← The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
These 7 Superfoods Are Secretly Wrecking Your Body : 1389
00:32:51
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- [00:00]
Dave Asprey
A lot of people think oxalates are something in spinach or almonds, but there's a huge lack of awareness in the world about how important oxalates are for health. They form these razor sharp calcium crystals that can cause widespread inflammation, pain, metabolic problems, basically sandpapering your inner organs and your knees and your muscles. It's just not a good situation because your mitochondria like little bags. And if you poke a plastic bag with a sharp knife, it's not going to work as well as a bag. Drinking a 32 ounce green smoothie with spinach and beets and almond milk every day for 10 days, by the way, that did kill one person. I know that I got my oxalate in part because I was a devout raw vegan and I ate a ton of it. If you suffer from urinary tract infections, the odds are exceptionally high that you don't have a bacterial problem. You have an oxalate problem. It's about allowing your urethra to not be sliced while you pee. Oxalate crystal can form on the lining of your nerves. Someone sticks a needle in there, of course it's gonna hurt. Well, you can build a needle internally. Oxalates are unique because they accumulate over time and they persist for a very long time. In this session, you're going to learn how oxalates work, how to tell if they're an issue for you and what you can do about it. You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
- [01:20]
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- [02:25]
Dave Asprey
It's time to talk about oxalates. And a lot of people think oxalates, if you even heard of them, are something in spinach or almonds. But there's a huge lack of awareness in the world, even in the world of biohacking, about how important oxalates are for health. And I wrote about them in the first chapter of the bulletproof diet, which was a major part of growing the biohacking movement. But I didn't consider how the dosing mattered, so I was too relaxed about oxalates. And I'm going to teach you what oxalates are actually doing to your health in this video and how you can avoid them. These molecules are found in plants, and your metabolism can also make them, especially if you have candida or fungus. But they're not just anti nutrients. They bind directly to minerals, which means your body can't use these superfoods. And they form these razor sharp calcium crystals that can cause widespread inflammation, pain, skin problems, hair problems, brain problems, metabolic problems, mitochondrial problems, and the list goes on and on. And this isn't just one or two studies. This is hundreds, hundreds of studies. But many of them were before 1950, when this was all over in health. And then we just kind of stopped talking about it, even though it still matters. And you might have heard of kidney stones, and you might think they come from beer and liver, but it turns out 70% of kidney stones, yeah, they're coming from oxalates. They're a plant problem. Another common symptom is musculoskeletal pain, either joint pain, old injuries, or just waking up and your back hurts and your muscles are sore and you didn't work out and you're like, what is going on? Well, razor sharp little crystals in those muscles, they'll do that. So in this session, you're gonna learn how oxalates work, how to tell if they're an issue for you and what you can do about it. People often will lump oxalates in with lectins or phytates or these other plant toxins, but each of them behaves entirely differently. In fact, I list five in my main nutritional book. But this one's special. Lectins and other things like that mainly irritate or stimulate your gut and your immune system. The difference with oxalates is they physically bind minerals in the body, specifically calcium mostly. And that's going to form those razor sharp crystals that can wreak havoc. That means oxalates can cause problems even if your digestion seems fine. But quite often, oxalates also mess up your Digestion because they're irritating the gut as well, but they don't have to. So gut irritation can happen, but doesn't have to happen. You can look at oxalates as things that steal minerals your body needs, things that form these crystals throughout the body and things that cause tissue stress in different systems. So you could have hundreds of different symptoms from basically poking your mitochondria or your fascia or your collagen or your organs. And when you stack multiple plant stressors at the same time, that can make it even worse. But just remember, oxalates are unique because they accumulate over time and they persist. If you have, say, some nightshades that have lectins in them and you're sensitive, well, then you're going to have a problem for a couple days and eventually it'll go away. But the oxalates will stick around for a very long time unless the body has the right conditions to get rid of the oxalates. And that in and of itself can cause new problems. Because if your tissues let go of oxalate and then you reform them in your urine, well, hello, uti. One of the things that makes oxalate even worse is Candida. So huge numbers of people have Candida. This is yeast growing in your body. You don't have to have a yeast infection for that. If you have kind of a coated tongue, there's a pretty good chance you have some Candida. And Candida actually causes more problems with oxalate than you might expect because it shunts something called glyoxylate towards oxalate, so it changes your metabolism a little bit. And then Candida suppresses your microbiome and your microbiome may help you handle more oxalate if you're lucky. And Candida also gives you leaky gut, which makes oxalate worse. So if you have a yeast problem, you probably have a bigger problem with oxalate than you might expect. So here's what you're going to learn in this video. You give a clear definition of oxalates and all the places they can come from. You're going to learn why some people handle more oxalates than others. And you're going to learn about something called oxalate dumping, which is a real thing and the mechanism behind it. And I'm going to give you science backed strategies to reduce your oxalate load without actually causing more problems than not. And at the end of this video, you're going to know whether oxalates are something you want to pay attention to as you work on improving how you show up in the world. Our understanding of oxalates goes way back, all the way to the 1700s, when we first isolated oxalic acid from something called wood sorrel. And there's actually whole categories of plants called the oxalates or oxalis, because these are the plants that have the most oxalic acid in them. And then we started doing research on kidney stones and figured out calcium oxalate crystals are the most common type. And in recent years, people including yours truly, have talked about anti nutrient and we've brought oxalate into this discussion. But mainstream medicine still says no, you just need to drink more water and have less salt to worry about stones. Unfortunately, it doesn't work very well. So this episode is to bring the clinical history and emerging biohacker research together, because I know that I had a big oxalate problem because I have a history of toxic mold and candida, metabolic dysfunction, et cetera, et cetera. And I've cleared all that. And we'll talk about how the term oxalates really just means oxalic acid and oxalate salts. And oxalate will bind to calcium and magnesium and iron. And this is why up until about 1950, it was really common to be able to buy oxalic acid to clean your dishes or to clean up your bar or to make metals sparkle because it will absolutely eat a iron for lunch. And if you have iron in your body, which you do, that might not be a good thing for you. But calcium's the big problem in the body. The biggest source of oxalate by far is from diet. Many, but not all green leafy vegetables, almost all nuts, almost all seeds, and sadly, cacao and matcha and raspberries and blackberries are very, very high in this and a few other types of plants. And the other source is endogenous. And this comes from your liver metabolism via something called glyoxylate or from the breakdown of vitamin C. So megadosing vitamin C or megadosing glycine could actually be causing problems, maybe more problems than it's solving. The good news is that if you do eat oxalate, if there's enough calcium present, oxalate binds to and gets excreted in your poop. If not, it's going to get absorbed and cause havoc in your body. If it's crystallized in your gut, you might get gut irritation. But I'd rather have an irritated gut than have razor sharp crystals distributed throughout my body. And this is why we add milk to hot chocolate. This is why milk chocolate, if you're not allergic to milk, might be a better choice. This is even why in Britain they add milk to black tea. Black tea is a very strong source of oxalate. So it turns out even traditional dishes like creamed spinach, they're putting the cheese and the cream in the spinach because there's calcium and it lowers the metabolic burden of these foods. So these traditional recipes work. I'm not saying milk's good for you. I'm just saying if you're going to eat these types of foods, which you probably shouldn't, you want to have a calcium source with it so they don't get it into your body. And what happens in your kidneys is your kidneys filter oxalate and there's calcium in your urine and the crystal formation happens, which creates stones. And the PH of your urine can be a problem. There's. And you can actually have oxalate circulating in your blood. When I did my last plasmapheresis, where they filtered my blood plasma, you could actually see a couple little white calcium oxalate crystals in the blood. And you do not want these causing mechanical damage to the lining of your arteries. So you gotta get your oxalate levels down to a comfortable level. The key levers in your nutrition is how much of it are you taking into the body. And you can have about 200 milligrams a day. Another one is the calcium to magnesium ratio in your body. How healthy is your gut, how hydrated are you, and what's your ph? And genetic factors that are a major part of this. And there is a phenomena that you need to know about. It's called oxalate dumping. And this is when your body has oxalate stored throughout your tissues, and then you stop eating it entirely. And then the body says, great, I get to start letting go of it. And it can let go of a lot of it at the same time. And what that does is it means that, well, I stopped eating oxalate, but I felt worse. And that's because your body's trying to excrete it when it finally gets a chance. And you could get rashes, joint pain, fatigue, and you just don't feel so good. So if you make a big change, what you can do then is you say, I'm just going to have a gentle reduction in oxalate. And you could also take things like citric acid or even just lemon juice, which helps the body to not recrystallize these. One of the things that can tell you Whether you've got an oxalate problem or not, if you have somewhere that's injured, either some that's healing or somewhere from a past surgery or substantial injury, well, those things attract calcium as a part of repair. But if there's oxalate present, the calcium combines and then those microcrystals end up in those areas. So you could eat a high oxalate meal, have some almonds, have some spinach and kale and raspberries, and have a bunch of chocolate for dessert. And then see if those parts of your body hurts over the next 24 hours if they do. And all of a sudden that joint that hasn't bothered you does, or you wake up with low back pain or other things like that, there's a pretty good chance you just showed yourself what's going on. This explains why joint pain and old injuries and scars or pelvic pain can flare when you're mobilizing oxalate. It's very interesting. If you've had a major surgery like a C section or any other surgery, those scars actually can soften up. When you go on an oxalate elimination protocol, even something like intense training or repeated injuries can increase your vulnerability. So if you work out really hard, there's a big rush of inflammation and a rush of calcium to build more muscle. But if you've got a lot of oxalate present, it's not going to work so well. Oh, and I should also mention, sadly, sweet potatoes and white potatoes are also high oxalate. I wish it wasn't so. I still think sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes. But too many sweet potatoes equals oxalate. And here are some system level interactions that you want to know about. Hormones like parathyroid hormone and vitamin D control where calcium goes in your body. And that affects whether the calcium can neutralize oxalates or it's going to end up contributing to those problems. There is a hormonal interaction. Things like parathyroid hormone or even vitamin D control where calcium goes in your body. This is one of the reasons that taking vitamin K2 with vitamin D is like you'll find in vitamin D, the supplements that I make. Vitamin K helps to keep calcium in the bones where it belongs. And if you take just vitamin D by itself, it causes widespread calcium deposition, which you don't really want. But still, it's better to take vitamin D than not take vitamin D, because vitamin D deficiency is so toxic. But if you have oxalate present and you're putting calcium throughout your tissues because you don't have any vitamin K. Well, you might not like what happens then. You can also get chronic pain or sleep loss from kidney stones in particular, or even just from everything in your body hurting and being irritated. And that's going to raise your cortisol, which also impacts your ability to absorb minerals. It causes more inflammation and your kidney load goes up. And from a circadian perspective, your kidney filtration and your ability to concentrate urine, well, those follow daily rhythms and overnight your urine concentrates, which raises your stone risk. So if you're not drinking enough water or not getting enough electrolyte, that could make the problem much worse, especially for kidney stones. Or maybe don't eat so much oxalate so that you don't have as much going on with your kidneys. And strangely, these microscopic razor sharp crystals can trigger pain pathways and threat signaling. Because two studies that I'm aware of and probably more, show that oxalate is directly toxic to your mitochondrial membrane because your mitochondria are like little bags. And if you poke a plastic bag with a sharp knife, what's going to happen? Well, it's not going to work as well as a bag. So that's happening. And mitochondrial stress equals inflammatory pathways being activated. And then your mitochondria need minerals desperately, but your minerals are getting depleted. So those people are still saying, well, eat your spinach to get your calcium. It doesn't work like that because the calcium in spinach is bound to, to oxalate and it's actually going to take minerals from you. It doesn't matter if there's iron in the spinach. It's there because it's bound to oxalate, which is not what you need in your body. So the ability to absorb minerals from food is much more important than whether they're in the food. You're a biohacker. You train your body, you probably track your sleep, but you probably also go out and you drink occasionally because, well, alcohol can be fun, even though we know it's not good for us. And when you do that, your gut works overtime to clean up what the alcohol left behind. Zebiotics Pre Alcohol Probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic PhD. Scientists invented this to tackle rough mornings after drinking. And here's how it works. When you drink, your gut converts alcohol into a toxic byproduct. And it's the buildup of this byproduct, not dehydration, that you can blame for those rough days after you're drinking Zebiotics. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme that breaks that byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel way better tomorrow. And I just want to say alcohol is not good for you and most listeners. On occasion, have a drink. 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- [17:19]
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- [17:21]
Dave Asprey
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Dave Asprey
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Dave Asprey
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Dave Asprey
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Dave Asprey
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Dave Asprey
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- [18:33]
Dave Asprey
And here's something that you really need to understand about those superfoods full of oxalate. It's that when you form these tiny crystals throughout your body, it's going to release an inflammatory cytokine called IL1B and something called the NLRP3 inflammasome. And what that does is first it causes local and then systemic Inflammation, but it's much worse than that. It also causes tissue fibrosis via those pathways. What is tissue fibrosis? It's something that happens as you age, where your ligaments, your muscles, your fascia, your skin, they become kind of stuck together. You get more diffuse scar tissue in the body. And this is a hallmark of aging. So I think that excessive oxalate in your body, in your diet, is going to make you age more quickly, because we don't want tissue fibrosis. It's one of the seven pillars of aging, cellular stiffening. So we don't want cross linking of collagen and fascia. And that is going to happen if you have lots of oxalate going around basically sandpapering your inner organs and your knees and your muscles. It's just not a good situation. And I know that I got my oxalate in part because of toxic mold, but in part because I was a devout raw vegan and I ate a ton of it. And when I first started doing sort of the. The thing that became the bulletproof diet, I was more pro almond and sweet potato than I am today. Even things like cassava have it. So now I just monitor is there oxalate in it? And I avoid it for the most part, or at least eat a little of it. My chocolate consumption is much lower than it used to be, which makes me sad, except it makes me happy because my body doesn't hurt and my brain works even better. The other thing that oxalate in your diet does is it chelates or binds to really important cofactors, things like magnesium. And that means your mitochondrial enzymes don't work because they require magnesium. So if the oxalate is grabbing onto minerals that your cells need to make energy, you're going to feel less energy. There's also a serious problem of damage to the lining of your arteries called the endothelium. And oxalate in studies reduces nitric oxide, which means you don't have good microcirculation, which means your body can't recover as well, your tissue can't repair as well, and even your brain won't work as well because your brain is critically dependent on blood flow. Most doctors know that oxalate can cause kidney stones, and that's about it. But the primary target for these things is your urinary tract and your kidneys. The other areas where you're likely to feel oxalates are your joints, your skin, your pelvic tissues, or even if you get those little styes in your eyes that's oxalate crystal coming out through your tear ducts. If you get lots of plaque on your bottom inside teeth, there's two little glands there that are secreting oxalate into your saliva, which builds up on your teeth. If you get really fast buildup, that's probably what it is. And there's a couple genes that can affect how sensitive you are. One is called SLC26A6 and the other one is AG XT. But it's complex because your gut microbiome is a part of it. You can get a viome test, probably use code Dave for that. And the viome test will tell you whether you have oxalate consuming bacteria in your gut. It's pretty rare these days. I think we used to have more of it. Most people don't have it. And even if you do, it only moderately affects your ability to eat more oxalates. The other thing that varies is how many minerals do you get. If you get more minerals, you probably can handle a bit more. And do you drink enough liquid? So the summary here is how you respond to oxalates depends on your genetics, your gut bacteria, how well you're mineralized, how well you hydrate, and also your urinary ph or your system ph. And that's why one person can eat spinach every day and feel fine for a while. Even though it might not be really good for them, they can handle it while another person actually ends up getting symptoms that they don't know are caused by that healthy spinach. I would suggest replace spinach with arugula and everyone wins. Here's what to know about oxalates and aging. Unless you're getting a megadose, oxalates behave more like a slow accumulation problem, more like almost a toxic heavy metal than an acute toxin. So you could poison someone with a high dose of arsenic, but usually arsenic builds up over the course of a few years until it reaches a level where it causes trouble. And unless you're doing crazy things like drinking a 32 ounce green smoothie with spinach and beets and almond milk every day for 10 days, by the way, that did kill one person, you probably aren't going to feel the acute effects unless you're already at that level where your tissues are crystallizing. Your tolerance to oxalate can go down as you age. Because your kidney function goes down, you have lower mineral reserves and you have slower clearance. And this is one reason why most people, especially when they're young, can tolerate high oxalate diets, sometimes for years. So you're eating all these superfoods and grinding your oxalates into smoothies, eating handfuls of nuts and a lot of chocolate, just like most people do. And you might get some skin issues or something, but whatever, it's not a big deal. And then aging shifts the margin for error. And what worked at 25 probably won't work when you're 45. And if you have just minimized but not eliminated oxalates starting early, you will have far fewer physiological problems as you age. So I think this is a smoking gun for aging because of that problem with systemic inflammation and mitochondrial harm. And it's not that hard to just make better swaps. I'm going to teach you how to do that in a little while. You can also think of it like this. Oxalates become a problem later in life, not because they're new to your biology, but because your body's ability to buffer the capacity is lower. So why take the hits when you're young? Because you don't feel them. You're still taking the hits. So here's what happens if you become oxalate aware. I'm not saying you need to eat no oxalate. I'm saying you should not eat too much oxalate. You will get fewer kidney stones, or maybe just get no kidney stones. You'll have substantially reduced joint and pelvic pain. That just doesn't make any sense. If you suffer from urinary tract infections, the odds are exceptionally high that you don't have a bacterial problem, you have an oxalate problem. Because as you're peeing, those little razor sharp crystals are cutting your urethra, which allows bacteria that would normally be present to continuously reinfect you. So it's not about killing the bacteria. It's about allowing your urethra to not be sliced while you pee. If you lower your oxalate, even without removing it, you should see improved mineral status in your muscle, your bone, your nerve and your mitochondrial function, and better energy, better thinking, and just fewer unexplained inflammations. And there's something else. There are studies showing that oxalate crystal can form on the lining of your nerves. So you have weird neuropathic pain. It could be caused by oxalate. This is a direct feeling. Someone sticks a needle in there, of course it's going to hurt. Well, you can build a needle internally with oxalate. So maybe you're thinking, this is alarmist. This doesn't really matter. Well, I only want to talk about things that matter. But here are some people who might want to pay attention to this video. So you eat clean, but you still have inflammation or fatigue, or you get kidney stones, or you have a history of kidney stones. Or if you've been on a long term keto or carnivore diet and you started adding plants back in, when you first go keto or carnivore, at least if it's low oxalate keto, you may experience an increase in oxalate symptoms for a little while as your body adjusts to the fact that it can let the oxalate go. But if you've really gotten used to being long term low oxalate and then you start eating plants, you know that big plate of almonds or beets may not be what your body needs. And if the next day you don't feel good, that's your body going, what do I do with all this oxalate? And maybe you have rashes, it burns when you pee, you have weird pelvic pain or joint pain and it moves around or it hurts some days more than others and there's no reason that you can find this could be it. And then, especially in the post Covid era, if you have histamine sensitivity, which is a big issue right now, histamine sensitivity, or its cousin, mast cell activation syndrome, or long Covid or toxic mold induced illness or Lyme disease or any of those things, you can imagine what happens if you have mechanical insult throughout the body because these little crystals are irritating tissues. Normally your body shouldn't release very much histamine from that. But if you're histamine sensitive, it's going to release a lot of histamine. It's going to cause a wave of systemic inflammation. And this could make things like exercise feel even worse because you're sanding your tissues against each other. So this is a real thing. Even in the world of biohackers where I'm so clean, I only eat almond butter. No, probably not. All right, here's your list of high oxalate foods that are causing the most problems. Spinach, beet greens, Swiss chard. And then you've got like almonds and cashews, sadly are very high. Peanuts are exceptionally high. Anything with almond flour. And this one makes me sad. Cocoa and cacao and dark chocolate. You can have a little bit, but watch out. Sometimes it just takes a little bit to trigger those symptoms. If you're in the middle of dumping potatoes and sweet potatoes, particularly the skins are a problem. And lots of tea. If you drink Much of it. And black tea is by far the highest in oxalate, followed by matcha, followed by green tea, which is certainly not zero, but is lower. So here's what you can do to reduce oxalate. Just food swaps. So get rid of the spinach and replace it with arugula, romaine or any kind of lettuce. And can we talk about kale? Kale contains oxalate. It does not contain as much oxalate as spinach, but it is a meaningful contributor, especially the lacy kale. If you are a kale fetish. If you eat the dino kale, which has less laciness to it, and you cook it with some kind of calcium and dump the water, you can get away with whatever's left. But kale juice and baked kale and things like that, they're going to contain oxalate. They're not good for you. Get rid of your almond flour and replace it with rice flour or coconut flour. Unfortunately, cassava flour is high in oxalate, even though it tastes really good. And buckwheat flour is also high in oxalate. Eat white rice, not brown rice, and support your calcium. So you can eat some dairy if you're not sensitive. A lot of people can handle sheep dairy. Things like manchego cheese or pecorino are good choices. You could eat some sardines because it has the skeleton inside them. And you can eat some low oxalate greens, but they don't have that much calcium in them. And use cacao as a special treat and maybe not as a daily breakfast item. And it pains me to say that I love cacao. I just know that too much of it is a problem. And if you are addicted to chocolate and you know about the health benefits of chocolate, there's a brand called Coco Via and Cocoa Via is a lower but not 0 oxalate high flavanol form of cacao, so you can have a little bit of that. So here's what to do. If you eat a high oxalate meal, take calcium citrate during the meal to bind the oxalate in the gut. Take magnesium later in the day or in the evening to support your mineral balance and your enzymes. You want to increase your hydration throughout the evening to support your kidneys. And you can use lemon water or potassium citrate, which will raise urinary citrate and blocks the crystal formation. And make sure that you don't get dehydrated. Doing a heavy sauna after your cacao might not be the right choice. And doing long fasting without fluids like a dry fast would be a terrible idea after a high oxalate meal. And here's something to know if you work out or use the sauna a lot is that heavy sweating concentrates oxalates. If you don't have enough minerals and fluids in your body before you do the exercise and even during the exercise, and if you're an endurance athlete and you're sweating for hours, you may be unknowingly raising your risks that hydration matters. And exercise can make your body more acidic, so you might even want to throw a little bit of baking soda in your water. And surprisingly, baking soda makes you have more endurance anyway, so that's not a bad thing. And exercise stress plus mineral loss lowers your ability to tolerate oxalates. And if you're a high performer exerciser sort of thing and you're getting joint pain or urinary symptoms, that's a signal that you should pay attention to this.
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- [32:48]
Dave Asprey
And let's say that I've convinced you and you have systemic muscle pain that moves around your joints hurt. Old injuries hurt some days more than others and maybe you run a test where you just do a super high oxalate day. May I suggest some spinach juice with a ton of almonds and a couple things of raspberries. And watch the burning pee and the joint pain and maybe the brain fog and the GI stuff and go, oh, maybe I am feeling that. Well, it takes sometimes a year or two to fully clear out oxalate. And the protocol for that is 2 ounces of lemon juice per day. I usually do it in the morning with lots of hydration. And you can get a urine PH strip, little bottle for a few bucks off Amazon and then check your urine once or twice a day. And if it's too acidic or too basic, use baking soda to change your urinary ph til it's right in the middle, which is the safest zone so you don't get any kind of stones. And if you do that over time and you take potassium citrate, if your body tolerates potassium, which most of us do, you could see a substantial improvement over time. But it does take time. And at a certain point, I got to the point where I can eat some chocolate, I don't feel anything. But if I went back a year and I ate a couple pieces of chocolate, like, oh, look, there's that pain where I had surgery on my foot. And it's repeatable, it's reliable. And now we know the mechanism for it. And I want to do a quick shout out to Sally Fallon, who wrote a book called Toxic Superfoods. I wrote about oxalates in the bulletproof diet. I knew they were a problem and I was moderating my intake. But her book maybe blames everything on oxalates, which I don't think is entirely the case. But I think oxalates are an important and underrepresented part of what's going on with our health in the modern world. And her exhaustive research, especially on very old literature about this, it's pretty convincing. So Sally, nice work on that. Oxalates, they're just naturally occurring compounds in plants. And the plants make oxalate to make sure we don't eat too many plants because it'll clog up our kidneys and our mitochondria. And. And this is good. So the plants can have babies. And if you try to eat the plant babies, the seeds and the nuts and the grains, they're higher in oxalate because plants don't like it when you eat their babies. It makes sense. And for some people, I would even say most of us at the right dose, that that oxalate buildup will interfere with your energy production, it'll cause inflammation, it'll stress your kidneys, your blood vessels your joints, it'll cause systemic fibrosis, which you don't want at higher doses. Oxalates are absolutely a problem for everyone. But the question is, how many oxalates can you handle now and how many can you handle over time? And the issue is cumulative load. So you might say I ate a bunch of spinach and nothing happened to me. Maybe I felt a little bit of fur on the back of my teeth. That weird rough feeling from the spinach salad. Yeah. Keep doing that and you're going to have a problem in three years or five years or 10 years because you're eating more than the body can get rid of. And should you avoid spinach all the time? No. If you don't have an issue with oxalate, just eat it once a week with some cheese in it. You'll probably be fine. But if you're eating it every day, or even worse, juicing it, juicing concentrates the oxalate so it goes in even faster. And that's just a bad idea. And almonds are not a health food. Almonds are a special treat during Christmas, throughout all of history until very recently. If you're going to do almonds, maybe you should peel them and blanch them the way they used to. It's not that you should avoid all oxalate foods forever. It's that you'll know if you avoid them, what each of them does to you, and you'll just make better choices. So your goal isn't eliminating them all, it's being aware of them and getting your total oxalate intake to under 200 milligrams per day for the average person. If you're not sure what has oxalate in it, you can ask your favorite AI how much oxalates in this and it'll probably be right. Although it does lie sometimes. And understand reducing oxalates really quickly can backfire and it'll cause a temporary flare up. And this is important. If you did zero oxalate for three or four days and you get a ton of symptoms, well, there you go. You probably have an oxalate problem. So it's that counterintuitive thing that makes this tricky. And your body's response is your best feedback. Just pay attention to symptoms as you adjust and use them to guide how you pace oxalate reduction and understand oxalates. They're just one variable. The amount of sleep you have, your hydration level, your stress level, whether you have minerals or not, whether you have movement and just your overall diet are going to matter a lot. There you go. Now you know what you need to know to understand. Oxalate's a thing. You know where to find it. And some of your favorite foods like raspberries and chocolate and sweet potatoes and almonds are the highest oxalate foods. So make the swaps you learned about earlier in this episode. Let me know how you feel. See you next time on the Human Upgrade Podcast.
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The Human Upgrade, formerly Bulletproof Radio, was created and is hosted by Dave Asprey. The information contained in this podcast is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended for the purposes of diagnosing, treating, curing, or preventing any disease. Before using any products referenced on the podcast, consult with your healthcare provider carefully read all labels, and heed all directions and cautions that accompany the products. Information found or received through the podcast should not be used in place of a consultation or advice from a healthcare provider. If you suspect you have a medical problem or should you have any healthcare questions, please promptly call or see your healthcare provider. This podcast, including Dave Asprey and the producers, disclaim responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. Opinions of guests are their own and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. This podcast may contain paid endorsements and advertisements for products or services. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. This podcast is owned by Bulletproof Media.