The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick–and How to Get Better by Sally K. Norton MPH

Episode Date: November 20, 2022

Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick--and How to Get Better by Sally K. Norton MPH An acclaimed nutrition educator reveals how the foods you’re eating to get healthy might be making you sick. “Sally Norton’s well-researched book makes a truly important contribution to the literature in revealing just how much oxalates can damage the human body.”—Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise If you’re eating a healthy diet and you’re still dealing with fatigue, inflammation, anxiety, recurrent injuries, or chronic pain, the problem could be your spinach, almonds, sweet potatoes, and other trusted plant foods. And your key to vibrant health may be quitting these so-called superfoods. After suffering for decades from chronic health problems, nutrition educator Sally K. Norton, MPH, discovered that the culprits were the chemical toxins called oxalates lurking within her “healthy,” organic plant-heavy diet. She shines light on how our modern diets are overloaded with oxalates and offers fresh solutions including: • A complete, research-backed program to safely reverse your oxalate load • Comprehensive charts and resources on foods to avoid and better alternatives • Guidance to improve your energy, optimize mood and brain performance, and find true relief from chronic pain In this groundbreaking guide, Norton reveals that the popular dictum to “eat more plants” can be misleading. Toxic Superfoods gives health-seekers a chance for improved energy, optimum brain performance, graceful aging, and true relief from chronic pain.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to the big show. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. We're going to be talking about toxic superfoods today and how foods might be making you sick.

We'll have an amazing author on the show talking about all the wonderful stuff you're going to need to eat better and be healthier. I mean, some of you might want to be into that. It sounds like a good thing to me. Anyway, guys, be sure to refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives, as always, the Chris Foss show that family that loves you but doesn't judge you, at least not as harshly as your mom does. Now go clean your room. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in.

Go to youtube.com, ForgeSXCrisFoss. Hit the bell notification button over there. Go to goodreads.com, ForgeSXCrisFoss. See everything we're reading or viewing over there. Go to all our groups, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all those crazy places those kids are playing on those interweb tubes in the sky. She is the author of the upcoming book.

It's coming out December 27, 2022. The book is called Toxic Superfoods, How Oxalate Overload is Making You Sick by Sally K. Norton. She has a title of MPH. We'll find out what that is here in a bit when she is on. But she's written this amazing book you want to take and pick up while you still can. Welcome to the show, Sally. How are you? I'm great.

Thank you so much. It's fun to be here with you. It's fun to have you on as well. Congratulations for coming on the show and on the new book. These are always fun to take and have. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. sallyknorton.com. There you go.

And you're a nutritionalist with a unique specialty, and you're in your nutrition degree from Cornell University and master's degree in public health from UNC Chapel Hill. And you're going to be talking about some of the different things about serious illness, chronic pain, kidney problems, osteopenia. Did I pronounce that right? Bone loss. I'm still working on that.

Osteopenia, osteopenia. Osteopenia, there you go, and chronic infections. So what motivated you to want to write this book yeah the train wreck of my own health oh i i when i realized what i had done to my health i also realized because i'm so well connected and i had strived for so many decades to do all the right things and follow all the right rules about how to eat that completely backfired and realized there were other people out there who are probably doing the same thing and experiencing similar issues for the same reason. And I felt that I needed to send out a little smoke signal SOS to others who might be in that situation. And that became clear that it took so much research and so much deep thinking about what's available evidence wise.

It explains this, that it needed to be put together in a book because it's so scattered in the medical literature and so lost on so many of us in the nutrition field and the public health field and medical practice and the clinical practices of all stripes. We're all kind of missing the boat. And it's my profession. I felt a tremendous embarrassment for my profession that we've missed this one. We've done things as a profession that's encouraged this obesity crisis that we have, this diabetes crisis that we have. And so I just had to happen. I had to put it out there because I know other people need it. So what got you interested in the field of nutrition? And then let's get into some of your journey that you aforementioned earlier where some of the stuff that you were doing

ended up not being the best for you. Yeah, I got pretty interested in nutrition early on. I was already listening closely to the kindergarten teacher who told us that we needed so many glasses of milk a day. And I came home and told my mom and mom, we need this much milk. She's like, forget it with five kids. We're not getting that much,

you know? And so I already in second grade, I was featured in the newspaper for being a learning healthy breakfast. And in seventh grade, a science teacher, really great science teacher showed this film strip, which is an old school way of doing visual, visual education, but pictures that showed like, Oh, all these vegetables will save you from cancer. And these bad foods will give you cancer. And I was like, wait a minute. You mean we can choose whether or not we get cancer, heart disease, obesity, whatever.

We could choose health, productivity and happiness and avoid sickness, surgeries and doctors. I'm like, that's something that I'd like to know. And I would like to help other people avoid that if they want. So I get interested in the preventative side of nutrition, which would be sort of health promotion side of it. Really early at age 12 was when I decided this would be my career. And I haven't changed my mind since. And I'm almost 60 now. Oh, wow. Wow. So did I pronounce it right? Oxalate? Oxalate. Very good. So how oxalate overload is making you sick? I always thought that eating vegetables and nuts and different things was healthy for me. What is this oxalate and how can you end up in an overload situation? Yeah, oxalate starts off as an acid called oxalic acid. It's a reactive acid. You can

use it effectively to take the rust out of your patio or the rust off of an engine because it grabs iron and calcium and magnesium. These are mineral ions that attach to it. So when it does that, it creates these salts called oxalates. So it's often pronounced oxalates plural because you have the acid, which has different charges. It can have one or two charges. So there's two kinds of the acid. There's the soluble form where those mineral complexes can dissolve easily in water. And then there's the insoluble form where the calcium oxalate together doesn't dissolve very well. And people have heard of calcium oxalate if they've had a kidney stone, because most kidney stones are made of calcium oxalate. But they start off as oxalic acid in your almonds, almond milk, peanut butter, potato chips, and some of these foods that we think of are health superfoods.

Wow. You know, I have a friend who, I think it's a genetic thing, but he has the worst kidney stones. Is it possible that that could be contributing to his kidney stones? No, definitely. Definitely. Because you can't build a house without wood and nails. You can't build a kidney stone without oxalic acid. Because most kidney stones are made of oxalic acid and calcium.

The calcium that it's taken from your bones and food and blood becomes calcium oxalate in the kidneys and other places in the body. So you can't really build a stone if you don't provide the substrate. You can't build a house out of air. You can't build a kidney stone out of nothing. You have to have the substance. So the main way you provide that substance is through eating it and foods. And also a lot of vitamin C, like supplemental levels of vitamin C, like a gram a day is plenty to add oxalate to the body because vitamin C is a small little molecule that can turn into oxalate inside the body. So too much vitamin C, too much of these foods high in oxalate really account for probably

90% of the oxalate that gets into the kidneys and becomes kidney stones. So there's a huge dietary component to kidney stones. The reason it's confusing is because even eating these, like spinach is the kind of poster child of a high oxalate food. Wow. Eating a lot of spinach can get some people into real trouble with their kidneys. And some of us, we don't get in trouble with our kidneys. So there's the genetic difference.

I'm able to pee it out without it getting clogging up in my kidneys because my kidneys are like 80% of most people's kidneys. It has the power to put out the citric acid and the magnesium, the pH right. It puts out these proteins that prevent, they stick to this calcium oxalate forming in the urine and the kidneys and that prevents them from clumping. But some people don't produce enough of those proteins, and so it starts clumping up and sticking inside the kidney, and it causes direct damage to the kidney tissues, and that damaged tissue tends to be where it gets stuck. And once something's stuck, it becomes harder and harder for the kidneys to deal with it. Now, some people's kidneys can eat those crystals that are forming and take them out of these passageways where the urine has to flow. The problem with a kidney stone,

it'll block the passageways where the urine has to flow. And that blockage will create not only pain and toxicity, but probably an infection. And before we had antibiotics, kidney stones could be deadly because of that infection and no way to treat it. So kidney stones are really a serious business, but not all of us who are in fact poisoning ourselves with this basic cleaning acid. You know, you don't always get kidney stones and that's confused the literature and the research as well, because not everybody on a high-oxidant diet will get a kidney stone. But eventually, get old enough, you do this long

enough, you will have renal damage of some form or another, often bladder problems. Your bladder can be jumpy and irritable, can wake you up at night, you start peeing a lot or leaking. Lots of different urinary irritations can occur that's not just the kidney stone. Wow. Can you offset if your kidney's not putting on enough magnesium? Can you offset that with magnesium supplements, or do they have an effect on that? It is very helpful to take minerals. Calcium and magnesium and potassium are all really good.

What's really nice is the citric acid that often in the supplement, it comes as calcium citrate or magnesium citrate or potassium citrate. That citric acid really helps the kidneys a lot because that will kind of stick to those crystals and help soften them up and changes them from what might be the hardness of quartz to something that's more like chalk. Because the crystals themselves can be harder than your teeth. And plants even build crystals. So you're not just eating the acid. You're actually eating these little microscopic invisible crystals that are more – it's like sandpaper, only toothpick-shaped sandpaper.

And it can even erode the teeth. Wow. It's hard to see. My one friend has – I mean, he just has the worst time with them. And I guess he's had them all of his life. So what are some of these? It's a terrible thing because once you've had several of them, it really causes chronic damage to the kidneys.

We have more fibrosis. And the more kidney stones you have, the more likely you'll have more. And when you go in there and you blow it up with this laser beam called lipotripsy, you just kind of explode a little glass bomb and create more damage in the kidneys. So that tends to promote additional, like everywhere you've got damaged kidney is a place where oxalate can stick. So in the literature, they're quite aware that some of the ways we try to treat kidney stones really don't work very well because it sets you up for

the next batch, especially if you don't know about the oxalate in your diet. And unfortunately, the doctors are being a little casual about how much oxalate you're eating, which is really too bad. Wow. So what kind of foods are oxalate foods that we need to watch out for? There's three greens to watch out for. And two of them are basically the same thing. We just don't realize it. And that's chard and beet greens. Chard is a beet green without a beet on the end of it. That's a high oxley food. That's probably one of the worst.

There's another one called sorrel that we don't eat here in the U.S. much, but that's the next worst green. Then the third bad green we mentioned before is spinach. There's three bad greens, but they have a lot of popularity. They're in the cool kid club and everybody thinks they're so great. You're killing me here because I have a spinach salad every day. I'm guilty. So many better greens for your salad. Romaine lettuce is full of minerals that you can actually absorb. The minerals in spinach are useless. There's so much oxalate in spinach that it has zero to negative amounts of calcium in it. Really? Yeah. The high oxalate diet is quite mineral, creates a lot of mineral deficiencies in the body. But if it's

already in the food, the food itself at the level that spinach has, it means that it's zero calcium food, even though you can measure calcium because these crystals in the spinach are calcium oxalate. So in the measurement in the lab, there's technically calcium in spinach, but nutritionally, that's just a toxic form of calcium. It's not calcium's fault that it's toxic. It's that oxalate is there. And we knew this in the 1930s. By 1935, it was well-established that spinach would deplete babies of calcium and cause calcium deficiency disease. And it got reconfirmed in the 50s, 60s, 80s, over and over again. Oh, no.

I mean, can I have a little bit? Or is there like a... Yeah, you can have about five leaves a day. Five leaves. Okay. That leaves this big. It's really strong. Spinach is very strong, and it's not worth it.

So I should. Also, that's what created my osteopenia, because the same thing that caused the kidney stones causes the osteopenia. It creates acidity and inflammation, and it creates a need for calcium in the blood, because after you eat these foods, it depletes your blood of calcium, which is really bad for your heart because the pacemaker depends on that calcium in the blood in order to work. As you have wobbling calcium, you might get palpitations and you can even end up in the emergency room because you might have weird swings in blood pressure and pulse and stuff because your electrolytes are getting messed up. And so the bones have to drill little holes in themselves and release minerals, especially

calcium, and you keep borrowing. It's like taking out your savings account, constantly using your savings account for day-to-day life as if you can't pay the grocer every day and can't get your basic heat bill. So you're like sucking your bank account dry, is your poor bones in order to keep your calcium levels even which is why you don't get symptoms because the bones aren't complaining about this development of mineral deficiency that they're having and your blood is now okay um but it ends up stuck in some people's kidneys and it can end up stuck in any tissue.

It apparently something like 85% of us have these same little crystals that make kidney stones in our thyroid glands. By the time we're 50, most, the most majority of us have these little kidney stones in our thyroid glands. Wow. I, so now you've like blown on my whole diet. I thought I was so proud of myself.

No, no, no. That can't be a good diet. So romaine lettuce, would that be the best thing to switch to? I love romaine lettuce. It keeps well. It's crunchy. It's versatile. It tastes nice. It gets along with others. And it holds up in the refrigerator really nicely. All the other lettuce greens are good, and many of the other greens are good. The kale and so on is not really high in oxalate. It's just chard, beet, greens, and spinach. They're not even really that delicious. We're just so programmed to believe in them.

And you said green beans? Beans generally are pretty high. And green beans, you know, have you ever looked at a seed catalog and noticed that there's like 50 versions of beans? No, but there's a lot. When you buy a green bean, you don't know much about it, you know? And so they vary a lot in oxalic content

because this is nature's design where plants need this oxalic acid and they need to build these crystals to protect their seeds and to deal with funguses and to keep insects from eating them. And us, they really don't want us to eat them either. So the plants are busy doing this chemical warfare. I mean, think about it. If your yew bush had beautiful red berries on it, would you eat the berries on your yew bush? I don't know. No, you wouldn't because you'd end up in the hospital. Yeah. I, I, that's why I don't eat stuff that,

you know, is hanging out in nature. You have to filter the foods, especially the vegetable foods. They have to filter them. Like you could hunt and know this is an edible food. This isn't, but you can't pick mushrooms or plants until you're basically a botanist so you know which ones won't kill you. Yeah, that's my policy, not being killed. Not being killed. I'm going with that one. Now, almonds, sweet potatoes, and what other things are? Almonds, cashews, and peanuts are pretty bad.

And the nuts generally are pretty bad. Nuts are really squirrel food. Squirrels are the only short-lived, tough little bunnies that can really stand eating a lot of nuts. Nuts were never a practical food pre-industry. They weren't even affordable when I was growing up. You had a garnish on the green beans at a holiday. And you had a few nuts at the Christmas holidays and Thanksgiving, and that was it. We just didn't eat nuts very much when I was growing up.

I remember someone coming from Europe on Continental Airlines and bringing this little half-ounce bag of smoked almonds. And they were so precious. They were a gift to the hostess. Wow. Because you couldn't get them, and they were so precious. They were a gift to the hostess because you couldn't get them and they were expensive and people were very frugal about their, their food back then. They weren't spending money on water, bottled water and fancy coffees. I mean,

every little penny counted when I was a kid. Wow. So not being able to afford nuts and eating them all the time and having things like almond milk, this is a brand new thing. And no one's ever asked our biology if it's really okay. That is crazy, man. I guess I've got some spinach I guess off to just stick to four leaves or something a day until I can get rid of it.

You might want to freeze it because if you end up getting interested in trying the low-oxalate diet, you actually need a little bit of oxalate because the body doesn't want crystals in its thyroid gland. Imagine that. It doesn't really want crystals in the bones and bone marrow or tendons or in your knee joint or hip joint. It wants them out of there. The problem is because it's so toxic to the blood and the kidneys, the body can't get rid of them from those places until the blood level calms down. And it doesn't calm down until you quit eating the oxalate. So when you stop eating spinach and almonds and this stuff, your body, after about five days, it starts to notice, hey, wait a minute, maybe there's a little room we can finally get rid of some of this stuff from, say, the thyroid gland or from the femur bone. And it starts digging this stuff up and then your oxalate levels go back up in the

body. And that too can be not all that great. So we don't want the body to be too excited about this opportunity to get rid of this stuff. Because before technology, we didn't have trains, we didn't have refrigerators, we didn't have trains. We didn't have refrigerators. We didn't have this big shipping industry from California and elsewhere to bring us vegetables 365 days a year. And in the wintertime, people lived on ham and biscuits and, you know, hunted foods. And so we get a break from the oxalates every year, you know, because you just wouldn't eat spinach and almonds. I mean, you just didn't do that. And so I think in the way past, you would just clear them out in the wintertime and you're living on fish or whatever. But nowadays, we don't have seasonality at all.

So we're pretty much committed to five a day, 10 a day, eight a day, whatever, some huge amount of vegetables. And a lot of them that are popular, like the sweet potatoes and the chard, the beets, they're really high in oxalate. Wow. And it can cause kidney stones, kidney failure, arthritis, osteoporosis, sleep disorder, gut problems, digestive problems, inflammation, and much more. You know, I have been having a problem with my gut since I started the daily thing. I just kind of tried to eat more different things.

Like, you know, I eat raw sauerkraut. I get that from the health food store and some other things. Pineapple is another thing I'm trying to make sure my gut. I've kind of zoned in at 54 at gut health, and so I try to eat a lot of foods that are supposed to be good for my gut health, but I've been eating spinach every day. I have a spinach salad every day and make it up. Is it peanuts in general or nuts in general, or is it just the almonds mostly?

It's most all the nuts. It's a strategy by trees. Trees use a lot of oxalic acid to protect themselves and their progeny. To a tree, a nut is very precious, right? A nut to a tree is a baby and it's protected it. It's also put the oxalate crystals in the nuts because then it's a way of storing calcium. So now we've got calcium available to the nut. When it germinates later to try to become a tree, it needs the calcium in order to run its enzymes.

So the calcium oxalate is a really easy, convenient way for plants to provide their future babies with the calcium they're going to need to grow up and be a big tree. There you go. There you go. Crazy. We're not squirrels. We really aren't.

We can't live on squirrel food. We're not built for it. So your journey, you were having a hard time with the – I imagine were you on a full vegan diet? I was for a long time. I started vegetarianism quite young. I read Francis Moore LePay's book, Diet for a Small Planet. And I got very involved with the vegetarian stuff and subscribed to Vegetarian Journal. And then John Robbins' book came out, Diet for a Small America or something.

New America. And he convinced me that yogurt was terrible and eggs were terrible. And so I went full vegan. And I did the vegetarian thing for just over eight years and then eight more years of veganism. So I had 16 years of doing vegetarianism. And I didn't notice at the time when I went vegan that that's when my knees started not working and I couldn't go up and down the stairs. Really? And then all kinds of stuff happened. And then when I quit the veganism, it was because now at this point, my gut was so unhappy. I was developing sensitivities to wheat and gluten and the beans. And if you can't eat any beans

or any wheat, really you start running out of foods if you're a vegan. So I had to stop that. And I was sort of carb addicted because I was eating so much whole wheat bread and beans and stuff that I started using sweet potatoes as my carb. So I would cook them for breakfast or take them for lunch or have them with dinner or sometimes have them two or three times a day. And very soon after that, I started having knots in the back of my, like the rhomboid area, which is what helps to work your shoulder blade and your shoulder. Like knife blades at bedtime. Now bedtime is an interesting thing because when we eat the oxalate, it's about

a four-hour period before it really peaks in our blood and urine, but it takes like eight or 10 hours for that oxalate. So if I had had, say, whole wheat toast with peanut butter for breakfast, it would be at lunchtime and through the afternoon where my kidneys and blood would be struggling with that high oxalate absorbing because it takes a long time for food to move from the mouth to the other side. And then lunchtime, you know, you might have a spinach top pizza pizza or something. And now you've got more oxalate in the afternoon ganging up on you. Then you have dinner. And for me, it was like Swiss chard and sweet potatoes

with some kind of meat or something after I stopped being a vegan. And or, you know, quinoa is another one of these buckwheats, really terrible with oxalate. So by bedtime, bedtimes four hours after the third time you've nailed yourself with high oxalate food. So bedtimes when the symptoms tend to show up. And I started getting not just the knife blades, but later on, because I carried on with my sweet potato love forever.

I became, you know, I'm growing my own organic sweet potatoes, really into this. I'm into sustainable ag and eating organic and perfect and doing all the right things. I got a degree in it. This is my profession, but I'm sick, really sick to the point where I had to quit my faculty job writing research grants in public health. I needed a total hysterectomy, did not recover well from the surgery. And my endocrinologist said, you know, I got to send you to sleep study because I don't know what's wrong with you. You look great and your tests seem okay, which is classic oxalate. Like you don't really, it's very hard to pick it up on the test. And of course, no one knows to think oxalate. So even if

we knew, and there is a way I mentioned in the book, you know, what are the clinical signs? You can look that up in the book. But in the meantime, the sleep lab, the sleep doctor says, well, you have something we're going to call periodic limb movement disorder because your brain is waking up 29 times every hour. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's two minutes of sleep at a time. No wonder I couldn't function. I couldn't get off the couch. I couldn't exercise. I couldn't read the mail. I didn't have enough mental energy to even go through the mail and decide what needed attention. I was just shot. And it turned out, it took me three years of trying to solve this.

I thought it was the gut dysbiosis, the sort of SIBO kind of stuff, making my brain toxic, because that's what the medical literature says. When I'm trying to answer something, I don't go online, I go to the medical library. I look for the actual facts, not for the fantasies online. And the medical library made me believe that I must have SIBO because one of my bedtime symptoms was getting these attacks of belching and hiccups. And oh my gosh, the hiccups and the combination of the two makes you feel like you're going to break. You're going to break ribs, something else.

It turns out in the medical literature with the starfruit dust, because starfruit is the highest fruit out there. And it's very popular in Southern Asia and in Brazil and places like that. It's like the spinach, you know, it's super food. You got to use it when you're sick. So starfruit actually causes people to die. It's so high in oxalate, like rhubarb can. Rhubarb's the famous one from the past, another poster child high oxalate food.

So in these studies, either the patient who's dying or the rat that they're giving oxalate to when they're studying it, the last symptom before the animal or the human being dies of oxalate poisoning is hiccups. Oh my God. I didn't know how close to God I was. Wow. Yeah. I didn't know any of this stuff. It took a lot of digging around. I didn't even know that hiccups was a sign of neuro poisoning that when your nerves are messed up and poisoned, they call it neurotoxicity. Really? Yeah. It's hiccups is one of those signs because what's happening is the nerves can't function right when the electrolytes are messed up. So remember calcium and these minerals get grabbed by oxalate, you know, because it's a reactive ion that can clean your patio. Well, it cleans your cells, including your nerves and muscle cells,

of the calcium they need to do their jobs, and suddenly they can't work right anymore, and you get spasms. Wow. That would kind of explain it. I mean, it's always weird how it happens after a big meal or something like that. Yeah. So, you know, I was like, wow, I guess I really want to understand the whole world of how plants

might have a secret plan to kill us. I read about lectins and saponins and just all kinds of plant chemicals. And what I've concluded was that every single plant chemical is getting us in the gut. Wow. So I don't know if plants mean to kick us in the gut. I do know they like the idea of confusing you about where you just stole this from. They want to make you neurotoxic so you can go off in a daze and not remember where I was as a plant. Like, oh, maybe we can make them forget I was here by poisoning their brains. I think they do that to bees too.

Anybody who's a predatory insect or fungus or human or rabbit or whatever, they're really not really happy that you're consuming them and they're playing this poisoning game that we're just oblivious to. That's kind of interesting, but that makes sense in an odd sort of way. Because evolution would have caused them to die off. We would have herbated them out of existence. If they didn't have some secret technique for staying alive.

The ones who were non-toxic don't exist, right? Yeah. So you can eat a little bit of us, but don't eat a lot. Right. Leave us a future. Pay yourself. One of your chapters is oxalate content of alternative milks. Let's touch on that. What is that about?

Well, almond milk, you know, you're buying a big box of water with some thickeners and some added stuff and a few almonds. But it turns out that little few almonds is in this soluble liquid diluted form that makes it especially toxic. So when it's all ground up and soluble and dissolved in water, it's more toxic that way. So even though it's less amount of oxalate than, say, your almond snack or your chocolate-covered almond treat or your almond ice cream or your almond donut or your almond bread. You know, People are using almonds everywhere now. Almond butter is popular, but the almond milk is especially problematic because by whipping it up in a water solution, it can get into your bloodstream so much more easily. And we're kind of doing that with a spinach smoothie and with juicing. We're whipping it

up in a liquid solution, dissolving it, and giving it superpowers to get into your blood, your liver, your heart, your lungs, and everywhere else. The eyes end up in trouble with oxalates too. Really? Wow. That's not what I need. I need my eyes. I like my eyes. I was a geek about eating vegetables, especially beets and beet greens as a kid. And I'm pretty convinced now that's why I needed glasses in 10th grade. I needed progressive bifocals by the time I was 21 years old. Wow.

Yeah. Well, I guess my spinach is getting tossed out. Yay. Good. We want you to be healthy and strong and live a long time and not become a patient. Yeah. I mean, here I've been thinking I'm like so good. And I wanted to write this book

because you're being good. You deserve better information. If you're willing to be good, let's give you good information. You deserve that. And I'm not a big fan of spinach. It doesn't taste all that great. Like I'm, I make these salads and I throw a lot in and I throw in some nuts too. So that's probably bad. But I make salads that I throw a lot of stuff in there, and I just make it really tasty, make sure there's some cheese and stuff in there. But yeah, I don't know. I've been having inflammation problems for a while now.

Maybe this is attached to all the spinach I've been eating. I mean, I don't eat a lot, but probably about 20 or 30 leaves I'll throw in there and mix them out. Every day. Every day. I don't know. I every day every day i would i would bank on it yeah i'm gonna cut it out and uh we'll see how it goes but yeah it makes sense what you're talking about and why some of these plants have these chemicals in them so that we don't over consume them and then yeah i mean you know one of the things i learned from we talked to in the pre-show about uh pendulet's, you know, one of the things I learned from, we talked to in the pre-show about, uh, uh, Pendulet's book, uh, Presto, one of the things he talked about in there is, um, we for winter that never comes. And so, uh, we used to be, like you mentioned before,

how we didn't eat a lot of plants during the winter. So it probably offset our diets and cleaned out all that sort of crap that we're eating. But, you know, now we have foods year round. And so we, you know, it used to be we would eat a lot of food. The concept of eating for winter that never comes is we would usually fatten up a little bit during the non-winter months. And that way we'd have food, we'd have this fat we could live off of during winter. So if we didn't have as much food, we'd be fine. We'd have this fat we could live off of during winter. So if we didn't have as much food, we'd be fine. But yeah, it's really interesting, the whole concept of that and stuff. I'm just really amazed by it.

What else have we touched on? It doesn't really ask us to completely rethink the way we think. So it tends to bounce off our heads because we just go back to thinking the way we always have. Like, it's hard to think this big a different thought, really. Yeah, it's crazy, man. It's crazy. It is. It is crazy.

It is literally, you know, like tearing your brain inside out. That's why I had to just keep writing and teaching and making, figuring out because it was just messing my brain up so bad. I needed to understand this. Yeah. I'm going to try it and get rid of the stuff. I'm actually a bigger fan of romaine lettuce. I mean, I love romaine lettuce, especially with the Caesar salad.

Oh, my gosh. A good Caesar salad is fantastic. I'm getting hungry talking about it. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm going to try that. What about, I mean, if black beans are a big staple of vegans, are black beans bad? Yes, they are, unfortunately. But black-eyed peas are okay.

Oh, really? The peas are much lower. So chickpeas, black-eyed peas, and green peas are way lower than black beans and pinto beans and these kinds of things. So if you're willing to cook at home, it's pretty easy to substitute black eyed peas and chickpeas, but you have to know how to cook a little bit because most restaurants aren't using black eyed peas. You know, if you're running out for a burrito, they're using black beans and they're sometimes putting sweet potatoes in there in that burrito and it can get up to really, you know, 100, 200 milligrams of oxalate. But if you use, you you know black eyed peas and eggs and then the same old

little bit of onion and cilantro is really low oxalate um that stuff is all fine so you could really cut it down to a tenth of the amount of oxalate in a burrito if you another thing you could do is use the white burrito skin not the whole wheat the bran is high in oxalate like a whole wheat one might have two and a half times as much oxalate as a white one. And they're, I can never pronounce this right, legumes? Legumes? Legumes, yeah. Legumes?

Is that the correct pronunciation? I think either one is correct, but we could look it up online. Yeah, I'm just cheating here, looking at some stuff. Now, a lot of people try and eat these legumes for, they'll use lentils. Is that bad for us, lentils? Lentils are not high in oxalate, but they're really high in something

called lectins. Oh, yeah. I thought they were good for you. Yeah, but you need, with lentils, you need to soak them several days and then cook them at high heat. That way you can disarm the lectin, which is a giant protein molecule, very different. Oxalate, you can't cook away. You can't soak or cook it. The big problem, all the other, not all of them, most of the other plant chemicals that are so toxic, there's often a way to deal with them. With lectins,

you cook the crap out of stuff. So it needs high heat, like a pressure cooker heat. So that's why like in India, they serve their lentils all like gruel, like a thin liquid, really well cooked. They use pressure cookers in long cooking times and soaking times because that's what helps save your gut. Now lectins will get you in the gut. So undercooked lectins, using things like lentil pastas and red lentil spaghetti, that stuff is probably not very safe because of phytates and lectins, but it doesn't have a lot of oxalate. But you've got gut problems. You got to know the plants have these chemicals that don't agree with our gut. Wow. I'm learning so much. I got to finish reading your book. You've got some whole foods diet transition, pescatarian diet transition and paleo diet transition advice in the book. I guess that's telling people how to adjust those diets so they

can fit to not have the oxalates in their system. That's right. That's right. And I even have a friend who is remained vegan and been able to really fix his foot and ankle problems. Although the process of getting this stuff out of your foot and ankle can mean gout attacks. So he's had at least three, I think, gout attacks over the last four years that he's been healing from this problem of too much oxalate. Wow. healing from this problem of too much oxalate. But his diet is kind of limited because he is insisting on staying full vegan. He's very pure about it. So he's eating a lot of white rice and nori rolls and things like that. And he's not spending a lot of time cooking either. So that can have its other hazards. If you're insisting on a certain label and signing up for a certain club in nutrition,

instead of just really following your body's desires and really nourishing yourself well. That's really good for the planet, by the way, to nourish yourself well because then you're not producing all this hospital waste and being a burden on other people if you're healthy. It's true. So this is pretty insightful, man. Maybe I've been dealing with some inflammation problems in the gut,

and I've been trying to resolve it, and it may be this is the core of what my problem is. Very good chance of that. Yeah. How long does it take to wash it out if you quit eating spinach and all this stuff? Does it take a couple days or longer? Well, you're basically asking your bone marrow, your bones, all your joints, and your thyroid gland to completely overhaul themselves and fix themselves in a few days. That's not how biology works.

And if your body were to kick it all out of those tissues in a few days, you would literally die of oxalate poisoning. So thank God the body's a little smarter than you are because it'll take its time. And I'm still, I think I was dumping some oxalates. We call it dumping when you've got visible signs of some symptoms of it being stirred up and pushed out. And I feel like I'm still doing that. And I'm just about in a week or so, it'll be the finished my ninth year on the diet. Wow. I think it's a 10 year process for us health geeks or more. Maybe it's 15 years because I still have damage in my spine. I think that's part of what's going on as I'm working on my spine bones. The hips and spine, I think are an area that gets really caught up with oxalates. And oxalate can cause, you know, slip discs, weak connective tissue, all kinds of deformities in bones and joints. And there's a lot of joints in the spine and a lot of activity. You know, slip discs, weak connective tissue, all kinds of deformities in bones and joints.

And there's a lot of joints in the spine and a lot of activity. You know, the oxalates kind of get caught up where there's a lot of activity and tissue turnover. And where have you got stress, inflammation, infection? Those are the areas where it tends to get stuck. It's stuck in the jaw and teeth. You can get teeth pain as the body's getting rid of the oxalates in your jaw and in your teeth. So I tell people, if you change your diet and you start getting tooth pain, do not pull your teeth unless you're a thousand percent sure that there's an infection there because there's these symptoms like the gout that my vegan friend had and the tooth pain that a lot of us get. That's just the process of the body turning on inflammation to try to

roto root out these toxic crystals from your tissues, which is unpleasant. Wow. Well, this makes sense. So anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? Oh, you know,

every, to me, every chain page, almost every chapter has stuff I didn't know before. It's so relevant and it's a cool tour down into the basement of the library, but I try to not make it sound too library geekish. And so that you can follow along. There's lots of little stories in there of clients I've worked with and their,

their stories are amazing. So hopefully you'll find it to be a fun read and life-changing, and you'll live in a hearty, healthy old state without osteoporosis and kidney stones. That's my goal, to live in a healthy state. And I've been eating spinach all this time like an idiot. Poor baby. You eat so many, though. It's not your fault.

You've been misinformed. I only started in the last six months or so. Nine months? Six months? So before that, I was just pretty much eating McDonald's. No, I'm just kidding. I wasn't doing that. But yeah. McDonald's is less dangerous than a spinach smoothie. Really? Totally. All right. I'm going back to eating McDonald's.

No, I'm not. Anyway, Sally, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Incredibly insightful. I'm going to be sending this to my you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it. Incredibly insightful. I'm going to be sending this to my friends and telling them they need to check out your book. Awesome. It's so fun to connect with you. I'm looking forward to the next story of you off spinach.

There you go. I'll let you know how it went. I just bought a big old bushel yesterday. Well, you know, if you need to inherit early, send it to your uncle and let him eat it. There you go. There you go. One of the uncles I hate. So thanks, Sally, for coming to the show.

We really appreciate it. It's great to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. And give us your.com as we part out so that people can find you on the interwebs. sallyknorton.com. Come visit me there. Thank you.

There you go. Guys, order up her book it comes out december 27th 2022 it makes the perfect uh christmas gift so there you go for the holidays you can give the you give people the gift of health and give away them a great book and then uh you know the great thing is you can order the last minute too and then you got that in the bag but don't you actually don't want to wait for books because sometimes they run into printing problems lately with uh i know last couple years with coveted they they were it was taking us a while to get books but uh order it up so you can be the first one on your block to say you read it that's always the best bet uh toxic superfoods

superfoods how oxalate overload is Making You Sick and How to Get Better. Don't knock it until you try it. Order it up today wherever fine books are sold, folks. Also go to goodreads.com, Fortes, Chris Voss, youtube.com, Fortes, Chris Voss, and all those places you'll find on the interwebs. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.