Are oxalates destroying your health?
If you are eating and living healthy but you still feel awful? Do you still have to deal with fatigue, inflammation, anxiety, and chronic pain? Are the so called superfoods you are eating are making you sick? Are you getting hidden illness from “healthy” keto and paleo foods? The problem could be your spinach, almonds, peanut butter, sweet potatoes, and other trusted “healthy” plant foods. The key to vibrant health may be avoiding these so-called superfoods that are high in oxalate. Yes, it could be the oxalate overload from plant foods that is making you sick. Do you want to try low-oxalate living? If you can relate, this post is for you!
Sally K. Norton Oxalate and Carnivore Diet Story
I have recently interviewed Sally K. Norton, a nutritionist and oxalate expert. Sally is very knowledgeable about health and nutrition, holding a Masters in Public Health from University of North Carolina. She is one of the first few experts who identified the health problems one faces from eating seemingly healthy foods that contain high quantity of oxalates. Sally is best selling author of ” Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick–and How to Get Better.” She is an expert that has studied this topic extensively and wrote this book after struggling for years with her mystery symptoms. This book will help you select nutritious, low-oxalate foods, build more energy and heal fast. Get her e-book here. Get the kindle version here.
She has helped guide others to make mindful eating choices throughout her career but she herself suffered lifelong from a significant number of illnesses. She later discovered that the her persistent health issues came from eating high- oxalate foods. She cut down the oxalate content, and introduced a carnivore diet into her eating too, which gradually eased her health problems. Since then she has been committed to helping others overcome their issues and subscribing to healthier eating habits.
Today she is going to be telling us about her story and her research into the lesser-known topic of oxalates in this interview. This was a really important talk and I think we all have to stay open all the time in nutrition or else we are just going to stop learning and be closed off and might be hurting ourselves.
Oxalates and Carnivore Diet: Sally K. Norton’s story of Healing Oxalate Poisoning
Watch the complete interview with Sally K. Norton where we talk about oxalate poisoning, problems with oxalates from plant foods, and how a low-oxalate diet and introducing carnivore diet to her eating helped her battle her many illnesses and stay healthy. She explains how she identified oxalates in her diet and shares insights about eating it in moderate quantities that can also be healthy.
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How did you start off and end up here?
I had decided in 7th grade that I would study nutrition and help people stay healthy. I stayed committed and had healthy foods. Despite that, I suffered through three decades of pain and health challenges. I was told I had muscle problems, arthritis, pre- lupus, chronic foot, joint, muscle, and back pain; sinus infections; irritable bowel syndrome; thyroid problems; reproductive problems; and bleeding problems leading to iron deficiency. I became highly allergic generally and sensitive to chemicals. Until my doctor sent me to a sleep lab, I didn’t even know that my brain was waking up 29 times an hour every night.
It took research and experimentation for me to realize that oxalate was the toxin that was waking up my brain, making it impossible to read or function, and it was slowly disabling me. Nowhere in my education could I have realized that oxalate could be doing things like this. Since then, I have been on a journey of educating myself and it has been a discovery. It was a revelation when I realized that it was oxalates contributing to me having bad sleep, joint pain, and all of the health issues.
Is it true that you were working in nutrition when you first got sick? Can you tell us about that time?
I have been in public health my whole career. I used to work in Cleveland teaching health promotion. At the time I was a vegetarian, teaching everyone about vegetarianism. I was very vocal about it, I was vegetarian for about eight years and then vegan for an additional eight. And it was all during this horrible time of sickness, where I wasn’t smart enough to put it together that I was eating foods that had harmful compound. That was slowing my brain down to a point that my body struggled to function. We have been convinced as a society for about 400 years that it is more noble to eat plants than it is to eat animal flesh. We are so convinced of that that we are blinded to what is in front of us. I was doing so bad with my diet, and even as a nutritionist it took me ages to figure out that it was the diet. There is little literature out there on oxalates. Most people dismiss it as calcium because we often see very abundantly the calcium oxalate form of oxalates. And I realized I was having a bad reaction to soy and legumes, so that is what brought me back to meat and elements from the carnivore diet. My health became so much better afterward.
So if somebody has the kind of health problems as you mentioned, what kind of food should they eat and what should they avoid?
What you should eat really depends on your own situation, such as what you’re allergic to and what your body demands, that’s a personalized discussion. But human beings as a group are meant to be hunters. Animal products and fats are very central to getting enough fat soluble vitamins, absorbable proteins and minerals which are easily absorbable in meats and can be used by the body; versus vitamins and minerals in plants are bound up with fibers and other chemicals and are very hard for the body to extract and use as a nutritional component. The bioavailability of plant nutrients is very weak. But sadly it is an area where nutrition has been pretty quiet because it doesn’t want to discourage people from having a plant-based diet.
So can you tell us a little more about oxalates and the effects they have on our body?
It is only very recently that we started to research about other compounds in food. The story here is that we’re eating foods that are full of a toxin called oxalate. We don’t realize how this chemical is affecting our physiology. Oxalate is a natural chemical that plants make from Vitamin C. Even we make it in the process of our metabolism. The vitamin C in your own body is a major source of oxalate. Your own body ends up discarding oxalate as a byproduct when it is metabolizing vitamin C, hydroxyproline and glycine that are amino acids born from collagen, connective tissue and gelatin. All these can become oxalates. There is always a baseline amount of oxalate that your body should make metabolically. But then when you eat a whole ton of it from foods, you absorb more of it and really overload your body’s capacity for handling the extra oxalate and then body ends up bio-accumulating in the tissues of your body and that’s what lands you in trouble. Unfortunately, in our parlance in medicine, we think of oxalate as calcium. We just generalize to calcium because calcium oxalate is the one form we observe the most.
How do oxalates function inside the body that causes these health problems?
The plants that we are eating have these oxalate crystals. The big ones just cause abrasion. They are very small, but at a cellular level they are quite big and abrasive. They cause mechanical damage. These soluble oxalates are the ones that easily — because they’re so tiny — pass through in between cells. Just with passive transport, we end up absorbing oxalates. The amount we absorb depends on a lot of factors, especially the health of our digestive tract.
Those of us with any inflammation in the digestive tract are more prone to absorbing more of that soluble calcium oxalate. But you see, soluble oxalate is not content being potassium oxalate. It would much rather be calcium oxalate, iron oxalate or magnesium oxalate. Right away, it starts grabbing minerals. It starts messing with mineral metabolism. It even can create bouts of acidosis.
Oxalates damage enzymes and their function goes way down. They also have direct damaging effects on mitochondria that can be very long-lasting where your ability to go to zero carb becomes almost permanently damaged. There is no research on the prevalence of this because there’s just not a wide understanding of how this is going on yet in science. But I can tell when I switched from vegan to carnivore I realized how sugar addicted I was and it took me three years of struggle to get over this extreme feeling of being sugar addicted and live on a high-fat diet. I still and many of my clients still have to add back some carbs every now.
Watch the complete interview with Sally K. Norton for more details and insights on her lifelong story of illness, research and realization about oxalates and carnivore diet below. She describes the foods which are high in oxalates and which are low. She explains if a low oxalate diet is enough to heal people and what are symptoms of oxalate dumping, what should people do if it is too intense and why or why not full carnivore right away. Get her e-book about how oxalate overload is making you sick and how to get better here.
Read my carnivore diet success story here.
The best way to eliminate oxalates is with a carnivore diet, it is also the most simple plan to follow. just spend 30 days on it and be amazed at the changes in your health. get started here.
Get my carnivore diet ebook to get started the right way on the carnivore diet (buy now)