Diet Archives - Sally K. Norton

May 14, 2026 by Sally K Norton

Chronic Rash and Allergies: My Battle with Food Myths

Here Ruth shares her oxalate story. She highlights the mental and physical trauma of being misinformed. How could farm-fresh greens and other supposedly healthy foods cause severe rashes? In her efforts to take care of her body with nuts and bio-dynamic, fresh-picked vegetables, she unknowingly poisoned it. Take it away, Ruth…

I was that person eating bags of nuts from Costco—at least a cup a day. I truly believed I was doing something good for myself. During the 2020 lockdown, most of my diet consisted of fresh, locally grown biodynamic vegetables. I was sure that I was protecting my health. I was brain washed to believe that these were “healthy foods.”

Looking back, it disturbs me how confident I was. I was so wrong.

My Annual Rash. Over and Over Again

In 2019, I developed a severe, chronic rash that no one could explain. It followed a pattern—appearing every year from June through November, then mysteriously disappeared in the winter.

This went on for six years.

In the summers, my body would erupt. In the winters, when I was eating mostly grass-fed foods from the co-op, my skin would calm down. At the time, I didn’t connect those dots.

When the rash was active, it was punishing! My skin peeled, the burning and itching were relentless, and my sinuses were on fire. My eyes streamed constantly, leaving acid tracks down my cheeks. The glands in my neck swelled painfully.

I knew something was very wrong—but no one could tell me what. I went from doctor to doctor: a general practitioner, a dermatologist, two allergists. No diagnosis. No answers. Just confusion.

During that same period, my life narrowed. I felt ugly, old, and used up. I isolated myself during lockdown and poured my energy into writing a book. When it was finally released, my editor died. I envied him.

A Mini-Breakthrough

In January 2025, something new happened: extreme bloating. My abdomen became hugely distended, unlike anything I had experienced before.

I started a specialized probiotic supplement and stayed on it for four months. It felt like a miracle. The bloating dissipated and I had no rash. My body felt calm.

Healthy Eating Continued

But my diet hadn’t really changed. I was still drinking tea, eating at least half a cup of nuts daily, and including whole grains. Then, in May, my bio-dynamic CSA resumed—bringing back beautiful red chard, beets and beet greens, and spinach. I welcomed them back enthusiastically.

The Crash

By the second week of June, everything came roaring back—worse than ever. My body exploded. My neck swelled, my throat began to close, I could barely breathe, and I couldn’t open my eyes. It was terrifying.

At urgent care, I was prescribed Augmentin. I reacted badly to it. I refused cortisone and instead spent $4,000 on allergy testing, desperate for answers. The results showed… nothing. No meaningful allergies, except birch trees. After all that, I was right where I started.

Finally, an Answer

Late that fall, I reached a breaking point. I asked—spiritually—for help. In that moment, I remembered a book I had purchased but never read: Toxic Superfoods.

When I finally opened it, everything clicked. For the first time, my symptoms made sense. I realized I was dealing with oxalate toxicity. I immediately removed the major sources: spinach, chard, nuts, tea, and whole grains. I went back to simple grass-fed meat and dairy.

And then things got much worse. I think I nearly died. I developed intense headaches, swelling in my knuckles, tightness in my knees, and extreme tooth sensitivity. It felt like my body was unraveling.

But this time, I wasn’t in the dark. Sally’s book had explained that this could happen. As awful as it felt, it was confirmation.

Resistance and Resolve

I brought the book with me to several of the physicians I had seen before, hoping to finally have a productive conversation. Instead, I was belittled and dismissed.

I left those appointments angry—but also clear. If I was going to heal, I would have to take this into my own hands.

Where I Am Now

Five months later, I feel better than I have in over six years. But I’m not fully well yet.

Looking back, I can see this didn’t start recently. The pattern likely began in my late teens—with completely different symptoms. I’m now 82. This has been unfolding for many decades.

I’ve always loved my body and felt connected to it. But now I carry a sense that I let it down—by unknowingly poisoning it with foods I believed were healthy. Like most people, I had no idea there could be a dark side to these “superfoods.”

Even now, my thinking tries to revert back—to assume these foods must be good for me. But my body tells a different story. Changing those beliefs has been one of the hardest parts.

I am deeply grateful for Sally’s book explaining what’s been happening—and for finding others in this situation. This realization has been one of the most amazing, important discoveries of my life.

Postscript: A Lifetime of Clues

When I look back, the signs were always there—they were just dismissed. At age 3, I had eczema, an inflammatory condition. In my teen years, severe undernourishment and was advised to eat spinach after receiving vitamin shots. Later, I was diagnosed with von Willebrand’s disease, which I now believe may be connected to longstanding issues with oxalates, bleeding, and digestion.

There has been a long history of surgeries too: Appendectomy 1951, Cholecystectomy 1972. D&C 1979, Hysterectomy 1980, Scar revision 1980, Oophorectomy 2005. Perhaps I could have had better health all along if I had known to avoid high oxalate foods, or at the very least, not expect them to make we well.

Sally Gets the Last Word

Ruth struggles not just with the pain of rashes, and the long recovery process, but even so more with her thinking that wants to “revert back to assuming these foods must be good for me.”

Ultimately, the mental trance that gives toxic superfoods a pass has be broken. While we get stuck in group-think, our bodies tell us a very different, and more truthful story. Lived experience is real. Maybe Ruth’s story will help you break the hold of ideas that are secretly making us sick.

February 10, 2026 by Sally K Norton

Cynthia’s Oxalate Story

Hello, I’m Cynthia. I am 59 years old. I’ve always battled cravings for sweets—especially chocolate, which was a constant in my life. From childhood, staples of my diet consisted mainly of pasta, peanut butter, and potato chips. Every so often, I’d try to eat healthier by cutting back on fat, giving up chips, and adding more fruits and vegetables to my meals.

Ten years ago, in 2016, after watching documentaries on Netflix, I decided to prioritize my health. The movie that most inspired this change was entitled Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead. This documentary tells an emotional story of two men breaking their addiction to processed foods through a 60-day juice fast. The idea of the fresh fruits and vegetable fast is to reset your system. That helps you lose weight and reverse diseases.

Healthy Diet Failed

Following that advice led me to a disastrous year of veganism. I was confident that plant foods were good for me, so I ate my favorites—peanut butter and dark chocolate—daily. The results were nothing like what was promised. Rather than improving, my health declined into brain fog, pain, skin problems, constant hunger, and difficulty losing weight. Misery had set in, to stay.

The solution was a shift to a low-carb, keto-style Paleo diet. Initially, I lost some weight and felt better, but something was still very wrong. I could never get into ketosis. I was eating mountains of almonds and almond flour, 85% dark chocolate, chia seeds, sweet potatoes, and huge bags of sautéed spinach that, when cooked, shrank to nothing. Discipline kept me on this keto diet, for years!

That created a massive oxalate overdose.

I was plagued with persistent health issues like fatigue, memory problems, pain, and anxiety. Switching to an all-meat carnivore diet in 2022 caused even more symptoms, which I later learned were caused by oxalate dumping triggered by removing all those high-oxalate foods.

I’m still deep in the clearing process, and it isn’t easy. But at least now I understand why. I’m finding my way back to my life and starting to have good days again—evidenced by my return to pickleball.

Cynthia is Back to Pickleball.

Lessons Learned

Looking back, I realize that my previous diet significantly harmed my health and career. Now, I know that no “superfood,” including chocolate, is worth the price: sacrificing my overall well-being.

I was misled about “healthy” eating, and as a result, I’m disillusioned with the medical field that I devoted my life to as a nurse. This experience showed me that many patients suffer from diet-driven issues that remain largely ignored in a system that rarely treats food as a root cause.

December 26, 2022 by Sally K Norton

Fake Meat: Dangers and Hidden Reality

Food companies use truly scary ingredients and techniques to make today’s plant-based meat substitutes. To mimic the aromas, flavors and textures of meat, high-tech manufacturing plants need to create copycat proteins, fats, and flavoring compounds. They use genetic engineering to create the key “employees” that do this work: genetically edited e-coli, yeasts, algae, and even stem cells from animals. The job of these genetically engineered micro-employees is to digest and transform big-ag GMO crops into fake meat products for human consumption.

This manufacturing is a franken-fermentation process that generates dangerous waste end-products that need careful handling and complete incineration. They must not escape into our natural environment because the consequences are completely unknown and could be catastrophic.

Large bio-tech companies are investing huge amounts of money to make imitation foods taste like real meats. This is because humans naturally love the taste of meat, eggs, cheese, and fish. Our reliance on meats is bred into our biology. Big tech wants to save us from this “problem.”

In the face of our uncertain future, new food technology is a comfort to some—but where are we putting our faith and trust?

plant-based meat subsitutes on grocery store racks — Fake Meats in the Marketplace

Bio-Tech Brewing

The “synthetic biology” at work here is briefly explained by Alan Lewis, a VP at Natural Grocers, in a 2022 Environmental Health Symposium video, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgXbr24JP7k (I attended this conference.)

The manufacturing process is called “gene-edited fermentation” or “precision fermentation” occurring in large bio-hazard lab facilities. The Silicon Valley food-tech entrepreneurs describe their technique as a “proprietary probiotic production process” (terminology from a Berkeley, CA-based company called “Air Protein”, cited in Guthman and Biltekoff, 2020).

Creating micro-organisms that have never been seen on Earth before is a recipe for accidental epidemics of (yet more) untreatable infectious illnesses.

Plant-Based Meats: The Basic Ingredients Come from Industrialized Ag

The base ingredients “feeding” these synthetic manufacturing systems are GMO soy, corn, mung beans, sugar beets, plus hundreds of other additives that create the target microbe metabolite (some sort of novel protein, fat, or flavor compound). The sales hype gushes over these products as a miraculous futuristic achievement and strongly implies that they require no inputs—as if bacteria can produce food out of thin air. This could not be farther from the truth.

The source materials come from GMO farming systems which:

concentrate the control of food production into corporate hands,
put small farms out of business,
destroy soil,
heavily consume fossil fuels, and
add many harmful contaminants to our foods, including glyphosate, 2-4-D, and other pesticides.

And to make these “veggie” farm practices even more dangerous, the newest high-tech strategies already in use on farms now include spraying novel genetic materials on plants to trigger expression of selected genes as they grow in our rural countryside. In open-air farming, there is no way to contain the drift and to keep un-intended problems from spreading into natural habits, such as newly invasive superweeds that crowd out native plants!

Herbicides such as glyphosate are heavily used in GMO ag – the backbone of the new fake meat industry. Image: Exposure risk and environmental impacts of glyphosate: Highlights on the toxicity of herbicide co-formulants
Published by Elsevier; open access article (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

The Process: Changing GMO Source Material into Flavors, Fillers, and Proteins

Manufacturers fill bioreactors with a GMO-derived mash of sugars, proteins and gene edited bacteria. Those engineered bacteria are designed not only to produce a target molecule but also for antibiotic-resistance. The bacterial slurry is treated with antibiotics to eliminate the naturally occurring bacteria and select the “edited” micro-organisms to consume the “feed stock” and produce the desired target compound.

Natural vs “Franken”-Fermenting

Traditional use of natural lactic-fermentation (a safe process long in use by humans to create sauerkraut, sourdough bread, beer, and yogurt) is incorrectly referenced to make the “brewing” of GMO grains with manipulated e-coli (a novel pathogen unknown in nature) seem similar and even safe. This is a far cry from reality.

The extracts that go into consumer products likely contain genes and other remnants of the gene-edited pathogens that created them.

“Cellular Meat”

Another human-invented fermentation type is lab-grown altered stem cells from beef, chicken, and pork. Bioengineers edit the genes of animal cells to enable them to survive in the fermentation tanks and grow exponentially fast to keep costs down. They remove the normal growth-regulating genes to bypass the cells’ normal growth limits (a self-regulation process) and to make them thrive on starch and sugar. This creates unregulated anerobic growth—the definition of tumor cells. Basically, this technique creates cancer tissue to be sold as a human food. Fake meat is marketed as superior to real meat, and even claims to be “animal free.”

More Synthetic Foods on the Way, Even for Babies

There’s even a lab-engineered breast milk alternative on the way called Biomilq, which is made from cultured human breast tissue. Bioengineers use a “proprietary cell culture media and growth factors” to stimulate the genetic code that directs the cells to create human casein and lactose as additives for an existing synthetic formula.

Dirtiness of “Clean Tech”

The major products of gene-edited fermentation, however, are massive amounts of “bio-waste” that must be deactivated. The spent synthetic GMO bio-hazard materials, gene edited microbes, antibiotics, and antibiotic resistant novel organisms all need to be incinerated. Misuse or release of these waste products into the environment could cause new disease outbreaks with no way to identify or track them. Regulation is almost non-existent, despite the risks.

Risks At Every Step

Key dangers are:

the presumption of safety;
limited surveillance of release controls and cleanup processes;
the absence of transparency;
lack of independent examination of the process and products;
no meaningful regulation;
no thorough safety review requirement.

The Solution: Better-Informed Consumers

The franken-synthetic realities hide under superior-sounding code names like “plant-based” and behind unproven promises like “planet friendly.” Unless consumers refuse to buy these franken-foods, the creation of cultured meat for the masses on a massive scale can only mean massive and novel environmental problems are in store.

No Real Benefits

Marketers promote these novel technologies as good for the planet. That could not be a bolder lie. As a 2020 academic article (Guthman and Biltekoff) put it, the food-tech entrepreneurs are engaging in “intentional veiling of pernicious processes” as they make grand claims and promises to attract investment capital.

Cultured meats have no environmental benefits. Bioengineers are creating GMO organisms that have never existed on earth before and these organisms and their waste are not even compostable and are certainly not edible. They pose great risks for environmental health for all life on earth, especially human beings.

Perhaps we are all Destined to Live in the Slaughterhouse . . .

The real world-changing ambitions of the bio-tech investors are to: 1) build up a culture that trusts big-tech over mother nature and, 2) to capture wealth and gain the on-going political control that comes with it. This gives them power to de-fang any future consumer protection efforts that might impede their vision of humankind needing near-complete dependence on corporate manufacturing for survival.

Who’s Cooking Dinner? Fake meat food-tech entrepreneurs.

Real Food from Real Farms

There are environmentally beneficial ways to farm. Instead of transitioning into factory laboratories where everything that comes out of them is a biohazard, we need to switch to regenerative farming and support local farms producing real foods using sustainable practices.

We can nourish ourselves by cooperating with nature. Regenerative farming communities—when set up as self-sustaining enterprise zones run and owned cooperatively by the farmers and not technocrats—can sustainably feed all humanity. It’s mostly politics (and big money) that stands in the way.

Please support small family farms not Big-Biotech companies in your food purchasing.

And to get involved in building a brighter future, you can participate in sustainable agriculture education. There are many ways to do this. Start by attending or sponsoring farmers to attend sustainable agriculture conferences. For the business minded, make connections with local leaders working to develop producer-run rural enterprise regenerative farming zones.

In Summary, here are Some Key Points:

E-coli based ferments use bacteria manipulated to be antibiotic resistant.

Lab meats are essentially cancer cells created from animal stem cells.

Neither the gene-edited living organisms, nor the substances that they create have any track record of safety.

Consumers are eating synthetic ingredients and gene-edited animal tumor cells thinking they are “plant-based” and “animal free.”

They are also likely eating virulent pathogens.

The waste products of these lab-factories pose health risks for all people, beyond those who elect to eat these foods (a choice typically made from ignorance).

DNA – Who Do You Trust to Design Your Franken-Foods?
Image by Sangharsh Lohakare on Unsplash

About Alan Lewis (from the video link)

Alan Lewis is based in Colorado. He has served various trade organizations: Non-GMO Project board, Organic and Natural Health Association board, Real Organic Project standards board, Retail Advisory Committee of the American Grassfed Association (certification program for grassfed producers), Farm Policy Committee of the Organic Farmers Association, and various committees of the Council for Responsible Nutrition (a leading trade association for the dietary supplement and functional food industry).

In addition to Alan Lewis’ talk, this article also references:.

Wuench, J. Got Milk! BIOMILQ Is The First Company To Create Human Breast Milk In A Lab. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/juliawuench/2021/06/01/got-milk-biomilq-is-the-first-company-to-create-human-breast-milk-in-a-lab/.

Guthman, J., and Biltekoff, C. (2021). Magical disruption? Alternative protein and the promise of de-materialization. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 4, 1583–1600. 10.1177/2514848620963125.

May 18, 2018 by Sally K Norton

Our Oxalate-Loaded Environment: No Seasons, No Awareness

I’m very excited to announce a new article in the Journal of Evolution and Health: “Lost Seasonality and Overconsumption of Plants: Risking Oxalate Toxicity” by me: Sally K. Norton. You can download it from my site)

Please read and share this heavily referenced, peer-reviewed article. Perhaps it will help us all see how we’re eating today in a new light. The article offers an up-to-date synopsis of what we know about oxalates, based on my extensive review of the scientific literature.

The rest of this blog post revisits and expands on the key points from the article.

Oxalate Toxicity Illness

Once you realize that oxalate in foods is at the root of your suffering, you can’t help but wonder: Why am I in trouble with oxalate? Why is this happening? Hasn’t oxalate been around forever? Is there something wrong with me that made me especially vulnerable to the oxalate problem? Why me? – this is the classic victim question. Yes, you are a victim, but of what? I say you are a victim of modern progress, affluence, cultural trends, and generalized ignorance of oxalate science; hear me out. . .

Oxalate-related illness is, in general, a problem of: 1) oxalate exposure and 2) bioaccumulation inside of our bodies. This is so, regardless if the effects of this exposure and accumulation surface as arthritis, digestive problems, headaches, pain issues, skin trouble, bad sleep, or kidney stones.

The One-Two Punch

Let’s consider that modern eating patterns douse us in oxalate far too routinely. (Missed any meals recently?) When the continuous oxalate marinade (daily low to moderate doses) includes occasional pulses of extreme doses (as in a spinach smoothie or a bag of almonds), accumulation is bound to occur. This combination – constant eating of plant foods (like bread and spices) interspersed with the occasional dark chocolate bar or spinach salad – is especially good at promoting the build-up of minute oxalate deposits in the body. The speed and extent of this process may be what separates the seemingly unaffected from those of us with joint, digestive, brain and neurological issues. Beyond just the level of oxalate intake, these factors seem to be key determinants of how fast and how extensively oxalate toxicity develops:

oxalate absorption
- (many dietary factors and other changing conditions will affect the amount that gets inside the body),
- it is generally much higher then scientists used to think
gut health, and
internal inflammation.

Never a Break

Never before has it been so easy to obtain oxalate-heavy foods. At the same time, we’ve become nibblers (or grazers) who believe that six small meals daily make for a healthy and acceptable meal pattern. We never take off from eating plant foods. We used to have those breaks: things called winter, or drought, or crop failure, or high-holy fasting days. And, of course when we’re eating oxalate, we have no idea that we are doing it; no one has bothered to tell us. Hardly anyone is aware of the presence of oxalate in our beloved foods and its potential dangers. Never have we been so at risk for slow, low-grade health damage thanks to our modern food choices, constant eating, and unawareness.

Global Food System Has Erased the Seasons

Winter is gone. No longer do we subsist on ham, onions, pickles, and white biscuits from January to March. Now, fresh green spinach, fruits, and nuts of all kinds can be had any day of the year. Our modern food scene is slick and sexy (packaged with grand promises), tasty and super-convenient, affordable, and . . . risky.

You can get nearly anything you could want, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Refrigerated trucks, the interstate highway system, inter-continental shipping, and the 24-hour grocery store all work to meet the demand for affordable, constant access to any and all foods. We usually see this as a great victory of modern commerce, but the downside… well, it has made it possible to bypass and disarm the body’s own defenses against what was historically only periodic over-dosing on high oxalate plant foods. That’s my guess, anyway. There is not any good research on the amount of oxalate in our diets and how this has changed.

Getting Plenty of Neo Foods

Envision some modern basics: tea, chips, fries, and almond milk. . . Finding our way to a daily cup of tea was never this easy! No longer do you have to haul water from the river, or fire up a wood stove. Potato chips? They were mass-produced for home consumption only recently. And french fries? Routine access to fries came with the invention of cheap (and addictive) fast food in the 1950s. That helped to launch the new and steadily expanding practice of eating meals away from home, not just on special occasions but as part normal daily life. Restaurants eagerly offer hash browns, potato chips, fries, and mashed (or baked) potatoes as the classic side. (Too cheap, popular, and profitable to resist.)

Almond and rice beverages? These new-fangled products became commercially available and widely distributed only about 10 years ago (and have been growing in popularity). And please note: These faux “milks” are marketed as a fitting substitute for calcium-rich dairy milk. They are not. Not only do they contain oxalate (which real milk does not), but they lack milk’s ability to protect against oxalate absorption offered by dairy calcium.

Normal variability in what and when we eat, and restrictions that once came with the seasons and periodic food scarcity, are all gone in modern affluent societies. Easy, routine access to tasty oxalate-ridden foods has created a new situation for our bodies. The constant bombardment of our bodies by oxalate is an escalating, and uniquely problematic source of toxic stress in 21st Century life. It’s as if it were Thanksgiving Day, every day. The harvest is in and abundance is the theme of the moment. Have whatever you like; if its “healthy”—have a lot of it, frequently.

Modern Concepts of Health Foods

Modern dietary approaches have placed great emphasis on the health benefits of vegetables, nuts, chocolate, and spices, despite their being high in oxalate. There is a great deal of encouragement, pressure even, to eat greens, nuts, fruits, and other “whole” plant foods. We constantly hear that the sure path to complete health is the “plant based” diet. If it doesn’t work, you are just not trying hard enough… so just keep selecting antioxidant-rich “health foods”.

In this culture, how would anyone ever begin to suspect something amiss with this moral and fail-safe approach to eating? They don’t, not until they have exhausted every other possible explanation for why they hurt or can’t think well or get restless sleep… but I digress.

Accumulation of Oxalate

Any tissue of the body can end up with oxalate deposits, not just the kidneys and other parts of the urinary system. But how and why? This question has been posed, but rarely studied, at least since 1940 when a London coroner found oxalate crystals at the site of a brain aneurysm in a 61-year old woman.1 The prevailing theory in medical science is that the entire drainage system had to be broken down (persistent kidney failure) for oxalate to collect in non-renal tissues. Yet the exceptions to this rule are many—littered across the various fields of research.

Pathologists report finding oxalate deposits in eyes, arteries, hearts, skin, wherever—despite functional, healthy kidneys. We find this in cases of acute oxalate poisoning among patients who have tried to commit suicide with oxalic acid washing powders or ethylene glycol anti-freeze (ethylene glycol is a metabolic precursor that becomes oxalate in the body), and in cases of genetic disorders that cause excessive internal production of oxalate. But we also find these deposits in the chronically ill, in previously injured tissues, and in perfectly healthy people.

Stuck in Catch Mode

The scientific evidence suggests that the body is good at a game of “catch and release”. This is a process in which healthy cells take on minute oxalate crystals with the intention of this being a temporary accommodation. When the coast is clear and conditions right, cells recruit immune cells to help them dismantle and release the sequestered oxalate and send it off for excretion. Our diets, however, are pitching oxalate steadily (and at quite a clip). The effect is that the catch and release cycle gets stuck in “catch” mode. Cells holding oxalate attract more oxalate crystals which then become ever-present because oxalate is ever-present in so many of our favored foods. Injured cells or cell fragments passively get saddled with crystals that not only persist but grow, for years and decades.

We don’t see the inevitable but invisible nano-deposits and non-crystalline traces in cells throughout the body. The trained pathologist can see the much larger micro-crystals (when the tissue are fresh and properly handled, and when using the appropriate stain and polarized light). But the hunt for these troublesome contaminants isn’t done in typical tissue biopsy and tissues are usually not fresh. (The central concern being the detection of cancerous cells.) The body, however, is aware of oxalate. It is designed to unload these toxic traces, if it can only get the opportunity.

Let the Toxin Go

The cells await the conditions necessary for dismantling and releasing crystals. It would seem that tissues may need several days of very low-level oxalate intake to start the slow process of dismantling, dissolving, and unloading these nano-deposits. (In one study, looking at rat kidneys, this process was underway in just a matter of days. In another study, complete dissolution of a crystal took five or more weeks to complete).

The way we eat, the “release” conditions don’t come very often or for very long. The next time someone tells you “you’re full of it” they might be right! And they might be full of it themselves!

References

1. Glynn, L.E. (1940). Crystalline bodies in the tunica media of a middle cerebral artery. J. Pathol. Bacteriol. 51, 445–446.

February 11, 2018 by Sally K Norton

Keto Getaway: Eat Less Plants and Feel Better!

In January I spoke at a wonderful nutrition and health conference, the Keto Getaway Conference, in West Palm Beach held by LowCarbUSA. Even though I was sick and the weather in Florida was cold, I had a wonderful time. Way to go Pam and Doug Reynolds, the founders and organizers who pulled together a wonderful program and a terrific line-up of speakers for the 2018 Keto Getaway!

Including a presentation on dietary oxalate in a low-carb nutrition event… this was a first! I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to introduce oxalates to some of the leaders in the keto nutrition movement. The credit goes to Carole Freeman (a.k.a. Keto Carole) who recommended me to Doug Reynolds. Thanks to her I shared and gained a number of important insights about the relationship between low-oxalate eating and a keto diet, some of which I have summarized below.

For those of you who are new to ketogenic diets, the first part of this post explores the whats, whys, and hows of “ketogenic” eating. If you’re already familiar with keto, you might want skip ahead to My Insights from Hanging in the Keto World.

What is Keto?

Keto is the popular term for eating a diet that is nearly free of carbohydrates, creating a fat-burning body “economy”. The term “keto” comes from the molecules (referred to “ketone bodies”) that your body generates when it burns fat instead of glucose to fuel activity and metabolic functions. Even the brain can switch to burning ketones when carbs are cut from the diet, which is a good thing. Doctors will sometimes worry about the body creating ketones, because they don’t understand the difference between nutritional ketosis (a normal healthy process that occurs when your body burns fat) and ketoacidosis (which also creates ketones, but which occurs when your metabolism is not working due to diabetes or other metabolic disorders).

Long having held the ecological niche of game hunters, human beings have been eating low-carb for many tens of thousands of years. Today’s carb-centric diet is a recent invention; the idea that processed carbs (eaten in abundance) are safe just came into being about 40 years ago. This is about the same time the 24-hour grocery store was invented. Not long after that, cup holders in our cars became standard equipment by the 1980s as well. By then we were hooked on sugar-on-the-go.

Why Keto?

A low-to-no carb diet is not new but is being explored anew by people seeking to:

cure obesity,
reverse diabetes,
treat brain and neurological disorders (Epilepsy, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s Disease, brain injury, mood problems and more),
manage endocrine disorders (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome),
support cancer treatment; and to
improve general health, well-being, and longevity.

Also, fasting has become a big buzz of late. Training your body to be good at burning fat and ketones is the best preparation for fasting. For my own health, I have been a carb-restricting eater for at least eight years, with the last year going lower and lower and relying on my fat-burning capacity more consistently over the last 6 months so I can experiment with fasting (and still stay energetic and fully-functioning).

How Keto?

To “go keto,” people remove sugars and starchy foods from the diet: grains, fruits, potatoes, junk foods, juice, sweet drinks, etc. The only effective way to lower carb intake is to eat something else, specifically fats (not excessive protein). Basically, if you want to burn fat for fuel, you need to eat fat. Simple logic, right?

The best example of this type of diet is The Atkins induction diet. Typically, a low-carb, high-fat (LCHF) diet involves a reduction in the amount of plant foods (no grains, beans, or potatoes), more animal foods (eggs, meats, fish) and many more fat calories from both animal (full-fat meats, bacon, chicken skin, bone marrow, lard, tallow, butter, heavy cream, cheese) and vegetable sources (coconut, avocados, nuts).

Bone Marrow

Shrimp Salad

Is it Safe?

A ketogenic diet means eating more butter, olive oil, heavy cream, coconut, avocados, and fatty meats. This is a shock to most people because we have been wrongly told over-and-over again for four decades that eating fat is bad for our health. It turns out that the only real problems with fats come from:

trans-fats (hydrogenated vegetable oils),
processed vegetable oils (e.g. canola, soy, corn),
poor-quality fats in the context of a sugary, high carb diet, and
the contamination of fats with environmental chemicals and, perhaps, with certain naturally-occurring plant sterols (as in soy oil).

Clean animal fats like lard, egg yolks, beef tallow, cream, and butter are beneficial to health because they contain needed nutrients, help the body assimilate nutrients, help act as a solvent, moisturizer, and clean-burning energy source in the body. Coconut oil, and fats from avocado are also safe and beneficial in the context of a low-junk, low-sugar diet. Despite the many unknowns still surrounding very low-carb, high fat diets (see the next section), lowering carbohydrate intake is safe for most people because a healthy body has no intrinsic need for them. (Some conditions, including heart failure, kidney stones, and gout may need special attention from a keto-aware medical professional who can monitor liver, kidney, and heart function to ensure safety.)

The State of the Art of Ketogenic Living

The science and even the definition of ketosis is still emerging. That is, although there are many scientific papers on the subject, many basic questions are just starting to be explored. For example: what is the most accurate way to measure ketone bodies so that we can monitor the state of ketosis? (Is it by the breath, urine, or blood?) How does a fat-burning metabolism affect our need for micro-nutrients? How do we correctly interpret diagnostic testing that has been standardized based on the modern grain-based, high-carbohydrate diet, when these tests are performed during prolonged ketosis? We may need more salt and electrolytes on a keto diet, but how much and when?

I have my own question too: Is the reduction of plant foods (such as wheat, beans, and potatoes) part of the reason that people on a keto diet feel better and love this way of eating? The keto diet is dramatically different from the standard diet, and there are many moving parts that are very much unaccounted for! (Especially the effects of reducing our intake of plant toxins.)

Does a Keto Diet Work?

Yes—if you do it right and give it enough time! That is, to feel your best while burning fat, your cells need to change the equipment they use for energy production. That takes time. There is a transition period of several months or a year, or even longer for some people. This transition can be a bit of an ordeal or it can be straight-forward: everyone is different.

There are several factors that can make the transition period challenging or even unpleasant. For example, you have to face the addictive nature of carbohydrates–they stimulate insulin and brain chemicals that make us crave sugar, bread, pasta, pizza, fries, chips, potatoes, donuts, desserts, chocolate, etc. Carb withdrawal is ugly. The addictive pull of carbs sets us up to abandon our body’s keto-metabolism training due to “cheats”. When we cheat and eat carbs, the progression to keto is up and down—prolonged and delayed by the internal food fight, personal habits, and the cultural challenges that are waiting around every corner in a carb-centric world. Patience, persistence, and starting again and again eventually pay off for some, but many people give up and prematurely declare themselves “not-a-fit” for this approach.

Key Tips on the Keto Journey

From my experience in being strict about carbs, there a few critically important keys to success:

Eat more salt, a lot more, because your kidneys will “waste” salt and potassium when you switch to low carb. If you keep switching on and off ketosis (like I did for years), you may end up depleted of salt and potassium and electrolytes generally. This can mean dry connective tissues and induce muscle aches and knots.
Get enough food: “strict low-carb” is not “low-calorie”.
Embrace fats: eat much, much more ghee, butter, and other animal fats than you think you should.
Let it take the time it takes (measure in months, not days). You will be reworking daily habits, holidays, ways to celebrate, etc. This involves the psychologly, sociology, and the physiology of eating!
While slowly progressing toward maintaining a consistent keto lifestyle, live and love your life as it is without fretting about the “depth” of your ketosis.

My Insights from Hanging in the Keto World

High-carb foods come from plants, and many (namely: grains, potatoes, beans) are high oxalate. Switching to ketogenic eating means cutting out grains, potatoes, and beans—completely! Unless you are frequently eating spinach, swiss chard, mixed salad greens, nuts, and chocolate, you will often be eating less oxalate on a keto diet. Some keto dieters even move to an all-meat, or mostly animal foods diet. This is exemplified by Amber O’Hearn (find her here and here) and many other 100% carnivorous eaters (think of this as the “feline diet”). What keto dieters may not realize is that this all-animal diet is also one way to do a zero oxalate diet.

One of the medical leaders in the field of therapeutic ketogenic diets is Dr. Eric Westman of Durham NC. He and other keto-promoters like to mention (okay: brag) that not only can they correct (cure) diabetes and obesity with diet, but that their patients also report less pain and digestive problems. He says that 80% of his patients with reflux get relief on the keto diet. He’s crediting ketosis for these bonus outcomes, without considering the effect of reducing plant toxins. However, pain and digestive problems regularly clear up on a low oxalate diet—even without ketosis.

Could it be that cutting out wheat, potatoes, and beans while eating more meat is a path to a moderate oxalate diet? Surely, reducing or removing oxalates and other plant toxins from the diet adds to the benefits of the low-carb, high-fat, ketogenic diet. Still, the keto world is mostly invested in the idea that ketones in the body are the principal source of the “keto magic”. Ketones are only one of the many reasons that people feel better on a keto diet. (Subtracting plant toxins feel good!)

Eat Less Plants

Who is looking at the changes in exposure to plant toxins? Sadly, not many researchers are exploring this angle in nutrition. But some keto proponents do suggest that a “low plant, high animal food diet” results in better health than a keto diet that includes more plants. Psychiatrist Georgia Ede does a great job explaining this seemingly radical idea.

Here is quote from Dr. Ede:

“There’s no evidence that I could find proving that plant foods are good for us. You see many, many studies showing that plant extracts can be used as medication when someone has a disease, are using [a subset of] their naturally toxic properties to your advantage. But if you are a healthy person, do you need to eat plants? As far as I can tell, you don’t…. When it comes to anti-nutrients, these natural chemicals within plants not only can irritate our systems, but they can interfere with our ability to digest and absorb nutrients, key nutrients …. The part of the plant which is most risky for us… is the seed. Because that’s the most heavily protected, that’s the future of the plant. …grains, beans, nuts and seeds are all seeds and they are very heavily protected. And I think that that is why… many people feel better on that [keto] diet, because they’ve removed legumes, they’ve removed grains… They have [often] not removed nuts and seeds, although I think some people who don’t feel better enough on a [low-carb] diet might want to consider that .”

Other Hints that Keto Sometimes Works Like a Low-Oxalate Diet

Example of the Low Oxalate Diet Rash

The “keto rash” sounds just the low-oxalate rash (see the picture nearby)!
Reports of “keto gout” sound a lot like oxalate flooding (dumping) reactions that may happen on the first year or two of a low-oxalate diet.

Why Oxalate Awareness is Needed in the Keto World

Oxalate is one more factor that makes ketogenic eating a good idea, SOMETIMES. There are at least 2 ways oxalate could be a problem in a keto diet:

1. Too Much Oxalate.

Some keto dieters may overdo oxalate by making these mistakes:

relying too heavily on nuts;
routinely eating some of the classic super-high-oxalate greens (spinach, swiss chard, beet greens, micro green salad mixes);
spicing up their foods with high oxalate spices like cinnamon, cumin, turmeric, etc.; or
treating themselves to keto “fat bombs” and hot drinks made with coco and dark chocolate.

Any combination of these low-carb/high-oxalate ingredients can quickly add up to a dangerously high oxalate diet.

2. Too Few Oxalates, Too Fast.

Another Low Oxalate Skin reaction – on a foot

The mostly-animal food version of keto may mean abruptly (and unawarely) switching to a much lower (near zero) oxalate intake. In some people with a history of eating high oxalate foods: Oops! They may experience an abrupt outbreak of a whole new set of problems. Why? Because this switch is likely to destabilize oxalate deposits in the body and trigger oxalate flooding / dumping. Boy can that be unpleasant! Flooding your tissues with ionic or nano-oxalate is hard on your body. The deleterious consequence of the body’s desire to be rid of oxalate can be softened with certain supplements and other strategies that are just beginning to be explored (and that need to be figured out for each individual).

Lets Get Together

In my own experience, Low-Oxalate and Low-Carb are a wonderful combination for enhancing mood and energy, and for managing pain. Both are important for optimal brain development and function, limiting the effects of brain aging, and for preventing and perhaps treating dementia. There is a potentially powerful symmetry in the union of know-how in the previously unconnected worlds of low-carb and low-oxalate. Lets keep thinking together about what we need to learn and teach to bring the greatest possible benefits to human health.

To view videos of 2018 Geto GetAway speakers go here. (https://www.lowcarbusa.org/videos/video-members-area/2018-wpb-premium-videos/)

November 7, 2017 by Sally K Norton

Will today’s natural foods fix our health problems?

Today’s health crisis. Have you noticed it? Obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, kidney disease, cancer, infertility, behavioral and mood problems, poor sleep, and PAIN. Do you know anyone with any of these problems? Yes, you do, even if you are not aware of it. And, the suffering is happening at younger and younger ages. Our kids are in trouble, we’re all in trouble.

It is expensive to be sick. Both time and money are sucked out of our lives, not to mention the fun. And what about the bigger picture all around us? Perhaps you’ve noticed that poor health is threatening social and economic stability, world-wide.

Eating Better?

So, what are we doing about it? Eating better? Going “natural”? Yes, we are indeed eating more veggies and less meat, less fat too. We’re swearing off gluten and milk, going for alternative low-carb or gluten-free breads, alternative “milk”, and fake cheese. Is this going to save us? I say no. Hear about one reason why this approach is not a great solution: in this video about oxalate toxicity from natural foods.

My Ancestral Health Symposium Presentation

In September, I had an opportunity to offer an address to the Ancestral Health Society. This presentation argues that many of today’s health foods are having the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than making us healthier, the superfood food craze could, like the holy war against saturated fat, be launching another public health calamity, as expensive and unpleasant as the current diabetes and obesity explosion.

Here are some highlights from this talk:

Bags of chocolate covered almonds on a supermarket produce shelf.

Chocolate is now “produce” at Walmart

Low-level toxicity and nutrient deficiencies make us sick.
One of the most potent toxins that people regularly ingest in the contemporary diet is oxalate.
Oxalate causes nutrient depletion AND toxicity in the body.
Oxalate, when purified, can rapidly kill a person.
It was even the poison of interest in the very first experimental toxicology study published in 1823 in England, because it caused several accidental deaths in the early1800s.
Many of the plant foods we like to think are good for us have enough oxalate to harm our health in much more subtle ways.
These natural foods might even cause mechanical abrasion to your digestive tract do to the “needle effect”.
Oxalate can collect in your tissues.
The availability of high oxalate foods we see today is unprecedented.
Today we are eating oxalate in amounts that cause us to begin accumulating oxalate in our arteries, bones, thyroid, breasts, and kidneys.
When you eat “normal” levels of oxalate, you “maintain” and grow the oxalate deposits that have already started in your body.
Medical and nutrition authorities have virtually no awareness of the threat of biological toxicity posed by over-exposure to oxalate and its precursors. They are not paying attention to the increase in our use of high oxalate foods.
Going low destabilizes oxalate in the body, and helps it move out.
Going low can prevent and even reverse a lot of common complaints, as proven by thousands of reports from real people in the real world (members of the VP Foundation, Participants in the Trying Low Oxalates online groups, my own clients and followers, and many others).

Action Items for You

Please watch the video, it is only 39 minutes and is packed with helpful images and information that will make you want to share it and watch it a second time.
Please give it a thumbs up.
Share with those you love.
Let me know what you think.

… and

Skip the swiss chard and almonds.

The fewer toxins in your body the better, even the natural ones!

“From a practical point of view, it would be better to avoid oxalate-rich foods than to take measures to neutralize the effect of oxalic acid, especially when other sources of green vegetables are available.”

—Hoover and Karunairatnam (1945).
Oxalate content of some leafy green vegetables and its relation to oxaluria and calcium utilization.
The Biochemical Journal 39, 237.