James Barry talks with a guest about oxalates, a chemical in spinach and other foods. The claim: eating more than 5-8 spinach leaves daily exceeds what your body can handle, and high-oxalate diets may drive arthritis, dementia, bone loss, and other age-related conditions. The question is whether it's the food itself or how much you eat that matters.
I believe that the low oxalate diet is the fountain of youth.
What exactly is an oxalate, and why does the amount we're consuming matter?
Oxalate is a tiny chemical that's all over nature. It's even in polluted air. We use it in industry as a cleaner. We remove all kinds of iron stains, calcium stains. We remove rust from engines and use it in industrial ways.
And so what you're doing when you're eating a lot of oxalic acid is you're losing calcium and minerals like But is the problem that the food contains oxalates, or is the bigger issue how frequently and how much of them people are eating?
It's always dose makes the poison. This is not a sensitivity, not an allergy. In all cases of toxicity— this is a toxicity problem— it's always about dose. What's really about 5 to 8 spinach leaves is your daily capacity for eating oxalate. So anything more than that is exceeding it. I believe that the low oxalate diet is the fountain of youth. A high oxalate diet is likely to be the major contributor to everything you think of as aging. Arthritis, dementia, vision loss, hearing loss, tooth loss, osteoporosis, renal failure, organ failure, vascular problems, all of it. And if you can just stop poisoning yourself on a day-to-day basis and just relieve your body of that toxicity, the aging just kind of just slows way down.
