Episode #51: Interview with Sally Norton

Curious about the secrets hiding in your pantry that could be affecting your health? Tune in to my chat with Sally Norton as we reveal how everyday foods like sweet potatoes and spinach might be causing more harm than good.

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Show Notes:

• Discussion with Sally Norton about the detrimental effects of oxalates on health.

• Sally shares her journey of discovering oxalate-related health issues.

• Topics include symptoms, diagnosis, and dietary adjustments to reduce oxalate intake.

• Practical advice on recognizing oxalate toxicity and implementing lifestyle changes.

• Emphasis on the importance of awareness and education regarding oxalate content in foods.

Key Takeaways:

• Oxalates can contribute to a range of health issues, from gastrointestinal problems to autoimmune conditions.

• Diagnosing oxalate toxicity involves urine testing to detect oxalate levels and crystals.

• Following a low-oxalate diet and utilizing resources like the Toxic Superfood Assessment can help reduce oxalate intake.

• Raising awareness about oxalate toxicity is crucial for improving overall health and well-being.

Transcripts:

Welcome back to Better Than A Pill.  Today, I'm so excited to have Sally Norton on as a guest and Sally is a distinguished expert in dietary oxalates with 35 years of health education and research experience. She holds a nutrition degree from Cornell University and a master's degree in public health from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. 

Her path to becoming a leading expert on dietary oxalate includes a prior career working at prestigious medical schools in medical education and public health research. Sally championed a five year National Institute of Health funded program at the UNC Medical School that educated students and faculty about holistic, alternative, And integrative healing,  her personal healing experience inspired years of research culminating in the release of her groundbreaking book, toxic superfoods, which was released January, 2023, and is available everywhere books are sold.

So Sally, we are so excited to have you here on the better than a pill podcast. So welcome. Thank you. It's lovely to be in a place where something's better than pills. I love it. 

Yeah, I know. I know. I hear you. I'm with you a hundred percent, right? So I am, you know, like I've heard of oxalates. I know a lot of us are listening today, but  I want you just to tell us what they are and why they are so bad. 

It's a natural toxin oxalic acid that forms Uh, crystal compounds called oxalates form things like calcium oxalate, which can become things like kidney stones in the body. And this little molecule is so little that we don't have a way to disarm it, or all we can do is excrete it if we get it into our bodies, and it can cause lots of problems.

It messes up membranes and, and, uh, causes lots of inflammatory problems because it turns on oxidative stress it's causing. A lot of things under the hood. And the sad part is that  we're generally unaware of this toxin. Like the word oxalate just isn't in the vocabulary. So no one has been telling us about it that exists and nobody's been watching how much we're exposed to.

And it turns out that foods that are really popular right now have enough of this oxalic acid and the calcium oxalate crystals that plants make. When they produce this oxalic acid, part of what they want out of it is to build these crystals. And we're eating both crystals and acid in foods we trust.

And it turns out that the amount of it in there is exceeding our capacity for managing it and handling it. And so  three times a day, you could be eating things that are under the hood, eroding your health.  My goodness. And so, well, how do we know, I mean, what are signs that we are doing this or that we're eating too much of these oxalates? 

That's a really good question because oftentimes you can have diseases and there's no signs at all. You could have kidney stones without any symptoms whatsoever. And that's true with many. Many diseases where it shows up are kind of late stage where suddenly you break a bone and you find out you have osteoporosis after the fact, or suddenly you're in the hospital with a heart attack and you didn't know it or hypertension.

There's so many things going on under the hood. The body does such a good job of not telling us. And then of course the signs are things that are so common. You could start getting coughs and hiccups and headaches and, um, frequent urination, having to wake up at night, having trouble sleeping or staying asleep. 

Having cloudy urine, having aches and pains, getting a little swelly and arthritic, getting a little crotchety and depressed. These can all be signs of inflammation that could be triggered by the oxalate consumption that you would never associate with the foods that have them because the foods that have them  are generally considered good for you.

So you'd never blame the good guy, the sort of white hat food, for the black hat processes going on in your body so you can't even connect the symptoms usually.  All right, because we're eating foods that we think are healthy, but they contain oxalates, we don't even know it. So are there foods that we need to be staying away from?

So what, you know, what foods are the highest in oxalates, for example? Yeah, the sort of poster child is spinach and charred.  So what, major  Exactly what, so, yeah, I mean, so I eat a lot of spinach and charred meat. Oh my goodness. Oh no, don't do it.  . It's so high in those foods. Your standard serving of spinach, whether cooked or salad, is gonna be at least 500 milligrams of oxalate.

You're designed to handle about a hundred. 150 a day. So you're exceeding by a big margin how much you really can handle with a load of a spinach salad or a chunk of cooked spinach or a smoothie. The spinach has shown up in the smoothie world now, and in juicing too, and in a smoothie also putting in things like almond milk or almond butter or peanut butter.

These are also high oxalate foods. Some people will throw in kale and chard also in there. Smoothie. That sounds like a culinary disaster to me, but they do that. Beets and beet juice and blackberries,  turmeric. These are things that can land in a smoothie. So a smoothie can start stacking these foods together.

And you go from your standard serving of spinach, whether cooked or raw, that's somewhere over 500, somewhere between eight and 500. And you can be up at a thousand milligrams. Now you're at eight. Or sometimes what you can handle and you're doing this  routinely. Some people adopt a smoothie as a standard breakfast. 

Yeah, you're speaking to the person right here that's doing some of these things and thinking that it's okay. So I want to pick your brain here. So what about kale? Because I put that in a smoothie every day, a handful of kale and I, and I also juice that. Is kale high oxalate? Not really. Okay. Yay. Okay. We got a winner.

Okay. Some kales are higher than others and there's a few fine points there. And it's more than like cabbage and lettuce, which are really low. Like the lettuces are super low oxalate and, and many of the greens like arugula and watercress are very low in oxalate and they're fine. So there's a huge pile of greens.

It's really just three bad ones. The beak, greens, the chard and the, and the spinach and sorrel, which you have to be a gardener to get that. They don't sell that in stores here in the us. So it's like, okay, just simply switch over to something safer, start using lettuce and problem solve. So  now, um, I'm curious, let's just say if, okay, if we want to eat spinach, like, and I'm asking, cause I eat cooked spinach a couple of times a week.

Can we still eat spinach? Are you saying to stop completely? Or what is a serving that would be okay? And how often? Yeah, good question. So for one thing, an abrupt change from a high oxalate food pattern in your diet  to very little is Not necessary and sometimes traumatic, because the body's been working on this defense strategy and has been busy holding on to the excess oxalate that it can't pee out enough.

There's only so many excretion routes, the oxalates come out in, mostly in the urine, and the, the When things are really stressful, the intestinal tract will excrete or secrete deoxylate out of the bloodstream into the intestinal tract and you can lose it that way. It can come out through the skin, it comes out in the saliva, in the, in the tear stuff around the eyes, and probably in the mucus that you're coughing up.

So there's other places, but basically you have to excrete this and  Because it's building up in the body, by the time you're 50 or so, you have pretty much a, about an 85 percent chance of having oxalate crystals in your thyroid gland,  and it's probably in your tendons, central nervous system. Stop.  That's really disturbing, like your thyroid gland, like, hello, this is a master gland of the body.

You shouldn't be having kidney stones in your thyroid gland. So when you switch your diet from having the smoothies and the spinach a few nights a week,  it's a pretty big change because the body's been looking for this little break. Where it can start cleaning up the mess and that is not a really ideal thing to start turning on inflammation to go after the crystals in your thyroid gland, right?

So it's fine to just start cutting back on the portion size and then start replacing the spinach.  Really, if you're going to stay, if you're going to get down to say under 250 milligrams a day, which is the definition of a high oxalate diet. So anything 250 and above is considered a high oxalate diet. So you want to bring it down from.

You're probably eating, if you average it out over the week, and imagine you had other foods like almonds or some other vegetables, or things like quinoa, buckwheat, arrowroot, cassava, chia seeds, blackberry, kiwi, potatoes, sweet potatoes,  and the nuts, and bran, bran is another one to tie. So all of these foods tend to be really piling on to a person's diet who's trying to eat well and organic and holistic and natural.

Yes. Yes! It's like an arctic zoo!  Yeah! Arctic Zoo! Arctic Zoo! If there's a lot of other background foods that have oxalate, you can just dump the spinach immediately because you're probably eating enough oxalate where it's not such an abrupt change that stimulates that inflammation and going after the deposits in the body. 

Okay. So I hear you saying a few things. One, I hear you saying that the worst foods are spinach, chard, like Swiss chard.  And the beet greens,  and so rhubarb is up there in that category, but people don't use it on a daily basis. Yeah, so the rhubarb is so high in oxalate, it can kill you and is known to kill children.

If you were to cook rhubarb leaves as if it were spinach and serve it, you would absolutely not survive it.  I like it. Oh my gosh. Within two days you'd probably be dead, honestly. All right. I'm totally in shock as we're having this conversation today and I know some of our listeners are too. This is like information that I didn't really know and I was so curious about like what this stuff is.

And so now I'm like, okay, so let me ask you, so then I heard you mention things like you're saying almonds and chia seeds and sweet potatoes are also high in oxalate.  Yes. Oh, my goodness. I mean, what's next? I mean, those are in. So like, if we're getting those into our diet.  So what you're saying is like  down first and two hundred and fifty milligrams.

Like we want, we want to stay at that or below that, right? Right. So if we're having like, a serving of almonds and a sweet potato every week, um, I'm just, you know, or a little bit of chia seeds in our flax or whatever in our smoothie, like every day during the week, is that safe? Is that going to keep us under 250? 

Well, so and you mention a few times a week and we're talking about 250 a day, um, it really, it does take a little bit of assessment of what's all in the diet and how it's stacking in your diet. Cause there's things like dark chocolate and tea to also consider.  Yes.  That's why my book is called Toxic superfoods, because we're trusting these and making them daily staples.

It's so interesting because the ability to eat these on a daily basis is a brand new phenomenon. We've invented it with trains and boats and refrigerators and grocery stores and new concepts like just the potato alone. It's really only been in the human diet for 200 years or excuse me, about 400 years in the chocolate world. 

150 years old. It's just we haven't had it as a thing. I mean, wealthy people first found chocolate. Queen Anne was the first person who could have hot chocolate every day. And when was she around the 1600s?  Tea, she's famous for Queen Anne tea sets because she was an early adopter of daily tea.

And she made herself quite sick eating sweetened chocolate and tea every day. She had severe gout. She had many, many miscarriages. None of her children lived to adulthood. And she died obese and in agony in an era when they didn't have vitamins, they didn't know about vitamins. And she was eating these high oxalate foods.

And I think she's a One of the early examples of how adopting foods that haven't been part of the human diet for very long is an experiment that you're making yourself elaborate.  You can actually, okay, first of all, dark chocolate. Let me just say, like, I mean, that's something that I eat because we're told if we want something sweet, that's safe.

Right. And so here I am trying to follow these guidelines and, and. Trying to do the right thing. And what I'm hearing from you is stop. And it's like, whoa. So,  okay. So knowing what I've heard so far, like, how do we test for the level of oxalates in our body? Is there a way to test for this? And how do we know if we have an overload or inflammation due to oxalates? 

Well, that's why we don't know about it, right? Because it's not easy to assess. It's not easy. You don't have what we think of as objective measures that are very reliable. There are urine tests that will test for the level of oxalate in your urine, which, uh, can be helpful because if you get a test that says high oxalate, it's worth believing in.

Okay. Okay. And the problem with the urine testing is that the body, if you're really toxic with oxalate, is more likely to pulse excretion. And so you get lots of fallow moments when you're not excreting any, and you can easily get a false negative test. If you get a low oxalate urine test, it doesn't mean you're not toxic with it.

with oxalate. It probably means that your kidneys are struggling, your body is struggling, and your body's taking a break, and it's in the sequestration mode. While you're heavily exposing yourself to oxalate, you see kind of normal ish oxalate levels in some cases. And then when you stop, The oxalate level goes up in the urine.

So there's lots of factors that will affect how much oxalates in the urine. And that's the only real assessment we have that  has any hope of being used in a clinical setting right now. Because think about a little tiny compound. It's a two carbon molecule. It's really tiny. It's the end product of oxidation. 

And that little molecule is, you know,  it's. has to be kept low in the blood and low in the tissues because it is so damaging. So it's hard to, we've only recently had the skill to pull this little molecule out of a complex fluid like blood or urine and really know how much is there. But then it's forming these nanocrystals.

And now a nanocrystal is like, A tail on a fatty acid. It's really tiny. How are you going to measure that? Diffusely spread in all tissues that have capillaries.  Diffuse spread throughout the body. You can't, unless we get into Star Trek kind of fantasy machinery that can somehow electromagnetically read the compound and the nanocrystals, and then they grow into these microcrystals.

Now, if you're a cadaver or you're a biopsy piece of tissue. If we get that under the microscope within a couple of hours and we properly take care of that specimen and slice it without moving the crystals out and have the right dye and the right polarized light, you can start to see those bigger crystals in the tissue.

And that's why we know that so many of us end up with these crystals in our thyroid gland. Because you can see the tissue. So, yeah, let's circle back to the thyroid gland. So if we have crystals in our thyroid gland, can that show up as things like a goiter? Can that show up as things like Hashimoto's?

Kind of speak to me about this because this is a big area for women right now. It is. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and hypothyroid. And then I went to The doctor at the university here for a standard checkup. And he's like, you've got big lumps in your thyroid gland. Let's do some scans.

And that was while I was eating a sweet potato every day. I adopted sweet potato as my daily starch  years ago when I was at UNC in graduate school, because I started being clear that my body was starting to react to wheat and beans and I was vegan at the time. When I started grad school, I was vegan. So I was relying on these starchy foods.

And I added the sweet potato back and here's an example of the symptoms, like I didn't notice the thyroid thing, but I, at the time during this vegan period, especially my fatigue level was off the charts. I was struggling. I felt like I was 85 with one foot in the grave and I'm in my mid thirties. And then I just didn't get better.

And when I adopted the sweet potato, I started getting it right away and I never put it together. Of course, because sweet potato was my savior. It was low. Allergy food that was going to keep me from having all this reactivity that had been developing, and it was clearer now that I was starting to react to foods like crazy.

This is a sign that you've ruined your gut. You're ruining your immune system with all these crystals and all this toxic load. It starts to really derange the immune system. So here I'm starting to do the healthy, low allergy diet with the sweet potato, and I get these crow's feet. And I'm like 34 years old, and I start getting a knot in the back of my shoulders near the shoulder blades and near the rhomboid muscle that felt like a knife that would come on in the evening, which is at the end of the day of absorbing oxalates all day from your food, because you know food moves from your plate.

to the toilet in like 24 hours. So you have this long period of absorption that peaks at around four hours after the meal. So four hours after breakfast is lunchtime. Then you add four more hours after lunch and dinner. Then you add more. So you've got these successive waves of oxalate building up and at bedtime, four hours after dinner.

you can be at your most toxic state. So sometimes that's when you'll see the onset of the symptoms. So that's when the muscle knot would come on, making it really hard to sleep.  And I didn't know it, but I was probably in the early stage of developing this brain arousal pattern where my brain couldn't stay asleep.

And fast forward many, many years later, After a hysterectomy for a health geek who had endometriosis under, no symptoms. I had asymptomatic endometriosis scarring my colon. Didn't recover from that hysterectomy very well. They had to do a whole frontal cut and the whole thing and hosed me out, lost everything.

They never saw ovaries that were in such tough shape. I'm a health nut and I have been ruining my insides.  So then I didn't recover well from the surgery and I was so disabled. I couldn't work. I couldn't work out. I couldn't read the mail. So the doctor said, you look fine on your test. That's another sign. You look fine in your test.

You kind of look fine on the outside, but generally you don't feel great. And so they sent me to the sleep lab and I learned that my brain was waking up. 29 times an hour. So the brain, the nervous system couldn't stay in a relaxed, proper state. It would keep being exciting. So you get this hyper excitement in the nervous system that can cause all kinds of problems with not just sleep.

It certainly causes mood problems. It can cause problems with anger, motivation, depression, and anxiety. But it can also cause things like muscle knots and tremors. So one of these neurotoxicity symptoms I developed with the daily sweet potatoes was hiccups at bedtime.  So I would have these spastic hiccups and that is the nervous system firing, random firing causing muscle spasms.

So you can get dysmotility and reflux and problems with constipation, diarrhea, you get. You can get fibromyalgia knots because the nerves are causing muscle contractions, which restricts the blood flow, that makes some really nasty little pain spots throughout your body. And that can all be the neurotoxicity aspects of  these foods that we're trusting.

It's really Oh, man.  It's about as evil a novel as you could write.  This is so, I mean, you are on here today for a reason. I mean, this is stuff that I am like, first of all, I'm sitting here listening to you like, okay, sweet potato. I, do you know, I stopped eating potatoes and I entered, I hate sweet potatoes, but I'm forcing myself to eat a sweet potato every week because the natural paths I've seen have told me that's what you want to do.

Okay. So now I'm sitting here thinking, okay, I need to stop that. And people listening, I'm sure can relate because they've been told the same thing. You're also saying stop eating spinach and stop eating Swiss chard. And I was told to start getting, you know, you know, getting more of that into my diet. So now it's like, so basically what you're saying is stop eating those things, eat more healthy greens, kale's okay, but stop the Swiss chard and the spinach and the almonds.

And things like this, because what you just described is, first of all, it's very scary. Second of all, you know, for me, understanding at the level of, I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's myself, listening to you with that diagnosis and multi  goiters that are getting larger that I'm under watch now. Every year I'm sitting here thinking to myself, could this also be a missing link for myself?

And I'm listening to you like I stopped gluten and that cleared up a lot of things. I don't know. So, have you not? Have you ceased eating gluten as well? 100%. Okay. So you, okay. So no gluten. Um,  but then I have a lot of IBS-like symptoms. They can't get to the bottom of, and it sounds like oxalates can contribute to that.

No question about it.  The original diagnosis of dietary oxalate poisoning came out in 1842.  And the way they were, the simple back of the envelope definition was that there were always gut problems. Always some kind of intestinal upset. Sometimes people would show up with what looked like an intestinal obstruction in the clinic.

In the 1840s, rhubarb was a big fad and big deal in England. And so the rhubarb season, the people who could afford to go get fancy rhubarb desserts would get sick. And a lot of these guys were fellow doctors and younger doctors or whatever. And so they knew each other and they could see the change in the mood, the change in the mindset.

The sudden onset of anxiety and neuroses is part of the neural things. And they could see that digestive problems were always associated with the crystals they'd see in the urine because they were big into studying urine, uh, at that time. So they could see that it wasn't affiliated with gut problems, with mood changes and other neurological problems, and also rheumatic problems where people come out with carpal tunnel and shoulder, frozen shoulder and arthritis and gout, and all these kinds of connective tissue inflammation problems. 

I can't believe this. I mean, this is just unreal. This is such important information that we're not told. I had no idea that there was so much going on here. And so now you're also talking about the spasms, which I find fascinating. I just got to ask you, could that include things like, like, um, major calf spasms?

Oh, yes, because this just started to happen to me and I have no idea.  I mean,  to the point where I do body work for a living, I'm doing all the right things and I'm thinking to myself, why am I getting these debilitating calf cramps where I have to kneel and crawl on the floor? Like that's not normal. 

That's exactly the kind of stuff this stuff causes.  That's amazing. We have a problem. So think about this, because your nerve cells and the blood and like the pacemaker, they all need the right amount of electrolytes. So they need the right amount of calcium, for example, in the blood. If calcium is low, the heart starts having arrhythmias.

Because the pacemaker, well, oxalic acid steals the calcium out of your blood and messes up the electrolyte calcium. In a nerve cell, the nerve in order to fire and function and stop firing has to move calcium at nanoseconds, nanosun seconds of movement of calcium ions. Well, if you're stealing minerals from nerves and from the nerve tissues, they start getting off.

That's one of the major toxicity effects. If you mess with electrons, electrolytes and minerals around, in and around cells, their basic function starts being crippled.  Fascinating. And, and this, and this obviously is a, can affect the brain and it's affected your sleep, which you described and  how did you, did you take a urine test?

Is that how you found out? And if we go to the doctor, can people listen today, can we get a urine test? to find this stuff out. Like,  how did you know, how did you find out and all this stuff? You might have to go to multiple doctors because as it turns out, one of the signs of too much oxalate is cloudy urine.

Cause if you're peeing out a lot of oxalate,  it'll start crystallizing as it forms and as it passes through the bladder. And if you get a lot of little crystals in the, in the, uh, urine, it's big enough that the light that's supposed to be going through the liquid of water, you know, urine is mostly water. 

That bounces off crystals and makes it look really cloudy. The other thing that adds to the cloudiness is that when the kidneys are really stressed, they'll start shedding epithelial cells in the bladder, too. In the bladder, things start, you know, in order to protect itself. You get a lot more debris in the urine, too.

But the crystals are a major source of what's called crystal urea, and you can see that in the cloudiness of the urine. So, For years, since I was a teenager, I've been turning in, back in my day, he used to do physicals and he always took a urine test, a sample, at least to look at to make sure there's no diabetes and no Frank problems. 

And no one ever mentioned that cloudy urine, which I had all the time, was a sign of crystal urea, which would be saying of a risk factor for arthritis and autoimmune problems and in health. Metabolic problems, even I have,  I could go on, but you're seeing not every day. It's not fashionable to do urine testing.

Um,  and you just have to hit the right doctor who's willing to run that test for you and know how to do it. Because if the urine vial preservative that's in it doesn't have enough acidity, then it's hard to get an accurate test. So you have to know how to preserve. The urine or look at it instantly  if we, if so, if we ask the doctor specifically, what do we ask for when we ask for a urine test to test, test for oxalate?

Do, do we say we want the, I mean, what's the terminology somebody would use? Yeah, so if you see cloudy urine, tell them you think you've got something with the cloudy urine, it could be oxalate crystals and you'd like to check for crystal urea. And you would like to get an oxalate level test in the urine.

Now they usually do a 24 hour collection, so you get a container and you  start in the morning and you take it till bedtime or to the following morning, and then you turn in the sample. Sometimes you will get a pretty high normal, even if you're expelling a lot of oxalate. So if it's, if it looks just a little high normal, chances are a lot of people are peeing out way too much oxalate.

We're living on even just the basic potatoes, Reese's peanut butter cups, and other chocolate and peanut butter convos that are so popular. And now almond and almond butter is substituting for that to be a little fancier, shishier.  Almond milk, people are giving this to their children. Exactly. Early babies getting sweet potatoes and beets and almond milk is just really scary. 

Wow, that's such an important piece of information because yeah, we can now go to Starbucks and in our, our coffee, we can have, we have the choice of almond milk now thinking that's safer. Right? So a lot of people. Yeah. Or doing that. So wow. But back to the symptoms and the testing, the really the best way for a person to assess themselves is use my symptom and exposure inventory, which is free on my website, Sally K Norton.

And it gives you a list of all the symptoms that tend to show up over time with oxalate poisoning. And it gives you the list of the high oxalate foods. There's also, what are your risk factors? Because if you have a leaky gut. The absorption rate of moving oscillate from your food into your bloodstream goes from a normal of 15% Or 10 percent up to 50 or 60 percent if you have any kind of permeable gut or, you know, once you've got IBS, you know, for sure, you're probably a hyper absorber.

And so even a 250 milligram a day diet, if you're absorbing 50 percent of that, that's equivalent to a diet that's more like this thousand, right? So you have to start really being aware of that if you have. a history of urinary problems or in your family, if you have gut issues, and if you've had a history of taking a lot of NSAIDs and so on, these are things that elevate your, you know, your intolerance to this stuff.

It's, we're all in harm's way when it comes to toxins, but some of us are even more vulnerable to them, like young children and elderly and the stressed and the inflamed and the leaking blood.  Yeah. So, oh, yeah. Yeah. Thank you. In fact, I'm definitely going to be including that link today, everybody listening.

to what Sally just mentioned, her website and the Toxic Superfood Assessment in this episode so that everybody can go to that and also in Toxic Superfoods in the back and the  paper book or the ebook, you get it as a PDF attachment, so you'll also get it there as well. Awesome. It's free on my website, so you can just go to the library and borrow the book if you don't want to buy it.

Awesome. And that's SallyNorton. com. Toxic Superfoods. I like Sally Norton. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. I have that link. Excellent. And the books and the book obviously have more in it as well. So I encourage everybody to take a look at that. I mean, you've done your homework and you've, you've experienced this stuff and come to the conclusion that it was oxalates causing you all these problems through everything you've experienced over time.

So you're living proof that now that you've gotten rid of the oxalates, have you seen improvements? Yes.  In your health.  Yeah, that's what got me going on the research and teaching other people because of this brain arousal problem and I wasn't able to even bother with the mail. I didn't have the mental heft to process my own mail or to work or work out or do anything.

I was really quite disabled with that. So I was on this quest to figure out how to get over the sleep problem and I, um, Stumbled on to the realization that all the arthritis I had been suffering from since I was 12, especially bad in my 20s. I would get this inflammation in various body parts, especially the hands.

They rendered me so weak. I could barely turn the key in the lock. Wow. I'm 20 years old. Wow, Sally. I was like, Oh my gosh. When I finally had this insight that it was Kiwis and celery and sweet potatoes bothering my arthritis, I resentfully really got serious about the low oxy diet for myself, and I was frustrated with that because I thought the sleep problem was from something else.

I didn't know that it had anything to do with the thing that was causing arthritis. Because we compartmentalize things so much. So I went on this thing because I had to, because I can't take the arthritic pain and what that does. Because I was getting all stiff again and all swollen and achy at bedtime. 

And then like within a week or so, I'm reading the mail and feeling perkier and realizing, you know what? I think my brain is sleeping. And I was like,  what? And then  the following summer, I started this at Thanksgiving  and, uh, almost well, it was, it's been 10 and a half years that I've been doing this, 2013. 

And by the following spring or summer, we went to a wedding  and I wore high heels the whole time and felt fine. And I have had. Foot problems since I was 19. Wow. Wow. I was in crutches and wheelchairs all through my 20s and painkillers. I was on loads of ibuprofen. I had to leave Cornell for foot surgery and I never had good feet after that.

I never could run and play or go barefoot. But now I'm wearing high heels. Now I can run barefoot on the pavement.  I'm about to be 60. And my feet finally are happy.  All due to the level of inflammation in your body due to the oxalates. Yeah, because the inflammation creates acidity and that acidity causes, uh, connective tissue and collagen breaks.

So the collagen is that basic part of your connective tissue and you get a lot of acidity with all this inflammation. And so the collagen is not really stable and you get.  Um, changes in the fascia and so on, the acidity causes molecules to shift in the sticky side, you get more adhesions and tightness and weakness.

And so I think what was happening with the foot pain is just the pressure that goes on a foot. Oh yeah. Red and if your connective tissues aren't solid that spreading causes pain And that's why I remained in pain because I was having too much oxalate in the system causing connective tissue problems, right?

bad when you start having  your fascia and everything filling up with oxalate crystals that eventually become other forms of Calcifications in your connective tissue and keeps your fascia and connective tissues inflamed  It makes you miserable and it ends up as autoimmune problems where you've got chronic autoimmune attacking going on in your connective tissue.

Luckily, that's not the case with my feet. My feet recovered quickly, pain free, they peeled and had rashes and all kinds of weird things going on for years and years and  But they,  the function came in. I was like, what? And so that just kept my research going and going. Same, I gave my husband carpal tunnel, feeding him sweet potatoes most days and Swiss chard at least once a week.

And three years after he met me and we started, I started feeding him, he started getting carpal tunnel and it lasted for eight years. And then we changed the diet and it reversed it. And thank goodness, because he was just about to get surgery right when we. started the diet. And then when he finally saw the surgeon, he's like, let's wait on this.

Cause I don't see the need for it now. And then he never did need it. He's fine. He's fine. That's incredible. Yeah. That's no, that's a great example right there. In fact, the book in the book, the book about toxic superfoods, outlines all of this, like everything we need to know. Cause then I heard you throw in celery and I'm like, what?

Celery. Celery has oxalates.  Yeah, lower levels, lower levels, then, you know, leave it around and leave it in your diet for a little while because you don't want to go to zero too fast. Okay. If you work on like, what are your top five of these really tough knotters, then you can just start working down one at a time and start worrying about.

The longer you go, the more you can finesse this, but in the book, there's many different charts of worst offenders and safe bets and numbers and how to swap and what middle foods would be like. And there's many different charts and things trying to guide you through the learning process. It's tricky to learn this.

And that's one, another reason why.  It's unfamiliar because it's too much for doctors to bother to know. It isn't really in our textbooks in the nutrition world. My old textbook had one inch in one chapter and one inch in another chapter mentioning oxalate, rattling off lists of like eight foods and each list doesn't match at all.

This one had eight foods, this one had this.  Right. They haven't really bothered to get it to, there hasn't really been oxalate expertise in modern science and no textbook writers have bothered to really get us any way up to speed about where it even is in the food. So you can have a degree from an Ivy League institution and be so ignorant that you ruin your health in the process.

And that's what I did.  Wow. Well, that's, that's powerful. And you know, one last thing, there's just been so much information here. It's been really valuable. And I've heard you mention acid a few times. And so I have to share, like, so a lot of times when it comes to gut symptoms, one of the things a, uh,  A functional medicine doctor or naturopath might say to you is you have low stomach acid.

So because of this low stomach acid, you need to take a digestive enzyme. So I'm wondering, do you think that the oxalate could be a root cause of the low stomach acid? Right. It absolutely is. Okay. Oxalate is a little ion and one of the ways it moves through the body, like how it gets into the saliva, for example, is that these transporters on cell membranes move ions in and out of cells.

You have to manage your sodium and, and with the, with the production of acid, you're putting  hydrochloric acid, basically you're building hydrochloric acid, moving chloride ions into the stomach. Right. Well, that same transporter, um, can get clogged up with oxalate and it, the oxalate. Interferes with that production of stomach acid.

Okay then, that makes sense. That totally makes sense. I was trying, as you're speaking, trying to put that together. So  if somebody that is listening today, they think that they may be experiencing this like myself, but I'm interviewing you and thinking I'm going to take action, even myself, right? Um, if we begin to make positive changes, we, you know, get the book and kind of read through things, et cetera,  we can, it's not too late, right?

We can make a change and, and save our, save our health, correct? It's amazing. It's amazing how quickly the body jumps to feeling better and helps you feel better. It is a long term problem though, because it creates chronic toxicity because it is in our tissues. I'm in year 11. I can tell I'm still clearing oxalates out of my system.

I have a scab on the back of my Achilles tendon right now. I showed that on Instagram a few days ago, um, how it's still, um, Working its way out, I can tell that the damage in my spine, which includes pits and holes in the vertebral bodies, flattened discs, Wow. Lung spurs, facet arthritis, uh, stenosis, I have every diagnosis you can imagine in my spine.

And so here in year 11, there's still more work to do to rebuild those tissues, hopefully. We'll see. I think the most worrisome part is how we can Restore a happier immune system when it's having to deal in crystals for decades. That's, you will feel better. Many things get better. And we, prevention is better than prevention would be ideal, but we can't prevent it because nobody knows what's happening.

We're not paying attention and lacking awareness. It's a big problem because nowadays, it seems like our exposure level is going up and up and it's going up earlier in life. And so we're expanding the number of people. We're bringing the kind of  illness phase closer into childhood and more and more struggling going on.

Uh, so yeah, well, um, yeah, so this has been informative and it's, I'm also thinking about my kids now too. You know, they eat sweet potatoes twice a week.  You know, it's like we got to stop doing that,  you know, is what you're saying. Winter squash is a good substitute for that.  Yeah. Winter squash. All the cucurbit family, the cucumbers, the squashes and the melons are all very low in oxalate. 

Yeah.  Okay. Well, I just want to thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this valuable information. It's been really informative. I'm so excited that you're learning about this. It just thrills me to death. We may have to do part two next year to see how you're doing. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, absolutely.

Um, everybody remember we do new episodes every week on Wednesday and I look forward to having you join me then.