Apr 18, 20195 min read

Sally Norton, MPH on Oxalates, Plants Hurting Your Health, and Never Eating Spinach Again

Listen on

Apple Podcasts // Spotify // CastBox // Overcast

Sally Norton has a degree in nutrition from Cornell University and a Masters of Public Health from the University of North Carolina. She managed a five-year, National Institute of Health-funded program at the UNC Medical School. She’s a nutrition consultant, speaker, and an all around oxalate expert.

This is a sad story with a happy ending. Sally’s life goal from age 5 was to study nutrition and help people be healthy. She followed all the traditional advice and ate a very plant-heavy vegetarian and even vegan diet only to have 30 years of health problems because of that diet.

At first all this oxalate stuff is hard to believe. It’s talked about so little and there’s not a lot of mainstream knowledge on it in the medical community. We talk some real science a little ways into the episode, so know it’s coming. Also for people who may be skeptical of how bad oxalates are you can go to the vegan site veganhealth.org/oxalate and see the comprehensive mile-long list of problems and warnings about oxalates. Yes, a vegan site warning about plant food dangers. This is not some wacky carnivore idea people.

I just started a Patreon for this podcast. I really want to keep this ad-free and I’m getting multiple offers for sponsorships. This is a huge amount of work I do completely on my own and I don’t think I have the bandwidth to keep it up much longer. I’ll spare you the details of how many hours it takes me weekly to put it out, but just know it’s way more than you think. I’ll continue keeping this a high quality and from what I’ve heard valuable resource for people if I can get the support of the community. We are a tribe and everyone does their part to keep things moving. I appreciate all the messages I get that help keep me motivated when the hours get long. Even people’s suggestions on guests really help. This episode was possible from 1 or 2 listeners who kept mentioning Sally and her work. Thanks so much for supporting me in all my efforts. This will allow me to keep putting out content on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube as well. Please go to Patreon.com/peakhuman or click through the link in the show notes and become a member of the tribe there. Just a couple dollars a month really helps. You can also get more perks like extended show notes and bonus content we’re just beginning to put out or an invite to the private Slack group. That’s http://Patreon.com/peakhuman. Thanks in advance, and here’s Sally Norton.

Preorder Food Lies: http://indiegogo.com/projects/food-lies-post

Support me on Patreon! http://patreon.com/peakhuman

SHOW NOTES

Sally had a lifelong quest to be in the nutrition and wellness space
Despite eating plant-based diets all her life and focusing on what she thought was good nutrition, she had major health problems
Some books convinced her to vegan and soon she could barely walk up and down stairs and got pneumonia multiple times per year
She finally figured out it was the build up of oxalated from all the plants foods she was eating
She published a great paper “Lost Seasonality and Overconsumption of Plants: Risking Oxalate Toxicity” https://jevohealth.com/journal/vol2/iss3/4/
How come she has all this training and she didn't know a thing about oxalates?
We actually knew about oxalates in the 1700s and 1800s
Populations like the Irish drank a lot of tea, ate a lot of potatoes, had greens in season, and rhubarb in the spring - all of these have high oxalate
Spinach and whole grains have a lot of oxalate
They did tests on rats to see calcium absorption of and we saw that spinach wasn't delivering calcium - same for iron and folate
The nutrients also degrade quickly unless the spinach is kept very cold the entire time after harvest (which is basically impossible)
All USDA data on nutrition in plant foods are wrong and don’t account for bioavailability
Nutrients drop significantly in spinach after harvest, especially when not refrigerated to a very cold 4 degrees celsius
More and more people are heading towards mostly animal foods as they learn about bioavailability and antinutrients and listen to their body
The carnivore movement has been great to just let people know it’s ok to eat only animal foods
World War 1 is when we started relying on fallback plant foods she thinks. We invented the idea of the victory garden
I was out with a girl from Peru who was laughing at Americans for eating green vegetables - the mainly eat meat, fish, and starches.
She talks about why we even think vegetables are so great in the first place
Our natural state is now a diseased state
Biggest current problems are toxicity and deficiency
High oxalate foods: nuts, seeds, brassica veg, potatoes, some berries
If doctors don’t have a remedy for it, you don’t have a disease
Calcium is being blamed for what oxalates are doing
Science behind oxalates
Range of oxalate poisoning that could kill you is 3.5 grams - 30 grams
A guy died of oxalate poisoning from sorrel soup
Cases of people with permanent kidney damage from juice/smoothie cleanses
Kidney disease is on the rise faster than anything in the last few decades
There’s so many other toxins your kidney needs to deal with these days besides the oxalate
She’s read about 3,000 studies and articles on oxalate over the last 4.5 years of research
Oxalates travel all over the body before going through your kidney to be detoxified
Even vegan sites warn about the enormous problem of oxalates https://veganhealth.org/oxalate/
Whole system is skewed supporting plants foods
Researchers aren't doctors don’t have time or aren't curious enough or can't get funding to do all this research
She’s had major foot problems most of her life due to oxalates and it kind of ruined her career
Susan Owens has great data on oxalate accumulation http://lowoxalate.info
Clive Solomons and the Pain Project http://www.thevpfoundation.org/effective_treatment.htm
Comprehensive oxalate charts http://lowoxalate.info/recipes.html
USDA food charts don’t account for bioavailability and 10-15% of the data is just wrong
A lot of oxalate problems are determined by how much is getting through the intestinal tract and how compromised it is / what problems you have like IBS, etc.
If you're constantly getting low doses of oxalate your immune system is constantly cleaning it up so you won’t really see any major problems… but that’s not good at all
We need to eat seasonally for a real reason - to give our body a break from different foods that may be giving us problems if eaten in excess
Herbivores evolved differently to be able to handle oxalates
Even these can die if they are stuck somewhere where they only have access to high oxalate food
She’s working on some proposals and a book
Her site is http://sallyknorton.com
Her Instagram is http://instagram.com/sknorton