← Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark
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- [00:00]
A
Are vegetables actually bad for you?
- [00:03]
B
Very bad. In fact, the ones that are high in oxalate. Oxalate's a very serious chemical that is essentially a poison when you eat too much of it. We're using these foods in an effort to protect our health, and it's doing quite the opposite.
- [00:16]
A
You're gonna be the most controversial guest I have ever had, Sally.
- [00:20]
B
Who else would dare except someone whose entire life was ruined by this.
- [00:50]
A
You're eating healthy, but nothing seems to be improving. Could it be the vegetables? Maybe, maybe not. Nutrition Nutrition educator and author Sally Norton is on the show today to explain why oxalates lurking in a healthy plant heavy diet could be making chronic health problems worse, not better. Of course. I want to reiterate that I have many guests on this show. Some you may agree with, maybe you disagree with. Maybe vegetables really help you. But for someone else listening, this episode could be an aha moment. One more disclaimer to any kids in the car. No, you are not allowed to use this episode as an excuse to say you aren't eating your vegetables. Only mommies and daddies get to decide. You're welcome, Mom. You can watch every episode on Spotify and YouTube by subscribing to Real Alex Clark, of course. It's available to listen anywhere you get your podcast. This show is made possible only by tax deductible donations from listeners like you through the link in the description. You can also leave a 5 star review anytime for free. I'm Alex Clark. Please welcome author of Toxic Superfoods and nutrition educator Sally Norton to culture Apothecary. Are vegetables actually bad for you?
- [02:02]
B
They can be very bad, in fact, which is completely mind blowing. I. I couldn't believe it. I had to get into the medical library for years to see it.
- [02:14]
A
What were you seeing about vegetables? This is just really crazy. It's like crunching my brain to try to even imagine this.
- [02:21]
B
It completely flattens your brain and just you're left kind of jaw dropping and drooling like, what the heck is going on? Yeah, I relied on sweet potatoes, for example, that I was low allergy, like it couldn't do anything wrong. And it was a great way to get carbs that were healthy carbs and all that Beta caroteno has got to be great. No, it turned out that was the problem.
- [02:43]
A
What do you mean when you say it turns out vegetables were the problem?
- [02:46]
B
Well, plants have their own world. They have a need to survive and they have a completely different way of being than we do. They're full of Chemicals. I mean, think about it. If you go out hiking and you decide you need lunch, what's out on the trail that you're going to eat?
- [03:06]
A
Not much. Unless you catch a moving animal.
- [03:08]
B
You have to catch a moving Animal. If your 3 year old nephew was grabbing the berries off the bushes and snacking, what would you do about that?
- [03:17]
A
You grab him, smack him out of.
- [03:19]
B
His hand and wonder if you need to call the poison control center. Why? Because plants are poisonous. Fundamentally, they are. What's in the produce department has been developed through thousands of years of human activity. We've created agriculture. We cultivate plants, we do selective breeding and we invent things like the carrot. So the wild carrot is completely inedible. It's a hard, tough, kind of light tan, whitish root that is not tasty.
- [03:52]
A
Okay, I've seen those white carrots. So that's how carrots are actually supposed to look. Not orange.
- [03:56]
B
Carrots don't look anything. The wild ones don't look like the ones in the grocery store. The grocery store is fat and juicy and sweet. But the wild ones is mostly just skin because they're skinny and tough like, I don't know what, wires or something. They're not tasty and they're not chewable. They're not delicious. But it probably. The historians aren't completely sure about the origins of carrots, but they seem to indicate it's been 2000 years of selective breeding to invent the carrot.
- [04:24]
A
Now, I gave a disclaimer at the beginning of this. I said, kids in the car, this is not an episode. To use it as excuse to tell your parents that you can't eat your vegetables. But, but maybe you'd be like, no.
- [04:36]
B
Use this episode as an excuse. Well, maybe the kids are right.
- [04:40]
A
Oh my gosh.
- [04:41]
B
Maybe they have instincts that tell them, you know, this isn't an important food for me. I think kids are more able to say, you know, mom, I need a fruit today. Maybe they needed vitamin C today, than we are. They're not as they're not in their heads about their food choices.
- [04:57]
A
What is the most important item on a plate for a child?
- [04:59]
B
Do you think Eggs and some form of animal protein, Cheese, milk.
- [05:05]
A
Do you think that the vegetables are poisoning us?
- [05:08]
B
The ones that are high in oxalate? Oxalate is a very serious chemical that is essentially a poison when you eat too much of it. And the way we're being pushed to eat foods that are particularly high in oxalate right now, which would be dark chocolate, peanuts, potatoes, those are all foods you give your children beets, sweet potatoes. Those are commonly first foods when you're giving the little mashed vegetables for children. And now spinach and weird things like quinoa, bran, buckwheat. These things are all showing up now in children's foods, and they're so high in oxalate that we are now pushing what is a toxic level of consumption of this chemical that's in those foods.
- [05:49]
A
But quinoa is one of those foods that I feel like they're telling us it's a superfood. This is like the magic thing that all of us need to be eating. You're saying that this is one of the most problematic?
- [06:00]
B
Yes.
- [06:01]
A
How?
- [06:02]
B
How.
- [06:02]
A
What is an oxalate?
- [06:04]
B
It's a little tiny chemical that's made easily in nature. It actually is a degenerative product of vitamin C. Vitamin C decays into oxalic acid easily. And plants often, to make it for themselves, they first make vitamin C and then that easily converts into this oxalic acid. This acid has a charge on it, this negative charge or two negative charges, depending on the chemical situation. And it connects with minerals, so it grabs calcium, calcium and oxalate. Calcium and oxalic acid are now called oxalate, which is the salt name. They call that a salt. And calcium plus oxalic acid can distill out into these precipitating crystals and form nanocrystals. The most famous calcium oxalate crystal is actually a microcrystal called the kidney stone.
- [06:53]
A
That's from oxalate buildup. Wait a minute. So kidney stones? I thought that was. You didn't drink enough water.
- [07:00]
B
Exactly. That's what they're saying. That's exactly what medicine is saying. They're pretending because you live in Arizona, you must be dried out, and that must be why you have a kidney stone, which is foolish.
- [07:11]
A
So you're saying if we talk to people who had kidney stones and we really asked some deep questions about what they had been eating for, like, a certain amount of time before they found out they had kidney stones, do you think a lot of them would say, like, oh, I mean, I've had a salad every day for lunch?
- [07:26]
B
Yes.
- [07:27]
A
Really? Is this what you're finding?
- [07:28]
B
Yes. Especially with men. It's just the potato. So you could be French fry fiend. A potato chip fiend. You love your baked potatoes. Those big Idaho bakers, which they use to make a lot of those fried products, are very high in oxalate. Soluble oxalate that's easily absorbed. Soluble, meaning it's actually that oxalic acid, single molecule that's so tiny, it's just dissolved in. In the water of your food. And the more watery it is, the easier it is to just slip between the cells of your digestive tract and get right into your bloodstream very quickly. That acid disturbs the functioning of all the cells there. Your white cells, that's your immune system, your red cells, which deliver oxygen, and the cells that make up the vascular system, which takes care of the whole body. So the vascular system delivers nutrients, oxygen, all that. And in these little capillary beds, which are single cells, oxalic acid running around in the blood is bad for those cells. So it causes them something called oxidative stress, which turns on cell damage, which turns on inflammation.
- [08:31]
A
Yeah, I've heard of this. I've heard of oxidative stress. I guess I just don't really know what it is.
- [08:37]
B
So there's this concept of a balance between how many free radicals you have and how many things that put down the free radicals. So you have antioxidants that your cells make, like glutathione, that attack the free radicals that are the bad ones. You need a little bit of free radicals to run your metabolism because they're used as a messenger. But when you have more free radicals than you can squelch because you don't have enough glutathione or other naturally produced by your body antioxidants, you are in oxidative stress. That's bad. Those free radicals are damaging the membranes. The proteins and fats in the membranes are damaging the mitochondria, which produces cell energy for you. And the cells are in this distressed mode. They start leaking their potassium. That tells the immune system, oh, this cell's in trouble. Come get it. And oxalate is fantastic at damaging membranes, causing that oxidative imbalance. Where you have this oxidative stress, turning on inflammation, damaging the mitochondria and how they work, and that can damage how the cells function, how long they live.
- [09:36]
A
Do seed oils contribute to that oxidative stress?
- [09:39]
B
They probably do because they are incorporated in those membranes and they're more polyunsaturated and they're more rancid, and they end up forming the wrong shape and length. And the wrong shape and length of fats in your cell membranes affects the proteins in the membranes. Now, membranes are where life happens. All the reactions that are what we call life is a membrane function. So if you wrong fats in your membranes, the proteins aren't working well, or if you have acidity from too much Inflammation. The proteins don't work well and you get things like insulin resistance.
- [10:13]
A
Yes.
- [10:14]
B
Yeah.
- [10:15]
A
Okay. That's what is causing all of this.
- [10:17]
B
Is membrane damage and inflammation. And the acidity that goes with inflammation causes those insulin proteins, the receptor proteins that sit amongst these fat molecules, to not know what they're doing properly. Because there's this concept of enzymes, okay. And proteins. One protein locks into another. Your insulin and insulin receptor meet each other. They have to be the right shape to recognize each other.
- [10:43]
A
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [10:44]
B
So their shape of that insulin receptor will be changed by the inflammation that causes things to be acid. Or the wrong fats in the membranes will also affect that molecule.
- [10:54]
A
Do you feel like there are a lot of people walking around America today that truly believe they are at their peak health, that are actually poisoning themselves because they're eating so many vegetables?
- [11:08]
B
That does seem to be the case. People come to me and say, I was perfect for 30 years on my high vegetable diet that had a lot of oxalate in it. And all of a sudden I am sick with bone pain, joint pain, urinary problems, burning urine, urinary incontinence, headaches, bad sleep, bad mood, out of the blue. So some people can hide this. Their bodies hide a disease. You don't necessarily know about it until late stage. You know, that's true with cancer. A lot of people don't get a diagnosis until they're six weeks before they drop dead.
- [11:42]
A
That was the first thing that popped in my mind right now is, is cancer. Because there's so many people who say that they're able to cure cancer naturally without chemo through a plant based diet. I mean, what do you make of that?
- [11:53]
B
Highly unlikely. So what do you think?
- [11:56]
A
They're just making it up and they were doing other treatments or it was something else.
- [12:00]
B
Cancer is an immune system problem ultimately, where something is causing the immune system to probably be overactive in one way and underactive in another and lose its capacity for clearing out problematic things. It's too busy being inflamed over toxins and other problems. And oxalate can actually inspire the immune system. There's a study, a couple of them, that show that crystals of oxalate accumulating in the female breast will bring along inflammation. The immune cells come to those crystals, and we know this happens throughout the body trying to get rid of the crystals. And in the effort to get rid of calcium oxalate crystals, it creates a change in the local cells that makes them become cancer cells and bone cells. So you get a different Kind of calcium buildup. As you remove the calcium oxalate crystals, you get a calcium appetite, calcium calcification in tissues, and you get misbehaving cells that are going cancerous.
- [12:58]
A
Do you think that if somebody goes with a plant based diet is able to heal their cancer naturally without chemo, that it might just be that one thing that they were regularly consuming was really irritating them and then it was just removed. And so that's really what was helping.
- [13:14]
B
Well, with, quote, curing cancer, how, how far out are we from the diagnosis? Because if you haven't let five, six or seven years go by, I don't know if we can call it a cancer cure yet.
- [13:28]
A
Okay. Okay.
- [13:30]
B
So it depends on the situation. And so you hear a lot of things online that hype up the idea that a vegan diet or even a keto diet will cure cancer. But the person has only been feeling well for the last year and they haven't really seen the long term effects of it. It's hard to say, but you definitely want to think about a lifestyle that allows your immune system to be healthy and vigorous, but not overactive. Because the more inflammation you have, maybe because you're forming crystals all over your body from eating too much spinach and almonds and these high oxalate foods, then the more you're likely to end up with some kind of chronic disease. It doesn't have to be cancer. There's other chronic diseases to be avoiding, like heart disease and diabetes.
- [14:18]
A
So is this belief that vegetables could actually be a problem and not a health food, Is that something super countercultural for the nutrition space, like you are on your own island with this, or is this something that a lot of people agree with? Because I have never heard it until reading your book.
- [14:37]
B
Well, it's not all vegetables that are high in oxalate. So the jury's out on how much vegetation we should be eating. And that might be an individual thing, but we haven't really done the science. So you can't say with authority one way or the other how much vegetation is required for human beings. There's plenty of historical examples of humans living primarily without vegetation and having normal life spans and be free of chronic disease. Situationally, just from a historical point of view, you can see that it's still a debatable concept, yet we speak as if it's not. Which is concerning because we're getting this kind of programming, this insidious program that has us being very comfortable with the idea that plants are here for us, they're on our Side, they want us to be healthy. That's why they're here. That's a delusion. It's not how it works.
- [15:28]
A
So it's interesting that you talk about this because I was just with Michaela Peterson and Jordan Peterson, and I don't know. Are you familiar with their. Their diet? They have the strictest diet I have ever heard. It's literally, I'm not joking. Red meat, salt water. That's it. They don't even use any oil to fry their steak in or anything. That is all they're eating every day, every meal. That is it. Those three items. They cannot eat vegetables. It irritates them. They get very, very sick. So are you familiar with their diet? I think they call it the lion diet, eating that way. But are you familiar with that at all?
- [16:05]
B
Yes, I've been on her podcast and several others who are really meat based.
- [16:09]
A
Okay, tell me about this. Tell me about this then. So she's one of these people that's like my audience knows her. At least I know her. And she's doing this. And she says the same thing, that the vegetables are making her sick.
- [16:19]
B
She's managing an immune system which involves the gut and lots of other tissues that's really struggling, that's in this. Over supercharged. A lot of us are getting in trouble with autoimmune type problems, which means your immune system is being triggered by things and is overcharged and working too hard. And that is a pathway to suffering and misery. So she's able to control that by eliminating these things that her system is now in our minds, unnecessarily reacting to. So in the short run, that's all you can do, is find out what's making you feel bad and eat what makes you feel. Well. I don't think for most of us, a diet with zero carbs and zero diversity is either sustainable socially, mentally, emotionally, or physically.
- [17:03]
A
I don't know how she does it.
- [17:05]
B
I mean, amazing.
- [17:06]
A
We were all sitting at the same dinner table and I mean, there was must have been eight of us just over and over, like, so what does your daughter eat? Is she on the same diet? No, she. She's able to eat more real things. Like, do you ever get tired of it? You know, how are you doing this? We were just fascinated by this. Completely fascinated by it. But you must encounter people like this all the time.
- [17:23]
B
Well, you know, it's interesting. In my world, people come to me restricting gluten and dairy and lots of things, and when I teach them about the oxalates, they Restore their ability to eat dairy and gluten, and back on some fruits, back on the right vegetables. And it's just more of a surgical approach to these foods that are high in oxalate can cause a tremendous relief of symptoms, but also a slight liberalization of the diet. That's not necessarily true for the Petersons, but it's true for a lot of people who are now seeing that oxygen oxalate is a big part of their health mysteries. You go to the doctor and you say, you know, I got these headaches. I don't feel so happy, or I've got this shoulder pain, or, you know, my pee burns, or I'm waking up three times a night to pee. And they're like, well, we can't find anything wrong with you. And they forget to test the urine to how much oxalate you're peeing out. And they really don't have toxicity diseases on their mind at all. And so this gets overlooked for years.
- [18:24]
A
Is this something that you have to ask the doctor for specifically to test urine for oxalates, or are they going to do it automatically?
- [18:30]
B
They're not going to do it automatically. And it might be an argument. They're unlikely to want to agree with you on this. What?
- [18:36]
A
How do you know if it's like a decent number or it's way too high and something's wrong with the urine test? Yes.
- [18:42]
B
Well, if it's way high, it's over 40 in American units that we use here in the U.S. and that is a flag. If it's within normal, it doesn't mean you don't have the problem. So you can't use the test to say, hey, I'm fine. I can eat all the oxalates I want.
- [19:00]
A
So how do you know if you have an oxalate sensitivity then?
- [19:02]
B
When we use the word sensitivity, we're kind of thinking allergic reactions to things like, oh, that bothers me, versus a toxicity. We're talking about too much of a poison beyond what your body can handle. Your body can handle some oxalate in the diet.
- [19:16]
A
Okay. That's why your book is called Toxic Superfoods.
- [19:19]
B
Yes. Because it's. It's about, we're being poisoned.
- [19:26]
A
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- [21:52]
B
You know, invest some energy to learn. And it's difficult if you just do a general search online, like what's a high oxalate food? Because major outlets have wrong data and wrong information. They'll tell you dates are high oxalate, they're not. So get a good list. My website would be a good place to do that Toxic Superfoods has the list like three or four times over. I have a whole nother book on my website. But you have to be able to know, okay, these are high oxalate foods. Quinoa, dark chocolate, spinach, chard, beet greens, beets, potatoes, quinoa, almonds, cashews, peanuts, kiwi. And you think, oh, I'm living on xyz. So pick your top four or five foods that you eat real frequently. Like me, it was my daily sweet potatoes plus Swiss chard twice a week. And that's enough to poison you.
- [22:44]
A
What symptoms might indicate that somebody is sensitive to vegetables or.
- [22:50]
B
Or getting poisoned by them?
- [22:52]
A
Exactly right.
- [22:53]
B
Which will create the sensitivity where you're going to have an immune system that is now having more and more trouble. I think those of us who get into that sensitivity place are people who often have a history of use of antibiotics as a child, whether you had ear infection, strep, or things like that as a kid. A lot of us were put on too much antibiotics as a kid. And that can affect your gut health. If you've taken a lot of ibuprofen or other forms of these NSAID drugs that are pain relievers, that can set you up too. So your gut gets damaged and then your immune system is more on alert and you can develop these sensitivities. But with oxalates, we're talking about too much of a chemical in your bloodstream, in your organs, collecting in your liver, your heart, your lungs, your eyes, your brain, your thyroid gland, your other metabolic glands throughout the body, your bones and your bone marrow. So over time, eventually those systems start breaking. So you can gradually be picking up oxalic acid and calcium, oxalate crystals forming in your bones and your bone marrow, and eventually that'll affect the formation of your bone self and so on. So as your body stays kind of in this toxic state space trying to like protect itself, it may not be complaining, but over time, it can also damage your gut because you're eating more than oxalic acid when you're eating these foods. You're also eating calcium oxalate crystals in the foods. These little crystals are like glass. It's like shattered glass dust. It's very sharp, very harsh, has electromagnetic charges on it. And the traditional diagnosis of poisoning by oxalate from foods was started in 1842. And the diagnosis then always included gut problems. So if you have digestive problems, plus you have some kind of aches and pains or mood problem or some kind of, you know, neuropathy or something, nerve Related. Which could be things like hiccups. Hiccups are nerve toxicity. None of us know that.
- [24:55]
A
I didn't know that. I didn't either. So what does that mean?
- [24:58]
B
It means it's your nerves. The electrolytes are messed up, the calcium's messed up, and the nerves are over firing and they're kind of permanently on and not relaxing. Well, so they're misfiring and that causes muscles to spasm. And so a hiccup is a spasm of the diaphragm muscle that helps you breathe. And then the nerves are toxic and they're causing these convulsions. Right. You can get little twitches in your face and your eyelid and other little tremors and things. And those are nerve toxicity. That's the nerves misfiring.
- [25:29]
A
I've never known where hiccups come from.
- [25:33]
B
Me neither until I read this oxalate research.
- [25:36]
A
Okay, but how do you know? Let's say somebody is experiencing all these problems. Inflammation in the body, they've got all, you know, all these issues, chronic pain, whatever. I mean, surely everything can't be attributed. Vegetables like. Do you believe that some other things might be causing these problems?
- [25:51]
B
Absolutely. There's a lot more in life that can pull us down. The problem is, is that we're using these foods in an effort to protect our health, and it's doing quite the opposite. That's a completely immoral situation. If you're making an effort to spend money and buy these nice organic produce and eating this supposedly healthy nuts and you're doing it to be low carb, or you think there's all these fantasy benefits to it. And it's quite the opposite, because insidiously, without symptoms, you could be eroding your health. And over time, you're going to end up kind of in pain with some kind of arthritis or gout, osteopenia, osteoporosis, digestive problems, mood problems, tooth problems that can cause real serious problems will give you vulnerability to all kinds of oral health problems. Sinus infections, chronic infections of all kinds.
- [26:43]
A
How many primary doctors are familiar with the oxalate problem?
- [26:47]
B
I would love to do a survey of all 20 of them or something, because it's not taught in medical school. Which is one of the things I'd love to do is really find a receptive audience in the clinical world. Whether you're a standard MD or other form of health provider, people with open minds to science are welcome to the space.
- [27:08]
A
So would you say that, like nutrition friends of yours largely agree with this theory? Or disagree.
- [27:15]
B
The ones who've experienced it personally are rabidly agreeing, and the ones who haven't are busy in denial.
- [27:22]
A
What can improve with a low oxalate diet? Diet?
- [27:26]
B
Your mood, Your sleep. I had a sleep disorder.
- [27:29]
A
What kind?
- [27:30]
B
Well, it was sent to the sleep lab because my doctors couldn't figure out what else was wrong with me. I didn't even know I had this. My brain. You know, when you go to the sleep lab, they put all these wires on your head and on your arms and legs, and you're like, am I supposed to sleep like this? But what it found was that my brain was waking up every hour, 29 times per hour, for all five and a half hours of attempted sleep, 29 times an hour. That explained. That explained a lot. And that got better very quickly when I finally got serious about eliminating those sweet potatoes and my Swiss chard. Those were my 2Real go to problematic foods. And for me, it was not just a sleep disorder. It was a lifetime of arthritis went away. It was a lifetime of foot problems. I had 30 years of really serious problems with my feet, and now they're great. At 60 and a half, I can run barefoot on hot pavement.
- [28:23]
A
What kind of foot problems?
- [28:24]
B
It started when I was in college where I had problems with my left foot pain. Down near the big toe, underneath these long bones in your toes, there's these two little lentil bones that help shock absorption. They live inside a tendon. They're called sesamoids. And mine were cracked and I had to have them removed surgically. I'd left Cornell for four years for this foot surgery and recovery. And I. Four years of recovery because I didn't recover because I was still eating Swiss chard. I didn't recover properly.
- [28:52]
A
This is the thing. How do you know that it's all vegetables and not just that? You have a severe allergy to that one.
- [28:59]
B
Right. So is an allergy causing my bones to be weak and my connective tissue and my feet to be incompetent and cause me chronic pain for 30 years? Well, that's not an allergy. That's problems with maintaining connective tissue. And that's one of the things oxalate does to us, is it causes connective tissue problems. Weakness and connective tissue and destruction of connective tissue, including the cartilage, the tendons, the bones.
- [29:23]
A
Here's what I'm going to tell you, Sally. I know my audience, and they're gonna say, you've gotta be kidding me. You've told us to change all these different Things about our diet. Now you're saying that we have to avoid vegetables. So they already feel like they are avoiding a lot of different foods to be cleaner eaters. What do you say to somebody who says, I can't. I can't even give this the time of day. I'm totally overwhelmed by this information.
- [29:49]
B
Well, you can think on any spectrum. The extremes are often problematic. Right. So there's the junk food junkie who's living on candy bars and potato chips and things at the convenience store. They go for gas and they think that's also a grocery store. That's a problem. Right. So they're learning to get back to more real foods. But on the supposed real food end, we have this beautiful produce department that's being pushed in our face. Like, you have to buy this produce, you have to make it organic. You have to smoothie it and juice it and make giant salads. And you should do this or else you're gonna die. Well, that's ridiculous, too, since the produce department was invented by human beings. So it's actually just relax, you know.
- [30:28]
A
Is there some kind of, like, big produce, like, are there some, like, secret, shadowy hands involved in how we got a produce department that I need to know?
- [30:37]
B
Well, I think it's really about the health of the American economy. We were an agricultural society, and we needed to push our agricultural products to thrive economically. And we've done really well with that. So we have orange juice from Florida. We have an orange train coming from Florida to bring it up the east coast. We have. California was developed as a place to develop produce, and that's why we needed a railroad to come out here. That's all economic development. Trucks and roads and moving stuff around. That's all economy. So the government is real interested in a healthy economy economy. So our nutrition education comes on behalf of forcing you to eat more agricultural products and need them and want them and go back to the store frequently. And produce is a lovely way to have you come back for perishable food every few days. Right. So there's a. There's an economic incentive just for the health of our economy.
- [31:27]
A
Now, wait a minute. You saying vegetables, the produce, it's a way they. They go bad so quickly and it'll keep you coming back to the store. That's freaking crazy.
- [31:40]
B
Makes sense, though.
- [31:41]
A
I mean, it does when you say that, Sally. But I'm just like. I mean, I'm really. I'm really skeptical on this, but I'm. I'm listening to you. Just quickly list through what are High oxalate foods and then what are low oxalate foods?
- [31:53]
B
So a lot of the nuts and seeds are high oxalate, Chia hemp, sesame, and then, you know, almonds, cashews and peanuts are the worst in the nuts and all the nuts tend to have that. So there's other things that are technically nuts and seeds like grains. The bran around grains is quite high in oxalate. Wheat brand, all the brands. So if you go for white rice would be a low oxalate grain and certain wheats are higher than others. Macaroni is kind of high in oxalate. So if you're big on like Mac and cheese, you might be eating a lot of oxalate from the macaroni. But if there's a lot of cheese, maybe that calcium on that dish is helping. Helping because if that oxalic acid connects with the calcium before absorb it, the amount that you absorb goes down.
- [32:39]
A
So could Americans adding a calcium supplement to their diet help so they can continue to eat vegetables in your opinion?
- [32:46]
B
Yes, yes. Calcium's really necessary. It's in the 80s. Back in my day, calcium was a really critical nutrient that we were worrying about from the nutrition profession side and trying to get people to do more dairy foods and all that stuff because it's so important to longevity and well being and development and growth. And now we've in this fad where we're against milk and we're against calcium. So there's a lot of warnings about calcium, but it is the binder of oxalic acid. It is the key way that you help your body eliminate oxalic acid and oxalate crystals. So it's very important to get calcium. I highly suggest calcium supplements, even though they're also demonized right now.
- [33:27]
A
Why are they demonized?
- [33:28]
B
Well, there's this fantasy that somehow if you eat some calcium, it jumps onto your arteries and sticks there and makes them calcified. But that's not how it works. Usually it's from some cell damage, some inflammation that's changing the way the cells work and they're not able to maintain your tissues properly. And some of them get turned into bone producing cells and that's how they start calcifying. It's a low calcium diet that promotes calcification of the body. That's well established in science. And yet the online influencers are busy telling you that if you take calcium, it somehow turns into calcification. But the body is not some kind of thing. It's a living, intelligent being that's managing things as long as it's healthy, but once it's starved of energy and inflamed and all things start to go wrong and tissue maintenance becomes harder.
- [34:14]
A
Okay, so one thing that was really tripping me up in your book, you say that turmeric is high in oxalates and should be avoided. So I'm right on that. Right.
- [34:27]
B
Well, I'm not saying to 100 avoid any particular food. I'm saying to bring your oxalate level down to a level you can handle.
- [34:34]
A
Okay.
- [34:34]
B
But when you turn turmeric into a supplement, the curcumin extract, you take away all the oxalate.
- [34:40]
A
The turmeric thing is confusing to me because. So I have Hashimoto's. So I have an autoimmune disease.
- [34:45]
B
Oh. One of it has something to do with that.
- [34:48]
A
Really?
- [34:48]
B
Yes, of course.
- [34:49]
A
Okay. So the thing is, is that I keep being told, you know, I have a list of supplements. One of the supplements on there that I'm supposed to take every day is turmeric. So you would disagree with that?
- [34:59]
B
I would.
- [35:00]
A
Why?
- [35:00]
B
We can do anti inflammation by getting rid of the cause of the inflammation rather than treating it and not removing the cause. So first you want to start with what's going on. Chances are, if you're a modern person, you're eating too much oxalate. That's really highly suspicious. Potential contributor to the development of an autoimmune condition. In this tissues, that oxalate collects. Oxalate collects very easily in the thyroid gland. Then the immune system comes along to attack those crystals, and it starts teaching itself to also start attacking the thyroid tissues themselves.
- [35:35]
A
They did say that I have 15 food allergies, and they told me what those were. And they said, do not eat these foods. And then one at a time, we'll bring each one back in and we'll see how you do. So far, eggs. Now that I've gotten rid of a lot of these, when I try to eat eggs, immediately throw them up. I think I definitely am allergic to eggs. And I was eating those, you know, every day. So my body was trying to deal with that. So I think that was contributing to problems. Obviously, they're telling me, you know, I have to avoid gluten forever, which is devastating to me. I love to eat sourdough bread, so that was really hard. And they want me to avoid cow's milk, which that's the one thing I don't. I love raw milk. So that's actually supposed to be a no. No for me. I'm doing it anyway. But I Mean, what do you think about that?
- [36:25]
B
About the eggs and the. The gluten?
- [36:27]
A
Yeah. Like, if I, like, let's just say. And there wasn't it. I don't really have any vegetables showing up on this list. It's just other random items, Right?
- [36:36]
B
Well, normally it's some kind of protein you're going to be allergic to. And the top allergens are eggs, wheat, dairy, corn, peanuts, and soy. They all have proteins. Classic allergy is an allergic reaction to a protein molecule. And we get trained up, the immune systems get trained up to be allergic. Because of various exposures and various damage to the body with eggs, the MMR vaccine is cultured in egg culture. So there's a chance that that's contributing to the commonality of the egg allergy, which I share with you.
- [37:11]
A
So wait, you think maybe I have, like, the MMR gene?
- [37:14]
B
I don't know about your genes, but I do know that all these different exposures affect your immune system. Food you can't handle, antibiotics you shouldn't handle, painkillers, vaccines, all these things are impacting your immune system function. And now your system is inflamed. And so your immune system is on a lot.
- [37:30]
A
Yes.
- [37:30]
B
So you're more likely to develop additional sensitivities where your immune system is hyping out over some random food that you loved because you're eating it so much. Foods that you eat frequently while inflamed can start to become a source of an autoimmune reaction.
- [37:48]
A
And this is exactly what I said. I said to the doctor, I said, don't you think it's weird that literally the only 15 items that I probably eat on a daily basis all happen to come on this list? How come? No, like, I don't like. I don't like cheese, so I never eat it. Cheese isn't on this list. I said, why is it only the literal items that are like, it's in my. The COD was on there. Cods in. In the. Happens to be in the collagen powder that I put my drink every morning. You know, like, things like that. I'm like, that seems a little suspicious.
- [38:18]
B
It's very interesting that while inflamed, whether it's an infection or this Hashimoto or some other whatever is going on where your system is inflamed, your immune system is out with its boxing gloves on, working really, really hard, like a big army, saving the day. But I think of the immune system when it's getting overworked is like the last round in a boxing Match. And the boxer has got blood, sweat and tears blinding him. And he cannot see anymore. All he has is this fierceness of his will and he's just punching anything he can punch. And that's your poor immune system. And it starts to be reacting to these foods.
- [38:57]
A
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- [41:54]
B
Oh, my gosh. Coffee has almost none at 2 milligrams. And a cup of tea has 100% soluble oxalic acid at a rate around 20 milligrams. So it's 10 times higher in tea.
- [42:05]
A
So you and the queen of England would have hated each other.
- [42:08]
B
The queens of England have been in trouble with oxalates for a very long time.
- [42:11]
A
Stop.
- [42:12]
B
Queen Anne. Have you ever heard of her? From, like, way long ago, kind of. She was fat and had gout and had dead babies galore. She never produced an heir.
- [42:22]
A
No.
- [42:22]
B
She was so sick and she died of kidney failure.
- [42:25]
A
And it was the T you think.
- [42:26]
B
Drink tea and hot cocoa. She was the first person in the world who could afford daily tea and sweetened hot cocoa. So she's eating sugar. She was kind of a carb addict. She ate a high oxalate diet from the tea and cocoa every day. Those are both highly what we call bioavailable. Meaning the oxalic acid in tea and cocoa move quickly into your bloodstream. So she was poisoning herself in an era where there were no vitamins to even help her along. Think about it. And so she was so sick, she. In my mind, she was one of the first really famous people to ruin their health with oxalate.
- [43:01]
A
Is it true that your liver can detoxify oxalates?
- [43:04]
B
It's absolutely not true that your liver does not detoxify oxalates. Your liver makes oxalate. So when you eat oxalic acid, say, your lovely royal cup of tea or your royal evening cup of hot chocolate, that very quickly goes into your bloodstream. So in 10 minutes, you've already got oxalate in your bloodstream and it goes straight to your liver. Everything you absorb from your stomach, intestines and so on is directed straight to your liver so that can be processed. The liver adds oxalic acid to the bloodstream because it's an end product of the metabolism of connective tissues. There's a. There's an amino acid in proteins and especially collagen called hydroxyproline that gets converted to a small degree, a couple percentage points into oxalic acid. Also, vitamin C is degenerating into oxalic acid. So when the blood leaves the liver and goes to the heart, it's got more oxalate than it did when it arrived. So the liver does not have any way to metabolize this tiny little compound. The body has to excrete it. So now that it's in your blood, it has to travel from your liver to your heart, to your lungs, to all over the body. And eventually the kidneys will remove a lot of it. The intestines will make an attempt at certain times, and how much they can is variable. The skin might collect it and try to excrete it. Your saliva glands will concentrate it when it's high in the blood. So 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 minutes after this food that's high in oxalate, your blood levels are rising, rising, rising over the next several hours, depending on how quickly it's absorbed. And now your saliva glands are concentrating it. So your saliva levels of oxalate go up. The amount of oxalate in your mouth goes up. But you already just ate it, so it was already on your teeth and in your mouth. Now it's coming out through your saliva. And the blood that's inside your teeth is high oxalate too. So your poor mouth and all of that, we have to wait for the kidneys primarily to take it out of the system. So you're exposing all these delicate capillary beds that deliver blood and the nutrients that is pushing it into the high pressure down there in those little capillaries. It's blood that's full of the oxalic acid is pushed into the tissues. And so, yeah, it's going everywhere after the meal and body's busy trying to deal with it.
- [45:23]
A
What can you tell us about almond flour that would shock us?
- [45:27]
B
Probably the most toxic food you could eat.
- [45:30]
A
This is a health food that I, at least I thought five minutes ago. This is like all my seed oil free snacks. They opt to use almond flour instead.
- [45:40]
B
But it is a seed and it is an Oily seed. That is a seed oil.
- [45:44]
A
Almond flour.
- [45:46]
B
Well, I don't know how defatted it is because almond flour is really just ground almonds.
- [45:51]
A
Right. And so what is the problem with almonds?
- [45:54]
B
Well, they have many toxins in them and they're quite indigestible. And oxalate is my favorite toxin to pick on because it is so commonly overdone. And it is the highest oxalate nut there is. It's at the top of the chart of the worst one. But it also has other toxins, is generally indigestible, and is damaging your gut health. So anyone with an inflammatory condition shouldn't be eating nuts at all because they're so hard on the digestive tract and so much of inflammation can start in the gut.
- [46:21]
A
I'm eating so many nuts. This is how I get, like a lot of my protein is helpful throughout the day. Brill nuts.
- [46:27]
B
Yeah, because you can't eat the eggs. Brazil nuts, too, because nuts are not.
- [46:32]
A
See, I was told to eat with Brazil nuts.
- [46:33]
B
Yeah. Not with an auto meat because it's selenium. But you, you. You need to rest your gut.
- [46:38]
A
Jeez Louise.
- [46:40]
B
This little focus on some little nutrient might be in a food, therefore the food is good for you. Is this benefits only mindset? No, you need to think broader than that and think more wisely than that. We're not getting wisdom, we're getting silliness.
- [46:55]
A
What advice would you have for somebody who is on the keto diet but does want to avoid oxalates?
- [47:01]
B
Well, the best keto diet that's low in oxalate is a carnivore diet. Diet.
- [47:05]
A
But do you feel like that's sustainable forever?
- [47:08]
B
No, it's not. I don't.
- [47:10]
A
What did you tell Michaela Peterson?
- [47:13]
B
I don't think she asked for my advice.
- [47:15]
A
That's fair.
- [47:17]
B
That's fair.
- [47:17]
A
That's fair.
- [47:18]
B
I do think that it's stressful, especially for women. Young women who want healthy periods and healthy babies have no business starving themselves of energy and carbohydrates permanently. So please, mix up your diet. The carnivore diet isn't a fantastic elimination diet. It's a great way to do a reset. Get that fiber out of your gut, let your body rest and heal and get yourself enough protein and learn to eat protein and not be afraid of animal foods. All good.
- [47:44]
A
What vegetables are low in oxalates that you eat?
- [47:47]
B
There's a lot of low oxalate vegetables. All the salad greens, almost all greens, except three of them are low on oxalate. So arugula and then cabbage, and you name it, all the different kinds of lettuces. And there's bunches of them. They're all low oxalate. And the whole. What we call the cucurbit family, which is melons and squashes. All the winter squashes, for example, are nice and low in oxalate. The whole cabbage family, which is cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, rutabaga, arugula. It's huge. In fact, probably 30% of the produce department is in the cabbage family, and that's all low oxalate.
- [48:24]
A
Okay, great. So there's some good news.
- [48:26]
B
Yeah, this is, like surgical. Don't eat spinach. Don't eat so much white potatoes. Throw in a little cauliflower and other things instead. And there's nice substitutions. And I've got some recipes on my website. You know, a whole book there. Once you just get this lens. You just never heard of oxalate. You never looked at a food and say, hey, you're an oxalate disaster. Hey, you're kind of friendly. You know, you learn this stuff and it's. It's easy. But the learning curve is, like, a little weird because we're being bombarded with messages that these. These high oxalate foods are okay.
- [48:56]
A
So you've seen people heal gout with low oxalate diet. You've also seen people heal carpal tunnel, including my husband. Really?
- [49:07]
B
I was shocked. We got really lucky on this one because we changed the diet right when he was about to inquire about getting carpal tunnel surgery. He'd been struggling for eight years, had been ruining his sleep. He was no longer useful in the garden. He could barely hold onto the shovel. You know, he was, like, struggling. And at this age where he was in his late 50s, he wanted to be, like, able to work out because you're getting a certain age, you've got to take care of your health. And he couldn't hold the dumbbells anymore, so he was heading for. For surgery. But we had just started the diet about three or four weeks before he went to the doctor. And then by the time he had the testing done to see if it was carpal tunnel, and then by the time he was referred to the surgeon, three or four months had passed. And by then, the surgeon's like, you know, let's wait on this, because I don't see that you really need this surgery.
- [49:55]
A
Incredible.
- [49:55]
B
And now he has absolutely zero carpal tunnel whatsoever. He can do anything he wants. His neck is fine. His arm is fine. His wrists are great. 100% gone. And you know what was more incredible? A year or two after his recovery, I found an old study from the 1930s, I believe it was, by a very famous man showing that he and his colleagues were very successfully reversing carpal tunnel with a low oxalate diet. That was nearly a hundred years ago.
- [50:21]
A
Wow. Okay. Yeah. I feel like nobody's talking about that.
- [50:25]
B
It's all hidden in the literature. That's why it took me years to dig it all out and go, oh, I was having. It was almost stressful to discover these things, like, how come we don't know this? How come we don't know this? How come we don't know that? It's all hidden back there and we've dropped it.
- [50:39]
A
If somebody suspects that their body is reacting to an oxalate overload, what are the baby steps to start converting their diet?
- [50:47]
B
It you've looked at what you're eating, and you've realized these five things that you eat a lot of are high oxalate. So pick one you can live without. I can tell you that you can live without Swiss chard pretty successfully. It's okay. So even if you're like me and you've been raised on Swiss chard and beet greens, you actually only ate them because they were supposed to be good for you.
- [51:07]
A
See, I'm eating the most common vegetables are definitely potatoes for me. And then green beans, Brussels sprouts, broccoli.
- [51:14]
B
Right. So green beans are this, for me, a poster child of a food that's very unpredictable in terms of how much oxalate they have. Now, if you've opened a seed catalog, there's like 60 or 70 kinds of green beans you can grow. So chances are different varieties are higher in oxalate than others. But no one's done that study, so beans aren't to be trusted. Small portions are probably fine.
- [51:35]
A
The green beans. Yeah. Okay, so other baby steps.
- [51:38]
B
The Brussels sprouts, start boiling them and throw out that water to lower the oxalate in those.
- [51:42]
A
I put them in the oven so they're crispy.
- [51:44]
B
Yeah. So you can finish them in the oven. So start them with a boil, shake off the water, and then finish them in the oven. And a little squirt of, like, vinegar is good on there sometimes. Take your time. Don't rush into this. Don't try to be an all or nothing kind of person. Don't get super crazy about it, because if you have a sudden precipitous drop from A high oxalate diet. And I define a danger zone as anything over, like, 600 milligrams a day. And a smoothie has about a thousand. So let's let, like, can a smoothie.
- [52:12]
A
So you're saying no green smoothies now that we're in the new year and everybody's trying to get their wellness together?
- [52:18]
B
Well, if you've got to blend your food like a big child, like, I feel like that's like baby food. When you blend everything or people without teeth.
- [52:26]
A
You're going to be the most controversial guest I have ever had, Sally.
- [52:31]
B
Totally. That's why nobody's out here with me. Who else would dare? Except someone whose entire life was ruined by this, Ruined every decision. What kind of house I live, what kind of education I got, what I've achieved professionally. All of it was touched by the devastation of having health problems from Oxley. And I would prefer that other people not be as ignorant as I was. Now that I know the truth, it's my obligation to be weird and say the truth.
- [52:58]
A
Whether you agree with Sally or not, we can all agree with that. If you could provide one remedy to heal a sick culture, it could be physically, mentally, or spiritually, what would it be?
- [53:06]
B
There's so much that goes into culture, but if your brain is better, then you can sift it a little better and maybe respect yourself better. And oddly enough, if you lower your oxalate, your mind works better, your mood is better, your body is better, and your ability to sit and meditate is better. And you're just a much more calm and peaceful person. So you could start with a low oxalate diet, and then there's a lot more we can do.
- [53:33]
A
Yeah. And you talk about all of that in your book, Toxic Superfoods. Tell everybody what they can expect from reading your book. If they're like, okay, I still just feel like I've barely scratched the surface, which we did that. Barely scratched the surface. What would they find in your book?
- [53:47]
B
Well, I attempted to address all the questions that people would bring up to me. I gave a lot of free lectures in my town teaching this. I would make food and bring it for free and teach for free. And they. I tried to address all those questions. So it's pretty comprehensive and it's written so you can zoom through it pretty fast. There's a whole big chapter in chapter four about this whole delusion about plants. So that's one of the longest chapters, is trying to address our indoctrination that plants are so wonderful and they're just here because they want us to eat them. And that's not really what's going on. And the sort of misinformation coming from science itself. There's a whole problem with faddism and the way we think. We're all indoctrinated and it all affects our biases. Whether you're a scientist, a researcher, and you get lots of biases in the whole built into the system where people would pick a certain way of interpreting their data because it benefits their tenure, benefits their fame, and it suits the culture.
- [54:47]
A
Where can people find you on Instagram?
- [54:50]
B
S.K. norton is my main handle on Instagram. There's also one toxic superfoods oxalate underscore book. And you can find me on my website. That's a good place to reach out and to get some basic free information, free downloads. You can find my data guide there, a cookbook there, and that's SallyKnorton.com and I also have a YouTube channel that has stories of people who've come to me and says, I want to tell my story. It's really nice to meet real people who are telling their truth as well.
- [55:19]
A
So who is the ideal person? Like, you know what, you might have an oxalate problem and you might want to try this. Like, how would you describe that person? So if they're listening, they're like, that's me.
- [55:28]
B
That person may be starting to have some fatigue or asking the doctor to check their thyroid gland. They may have some urinary tract issues where they're waking up now at night and have to pee. Or sometimes they have urgency and they're only peeing like a tablespoon of pee. Like, if there's some urinary tract issues, pelvic floor issues, you have chronic infections, like sinus infections or yeast infections a lot. If you're getting some issues with your eyes, a little bit of night vision problems, any kind of sensory disorder, tooth sensitivities, aches and pains here and there, arthritis, not waking up, rested indigestion, acid reflux. Like a whole host of things can go wrong. And it's interesting that it shows up very differently in each person. For some people, it's just their bladder. Other people it's their depression. Other people it's their arthritis or their poor sleep or their loss of motivation. Because chronic inflammation makes the brain not work well. And sometimes it just feels like apathy. You don't want to be apathetic. You want to express joy and creativity and be excited about the day. Could be your spinach is getting in the way of joy.
- [56:35]
A
I adore you. Thank you so much, Sally, for coming on Culture Apothecary.
- [56:39]
B
What a pleasure and a privilege. Thank you.
- [56:45]
A
Okay. One of those episodes that is going to be a mind bender. Extremely challenging. I don't. I'm still processing. Okay. I don't even know what I think about that, but I am curious what you think. I know that. I know that this is going to be a controversial episode. I know that you're either going to be like, okay, what she just said blew my mind, opened my eyes for the first time about what could be wrong with me, or you're going to be like, this is insane. Absolutely no way. So I am very curious to see whatever it is that you thought in the cute service Facebook group. We have new episodes every single Monday and Thursday night at 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern, anywhere you get your podcasts. We are on a mission to heal a sick culture physically, mentally, and spiritually. I'm Alex Clark, and this is Culture Apothecary.