Toxic Superfoods: Identify And Avoid Oxalates

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So many innocent-looking “healthy” foods (even so-called “superfoods”) could be actually compromising your health! Carrots, beets, spinach, and cashews, for example. These plant foods, and others, contain oxalates that trigger inflammation, steal minerals, destroy connective tissue and lead to a host of problems like kidney stones, arthritis, joint pain, osteoporosis, and oxidative stress in the body.

Sally Norton, the author of Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick–and How to Get Better today reviews which foods to avoid (including potatoes, figs, nuts, some berries, and, yes, even chocolate) and what to do if you have symptoms of oxalate overload.

 

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Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Sally Norton.

Is your spinach smoothie or chia bowl trying to kill you? The answer is quite possibly yes. This is episode 428. Our guest is Sally Norton, the author of Toxic Superfoods. Sally is a nutrition expert who describes the problems with certain foods that we’ve considered healthy but contain oxalates that compromise our health. We’re talking carrots, spinach, almonds, and more.

Sally reviews the problem with oxalates. What they are exactly, how they operate, how they trigger inflammation, steal minerals, destroy connective tissue, and lead to a host of problems like kidney stones, arthritis, joint pain, osteoporosis, and oxidative stress. She gets specific about which foods to avoid including those mentioned and potatoes, figs, nuts, and even chocolate. She tells us what to do if we suspect that we have oxalate overload.

Before we dive into the conversation, I want to invite you to join the Weston A. Price Foundation’s email list. Let’s have a direct line of communication. Join our email list to stay abreast of action alerts in your area along with important topics of interest related to food freedom, upcoming events, and more. Go to Weston A. Price and click on the yellow button on our homepage to sign up.

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Welcome to the show, Sally.

Thank you. It’s so fun to be with you at last.

You’ve been a longtime friend of the Weston A. Price Foundation. I found out that we have a mutual friend, Dr. Bill Schindler who wrote Eat Like A Human. You two have bonded in part because there were some superfoods that were toxic to him. Can you talk to us about that?

He and I connected a few years ago. This was a major turning point in his life, which is an exciting idea because things were devolving for our dear friend, Dr. Bill Schindler. He was suffering from such light-intensity pain. Even two pairs of sunglasses were making it impossible for him to do anything. He couldn’t drive. He couldn’t even watch TV. He could barely open his eyes. It was extremely painful and debilitating. His doctors had no answers for him at all and essentially accused him of being crazy.

He had more problems than this over the previous decades, including pseudogout and all kinds of other physical pains. The ordeal of having unexplained pain and then serious vision problems. He’s had a long history with his eyes. It was so stressful and worrisome that it was eroding his mental health. The way he puts it, he goes, “I was an emotional wreck.”

When we connected, we spoke very briefly, and then he had me on a series of programs of his. He changed his diet. He cut out things like almonds, potatoes, and chocolate. Every single one of his unexplained health problems is now completely gone. It turned out, his mom is affected by it and his story is like mine. All kinds of weird things for decades are suddenly explained by taking out a few foods that we trusted as being okay.

What are the elements in those foods you mentioned that we’re toxic to Bill and maybe toxic to all of us in ways we don’t expect?

It shows up differently in everyone. The chemical in the foods is called oxalate or oxalic acid, which is the parent compound. This little compound is natural. It’s in nature. Plants make it for their own physiology and survival. Certain plants have a lot more of it than others. Weirdly, the ones that are high in it are the ones we trust the most and think are safe. We have great faith in plants being safe to eat, not being too educated about plants.

I’ve heard Bill also say plants are trying to kill you and he’s not the only one. Yet, when I learned about the Wise Traditions diet, I knew that they say everything can be on the table when it’s properly prepared. Some of the ways our ancestors would prepare foods are by soaking, sprouting, or fermenting. Don’t those neutralize some of these toxins like the oxalates or phytic acid? Doesn’t that make the nutrients more bioavailable and the foods themselves better for us?

That’s a complicated question. It needs to be deconstructed. A lot of the foods that are high in oxalic acid are not traditional whatsoever and nobody that he studied ate them. The Weston Price technology is based on Weston Price research based on foods that people ate, and they didn’t eat these foods. You can’t grandfather in modern foods that came after Weston Price’s time or weren’t considered real regular foods that people ate routinely and give them a pass. “As long as we ferment them or soak them, they’re fine.” That’s ridiculous.

Oxalates are quite different from phytates, lectins, and many other nasty chemicals in plants. They are not easily disarmed or defanged at all through these preparation methods. We need to cook. We need to know traditional preparation. We need to know what sourdough is, what traditional ingredients are, and how to safely soak it without creating more mold on your nuts and safely prepare things at home. That does not mean that we give the peanut butter and whole wheat toast a pass.

I understand. Yet, I want to explore this more. For example, my stepfather was from Bolivia and he showed me a way in which the Quechua people in Bolivia would store potatoes underground. It was a certain method of storage that allowed them to shrivel up. I know they consume those. You can see chocolate being new, but potatoes seem like they’ve been around a long time. Are you telling me that’s not right?

That’s not right. The people who were eating potatoes is Peru primarily. Historically, the rest of Europe and the world didn’t adopt potatoes that didn’t come to Europeans and so on until about 400 years ago. It didn’t become a daily food until certain parts of England adopted them as dinner food. In the modern centuries, we created things like French fries, potato chips, tater tots, and all kinds of potato derivatives. Some of that came out of the world wars because we needed a cheap way to feed soldiers overseas. We started dehydrating potatoes and making mashed potato flakes. Soldiers came back expecting mashed potatoes with dinner because that’s what they got while they were fighting with their buddies.

Dehydrating potatoes and making mashed potato flakes came out of the World Wars because we needed a cheap way to feed soldiers overseas.

A lot of this stuff is more modern than we realize, including potatoes, and the use of them. The way we use them now is anything but these clay-soaked year-old shriveled rotten potatoes in the ground. That’s nothing like what we’re eating now. It looks on the surface because the word is potato, but it’s not the same thing, whatsoever.

I’m getting defensive because I’m the next person. I like my potatoes. I even like my chocolate. I’m going to stop defending the foods for a second, and I want to do a deeper dive.

It’s useful to think about the defensive attitude because that’s been getting in the way of our recognition of the oxalate problem for a long time. It’s perfectly understandable. The last thing I ever wanted to do was be in the business of saying, “Don’t eat something.” That’s why I hung out in academia my whole career. I’m here as a desperate little over here on the shoals of shipwreck live saying, “Please don’t hit these rocks over here.” I’m this little weak lighthouse trying to protect you. If you want to slam into the rocks with us, you can. I’d wish you were out sailing having a good time instead of letting Bill and me in pain and wondering why.

I like that analogy and illustration. You paint a beautiful picture. I don’t want to be shipwrecked. I want to be on the high seas having a good time.

I’ve been in wheelchairs, crutches, and all kinds of tragedies. I wasn’t able to do sports. I’m in a ranch house because I couldn’t do stairs. It’s so many places that your health starts falling apart and it cuts back your choices in life. I certainly don’t want that for young people or you.

Let’s define oxalates. I know you said there are also phytic acids, lectins, and other things that are anti-nutrients in our food. Let’s talk about oxalate specifically because the subtitle of your new book is How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick. Tell us what oxalates are exactly.

This chemical is a chelator. Oxalic acid is in the plant foods that we eat like nuts, spinach, and chocolate. It also is in crystalline form because it chelates minerals. It forms what’s called a salt, chemically. These can precipitate out and form particles called nanocrystals and then microcrystals. You can eat oxalic acid and oxalates in multiple forms in foods. They’re quite irritating to the whole body, including your mouth, teeth, and guts. The acid is what gets into your bloodstream and starts causing more systemic problems for the body.

It could be anything from the issues with sight, that Bill was having, to joint pain to what else?

Kidney stones, interstitial cystitis, fatigue, arthritis, weakness, vascular problems, inflammatory conditions, autoimmune conditions, connective tissue weakness, osteoporosis, strokes, and heart attacks, maybe cancer. The list is pretty much anything that’s horrible, modern and happens with old age. This is the stuff that it’s causing because oxalic acid is creating oxidative stress for all the cells that it encounters.

Cellular damage, both of which turn on inflammation, and then create deposits in the body which turns out a chronic problem of contamination and inflammation that can last for a long time. Once you’ve filled up your body with toxic nanocrystals, thyroid gland, ovaries, pancreas, bones, and bone marrow, you’ve got real problems because it’s affecting the quality of your immune cells that are trying to help you and affecting the quality of the white blood cells and also the red blood cells. You can end up with anemia and all kinds of metabolic problems as well.

I’ve got the impression from your book that not only do these acids create havoc at a certain time, but that they accumulate so it becomes increasingly problematic for the body and our health.

It can silently accumulate. This is happening and you don’t even realize it until it starts breaking down the whole management of your health. It’s your thyroid gland, pituitary gland, bone edge, bone marrow, and immune cells. The energy production in cells starts to be sub-adequate. Your tissue repair and maintenance becomes so adequate, and you end up with fibrotic problems and aging problems. You have a big stress, your mom dies, you’re in an accident, or you have surgery. All of a sudden, you’re really sick and don’t recover from that. Underneath what seemed like you were okay was this erosion of all these layers of what you’re required to have to remain healthy and vibrant.

I know you’re not just speaking from your academic understanding. As you said, you are the voice of experience. Tell us a little bit about your health story.

It started pretty young with my tonsils being ripped out at age 5, and then by 12, I was having arthritis and back pain. In high school, I was having trouble focusing on my studies and concentrating well. In college, I had to drop out of Cornell where I was getting my Nutrition degree because of foot problems. I couldn’t function anymore. I got permission to drive on campus and got a bicycle, so I didn’t have to walk. None of it was working.

I went to two states over to Ohio to have foot surgery on both feet at the same time. I didn’t recover well from that. I remained on very high doses of Ibuprofen to get around. I was still having to swim every day to try to get some blood in my feet. It was a real struggle and I remained unable to run, jump, play, and go anywhere without shoes. I couldn’t wash the dishes without shoes.

Apparently, I had weak connective tissue that kept my feet weak enough that I couldn’t handle standing on my own body weight. I’m not fat. It wasn’t my fatness that was the problem. It was that the connective tissue in my feet never was strong enough. Oddly enough, at age 49, I go on this diet out of sheer desperation. My arthritis was coming back. All through my twenties and my vegan years and prior, I had terrible arthritis and I’ve had other problems with fatigue and brain fog. I had bad fatigue for years.

Finally, I had to quit my career as a grant writer at the university here in Richmond because I couldn’t think anymore. I was bleeding to death from fibroids. I had to have a total hysterectomy that got in there. I had endometriosis. I didn’t recover well from that. I ended up being sent to a sleep doctor because I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. The sleep study showed my brain was waking up 29 times every hour, which explains a lot of the fatigue and difficulty focusing here. I’m a grant writer working 50 hours a week on budgets. It’s like good brain work with the brain struggling.

I’m trying to figure out how to fix this sleep disorder and I have this attack of vulvar pain. I found a website, thanks to my husband’s Google search talents, for the Vulvar Pain Foundation that says vulva pain is from oxalates. If you take them out of your diet, it helps with pelvic pain, inflammation, and even connected tissue disorders.

 

None of that made any sense to me because I know a bunch of stuff. I’m in Integrative Medicine. I’m a professional in public health. I’ve got a degree in Nutrition. None of that made any sense to me, but I didn’t have any other choices. I tried it. I didn’t understand it initially when I first tried it. Now, I was learning about the oxalates in my diet more carefully.

Because I went to nutrition school, I knew about spinach, nuts, chocolate, and tea being bad. I didn’t know about sweet potatoes, charred, kiwi, and the things I was eating. I was learning that thanks to the Vulvar Pain Foundation. I then realized that my arthritis was connected to the foods I was eating, which was quite a shocker because I had so much trouble with arthritis. It had been brutal.

When I was even nineteen, I couldn’t open the door to my mother’s house. I couldn’t turn the key in because I didn’t have enough strength to turn the key in the doorknob. That’s how bad the arthritis was. I’ve been through hell. I go on this diet again for the second time correctly. Within a week, I’m reading again. I had gotten to the point where I couldn’t read my own mail. I could not work. I was on the sofa debilitated. I couldn’t exercise. Within a week to ten days, suddenly, I can tell I’m sleeping better and my arthritis is again receding into the distance.

By the following spring, I’m wearing high heels all day long at a wedding. I’ve never been able to wear high heels. Suddenly, it became clear that what I thought was this long Santa Claus-like list of problems was one problem. One central poisoning toxicity disease. That was flooring me because that’s not in my education. That’s not anywhere in the world I live in. I went to the library and started studying it and teaching it for free.

This is blowing my mind, too, because so many people have the very issues you were experiencing, whether it was joint pain, brain fog, trouble sleeping, arthritis, or all these different things. They go to doctor after doctor with no resolution and are mystified by it. All along, it could very well have something to do with their diet. It could have something to do with oxalates.

It absolutely could. After working with so many people and thinking and writing so hard about this, I’m convinced that most of the modern suffering can be traced back to the fact that we’re all eating way more than our bodies are intended or designed to handle. We’ve missed the boat on this one. It’s an easy one to pick up and manage, but there is this defensiveness and reluctance to change how we think and what we do. You have to be thrown to the mat and beg for mercy to be willing to change your mind.

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Let’s go back now that my defenses are down and I’m listening with an open posture and open heart. Tell us exactly in what foods these oxalates are found. You’ve already listed some, but let’s review. We know spinach and potatoes.

Do you know how the nuts need extra care?

Yes.

They’re particularly inedible. Bill Schindler is pretty clear about nuts, seeds, and grains being the babies of plants. They are defended in many ways. Oxalates are one of the ways they’re defended. There are heavy metals and all kinds of other troublemakers. Nuts, especially almonds, cashews, and peanuts are trouble. Right now, those are the most popular nuts going.

You then have the beans, which are the closest thing to a traditional food-ish that is on this list. Black beans, white beans. There’s a whole story there if we have time to talk about them. The peas are lower, by the way, the chickpeas and the black-eyed peas. There are all these pseudo-grains, quinoa, teff, buckwheat, and the bran in grains. Mostly the seeds are putting the oxalates in their outer coverings, so the bran has much more than the starchy center does.

Seeds like chia and hemp are popular. They’re terribly high in oxalate. Turmeric is popular. It’s very high in oxalate. Cumin is not so good to have either in great quantities especially when you’re stacking them together in Indian cooking, which uses a lot of these high oxalate spices. In the fruit department, it’s these modern ideas of kiwi, pomegranate, blackberries, and starfruit, which is like the spinach of South Asia and Brazil. They run to starfruit when they’re dying and it’s quite poisonous. People literally die from starfruit juice from oxalate poisoning.

That’s most of the categories. A lot of them are grains and seeds. There are 3 or 4 leafy greens like spinach, chard, and beet greens. Chard and beet greens by the way is the same plant. One makes a beet and one doesn’t. Also, sorrel, which only gardeners and exotic chefs use. It’s just chard, beets, and spinach. They are the ones that everybody thinks are the best and they’re not.

Interestingly, in my circles, these alternative health circles, when you put the title of your book out there, Toxic Superfoods, the first thing I was thinking was, “She’s going to say spinach and kale.” Some of these plants that are touted as amazing are not, but when you mention pomegranates and kiwi, it’s things that I love. I’m not as ready to give those up. Yet, these are on the list of foods high in oxalates.

I had real trouble because I was so into sweet potatoes. When I was trying to figure this out and I tried the diet the first time, I’m like, “I don’t have all the pain anymore so it’s fine.” I did not know in the beginning that oxalate could cause the osteoporosis that I had, which is now gone. I went and put back some sweet potatoes in my diet and I didn’t feel worse. I didn’t see arthritis suddenly was worse because I ate sweet potatoes again.

In fact, if anything, I felt better. There’s a reason for that. If you take them out completely, you can start getting oxalate poisoning from what’s loaded in your bones, thyroid gland, and tendons from the inside. If you eat more, that helps the body stop releasing it and mobilizing it from tissues. Momentarily, you feel a little better when you put them back in. I was convinced that the oxalates that are in sweet potatoes don’t bother me. I try to work it out and it does upset people. I’ve had people even go online and go, “Sally says figs are toxic.” They’re upset about it because we are emotionally attached to foods, ideas, and ideologies. Don’t let some old lady tell you differently.

I’m glad you mentioned this about how we assess our own health because some of us are tooling along quite well, even though we have some of these foods in our diet. My question to you is, is it that we are managing these oxalates well? Is it simply that we haven’t reached such an accumulation load that it’s bothering us evidently?

It’s probably a combination of both. If you step back and think about it, does everyone who smokes cigarettes die of lung cancer?

No.

Some people live to 100 or more without lung cancer smoking for 40 years or more. Not everyone expresses the same outcomes. That person had yellow fingers, shriveled skin, and looked terrible, probably, but they weren’t dead with cancer. There’s always some price to pay, even if it’s not the poster child story that we like to believe in.

The other thing is that there’s so much confirmation bias that these foods are good that they have strong placebo value. It’s easy to overestimate how healthy we are because we are so devoted to our health routines, spinach smoothie, or chia bowl. We have invested so much confidence and faith. It’s like a talisman for us. It’s giving us this strong will. It’s coming from our willpower. We are going to will ourselves to wellness.

It’s easy to overestimate how healthy we really are because we are so devoted to our health routines and our spinach smoothie, chi bowl, or whatever and have invested so much confidence and faith that it’s like a talisman for us.

It’s really easy to overlook our declining health. How do you know if you have osteoporosis? I was never going to get osteoporosis. I’ve been so active and so good in my diet. Here I am, 40-something years old with osteoporosis. Even then, we underestimate how important that is. One of my clients is a man who started with almond flour and all the health foods right out of college. By the time he was in his 30s, he already had osteoporosis already and he had wheat connective tissues. This was all from the almond, butter, and oxalates.

By the time he was 48, he was on a mountain bike ride and took a terrible spill, which crushed five vertebrae in his neck. He’s quadriplegic from oxalates. You underestimate how important it is to have strong connective tissues and bones. This can be perking underneath the surface without your awareness. Suddenly, you get injured easily and you think, “That was just a fluke.”

Can we, at a glance, recognize what foods have oxalates or do we need to walk around with a little chart with us from now on?

That’s the other reason. It’s so inconvenient to have to learn a whole set of new information. When you’re sick and your brain is sucking bad, it’s like, “I can’t remember one thing. Was a carrot high in oxalate? Am I allowed to have this or that?” It’s very difficult. That’s why I realized I needed to get out there, try to support people, provide resources, and figure it out well enough so that I, as a lighthouse, could work a little brighter and be a little better for more people.

You can get the beginner’s guide on my website that has the high and low oxalate foods. I have a version that’s a little bookmark that people can carry around, but then it becomes second nature. One cool thing is, if it’s an animal food, it’s okay. If you’re unsure, just go with some butter cottage cheese, a nice steak, or a slab of fish. Enjoy it and you’ll be fine. If you decide to skip a produce item for a few days until you figure it out, no harm will come.

Is avoiding the offending high oxalate foods the only answer? Is there a way as we were discussing earlier that we can neutralize the oxalates?

Unfortunately, there’s not a good neutralization technique because the ones that are high in oxalate are so high that whatever benefits you can get from boiling or fermenting are so tiny. They’re not meaningful benefits. When you start with a low oxalate food or a moderate one like tea, you ferment tea into kombucha and you’ve lowered the oxalate level. You can have more kombucha than you could have tea, but tea is not so severely high that you necessarily have to give it up 100%.

That’s the thing. It’s not a complete on-or-off decision. You can have a reasonable portion of boiled white red-skin potatoes and certainly enjoy them for the holidays but having the higher oxalate Idaho potato in routine ways as you do. When you go out for any meal, lunch or dinner, you’re offered fries or chips at lunch, and at dinner, it’s fries, chips, mashed or baked because they’re so cheap. It’s so easy to dress them up with salt, butter, and fats and make them taste good that we’re all hooked on them.

 

We can’t just look at it and be like, “I know that it’s a high oxalate food.” As you said, if we stick with animal products, we’re likely to avoid oxalates more easily. Let’s go back to the beans because you said you had something additional you wanted to say about those.

We think of beans as a traditional food because in Latin America, they have been used for a long time and they’re a staple for a poor country. At least, that’s the staple that we’re impressed with here in the US where these concepts of bean burritos and so on have been easily imported into commercial foods that are profitable. The more expensive meat-based foods from other countries are not imported by restauranteurs and fast-food restaurants. We’re going to do the el cheapo version.

In this country, we weren’t using beans as a regular food until the invention of nutrition, which I mentioned in my book. The very first nutrition science was about measuring fat, protein, and carbs in foods and guesstimating how much protein minimum we needed and how you could get that minimal protein as cheaply as possible.

As elites will do, they deliberately decided that they could come up with cheaper foods for the poor people, so they wouldn’t buy these lovely steaks. They’d rather eat and teach them to make succotash and Boston baked beans. A lot of these New England foods were invented by the elites for the poor people, which I feel is wage slavery. You’re going to have to have terrible wages so you have to eat terrible food. They weren’t what people traditionally ate. A meat-centric diet has been a human way for a very long time.

A lot of these New England foods were invented by the elite for the poor. They weren’t what people traditionally ate, which was a really meat-centric diet. It’s been a human way of life for a very long time.

I want to know because we always like to offer solutions on the show. What are some ways we can clear or eliminate accumulated oxalates in the body?

Luckily, your body knows how to do that. It knows about oxalates. It knows about contamination. It knows about excretion. The kidneys can handle a lot of oxalates surprisingly with a lot of people. Although probably about 12% to 18% of the public is prone to kidney stones. We have to be careful with that. Taking lemon juice is helpful. About a half cup of lemon juice a day is said to dissolve kidney stones. It also supports the dissolution of oxalates anywhere else in the body because the citric acid attaches itself to the calcium oxalate crystals that are in the body. It helps soften them and makes them easier to break down. Lemon juice is a great thing to add. I’d like to suggest a quarter cup in the morning and a quarter cup in the evening. When you don’t feel well, do more of them. They’re helpful support.

Calcium is a critical binder of oxalate and how the body gets rid of oxalate is with more calcium. Even though calcium oxalate is the crystalline form in the body, more calcium helps your kidneys and all of your tissues release oxalate including the colon. We use calcium supplements, usually citrate, that’s citric acid like in the lemons. Calcium citrate can hang out in the colon because you don’t absorb most of the calcium you take. Most of it goes through you. If there is a binder that allows the intestines to excrete oxalate, your kidneys have to do a lot of it. When the kidneys are stressed, the intestines happily help along, and so do the skin, the eye fluids, and the saliva concentrates oxalate, too.

The body will get rid of it provided you don’t keep adding it. If you keep adding it, that’s what’s causing the accumulation. We’re eating it so routinely that it has to accumulate because it’s overwhelming these excretion pathways. Once you let the excretion pathways clear out and your kidneys heal, the body will recover on its own as long as you stay aware of your oxalate consumption and consistently adopt this as a normal healthy diet. It’s one that’s oxalate aware forevermore.

That’s helpful to hear. Do you think right now it’s super popular to do coffee enemas or colonics? Do you recommend that for getting all this stuff out of the system?

I don’t think most of these detox things are typically necessary. Some people do well with castor oil packs. A sauna is very important because it lowers inflammation in the vascular system of the body overall. The oxalate and the related inflammation it’s causing keep upping the inflammation. That’s what’s making it so dangerous and destructive to our health. Sauna’s a way to keep cutting back the inflammation, but it’s like brushing your teeth. You have to keep going back at it and doing it routinely.

Cold therapy is another one that I know you love that cuts inflammation in the body. Those are helpful. Sometimes we need some patients because the liver gets damaged from a routine diet of high oxalate foods. There’ll be times when liver enzymes wobble and so on. Bile function and bile production can wobble as the body heals. It’s pretty straightforward that the body will heal. You don’t have to keep buying detox programs and spending money on excessive colonics. We love to over-intervene rather than just respect, listen to the body, honor what it needs, let it do its thing, and be amazing.

We love to over-intervene rather than respect and listen to the body, honor what it needs, and let it do its thing and be amazing.

That’s a good word for a lot of us. The food on your list that surprised me the most, I have to admit, was sweet potato. Some of my best friends are carnivores and they will still include sweet potato. They’re carnivore-ish. They will still include sweet potato as a wonderful root vegetable even though they don’t touch other plant foods to speak of. I was surprised. Is there another superfood on your list that might surprise most people as being more toxic than they expect?

Chocolate. That’s another one where I start to need a bulletproof vest. People want to get me for that one. I’m just the messenger. I didn’t do this. Chocolate’s full of lead and other problems, too. It’s ethically a problem. If you get away from it and you go back and try dark chocolate, you realize it’s just bitter wax. It’s not as fabulous as we think it is, but we are into it. If you had enough sugar and peanut butter to it, it’s a pretty standard way to have a treat.

A chocolate peanut butter cup is like the most salacious comfort food we could possibly imagine. It’s hard for people to want you to pry it out of their hands. We’ll just put this episode out there for people to consider.

Only if you love your body and want to keep it well, not get osteoporosis, dementia, and all these things I’m concerned that oxalate is causing. I certainly have felt pretty demented and a miracle I came up with a book.

You sound super lucid, and we’re so glad you came on the show. We’re glad that you’ve turned things around and we will put this out there as a lighthouse for people’s consideration. Now, I want to pose to you the question I’d like to pose at the end of the program. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health, it could be related to oxalates, or maybe not, what would you recommend that they do?

Maybe give me a compound answer of dropping our trust in the superfood notion and recognizing that plants are not benign. They are defending themselves or their babies. They’re serious about it. That’s why they’re still here. You can think about your health habits and remember they all started at home on your own stove and on your own counter. That needs to be a priority in your health program. When it comes to food choices, use whole animal foods like sardines that have skin and bones. It’s got the head gone, but basically, that’s a whole food when you have the skin and bones. If you include that in other whole animal foods every day in your diet, that’s going to make a huge difference in the long run.

 

Thank you so much for coming to the show.

Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.

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Our guest was Sally Norton. Visit her website Sally K. Norton and check out her book, Toxic Superfoods. You can find me at Holistic Hilda. Now, for a letter to the editor from a journal. Surviving a hospital visit, Irena has this to say, “I want to thank everyone involved with your organization for putting out the most valuable and timely information during this time of weaponized medicine. I’m sending a special message of gratitude to Dr. Kaufman and Dr. Cowan.”

“In particular, it was Dr. Kaufman’s instructions on how to handle ourselves if we needed to go to the hospital, which he shared during his recent conference presentation that helped me navigate the situation I found myself in. I landed in my local hospital ER this past Saturday night with an excruciating painful abdominal hernia that needed repair.”

“Though I have been managing this hernia for over ten years by being careful, recently, things have been very fast paced in my family life and I neglected it. Also, a hospital or medical setting was the last place I wanted to end up in. In recent weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of heavy lifting and generally overexerted and stressed myself and my body.”

“I am home recovering. However, I want to let you and Dr. Kaufman know that I followed his instructions to a T. I declined the PCR test and questioned everything they wanted to put in my body and every procedure. They told me in the ER that I would not be admitted because I was refusing the PCR test. I held my ground. They told me when admitted that I would not be able to go into the operating room if I didn’t have the test. The surgeon said that I was the first in three years to refuse the PCR test and that they did not know what to do with me. I kept telling them that I do not give informed consent to the PCR test and nothing more. I let them figure it out and did not acquiesce.”

“By the end of Sunday, the doctor said their management have figured it out and they would rush me into the operating room without any special protocols, whatever that meant. They took me into surgery, and when I opened my eyes, the doctor said I could leave. They did not let me recover overnight, but kicked me out like some sort of nuisance.”

“As my friend from New Jersey Medical Freedom Community said, I hit the matrix of ignorance when I arrived in the hospital. I was questioning everything they were doing, every drug and every blood test. I refused all narcotic pain medications. I questioned the need for the IV and what was going into the IV. I allowed IV Tylenol, and then a nausea medication after finding out what category of medications they were. I refused repeated blood work the next day.”

“The doctor said my white blood cell count was high. I said, ‘After stress and intense pain from the injury, of course, it would be high.’ He agreed. They said I was being difficult, so they needed me out ASAP. I’m glad to be home, out of the matrix, and recovering. Thank you for all you do and the amazing WAPF community of informed individuals.”

It’s a letter from Irena in New Jersey. You went through a lot. We are so proud of you for standing up for yourself and deciding exactly what you wanted and what you didn’t want. Congrats. You too can write us a letter to the editor. Just write us and put Letter to the Editor in the subject line and write about the topic of your choice. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

 

About Sally Norton

Sally K. Norton, MPH holds a nutrition degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree in Public Health. Her path to becoming a leading expert on dietary oxalate includes a prior career working at major medical schools in medical education and public health research. Her personal healing experience inspired years of research that led to her book, Toxic Superfoods, which was released in January 2023 and is available everywhere books are sold.

 

Important Links

• Visit Sally’s website
• Join the WAPF email list
• Check out our sponsors: Upgraded Formulas and Optimal Carnivore
• Toxic Superfoods
• Dr. Bill Schindler – Past Episode
• Eat Like A Human
• Holistic Hilda
• Letter to the Editor
• Vulvar Pain Foundation
• Dr. Andy Kaufman – Past Episode
• Dr. Tom Cowan – Past Episode

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