Oxalates: Should We Be Afraid of Them?

The latest diet bogeyman has been trending that our problems can be blamed on oxalic acids, or oxalates.

With advice that we should all find low-oxalate foods and avoid high-oxalate foods.

The reasoning is that oxalates are often called an “anti-nutrient” and will bind to calcium and cause kidney stones on a very rare occasion.

Which I think may happen to a rare person. But virtually all healthy whole foods contain oxalates. And making all our dietary decisions based on their oxalates content seems overkill, and a highly restrictive diet like that seems relevant to very few people.

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So the foods super HIGH in oxalates are spinach, almonds, Swiss chard, parsley, pepper, black tea especially but teas in general, actually.

Also rhubarb, potatoes and sweet potatoes, and cassava and quinoa and buckwheat, beets, cashews. 

Citrus fruits, kiwis, raspberries, and dates. Dark chocolate.

And in fact most beans. Actually I could just keep going and you’d basically have eliminated all the foods you know to be healthy for you.

So yes, some people do get kidney stones. I’m much more worried about the people drinking soft drinks getting kidney stones than the people eating whole foods that contain oxalates.

I worry zero about counting how much oxalic acid I eat. But then, I do a “flush” twice a year that dilates all the ducts of my kidneys, liver and gallbladder, and then cleanses them so they can go forward functioning better. Which is kind of like changing the oil on your car twice a year.

So I tuned into what Sally Norton had to say, because she’s the one out there constantly seeking media to talk about oxalates.

I figured there’s always something of value to learn even with people I don’t 100% agree with. And she’s the one that got Joe Mercola believing that all the spinach and vegetables I eat was going to kill me. (And that’s a direct quote.)

But listen, tens of thousands of studies don’t lie, the extensive list of foods containing oxalates are also the foods that lead to longevity, and also prevent cancer and heart disease and auto-immune disease.

And while if you’re one of the rare people who need to worry about the oxalic content of foods, I feel for you, because that’s an elimination diet that’s like no other, it’s so restrictive.

(Even more difficult than the anti-candida diet I used to think was the most restrictive of all.)

But I think there’s some underlying gut-liver dysbiosis, if the body is not processing these benign compounds in food.

What if a cleanup of the gut and liver meant you didn’t have to spend the rest of your life counting oxalates and forgoing the healthiest foods?

As it is, even the die-hard anti-oxalate people like Sally Norton will acknowledge that pretty much all the healthy, unprocessed foods have oxalates.

So, at best, you’re going to avoid the high-oxalate foods and stick to the lower-oxalate foods. Eating less rather than more, since elimination is virtually impossible.

Just my two cents, I think sometimes we hear one expert and go “all in” on that idea that greens have goitrogens so we better not eat them, or grains have phytates so we better not eat them, or 200 different foods have oxalates so we better not eat them ….

… and the fact of the matter is, these compounds called “anti-nutrients,” that’s just a word somebody made up.

These compounds may actually have important roles in the body. And while there may be such a thing as “too much,” I’d also hate to see you become orthorexic and terrified of foods that are healthy for you in countless ways.

And if my body was super reactive to foods containing oxalates, I’d be really curious about what the underlying issue is, rather than just eliminating 90% of the healthy food on earth from my diet.

Maybe if you did that, it would just be a temporary thing while we teach you how to flush all the crystalline buildup that people with oxalate problems have.

Our method (learn about it in a four-part video series here) of helping people flush the buildup up crystalline material from kidneys, gallbladder, and liver, was pioneered by Andreas Moritz, who recovered his own health doing more than a dozen flushes until all the traffic-jam of precursor stones were cleared out–

–but we also incorporate into our detox the best parts of the detox protocols of Dr. Bernard Jensen, Dr. Max Gerson, Dr. Richard Anderson, Dr. Jack Tips, and Dr. Ann Wigmore.

So that the liver and gallbladder are a focus, but we also attend to cleanup needed in the gastrointestinal tract, blood, and kidneys.

I know that opinion is quite different from the people super committed to the oxalate narrative, and I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I’d also hate to see you become basically terrified of almost all the healthy food in the world.

If you’d like to see this article in video form, here it is:

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