Toxic Superfoods: Are Chocolate, Spinach and Almonds Making You Sick? | Sally K. Norton

A high oxalate diet is likely to be the major contributor to everything you think of as aging: arthritis, dementia, vision loss, osteoporosis. 5 to 8 spinach leaves is your daily capacity. I believe that the low oxalate diet is the fountain of youth.

What if some of the foods you're deliberately eating because you've been told they're healthy are actually contributing to the health issues you can't seem to shake? Welcome back to Everyday Ancestral. My guest today, Sally Norton, is shining a light on what she believes is a major blind Sally has a degree in nutrition from Cornell, a Master of Public Health, and is the author of Toxic Superfoods. Sally, let's start with your own experience. What were you eating because you believed it was healthy, and what started happening that made you question these foods?

I was the one kid who would eat her vegetables. I'm the middle of 5 children, and I loved my vegetables from the start. And I love main dishes and savory foods so much that I would be done and skip the ice cream and run out and play. Like, I've always been a veggie kid.

You'd skip the ice cream?

Oh yeah. Like, I'm good. I want 3 servings of the main dish and plenty of vegetables. I'm like, ah, no, I gotta go play now. Bye. I was learning gardening at age 9. I had my own garden plot and my mom's like, grow Swiss chard. It's so much better than spinach. It's a cut-and-come vegetable. And we grew up doing beets with little baby beets on them. My dad is like, yeah, you put Put vinegar on them. It's so great. So my parents were quite big on having vegetables with dinner and I grew up with that. And then I got really into health because I was sick on that healthy diet as a kid. I was already sick. I was having strep. They were spooning penicillin in my mouth and, oh, that is disgusting. And by the age 5, I had my tonsils taken out and I hated that. That was awful. This is not the life I want to live. I want to go swimming. I don't want swimmer's ear. I want to go have fun. And so it was just part of my consciousness that I wanted to not be sick. And I figured out around age 12 or 13 that nutrition was the biggest piece of that. So I have been on this path of healthy eating. So I've been doing it all. We had rhubarb crisps made in the backyard, rhubarb and freshly made cherry things out of the cherry tree and applesauce. And we had all this scratch cooking growing up. I believed in that. My health was terrible. I started having problems at age 12. With arthritis. My grandmother called it growing pains. Neurological issues. In high school, I was really struggling to focus on reading and learning, which wasn't so good for a kid trying to do honors classes. And then in college, my foot went bad, my left foot, and then it became both feet and I had to drop out of college to go get foot surgery. My feet never really recovered from that until I was, uh, 49 years old and really got into this thing about, oh, oh, my sweet potatoes, my Swiss chard are trouble, my kiwis. Like, this was a revelation to me despite my nutrition background. So yeah, I, I just went into like veggie-centric eating and whole foods eating, all the stuff we're supposed to do, the heroic non-processed life. That was me. I got sick on it.

So when did you make the connection to those foods? I mean, this was so young that you got sick, and then you only learned about nutrition when you were much older. So how did you make those connections?

Well, now, once you've recognized the problem late in life, you go back and you look at that story, and you can see how that story unfolded, but you don't see it at the time. When, when I really was starting to go extra fast downhill, was right when I started graduate school, when I got off the vegan diet. And I did that because I was now clearly getting fatigue reactions and really sick reactions and skin reactions to wheat, bread, and beans. So I couldn't eat wheat and beans. And as a vegan, you cannot, there's not much left to live.

Not much left, yeah.

So I started eating sweet potatoes instead of bread and Chicken and turkey instead of, you know, tofu. I was living on tofu. And at that time, I quickly developed severe pain at night that would usually hit the rhomboid muscle near the shoulder blade in the back like a knife. I started getting little brown dots everywhere that the dermatologist called aging spots. And I'm like 34 at the time, like, oh, that's not good news. I got this cyst on my head. That's why I was at the dermatologist. I had to have take it off because I couldn't really style my hair because it was really bothering me. And now I realize that was all a response to the sweet potato. I had gone from bad to worse, starting to make sweet potato a staple and brown rice because I wasn't eating the whole wheat bread. All of those things are high in oxalic acid, but I knew that oxalate mattered for kidney stone patients and kidney patients generally. That's what we use it for in dietetics. the low oxalate diet. So, like, I've never had a kidney problem except that I'm always turning in cloudy urine. Every time I did an annual exam and they asked for a urine sample, I would turn in a little cup of something that looked like somebody poured a little cream in there because it was kind of white and cloudy.

And, is that a sign of high oxalates?

It is.

Interesting.

It's a sign of crystals in the urine that the light is bouncing off little microscopic Invisible to you, but light photons are bouncing around and gives it a cloudy appearance. And I put out cloudy urine almost all the time for many, many decades. And for about 8 years after I changed my diet, because that same Swiss chard and sweet potatoes and bran and things I was eating has caused deposits accumulation of this stuff in my body. And so even after I stopped eating it, I still had oxalate poisoning problem. And that is one of the big issues here.

But so many people would be eating the way you were, having ailments or symptoms, but they wouldn't necessarily connect it to oxalates. What was it that made you connect it to oxalates?

Thank God for Joanne of the Vulvar Pain Foundation and her little website. Because when I had an attack in 2009 for about 2 days of severe vulvar pain, which is like so bad, I literally, in my house, I said out loud, somebody cut these off because I don't need genitals anymore. And my husband panicked and did a Google search and found the Vulvar Pain Foundation. And I'm like, what? That's a kidney stone thing. And they're saying it's like there's this thing called like a connective tissue disorder, which I really hadn't learned about in school and public health and that people with the pelvic pain syndromes, both men and women that affect the genitalia and beyond, do really well when they get the oxalates out of their diet. And she could explain it in her layperson's way, but it didn't satisfy my highly logical, sciencey way of understanding because I'm like a nutrition person and a holistic healing person and an academic public health professional. So I needed a different explanation. But I tried it out of desperation, but my vulva pain went away and I thought, well, you know, I'm done with that and I don't have that problem. So I don't really need that diet. And by the way, when I eat sweet potatoes again, it doesn't really bother me. So that's not it. Then I was still having all these other problems. I have these many layers of health problems. My feet are not great for years. My digestion is terrible. I have arthritis and pain syndromes and chemical sensitivity and masseter pain and tend to grind at night and have losing my night vision and just all kinds of issues. Then I'm like, well, I needed a hysterectomy. I had to leave my job writing research grants.

What age are you at this point?

At this point I was 48. No, 48. It was 2010 when I had my hysterectomy. I had to leave my job. And they got in there, they found endometriosis. I didn't know I had it. Loose blood in the pelvis, scarring on the colon from the endometriosis. The ovaries were trash, everything left. I had to lose all of it. And afterwards, I really was just as worse as ever in terms of my mental fatigue, really having a serious time focusing and concentrating. And I was pretty much just kind of in a daze on the couch. I'm going to an endocrinologist because I don't have ovaries. So I get like, you got to fix me up so I feel better after the surgery. And he's like, you look fine. Your tests are good. You look beautiful. I'm going to send you to my sleep doctor friend. And the sleep lab experience where they wire you up and watch how your brain is doing and your legs and arms are moving around found that my brain was waking up 29 times every hour in the 5 or 6 hours that I was supposedly asleep. I was really mostly up the whole time and too tired to know. I never knew that I was getting no sleep until that sleep study. So now there became this emergency of why, how, you know, the sleep doctors are giving me, trying different drugs which do nothing. And the only diet I hadn't tried is the kiwi diet, which has a lot of oxalate crystals in it, which I didn't know the kiwi, and it forces, it forces like, uh, you know, bowel movements. So it's for someone like me who's constipated and looks like she has SIBO, I thought, well, this must be SIBO causing endotoxemia, which is the only explanation in the literature. When you can't sleep, that's a toxic brain. And the main thing that they've, that I could find in the medical literature was endotoxemia. So it had to be dysbiosis and SIBO. So I'm doing the Kiwi diet and boy, that was not good. Because within about 6 weeks, I went to my first ancestral health conference that year. That was 2013. I was getting more and more stiff and having trouble sleeping again and just not feeling good. It wasn't helping with the sleep at all. In fact, it was the worst. Getting worse. So about 6 weeks on eating a couple kiwi every day, I was becoming like 80 years old in yoga class. I couldn't do my poses, which I've been doing for years. My arthritis was coming back. The kiwi experiment happened after my oxalate consciousness came on. See, Joanne at the Vulvar Pain Foundation has done us a great service of having foods tested for oxalate content, which nutrition science hasn't bothered to do. They don't have good tables. The dietitians do not have good tables that come from themselves. If they do, it's a big hidden secret, and those of us who used to look up food data in government tables don't have access to it. Putting oxalates back into my diet brought back all my lifetime problems, and it made me much worse.

So this was a big revelation that my longtime arthritis, which started when I was 12, For the person who's hearing this for the first time, can you share 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. It's in the soil. Plants make it. It starts as oxalic acid, which is this ionic acid. It's only 2 carbons. It has 4 oxygens on it, very heavy oxygen. It almost looks like 2 carbon dioxide molecules. Uber tiny, can get anywhere. It has a negative charge and then drops one of them, one of the protons that has a double negative charge, which makes it a great scale remover. We use it in industry as a cleaner. We remove all kinds of iron stains, calcium stains, and mineral stains that hold stains in wood, leather. We remove rust from engines and use it in industrial ways on fabric. And it's amazing. You can really clean all the rust spots off your patio with oxalic acid, and you can buy an oxalic acid cleaner to clean your deck. And so on, because it's a great stripper of scale. And so what you're doing when you're eating a lot of oxalic acid is you're losing calcium and minerals like magnesium and iron.

Which is thus the arthritic pain, joint pains, all that. That's fascinating. So, 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. And it turns out that the science suggests that the human kidneys and the body, because the kidneys is the main way the body tries to remove this after it gets into your system, is the equivalent of about, I would say, A quarter or a fifth of a spinach salad, what's really about 5 to 8 spinach leaves, is your daily capacity for eating oxalate. So, anything more than that is exceeding it.

Yeah, anyone that's not only eating meat basically is exceeding it daily.

Pretty easily.

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Do you think it's— this modern wellness culture is really emphasizing, you know, spinach in smoothies and cruciferous vegetables and all these Things that we, we, we label as healthy, but in many ways what you're sharing is like, that's not, it's not as clear cut. It's, it's not black and white. There's a lot of more subtlety to it.

Right. Well, there's a lot of blindness to it. We've, we've been studying oxalic acid since the late 1700s. We were studying poisoning by oxalic acid in the early 1800s. There was a lot of accidental deaths and great concern that this would be easily used as a murder weapon. And so there was early studies done. One of the first real experimental study on the toxicity of oxalate was published in 1823.

Oh, so it's been around a while.

It's been around a long time. And that's the sad part. That's what's really maddening, honestly, because by the 1840s, we had a diagnosis that you could do this dietarily to yourself because in the UK, there was a great fad for rhubarb. They were forcing rhubarb in greenhouses using horse poop so you could have rhubarb in time for Christmas. And people who could afford Treats, were particularly interested in them during the holidays. And some people would get very sick, and they were usually the fellow doctors, like intellectuals, friends, they knew each other, who would come into each other as patients and be super sick. And they would see huge changes in personality, see this neurosis behavior, this anxiety, this anticipation of doom, and intestinal obstruction and pains and things like this. And so they— knew there was a dietary poisoning condition from oxalates and gave it a name. And it was a known thing until about the time blood tests became standard about 100 years later.

In the—

around the 1940s, we started saying, eh, we don't care what the patient has to say. We only care what their blood has to say. And that conveniently helped us relegate it just to kidney stones. And since about the 1950s and '60s, Most of the funding looking at oxalic acids and oxalates' problem in our health is strictly kidney stone research.

If somebody wanted to do the oxalate audit that you recommend, what exactly should they look for in a normal day of eating?

Things that you might be overeating that can contribute to long-term health problems are the nuts, like almonds, cashews, and peanuts being the primary ones. The top greens are really just 3 or 4 greens, and that is Swiss chard, beet greens, spinach, and sorrel. Sorrel is not a common one, but the others are very common and overused, and even in baby foods. There's things like the pseudo grains, like quinoa and teff, chia seeds and hemp seeds, sweet potatoes, my personal hero, beets, and then, you know, blackberries. The fruits aren't too bad. Plantains are not great. And bran is another problem.

What foods tend to surprise people the most when they realize how much oxalate they're getting?

Uh, definitely the spinach and chard and the almonds.

What about chocolate? Isn't chocolate high in oxalate?

Oh, chocolate. Yes. Chocolate and chocolate. You know, I hate to talk people out of this fantasy, but we are being told chocolate is medicine and it's so great. Chocolate is loaded with cadmium, lead, theobromide, and oxalate. And those people who get off of it for the sake of their oxalate problems and their health, when they go back to it, they're like, this stuff is kind of waxy and bitter. But we're in this mentality right now that chocolate is the bomb because it's supposed to be so healthy. And that's true with every— like, I thought my sweet potatoes were so good for me. They were so hypoallergenic and I was becoming so allergic to things. And, you know, so they had to be the a safe food because it doesn't cause allergies. This ignorance about the fact that oxalic acid is fundamentally poisonous to us and it's easy to overdo it has us just completely oblivious to the possibility. So it's a miracle that I could put it together, that oxalate was the basis of a lifetime of health problems. And it's also a miracle that the body recovers from it. I can now run barefoot. I spent 30 years not being able to go barefoot at all, not even for 10 minutes at the kitchen sink. And now I can. I can run on harsh pavement with no problems at all. And I'm almost 63. 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, maybe even cancer. 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.

Did you find that you also kind of de-aged?

Well, in my 20s and 30s, I felt like I was 80. I had bad arthritis. I was achy, fatigued, having trouble doing things, getting things done. It was hard. I taught yoga to 80-something-year-olds in a fancy retirement community because They were my peeps. I was, I could relate to that. Now, I'm in my early 60s. If someone asked me, if I didn't know my age, I'd probably guess I was like 43, not 80. You know, I'm still, you know, getting the look of an 80-year-old. I'm still getting gray, but I don't feel like I'm aging anymore at all.

Yeah.

And that's important. How we feel is really important.

So it's more than how we feel though. Let me just mention this. I had osteopenia at 48 years old. I now have such hard bones that very hard fall on ice in December did nothing. No contusions, no bruises, no bone problems whatsoever. And anyone else who took those, that fall at age 62, like I did, would have broken something. And I didn't.

But millions of people are, obviously they're eating spinach, almonds, sweet potatoes, chocolate without Obvious problems. So why are some people able to handle these foods while others like yourself may struggle? Or is everyone struggling?

Well, I think a little of both. I think some people tolerate it better longer. And my guess, based on my observations with my clients, is that if you had heavy exposure in utero and you had antibiotics as a baby and had early exposure to high oxalate foods, you're more likely to get really sick on it. than if you just like started off as a kid who ate Skittles and peanut butter occasionally, and then, you know, started developing the potato habit later or whatever. So I think some of it is like the timing of the exposure as well as the intensity or the amount of it. Leaky gut is a big issue. So if something, if you do something that messes with your gut, it might be a drug constant. I was put on a lot of NSAIDs, but I think it was too late by then. I was For my foot problem, for 5 years, I was on 3,600 milligrams of ibuprofen. That did not help.

No, that destroys your gut, right?

Yeah. And with oxalate, you go from about a 10 to 15% absorption rate when you're kind of healthy to a 50 to 60% absorption rate with leaky gut. So you end up 5 timesing at least how much oxalate's in your bloodstream and your kidneys and your tissues are dealing with. When you have an inflamed gut and that vegetarian diet, I was eating too many beans, not cooked properly, really set me up for like super poison. So there's that. So there's lots of those factors. And then there's some genetic factors and other things we haven't fully identified with how well we excrete oxalate or how well we sequester it. I think some people can hold it in their tissues in ways and keep it quieter. 'Cause their immune system is like, yeah, we don't need to bother with those crystals forming in that shoulder joint or that neck or in that jaw or in those teeth. We'll just leave 'em alone so there won't be any symptoms. So you can build up a toxic debt in your thyroid gland, in your pancreas, in your brain, and maybe not have all the arthritis and the fatigue and the things I was struggling with right away. But if you go and like, okay, I'm gonna turn 60, I'm gonna get really healthy, I'm gonna start eating keto and lose some weight and add some spinach salads, you do that, you could suddenly go from pretty awesome to trying to get awesomer to suddenly really sick.

Hmm. You've shared some of the symptoms, but what symptoms should someone kind of be aware of that are potentially being caused by the oxalates they're eating?

If you have bladder symptoms, like you're getting up at night to pee more than once, if you're running to the bathroom too much, if you have a lot of urine in the morning or just like peeing tiny amounts and like, why am I gonna pee? Migraines, headaches, Anxiety, depression, mood swings, lack of enthusiasm for things, kind of flat affect, nightmares, any kind of digestive problems like heartburn, bloating, IBS-C, kind of diarrhea, constipation cycles, reflux. Of course, kidney stones are a classic one, and arthritis and aches and pains, random aches and pains.

But a lot of these symptoms are tied to other things. Like, I mean, many of the ones you just mentioned are tied to mold exposure or to even Lyme sometimes, right? So is it, is the philosophy more like, okay, yes, there could be another outlying issue, but oxalates is just a good default to just start removing from your diet when you're showing these symptoms?

Well, there are like foundational core causative issues. And toxicity and deficiency are the 2 big core foundational issues that degenerate our health. Oxalate is a toxin that causes deficiency. Those infections are just secondary to a system that is too malnourished or toxic to prevent infection. So in the case of oxalate, oxalate messes up your immune cell function right after a meal. Within an hour of eating your spinach, your immune cells can no longer fight infection. So a lot of people with oxalate toxicity end up with chronic infections. I used to have a sinus infection every year, right around New Year's Eve. Every New Year's Eve was ruined for, from age 17 to 49. Once I started this diet, I no longer have those. I used to get yeast infections when I was a younger woman, never get those. I've only had one bladder infection in my life. That was when I was eating high oxalate foods. So, you know, this is a big, um, issue now in holistic health and healing where everybody's supposedly got, you know, parasites and mold and Lyme and all this. And I'm saying you've got some foundational thing that allowed those diseases to get into your system and stay there and your system wasn't strong enough to fight them. And this is probably it.

Interesting. Is there a test that Can tell people if they're high in oxalates?

Wouldn't that be nice? But that's why we don't know about it. Like we only treat what we can test.

Yeah.

So, like with joint pain, we say gout is uric acid because we have a drug for that. That's the other thing we're willing to test for and treat is because we have a remedy we can sell you. So if we can sell you the remedy and we can test for it, then we've got this case and we've got a real business model. There's no business model with oxalate. That's why I'm the only one talking about it because I'm willing to live on fear. And no one else is.

Well, if anything, it's a negative business model, right? Because you're telling people don't eat the spinach, don't buy these things. And so those industries are like, ah, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I luckily I haven't needed a bulletproof vest because the spinach mafia has not mowed me down yet. But if if coffee had been high in oxalate, I'd probably be dead already just from the random coffee drinker.

Sally, I know you're I know you're somewhat joking, but actually, so I know someone that was in the mushroom. business, and there was a mushroom mafia. Like, they got closed down because they were doing so well that they were impeding on the bigger giant, and that they actually got kind of like, you know, hit on the hand by this giant. And so I'm like, if it exists in the mushroom business, it's gotta exist in all the other industries.

Yeah, there's actually a whole commodity trading on spinach seeds.

Wow.

Yeah, you can buy and sell spinach seeds and make money on that.

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Let's talk about the whole oxalate dumping. So, like, so someone's hearing this, they're like, okay, I want to start cutting out these high oxalate foods, but there is something called oxalate dumping where people may feel worse after lowering oxalates. So, what's going on there?

Yeah, this is another thing that science hasn't bothered to notice because science hasn't bothered to study what does happen to you if you've been on a high oxalate diet for a long time or been in one of these intense diets that's really poisoning you fast and then you suddenly stop doing it because they really have never been able to teach a patient how to truly do a low oxalate diet. So when you have kidney stones and they finally get around to testing you for oxalates and they finally say, you know, probably you should stop with the chocolate and the spinach and the Cut back on your potatoes. They're not giving them a complete list, and they're not really teaching them how to get under, say, 80 or 60 milligrams of oxalate a day, so that they don't really see it. And of course, in the way we practice medicine now is just blood tests, not the patient saying, "Hey, my urine is burning, and I've just pooped out crystals, and I have crystals coming out of my beard and out of my temple and in my head." The doctor's not listening to that, but that's what we're experiencing in this community, which is tens of thousands of people who have come to this, started this diet, and done it correctly because we're able to offer good data that's pretty fairly complete. Like, I have a whole data companion to help people really get that, but there's plenty in this book to have you do it correctly. And when you finally stop adding oxalic acid to your bloodstream after every meal, day in, day out, The body's like, oh, look, yay, we can clean up the kidneys. And you can start removing calcium oxalate deposits from the kidneys, whether it's nephrocalcinosis or kidney stones. We help with that with some calcium and lemon juice. And then you can start removing it from your teeth and jaw and your, maybe your thyroid gland, maybe, and your joints and tissues. And what we see is people peeing out massive amounts of cloudy urine, saving it in a jar. I just talked to Dr. Peter Martin and he was showing me that this sediment in this woman's urine, he went, had it tested at the lab and confirmed that it's calcium oxalate crystals coming out in massive amounts. But we see it out of other orifices as well, including the skin. And this is pretty dangerous stuff because if you're taking oxalic acid crystals from tissues, trying to burn them down back into oxalic acid, that's a lot of inflammation work. Has potential symptoms associated with it. Put oxalic acid back in the bloodstream, you're messing around with your calcium ion level in your blood, potentially creating hypocalcemia, which can create arrhythmias, severe hypertension, and it looks like you're having a heart attack or a stroke and you end up in the hospital with electrolyte problems. It only lasts a couple hours. By the time you've gotten to see the doctor, things are settling down and they give you some saline and send you on your way. But it's pretty scary that you could be Repoisoning yourself from the inside. So it's very important to manage that. But if you start on a meat-based diet that gets rid of plant foods, you've eliminated all your oxalates because all the oxalates are in the plants. And now you're doing this experiment on yourself. You went from probably a high oxalate diet to practically zero. At some point, maybe not right away, some people start feeling sick right away. At some point, you may start to see the cloudy urine, Bad sleep, getting up at night, having to run to the bathroom, getting aches and pains, getting mood changes. These are— can all be signs of this oxalate clearing that can get so extreme it gets into like we call a dump. It's just like coming out.

So let's just say you go, the pendulum goes the other way. Now you're just going carnivore. You're just eating animal protein. Can't that then also produce its own problems as well down the road? Don't you work with a lot of Clients who have, who have had issues from being on those diets too long?

At some point, there is this oxalate clearing problem, which creates more electrolyte problems. And the meat-only diet and the ketoness of that can create electrolyte stress. And the high oxalate diet we've been on in the past has caused us to be deficient in minerals generally. And then the dumping creates more loss of potassium. And more need for sodium to protect your kidneys, believe it or not, potassium, calcium like crazy. And the carnivore diet does not address that, the need for the extra calcium and so on enough. And also, in my group of people who come to me, many of them are severely in trouble with too little carbohydrates. And they're really struggling with that. And I think the no carbohydrate sometimes suppresses that oxalate clearing response, that the body's energy level is so low. That some people stay on carnivore for a long time and don't experience the oxalate dumping, and I think that's the lack of calcium and the lack of carbohydrates. And sometimes we add in the calcium, which is much needed, and the carbohydrates, and you get more of the oxalate clearing, which is just a sign the body's getting the nutrients it needs. So oftentimes I have to teach folks who are not doing well on a full carnivore diet how to carefully. regain their glycemic sensibilities because you really create kind of an insulin-resistant kind of problem with carbs when you don't eat them for— it just takes for some of us 6 weeks and suddenly we're less tolerant to carbs because our system isn't used to handling them anymore. So it takes about 6 months to correct that glycemic inability to— we really are meant to be able to handle all the kinds of foods, all the macronutrients, and be well, keep even blood sugar, but that is not the case for a lot of people who've been on the carnivore diet.

Well, and so much of the diet culture these days is really emphasizing such extremities, right? So in many ways, I don't think we as humans are designed for such isolated diets. You know, we're omnivores, we're opportunistic, you know, like whatever was food we would, we would find and try to, you know, get calories from. So I don't think we were ever like, oh, I'm gonna only eat the ribeye off this cow or whatever we killed because I don't eat the other parts. Or, you know what I mean? Like, we, we are way more opportunistic about that. And, and honestly, I don't want someone hearing this episode to go home tonight and just throw away everything in their kitchen, right? So what, what's the, let's first identify before we go into a lot of the solutions. What's the biggest mistake people make after first learning about oxalates?

Usually this abrupt elimination of oxalates. Oh, I just— actually, reading my book is a great entry to the carnivore diet. Many people have said, because of your book, I just went carnivore because I didn't want to bother with learning which vegetables are okay. Because it's very confusing in the beginning, like, oh, can I have carrots or not? Because carrots are kind of like small portions, fine, just don't live on them and juice them all the time. You know, like there's a lot of Gray areas, a lot of things to learn, and that is just so annoying. We just want a real simple black and white story. Sugar's bad, meat's good. That's a good enough story for me. Like, it's not like that. Vegetables are bad, meat's good, vice versa. Meat's bad, but like, we love that. So the tendency is, well, I'll just go on a carnivore diet, which is okay. It's a nice elimination diet if you have a lot of food sensitivities. It can be Quite useful. I kind of like it, but it's too abrupt if you've been on a high oxalate diet to eliminate all that keto muffins and almond pancakes and sweet potato this smothered in chocolate and spinach this and that. It's just like these smoothies that are loaded with all these high oxalate ingredients, including turmeric. Like you're going to throw in all the kitchen sink of high oxalate food. You'd be better off like just. Cutting that down to a quarter of a smoothie for a while and then figuring out how else to eat a real breakfast again, because smoothies have become this kind of sippy cup life. I'll make something I can grab and go run out and do stuff in the car or whatever, go to work. So it might be like, how do I reconstruct a real breakfast again? So there's— it's this nice process that you can take months doing. So that more gradual implementation. is easier to think through. You don't have to learn it all now and ultimately easier to sustain and probably a lot easier on your body as well.

So if someone were to not go full carnivore, but to kind of ease in, really kind of how you recommend, which is just swapping out, right? High oxalate foods with lower. So what would be a swap for common foods? Like let's say spinach. What's a good swap for spinach?

All the lettuces are great. Romaine, leaf lettuce, and then there's watercress and arugula. Um, yeah, the majority of the green leafies are fine. It's really just 3 bad ones. So, you know, just, and now the grocery store does give you the option. If you like those pre-done salad mixes or whatever, you can get a romaine-based salad mix pretty easily.

Yes. Surprisingly though, a lot of them have spinach, which is fascinating. They really do. Like it won't say anything. It will make it sound like it's salad greens, but then you'll in there and it's all baby spinach, you know, mixed in. I don't know if that's because it's cheaper. I don't know. Or maybe it's a little more robust.

It's popular. And I think there's a lot of it on the market. I think that, that whatever is available, they'll put it in there based on what's available. It's, you know, it's a seasonal thing. And even though we have California and Mexico and Texas and Florida and everybody trying to help out and all the greenhouses in Canada all contributing to your salad bowl, There's still some of that going on. But now I'm noticing, I've been looking in the grocery store at these packages. Most people are buying these prepackaged mixes and they do tell you what's in there, but they also have the caveat of the amounts and so on are going to vary from time to time. But I am noticing that you can get some spinach-free and Swiss chard-free because they love the Swiss chard and beet greens in those lettuce mixes because it has a cute little red vein, and it's very pretty. But that's easy to identify. And if you're just getting started off, a mixture that has a little bit of that is okay. You want maybe 5 or 6 spinach leaves in your salad in the beginning anyway.

What about for sweet potatoes? What's the swap there?

I would say the winter squashes like butternut and other winter squashes work great.

They're orange and they're starchy and they take butter and You mentioned nuts earlier, almonds obviously, but you mentioned a bunch of nuts. Are seeds better or does sprouting the nuts do anything?

Great questions. Most of the seeds are terrible too. The one seed that's really wonderful in terms of oxide content is the pumpkin seed. And you can buy them pre-salted and pre-sprouted. The Go Raw brand is that way. So that's a good choice if your stomach can still handle seeds. Even, I think all seeds tend to have some Gut irritating potential. Sunflower seeds aren't too bad, but otherwise seeds are not so great. And that's why several spices aren't good. Kind of high, and you want to kind of moderate how much you're using of, say, cumin. Cut back on, you know, instead of half teaspoon, use an 8th of a teaspoon. You're good. Black pepper is a seed that's pretty high in oxalate. You can just use white pepper. That's a nice easy swap too.

We were talking about the animal meats. Eggs, dairy, organ meats. What are those foods providing that someone relying on, you know, heavily modern superfoods, you know, like we've been discussing, what those foods may be missing?

One of the things that makes us more sensitive, you might say, less tolerant of the oxalate in these foods, it's not just we're eating more of them, which we are, and many of them are novel in the last 100 years. People have adopted the chocolate and the spinach and the peanut butter and so on. It's pretty new behavior, but we used to rely on dairy in the nutrition field as this safeguard food that if people ate dairy every day and had a glass of milk with meals, it was really prescribed to the human race from American dietitians to do that and have some cheese for snack and have milk every meal to protect your you from this calcium deficiency problem and mineral deficiency problem and protect you from things like the oxalates and the phytates that are grabbing all that calcium. So you have to get lots of extra calcium because you need it in dairy because it's only food that's so high in calcium. So, but what's been happening the last 30 years is less and less people feel that dairy is agreeing with them. And so they're not using it like they used to. And even babies are being given non-nutritive things that are high oxalate, like almond milk, instead of a very nutritious food like milk, which has all kinds of vitamins and minerals in a pretty bioavailable place. So that's an issue because I think it's very true that a lot of people don't do well on dairy, even A2 raw and so on. And I think that's probably because some of the issues with the combination of the processed foods and the high oxalate foods that we've changed our microbiome with all the drugs. We have changed the gut health with the emulsifiers and the processed foods and with the high oxalate foods that we're using, like peanut butter, chocolate, and potatoes, which everybody grows up on in Western culture. So those things are putting us at risk for the high oxalate problem. And if eggs are a wonderful food, the egg yolk is great for someone who has terrible digestion because the egg yolk is so readily digested, especially if it's runny or even raw. And you can get all kinds of vitamin A and other vitamins and proteins that are complete out of an egg yolk. And that's very good and soothing. But again, vaccines like the MMR vaccine is cultured an egg. And if you have so many exposures to the MMR, because you need it again for 6th grade and again for college and again for grad school, or again to go to Europe or something, you could end up with an egg allergy from that or whatever reason. So we have, you know, more and more people who are having to pick and choose because of food sensitivities. And that's a sign of gut health problems and also an overactive immune system.

What about the argument that Milk from an animal is really, you know, there's no other species that really does milk beyond a certain age. So, so what about that argument of, of just that milk is made really for young animals or babies, and that beyond that, we shouldn't be eating it? And then some people would argue, well, that's why so many people are sensitive to it.

Well, you know, you mentioned earlier that we are omnivores, we're also clever in that we developed knives and spears and other ways to be able to hunt and traps. All of that wasn't natural to us. We had to invent it. We've invented the food supply in general. The entire produce department is an invention. And so the dairying industry is a whole invention as well. So I don't know which inventions you want to throw out, which ones you want to keep, but I don't think the produce department is doing us any more favors than eating milk lifelong. Is. In fact, I think it's much worse. I think there have been cultures who have thrived, the Norwegians and so on, and northern cultures where being able to dairy and fish and so on was critical to survival. And we have historical examples where dairy has been an important part of the diet for whatever reason. But nowadays we're looking at a different situation with commercial production and Who knows? There's so many variables going on. I think that we need that ancestral perspective of what we used to do and what we did during those million years before industry, where our technologies were basically Stone Age, making crockery and simple foods, simple tools for food. And, Learning fermentation. You know, we've been fermenting foods a long time. Um, the newer technologies, you know, the newer the food technology, the more suspect it is. But the dairying technology, I think we've been, you know, in Northern Africa relying on herds of various ruminant animals and using their blood and their milk for food has been going on a long time. And some of those cultures have done very well on it.

You know, sometimes I feel like the more we know, the more paralyzed we feel. There might be a lot of people listening to this kind of feeling like, well, now what do I eat? Low histamine diet has kind of presented itself in my household for, uh, for different reasons. So it feels like you're either, if you're focusing on low oxalates, well then that you might be eating high histamine, or if you're focusing on low histamine, you still might be getting high oxalates. So it just, it Sometimes it feels like you just can't win.

Yep, it does, especially those of us who are oxalate poisoned, because an awful lot of people come to me with multiple food sensitivities and histamine issues and salicylate issue and this and that. And but we find our way out of it, and through the low oxalate eating, we regain our ability to handle aged foods. And a lot of these foods come back into the diet, and a lot of people who have been giving up wheat and dairy find they're fine on them now. And so Once we get into the core issues, we can start correcting the damage we've done to some degree with the gut health. I think this is a major factor in modern eating that whether it's oxalates, whether it's emulsifiers in bad food, whether it's drugs and antibiotics and so on, we have really messed with our gut health badly. And that's where histamine issues come in because it really is the gut's not able to break down the histamine. And the system's getting overwhelmed by inflammation. So there's all these factors like oxalate poisoning that can create so much chronic inflammation. The mast cells are just having these little hissy fits and like drama attacks and releasing histamine and your system's getting overwhelmed with it. And so fundamentally calming down the immune system means calming down the toxicity, calming down the problems in the gut, not overfeeding them gut microbiome, like too much fiber and too much prebiotics, so you get more inflammation. And also learning relaxation and calm. We have a very stressed-out culture. So if your head is busy being fearful of food and being fearful of life and stressed out and worried about your performance and insecure, the mast cells know you're feeling endangered. The mast cells can hear you have these victim thoughts and this scary mind, and they're like, On alert to help you out. So like, they literally can hear your thinking. So there's a whole piece about learning to chill, learning to have fun, learning how to get your nervous system back into rest and digest mode so healing and wholeness is more possible.

Well, I love that. And, and what I hear you saying is that while we did focus on oxalates, um, and we're focusing on why lowering the foods that are high in oxalates, uh, or, or removing or lowering them in your diet is so important, you're also saying like, look, One of the reasons why it's affecting you is because your system's compromised. That if we can get our systems to a robust state, you actually can eat more than you realize you could. That you don't have to be on this completely isolated, very foreign diet in terms of what probably ancestrally we ate. You know what I mean? Yeah.

I have more options in life and be able to enjoy life again is—

Yeah. Because I think that is sometimes what gets lost in the pursuit of health, right? Is is the enjoyment of life. And it kind of goes both ways. Either some people are extremely in the, I just want to enjoy and I don't want to worry about health, but then others are overworried about health and not enjoying. So there's somewhere in the middle is where I think we want to lie. And obviously, you know, hopefully this discussion is a resource for people to support them finding that middle ground somewhere.

Yes. And I just want to say for all of you poor individuals trying to figure this out, it's really not fair that it's left up to the individual because health is collectively created by communities, communities who care about the air pollution and the sidewalks so everybody can walk to school and just have an active day. You know, having a culture that supports getting together for dinner instead of running around with chicken nuggets in the backseat and Cheerios in the backseat of the car. Like, you know, getting back to a social way of life that we agree on is wholesome, and we put our resources into that to make sure we have the safe walk to school and opportunities for family dinners and so on, and community dinners and so on. That's critical to our health. And also getting past this good guy, bad guy mentality about vegetables and things like that and thinking, oh, vegetables are great and they can't hurt you. We need to be a little more sophisticated about that and be willing to slow down enough to learn a more complicated story about what is healthy and what may not be.

Yeah, it's almost like, like no longer pretend there isn't a blind spot, but let's, let's see the whole picture and then make decisions from there. Uh, well, I've really enjoyed this conversation, Sally. Um, always enjoy seeing you. Uh, if someone's listening, realizes, okay, spinach, almonds, chia, sweet potatoes, all the stuff that's high in oxalate. Chocolate is basically their health food, and it's kind of what they're all that they're eating. What is the first thing you want them to do tomorrow if if this conversation has affected them?

Well, I would say come visit my website and read around and and maybe look at the reviews at Toxic Superfood and be very encouraged. Like even the AI summary of the reviews. will be very inviting to you about how much benefit people are getting out of learning this. And this is a very easy book to read and really getting educated, opening your mind and seeing what, what information I've been able to uncover and start teaching. Invite yourself to the table of learning this. Nice.

So just take that first step and just learning a little bit more, get on some solid ground around that learning.

I love it.

Is dandruff an example of a—

It is.

What about psoriasis?

Yes. All these inflammatory skin issues. Some people get into serious skin problems with oxalates, bad, where they're itching like crazy, boils, they're scratching so much they're bleeding through their sheets and their clothes, and it's quite horrid.

So, I have a final question I ask every guest. If you could wave a magic wand, bring back one ancestral practice, what would that be and why?

Oh gosh, there's a lot of them. Um, I would say being able to go barefoot more often would be nice.

Says the person who, when they were younger, couldn't do that. Yeah. Yeah. Someone can get your book, they can go to your website, and, and will they get the information needed from your book and maybe some, uh, Anything auxiliary, um, that will support them in dumping, getting rid of these things so that they can start to feel better? Or is it more like the book plus you got to do a course?

Well, I do offer a very inexpensive support group twice a month and people love coming to that and you get a ton more handouts about how to handle the dumping, a lot of coaching on that. PowerPoint slides, you keep, it's hard to get this in your head, even, you know, with the book and get audio, have the audio read it while you're reading along. in the text and try to get it in your head, but it's so countercultural and there's no reinforcement anywhere. It's important to plug into the community and hang out with us, and there's, it's inexpensive thing to do.

What is the website? How do they get in touch with you and what's the best way for them to do that?

So visit sallyknorton.com, sallyknorton.com. Through there, you can reach out to me, you can send me emails, you can sign up for the group, you can get the data companion there. That's the only place you'll get the good data. through the website. It's not on Amazon. And just come, come and learn and meet some other people who are on this path. Some very cool people with some amazing stories. It's quite grounding to hear people share their stories as we often do in our meetings.

Well, thank you again for joining me on this conversation. And thank you all for joining us. We couldn't be doing this without you. We need an audience to share these stories and it And it, I think ultimately it comes back to even something Sally said, which is community, you know, like we shouldn't be doing this alone. And, uh, so I'm really grateful for all of you that chose this episode, chose Everyday Ancestral today to, um, maybe learn something new and or just enjoy the conversation. But either way, we appreciate that connection time. Uh, and as usual, stay curious. Bye.

Thank you so much for joining me on Everyday Ancestral. If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe so you don't miss the next one. You can find the show notes, links, and resources mentioned at eatpluck.com. That's eatpluck.com. And hey, if you know someone who'd get something out of this, share it with them too. Stay curious, live well, and keep it ancestral.