Toxic Superfoods

A book review

Some of you may remember a two-part newsletter I wrote before Christmas called, I’ve Been Poisoned: The Health Edition. Here’s part two if you should care to refresh your memory. (I would recommend it because I’m not going to rehash what oxalates are and the harms they can cause in detail here.) Oxalates are concentrated in high amounts in superfoods like beets, beet greens, dark chocolate, almonds, sweet potatoes, blackberries, etc.. The oxalate issue and it’s effect on my symptoms hit me like a thunderclap after I had been taking a multi-vitamin that contained a superfood complex. It brought on a horrible IC flare back in September and forced me to take the information I already had about oxalates much more seriously.

I began to cut down on the oxalate content in my food before Thanksgiving and experienced some pretty wretched dumping symptoms. (Dumping is when your body rids itself of stored oxalates.) Right this moment, I feel pretty great. I know I may have some rough times around the corner, as I have been eating a “healthy” oxalate-heavy diet my entire life, so it’s going to take probably a year or more to get rid of the oxalate accumulation.

Anyway…don’t want to get ahead of myself.

I recently bought a book called Toxic Superfoods by Sally K. Norton. (She has made oxalates and combing the scientific literature for information about oxalates her entire focus for many years.) And I promised you a book review once I’d read it.

Now, a book about some weird crystal thingies in “healthy” food that wreak havoc on the body in almost every way imaginable—could be a dull tome indeed. But this book is not. Sally’s writing style is engaging, fun, and witty. I laughed out loud more than a few times, and those of us who have chronic pain and misery caused by our bodies know just how important it is to laugh. So, I appreciated that a good bit.

The book is split into two parts. Part 1 explains the problem—what oxalates are, how they harm the body, why so few medical professionals know about the problem, how our “healthy diets” are making the problem much worse, how oxalates accumulate in the body, the staggering array of symptoms oxalate toxicity is responsible for, and a lot more. Part 2 lays out a common sense plan to figure out how many oxalates you’re personally eating, how to slowly transition into a lower oxalate diet in phases, and what kinds of vitamins, minerals, herbals, and probiotics are helpful and which of these are NOT. (Honestly, the NOT part is almost more important than the first part, but I digress.)

Where Sally’s book is most valuable, I think, is that she gives us permission to stop eating what everyone else is calling “health food.” Oxalates are heavily concentrated in many plants, not meat or dairy. (There are negligible amounts in some dairy.) Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 75 years, you should be aware of the push for plant-based eating. The current paradigm is that animal foods should be limited because 1. cow farts are destroying the planet and 2. animal products cause all disease. Both of these claims are massive oversimplifications at best and outright lies at worst. I will not belabor the point here. Many doctors, scientists and nutritionists have combed through the literature and arrived at the truth. Unfortunately, the propagandists have been successful and Americans have drastically reduced their animal product consumption since Ancel Keys began his campaign of lies in the 1950s.

Sally’s opening paragraph begins thus:

“Actor Liam Hemsworth publicly blamed spinach smoothies for a 2019 kidney stone episode that required surgery. At age 29 he had to miss a movie premiere and an awards banquet because of it. In 2020, Men’s Health magazine quoted Mr. Hemsworth as saying: ‘February last year, I was feeling really low and lethargic and wasn’t feeling good generally. And then I got a kidney stone.’ He added: ‘Every morning I was having five handfuls of spinach and then almond milk, almond butter, and also some vegan protein in a smoothie. And that was what I considered super healthy. So, I had to completely rethink what I was putting into my body.’

This is just one example Sally provides among many well-documented oxalate poisoning cases. Liam was lucky. Others have died of kidney failure after consuming massive amounts of oxalates via sorrel and spinach dishes in a short period of time.

Oxalates, you see, are weapons for plants.

In an ancient technique, central and southern African hunters harnessed the power of oxalic acid by driving wooden arrowheads into banana tree trunks about 24 hours before the hunt. The oxalic acid in the tree sap is powerful enough to paralyze prey. It’s a nerve toxin.

Much more insidious, however, is the gradual and slow decline of oxalate poisoning over years. That’s most people’s experience with oxalates though they may not even know it. That was me. At various times in my life, I have eaten upwards of 2,000 mg of oxalate per day. Sally writes:

The amount of oxalates humans can consume without ill effect, while variable, is surprisingly low. Kidney researchers tell us that a ‘normal’ and safe intake level is within the range of 150 to 200 mg a day. ‘High-oxalate’ eating—with great potential to get healthy people into trouble over time—is typically defined as 250 mg or more per day. Diets over 600 mg a day are considered ‘extremely high.’ (Note: As we saw in the previous chapter, estimates of oxalate content of foods tend to have a ‘ballpark’ specificity because actual content in foods depends on many variables.

When I was a kid, a typical day of food included a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast with walnuts and raisins added in and possibly a fried egg with whole grain, whole wheat toast topped with a generous helping of zero sugar added peanut butter. (97 mg) Lunch would be mixed salad greens with roasted soy nuts and some cheese. (80 mg) Sometimes we’d get a snack of almonds and raisins. (122 mg) Supper would typically include beans and rice or beans and whole wheat noodles with perhaps ground beef. Often a helping of cooked beet greens. (296 mg) Added up, that’s nearly 600 mg per day. It was a whole foods, minimally processed, very low sugar, “healthy” diet, because my mom was extremely conscientious about how she fed us. I doubt she’d ever heard the word “oxalate” in her life.

At other times in my life when I was consuming almond flour, almond butter, almond milk, dark chocolate, and spinach in smoothies almost every day, my oxalate intake was much higher. Of course, I was doing all that heavy oxalate eating so that I could feel better, because I felt bad to begin with!

You’ve all heard me delineate my many health issues. The one most obviously sensitive to oxalates is the interstitial cystitis. That came on fast and furious when I was 32. When I think how I have been shredding my bladder with this compound because of my “healthy” eating for years…when I think of the years of abject misery I have suffered, the sleepless nights and pelvic pain…I am quite livid that this information is not readily available and shouted from the rooftops.

The thing is, this knowledge has been around since the 1800s. But, as usual, it was not of much interest to the medical establishment and still isn’t. In Chapter 6, Sally lays out the timeline of how knowledge of oxalate toxicity was lost.

In 1842, the nascent oxalic diathesis emerged as a medical condition associated with diet and involving elevated oxalate in urine…Affected patients suffer from digestive problems; arthritis; back pain; anxiety, nervousness, despondency, or other mental distress; fatigue; soft bones; boils; rough and scaly skin; cardiac symptoms; pain or heaviness in the loins; urinary tract stones or distress, semen in the urine, and cloudy urine. Urinary expert Golding Bird and a handful of his colleagues from the tea-drinking British Isles believed that excessive oxalate in the body was bad for the ‘general health…’ By the late 1930s, while foundations funded by the Rockefeller were pouring millions of dollars into medical research, medicine was gradually moving away from recognizing diet’s power to generate acute symptoms and chronic problems.

The only branch of medicine that recognizes oxalate toxicity anymore is renal care. And even then, some kidney specialists don’t even mention oxalates to their repeat kidney stone sufferers. Why, I do not pretend to know. Seems like a fairly obvious thing to mention, as calcium oxalate kidney stones are pretty common.

I don’t want to make this newsletter long, as I’ve written two lengthy newsletters on this topic in the past. Cutting to the chase, here’s why I recommend this book.

It’s clear and concise. It lays out the problem with high oxalate eating that is difficult to argue against. Oxalates are compounds that plants produce to protect themselves and their offspring from being eaten. Oxalates are toxins. There are no good ways to reduce oxalate content in high-oxalate foods. There is no good reason, therefore, to eat them. None.

It helps us shed the guilt trip. Besides oxalates, there are numerous toxins in plants that we have to mitigate in order to eat them—lectins, goitrogens, phytotoxins (which people love to call phytonutritients), and fiber. (Yes, fiber isn’t all that great, believe it or not.) Given these toxins, there is no need to feel guilty if your plate isn’t piled up with veggies, and there is no need to feel guilty if you haven’t “eaten the rainbow” in a given day. None.

It provides a game plan. If you have been eating a high oxalate diet for a long time, it can be hazardous to suddenly eat a zero oxalate diet. For real. You might end up in the hospital. (I had heart arrhythmia for three months. That was disconcerting.) Don’t do that. Instead, get Sally’s book and read about how you can slowly reduce oxalates with minimal pain and suffering.

I hope this has been interesting and informative. I have written most of this with a bad headache as I spent all day yesterday outside in the damp cold and my sinuses are not happy about it. So, please forgive me if this particular newsletter feels a bit disjointed. It’s because I feel a bit disjointed.

At any rate, buy Sally’s book! Here’s a link: Toxic Superfoods

Housekeeping!

I will release Chapter 5 of The Pursuit of Elizabeth Millhouse audiobook on Wednesday at 7:00 AM as usual. To listen along, please consider upgrading to paid for 8.00 a month or 80.00 per year. This will help me get the book back in print as soon as possible.

Thanks for reading, everyone.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…