain, suffering greatly and he's
28 years old. So you you can go either way.
That's the weird part about thisis you think, well, anyone who's
saying vegetables are bad is outof their minds.
But actually seeing too many of the wrong vegetables can be
depleting and diminishing you inways that are more profound than

(48:02):
the junk food diet. Unless you're on the Pringles
diet. That's that's worse.
So the Pringles diet is worse. The raw vegan is pretty bad and
then the junk food. And then now when it comes to
real food, what real foods are the best ones to eat?
We originated from primate rootsand we have these flat molars,
but we have been meat eaters. That's how we got big brains and

(48:24):
we got smart and we got upright and we developed tools and
knives and things. We didn't really need any bigger
canines than we have because we all these sharp objects.
We know how to butcher things with knives and we have been the
hunters in the ecosystem for a very long time.
You know, bare minimum 50,000 years.
But we've been messing around with meats for a long, long,

(48:46):
long time. And all of a sudden, in this
last 400 years, suddenly plants have been rising in status as a
food for humans. And we've, we've gone too far,
the pendulum has swung too far. And so the ideal diet has some
animal products in it every day,not once in a while.
And it has a chunk, you know, like 6 oz at a meal every day.

(49:11):
And it doesn't have to be meat. It can be fish, it can be
shellfish, it can be cheese, it can be eggs, but you don't want
to have like 6 eggs every day. Eventually you're going to get
vitamin A toxicity and all that kill your yolk so much that you
kill the vitamin A in it. But you want, you know, some

(49:32):
diversity with some animal foodsand have that be the first
priority is getting enough protein.
But not if your goal. If you're low carb, you can't
turn protein into energy. You do need energy.
And if you're taking away carbs as a source of energy, now you
have to emphasize fat. So it's where you go with your
energy proteins, that structuralcompound that will build and

(49:54):
maintain bones and muscles and so, so important, that's so
critical for longevity and performance and even appetite
control. But then you have to decide your
balance of carbs and and fats. And in many days it might be
smart to make fats the priority and then figure out how to play
around with the carbs. So the ideal diet is kind of,

(50:16):
well, for one thing, what are you capable of doing as an
individual? Where are you now in what
direction you want to head in? But for most women, I would say
more protein, more animal foods and making that the centerpiece
and then growing from there and getting, getting over this fear
of animal foods is a key first step towards getting a healthy

(50:37):
diet. Now, you can do yourself a huge
favor by lowering the high oxalate plants.
Still, as a vegetarian, even as a vegan, if you lower the high
oxalate plants, you will get yourself so you're not in so
much pain and you'll get yourself in a better situation
in terms of your bone health andso on.
And that's a great first step because if your brain is not

(50:59):
messing with you anymore with its anxiety and, and that
anticipation of impending doom and all this sort of toxicity,
the neurotoxicity that you may be in because of your diet will
prevent you from moving in the right direction in in a kind of
consistent way. So you have to lower this
toxicity. So start where you are.
If you're raw food, vegan or vegan or vegetarian, just start

(51:22):
pulling out the nuts and the spinach and the dark chocolate
and see if we can lower this toxicity enough so that you can
have the the courage to try an oyster or something like that.
Yeah. And let's talk about that here
too, because I know we're kind of coming up here on time and I
want to be respectful of, you know, everything else that you
got going on in your day. Let's talk about fixing the
issues and the clearing. And I know we were chatting a

(51:45):
little bit about this before we started recording.
And I was kind of telling you that when I was re, when I was
reading the clearing in the dumping section of the book,
part of me starting to understand what some of the
symptoms I may be going through.If I'm going through like a
heavy oxalate dump, part of my brain kind of went in and it

(52:06):
went into like the fuck it mentality, like maybe I'll just
deal with these little guys floating around my body.
But once I kind of started to understand that there's a very
specific way in which you can toggle the consumption of
oxalates so you don't dump too quickly, so you don't
necessarily start running into all these dumping issues.

(52:27):
So could you maybe breakdown forthe listeners like the reduce
and repair approach that that you you recommend?
Right. So the problem with us growing
up on potatoes, chocolate and peanuts is that we've got it in
our system. We probably have it in our
thyroid gland and our brains andour bones, bone marrow and
tendons potentially. And this is all like, oh, it's

(52:50):
kind of like having asbestosis. You have this particulate matter
that's built up in tissues that is now engendering immune
attacks. That's where the rheumatism and
arthritis and so on comes. So you don't want to have a
toxins dose go up in the body because you're releasing it from
within. While you maintained your high

(53:11):
oxide diet, your body was tolerating it.
So I guess there's a parallel inthis with alcohol.
Like people who drink too much can keep drinking 20 beers a day
or something like that because their system has this quote
tolerance, but they have to keepdrinking because the minute they
stop, they get sick and they getthe hangover sickness, right?
And so they keep drinking to avoid feeling bad and they're

(53:33):
just putting off the inevitable.And that's what we're doing with
our high oxalate diet. We've tolerated it.
So you don't see the symptoms because the body's busy coping
and holding and sequestering it.And it's getting to the point,
though, where suddenly it can't do it anymore and the whole
system will break. And you could flood your body.
So when you change your diet from the all the potatoes and
dark chocolate and maybe almond flour or whatever you're doing,

(53:56):
that's high oxalate. And then the body's like, oh,
you mean it's not coming in anymore?
It's not coming anymore. Hey, everybody, we don't have to
keep holding it. Yay.
That's not coming in anymore. Look, the blood is like clearing
out. There's hardly any oxalate and
the kidneys are getting better and hey, the exit roads are
opening up. And so that gives everybody
else. So it's your jaw, your teeth,
your eyes, your brain, something, but the mood to like,

(54:18):
unload. And that unloading process
involves inflammation, which is unpleasant, and it can raise
your oxalate levels and cause hypocalcemia.
And hypocalcemia can cause health palpitations and blood
pressure spikes and things that land you in the emergency room.
So you do need to do this in a conscious way if especially if
you have a history of high oxalate eating.

(54:39):
So you would start with the worst offender like your spinach
smoothie or your almond flour oryour almond milk and just
gradually work that down and kind of sneak out a little
slowly so they all those sleeping dogs don't wake up.
You know, I think of this as like tiptoeing backwards out of
the baby's bedroom, like OK, do not disturb the baby.

(54:59):
It's finally asleep. Leave it asleep.
You, you're better off leaving all that junk in place then
letting it all start getting loosey goosey.
So you don't have to do this allat once.
You just have to come back to this consciousness about
oxalate. So you know what you're doing.
You have to really to manage this well, keep studying.
Like what is high again? What's low again, what's OK?

(55:21):
How much is too much? So there is a little bit of
nuance to this, which is may test your patience, but I'm
really begging people who want to take them their health
seriously to pay attention to oxalates and get this oxalate
awareness going in your own life, in your own mind and find
an ally in your life who who's with you on it so that you can

(55:44):
manage this in ways where you don't cause any kind of funky
kind of hangover. I want to betting over.
They can come and go in these episodes for years.
I'm still having sometimes when I'm pretty sure I'm still
clearing oxalate. I've been on this diet for
nearly 12 years or I'm in year 12.
I'm finishing year 12 this fall.If people are really interested

(56:08):
in managing this well and feeling a little confused, you
might want more data and information.
And I have another book that's on my website only you can't
find us online. You have to come to Sally Kane
Orton. And this has the information
about the oxalates like this page happens to have foods that
don't have a lot of oxalate. Those are the teas.
Those are the herbal teas. Don't have my oxalates, whereas

(56:30):
here's something what page is that This is a plantain and
plums and pomerade. This is some fruits and you see
the numbers are all over. You can tell because I've
color-coded one of the data columns that gives you a quick
visual cue about things that aremoderate and low versus high.
So if you, if you don't love just the list and if you like
tables and colors and more information, you can use this as

(56:53):
a tool. And if you start feeling, if you
get, if something's going on andyou're confused, go ahead and
look at this, see if you can do it consciously.
And well, it means it's like youcan keep a little bit of
chocolate and keep a little bit of this for quite a while so
that you don't get into this over the body's like over

(57:16):
enthusiastic release of oxalate from tissues.
Yeah. And one thing I wanted, maybe
two things I wanted to touch on before we wrap up here because
you talk about cotton, cold therapy, saunas being helpful.
What about exercise? Exercise in general, I know it
can kind of like dilate the blood vessels, kind of get blood
moving. Would exercise.

(57:38):
And it seems like to me in the book that sauna would be way
more valuable than exercise. But what are your thoughts on
exercise? Can that do anything?
Consistent exercise, daily movement in terms of blood flow
cannot help to move things around, move oxalates out of the
body. Right, So sauna is kind of a
type of exercise because you're getting a pulmonary system

(57:58):
going, you're getting a heart rate up and you're getting a
circulation going all through the body improving.
So it's exercise for the frail, the feeble and the lazy, right?
It's excellent. Sure it has.
It stimulates the heat shock proteins and it stimulates an
anti-inflammatory response. But exercise stimulates a pro
inflammatory response. If you're doing like muscle
breakdown and things where you you tells your body, your body

(58:21):
is going to do a healing processwhich requires a little bit of
inflammation afterwards. The other thing about exercise
is that you can kind of almost like get things looser and and
you can stimulate some oxalate clearing.
So you can also push yourself tothe edge of your energy
production abilities because like I said, oxalate interferes

(58:44):
with cell energy production and you may not really be up for as
much as you think you are based on your past if you've got a lot
of oxalates moving around. So you want to do like 80% of
what you're able to go into whatever exercise you're doing.
Or I'm just going to chill. I'm going to enjoy it and focus
and just be kind of chill and not push myself, not try to
prove anything to anyone else inthe room or on the race or

(59:07):
whatever. I'm just going to do what's
right for me and get a compassionate attitude and, and
dial it back a bit. I do think you need to move
every day. Stay on your feet, move around,
do some inversions, do some stretches, do some foam rolling
or whatever, but in a gentle kind of way.
We want to get the lymph tissue flowing.
We want any inflammation that's going in your body to flush so

(59:30):
that your blood flow. You need blood flow for your
brains and eyes to work. You just don't need to push
yourself so hard. Perfect.
Excellent. Well said.
What's next for you, Sally? I know you just held up the The
Data Companion booklet to Toxic Superfoods.
What are you working on? Anything else new or you have

(59:50):
any spanking engagements coming up?
What does that all look like? Well, one interesting thing is
that a toxic super foods is out in many languages now.
It's Spanish, Polish, German andthe recent one is French.
The French world is exploding. With interests and Oxides, I'll
be speaking remotely at a Brazilian conference.

(01:00:10):
There's a huge there's a gal who's a little mini Sally in
Brazil. Don't yet have my book in
Portuguese, so I'm going to get to be able to speak there and
translate it for the Portuguese audience.
So it's really fun to be part ofa global conversation.
My book is also out in Chinese and Vietnamese and will be the
newest one is hopefully maybe Korean coming too.

(01:00:32):
So we're going to we're very international.
I have APDF cookbook on my website where you can find the
data book and that's coming out in a print form in the fall of
2025 here. So you'll be able to get it.
This going to be just like this with this spiral bound.
The reason I sell this only on my website because I want this
convenience of a flippable spiral bound book and I want

(01:00:54):
this size that lets us be sit onthe shelf in a way that's
practical for storage and retrieval.
And as you get your tiny oxalatelibrary together, it's it's
works as it is something that you use in your day-to-day life.
So that print cookbook is comingalong and I, I think we're going
to be seeing more things coming from me slowly.

(01:01:18):
We you can join me in a Group A session twice a month, Ioffer a
zoom class and I'm teaching and provide a lot more details and
handouts and a chance for you tobe in a support environment
where you meet other people who've been affected by this and
their health. It's very cool.
Nice to meet other people and feel like you're not alone.
If if for those who are realizing that some of their

(01:01:39):
health issues are from this, it's like they don't know where
to turn for anyone who knows what they're talking about.
If you start discussing this, people look at you like you have
two heads and your face is green.
Totally understand, totally understand.
And before I say this last part here, I wanted to give your team
a shout out. I know we were also chatting

(01:02:00):
about this before we recorded, but they essentially sent
everything over to me in terms of like where to find you, where
to find your books, your website, all of that just for
it. So everyone knows it's going to
be in the show notes on YouTube,Spotify and also like on
Instagram, you'll be able to click on any of the links and
find Sally there. Sally, just so you you can tell

(01:02:22):
people real quick though, about your website.
Maybe before we hop off, hop offhere and and wrap up how Woody,
what would you say is the best way for people to get in touch
with you, whether they want to be in that group, whether they
want to find the books? Would it just be your website?
Would it be your social? Go ahead and and drop any of
that if you'd like. Yeah, 100% my website.
I don't have any consistent timeto be on social that much.

(01:02:44):
I'm busy helping people and writing follow-ups and working
on stuff. So I don't have the luxury
because it really is just me. I have wonderful publicist and a
few helpers, but it is a lot on my plate.
So it's my website is that one portal where you can find a
support tab and a support tab. You can find the support groups,
you can find the books, you can find the resources and that's

(01:03:05):
the place to start. You can write to me through the
website. I have a team that helps me
handle that flow of incoming messages.
Please visit sallyknorton.com itwhile you're online, please
visit SK Norton and YouTube because I have about 14 stories
shared there, about 15 minute videos from people and 20
something little one minute shorts.

(01:03:27):
And they didn't help you get oriented and get a sense of the
scope of this and, and how this can ultimately affect people
badly. I was hoping I'm, I'm hoping
people don't let their health get to the point where you're
sick like I was and hoping to prevent people from having to
suffer like we have. Those of us in the community,

(01:03:48):
people who've fallen because of not knowing this.
But unfortunately, prevention isn't popular.
People think, yeah, it's not going to be me, but if you know
of people who need to have this information who are looking for
answers, no matter what you're sick with, there's no way that
eating too much toxic oxalate isgoing to help you with that
sickness. Any kind of struggle with health

(01:04:12):
can be enhanced. Your recovery from that your way
out of suffering can be enhancedby knowing about oxalates,
making sure you're not adding salt to the wound by eating too
high an oxalate diet. Well said.
So the website issallyknorton.com, it'll be in
the show notes. Everybody go out and get

(01:04:33):
yourself a copy of the book Toxic Superfoods.
It's fantastic. A lot of really good
information. Sally, this was fantastic.
And to everybody else out there listening to the Low Carb
Consultant podcast, We'll catch you guys on the next one.

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Sally K. Norton | The Dangers of Plants & Oxalates | August 13, 2025 Ep. 16

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Sally K. Norton | The Dangers of Plants & Oxalates | August 13, 2025 Ep. 16