Sally K. Norton:

Thank you, Carole. It’s fun to be with you, and whoever else is with us today.

Carole Freeman:

Yes. Excellent, excellent. Yeah. So, as you’re watching, go ahead and put some comments in there, and questions. I’ll chime back in a few times here to reset, and invite people to to ask questions of you, too. So Sally, I’ve done an interview with you in the past, but people may not have watched that one. So, let’s start with some background. How did you get into this oxalate territory? How did that path happen for you?

Sally K. Norton:

The Oxalate Outpost. It’s like, “Boy it’s lonely over here.”

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, the pioneering oxalate days.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah. I have been in the nutrition sphere forever. I think it was probably 1977 when I decided to get into nutrition, as a kid. And in school, I went to Cornell for Nutrition, they talked about oxalate barely. I mean, I came away from school realizing oxalate captures calcium, and so does tea, and a lot of other things, oxalate is a kidney stone thing, and that’s about all I knew.

Sally K. Norton:

And then I went back later on, when I realized how profoundly it had affected my health. That’s what sucked me into going, “Oh, you’re a big ignoramus, Sally. You really don’t have an education in this, even though you’ve been in integrative medicine, and grant writing, and public health, and nutrition forever. You don’t know anything.”

Sally K. Norton:

And that, being in the field of nutrition, you think you know stuff, and so you’re kind of a jerk. Because you really… The more you know, oftentimes, the less you’re free to hear new information. And that’s really the problem we’re all in right now with oxalate. We have been so misinformed, and this topic has been so overlooked, that when you bring it up, people immediately have this negative reaction to it. Because it actually flies in the face of a lot of the garbage that we’re hearing online, and the general sphere of nutrition has been moving towards, “Oh, any amounts of any old plants, in huge piles is going to be great for you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a plant, and it’s not covered in canola oil, and trans fats, you’re cool.” This, “Have all you want, and the more you have, the better.”

Sally K. Norton:

It turns out, no, that is not true. And oxalate really taught me that very seriously. I was a big kind of vegetable over doer. I always had to have a nice big salad, plus three side dishes that were vegetables, plus something that was called the main dish. I’ve been way over doing the vegetables, and the plant foods for a long time, and I paid a terrible price for that. I mean, I started having problems as a kid, and never connected it to my love of home cooking, and rhubarb crisp from the backyard, and liking peanut butter, or anything like that.

Sally K. Norton:

And now I realize that wow, we’re not being careful curating what we eat. We have such kind of vague, and crude ideas about foods, that we don’t realize when we’re eating a toxin, and when we’re eating something that’s metabolically appropriate for us, in terms of something you eat chronically, over and over again.

Sally K. Norton:

Our daily staples, so many of them are now these foods that are full of these plant toxins, and oxalate is a plant toxin that has a lot more profound effects down at the cellular level, screwing up your immune system, and your mitochondria, and your connective tissues, and your vascular system, and then ultimately taking those of us who keep abusing them, we end up with some form of sets of autoimmune diseases, connective tissues falling apart, fibrotic problems, organs start being taken out, you can even have vision problems, and lots of arthritis, and joint problems and osteoporosis, and skin problems, digestive problems, neurological, and mood problems.

Sally K. Norton:

So, when you’re messing up your cells at the mitochondrial level, day in, and day out, you’re taking in a poison that plants produce for their own reasons, and for their own self defense, day in and day out, it starts to add up to something that can get quite serious.

Carole Freeman:

So, let’s do the record scratch part right here, because I know there’s going to be a ton of people watching this, that like, “Plants are toxic? Plants, toxins? How can plants be bad for us? We’re supposed to eat 47 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.” So, let’s start there with this basic concept, because this is really really hard for most people to wrap their brain around, that plants could ever be bad for us.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah.

Carole Freeman:

We’re all being told right now, we’re evil, we’re trying to kill the planet if we don’t move towards a high plant based diet. So, let’s cover this topic a little bit, of the plant toxins.

Sally K. Norton:

Boy, I would love to spend the next hour talking about that issue, too.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, so okay, so if you’re a plant, you’re planted in the ground. Now, some plants are clever enough to have thorns, but even the thorny rose still gets picked. And some of the self defensive plants are more obvious like that. So, I put one on my Facebook Live, because some herbalist had a beautiful picture of a leaf that had like two inch barbs on the leaves themselves.

Sally K. Norton:

Now, you don’t usually see things quite that sizable, and plants are often defending themselves from funguses, and tiny insects, and aphids, and small animals that are eating them, and they put in there, actually, plants designed the first arrow of warfare. Okay? So a lot of plants will produce these bundles in their cells, of basically sets of toothpicks with double pointed needles, that are very fine, in bundles like hundreds of them, in these [inaudible 00:07:22], and they’re really designed to be puncturing the cells of things that break up their cells. So, when you damage, or chew on a leaf, you can be releasing these needles, and they’re in the fluids of the plant.

Sally K. Norton:

And we see that in plants we know are toxic, and if you think about plants, when you go to the plant store, and you go buy plants, almost none of them are edible. Or if your kid ran outside, and ate the berries off your front bushes, would you be okay with that? No, because they might be yew berries that would kill them. Or even chocolate, you give chocolate to the dog, and the theobromine in the chocolate can kill your dog, depending on your dog, and the situation, whether you’re running to the vet and spending $200 to have

the stomach pumped, or what. If the dog got on the counter with your chocolate chip cookies, that could be expensive.

Sally K. Norton:

And that’s because plants are full of many thousands of chemicals, for their own purposes, and some of those purposes include self defense. So plants, the only reason they’re still here, and haven’t been herbivored into oblivion, is because they’re toxic. So, it limits how much a cow will eat, which ones the cows will eat, which ones the insects will eat. And it turns out that’s why Swiss chard, and spinach looks so lovely in the garden, because the insects don’t want to eat it, because it’s so loaded with oxalate. If you eat enough Swiss chard, and spinach as an insect, then eventually you’ll be dead, or you’ll figure out there’s got to be something better to eat.

Sally K. Norton:

And so, we have cultivated certain plants since we left the old hunting days, when we ran around and shot big animals, and then had giant parties, because we had a ton of meat because we were eating initially, wooly mammoth, and stuff like that. Did that for a long, long, long, long time, hundreds and hundreds of centuries, we were doing stuff like that. And then we got real clever, and started being able to collect seeds, and start to select for certain properties, and start training plants to produce more, and more of the parts that we figured out how to make them edible.

Sally K. Norton:

But to make them edible, we had to learn things like soaking, and fermentation, and grinding, and all kinds of things you have to do to make them safe to eat. A lot of which has been forgotten now, including by those of us with degrees in nutrition. Like I didn’t realize that if you don’t hyper cook your beans, you really should soak them for like three days, and then pressure cook them with high heat. If you don’t do that, you allow the lectin proteins to survive, and they start destroying your gut.

Sally K. Norton:

Gluten is an example of a lectin protein, very hard on the gut. And these proteins can move around, and attach to your nervous system, and do a lot of problems, and there’s a book about the lectin problem by Steven Gundry. But he’s missing the other piece of it. Well, hello, plants have many toxins, lectins are not the only ones.

Sally K. Norton:

And oxalate turns out to be kind of the ringleader. I mean, this is the real pimp of all the toxins. Oxalate pretty much helps make everybody be toxic. More than the other way around. But, the more different chemical toxicity techniques a plant can have, the better chance it has of getting you, and keeping you away. And trying to train you, “Hey, I am not here for your dining pleasure. I’m here to give you oxygen to breathe. Isn’t that good enough? Okay? That’s a service to all of you mammals, and animals. I’m here, in the plant kingdom, so you can breathe. You want more from me?”

Sally K. Norton:

I think it’s like the plant kingdom is over us. We have tried to make plants edible, so we have developed like the cabbage family, which is two thirds of your produce department. It comes from some old mustard plant, and we’ve turned that into a arugula, and watercress, and cabbage, and collards, and broccoli, and cauliflower, and you name. Like huge… Rutabaga, turnip, there’s just a bunch of them. They’re all the cabbage family. But that was human intervention, creating those foods, because if you go out in the woods, and you get like really wild plants, they’re not too tasty. They’re not too nutritious, and they’re going to give you stomachache, if not worse.

Carole Freeman:

And they’re like little tiny, tiny doses of them. If anybody’s ever gone hiking in the wild, and like the berries you can eat, they’re tiny little things, and you can’t pick a gallon of them.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, you’d spend days getting a bucket full.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah. And that’s the other thing. We’ve had the mono crop these plants that we’ve invented, in order to get enough of them in one place, in order to concentrate them into enough calories. We have a big brain that requires a lot of calories, and despite that, we still get fat. But we need calories, and plants, it’s very hard to extract the calories from plants, partially because these chemicals will interfere with the enzymes that let you digest food, which is one reason when you go on a plant based diet, it’s easy to lose weight, because you’re no longer extracting the proteins, and the calories that you need from the food, because the polyphenols and so on are interfering with your digestive enzymes.

Sally K. Norton:

It’s really a de-nurturing kind of process, where too many plants can kind of like suck nutrients out of you in a way, and that’s what oxalates are doing, too. They’re binding with chemicals, or with minerals rather, oxalic acid is a tiny little chemical that is a chelator, and chelating meaning it sticks to minerals, and minerals sticks to it, and that’s why oxalic acid, which is the base chemical of oxalate, which is just the oxalic acid, plus the mineral. Often it’s calcium oxalate, but the soluble form is a potassium oxalate, or a sodium oxalate.

Sally K. Norton:

And potassium oxalate is a cleaner, or oxalic acid is a cleaner, because it grabs minerals. So, you can take the rust stains out of your concrete deck with oxalic acid. You can bleach wood, and fabric with oxalic acid. You can strip the rust off an old radiator with oxalic acid. You can strip varnishes, and paints with it. It’s quite corrosive, because of this strong [inaudible 00:14:13] affiliation with positive charges.

Sally K. Norton:

So yeah, if you can clean your deck, and your radiator, imagine how it’s cleaning you out of your calcium, and your magnesium, and your iron, and so on. And that’s what it does over time. You end up with osteopenia, and osteoporosis, and problems with nutrient deficiency. It’s not just the minerals, too, we lose magnesium and calcium, and other nutritive minerals, from too much of this soluble form of oxalate, which is the form of it that gets into our bloodstream, and starts cleaning our clocks.

Sally K. Norton:

But, then it starts forming… When it takes the calcium out of your blood rather than just out of your food, that little chemical called calcium oxalate can start binding with other chemical oxalate molecules, and become crystals. And that’s a big problem, because you get these nano crystals, and micro crystals forming in your body, the ones, like you ate the crystals from the dieffenbachia plant, but they can start forming in your bones, and tendons, and tissues, and joints, and kidneys.

Sally K. Norton:

And eventually they start clumping together in some people, in their kidneys, and they get kidney stones. And those are aggregates of small crystals sticking to each other. And this happens in people who aren’t producing enough anti-clumping proteins, and citrates. Their bodies might be a little too acidic, and they might have a genetic tendency to be a little bit sluggish, in producing these many anti-clumping proteins.

Sally K. Norton:

So, some people, 12%, 15% of people are inherently vulnerable to oxalates becoming kidney stones. But the rest of us produce a lot of anti-clumping proteins, and we don’t get the kidney stones, even when we eat a lot of oxalate. So, that’s confusing to the researchers, or used to be for a while. They used to think, “Well, it doesn’t matter. Some people eat a lot of oxalate, and they don’t get stones, and other people eat a lot of oxalate, and they do get stones. So therefore, it can’t be the oxalate.”

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

Well, it’s the oxalate interacting with whatever your genetic vulnerabilities are, your nutritional vulnerabilities, your metabolic vulnerabilities are. If you’re born, you know deficient in a B vitamin or something, that’s a type of vulnerability. And the combination of eating a lot of toxins, and being nutrient depleted, or under resourced with nutrients, sets up the kinds of vulnerabilities that you have, and sets up your genetic expression.

Sally K. Norton:

And one of the things that oxalate will do, is turn on the genes that can transform a muscle cell into a bone cell. So that’s how you get oxalate turning your arteries into calcified arteries, because you change the genetic expression, you turn the muscle cells around

those arteries into bone producing cells, and if too much of that’s going on, you get calcified.

Sally K. Norton:

And so, you can get calcifications all through the body. You can get fibromyalgia, calcified damaged muscle fibers. And interestingly enough, one of the things that turns that on, is the proteins your kidneys and other cells make when there’s too much oxalate in the body. So, you turn on the production of these anti-clumping proteins, which I do beautifully. I never will get kidney stones, because I have been eating oxalate like crazy, and peeing it out like crazy.

Sally K. Norton:

You can see it often in cloudy urine. When you’re really high in oxalate, you’ll get these cloudy urine episodes. And that’s often the crystals that you’re peeing out. Which everyone pees out crystals of oxalate at some point almost every day. Every day of your life, you’re peeing out millions of little bits of oxalate, but when you’re really doing it a lot, you can start seeing cloudy urine. So, anyway, this can go on, but I’m producing something called osteopontin, which is one of these anti-clumping molecules, that helps to turn on that calcification process, and helps to create fibromyalgia.

Carole Freeman:

Okay.

Sally K. Norton:

And so, in fibromyalgia, there’s an example of an autoimmune disease that goes along with migraines, or pain, or digestive problems, and fatigue. Well, also these crystals are getting set up in your tissues, which tells the immune system you’ve got particles and enemies hanging around that have got to go. So the immune system either tries to wall them off, tries to eat them, and that doesn’t work. And so, then these neutrophils expel their DNA, and so on, and the dead DNA wraps around the crystals, and it’s a way of hiding that crystal, so that the other tissues nearby don’t get damaged, and don’t get that genetic change.

Sally K. Norton:

It helps protect you from getting calcifications, but you end up getting these things called granulomas, and you get into these sarcoidoma kind of diseases. If you’re doing this, too much of this having to deal with crystals in your tissues, you’re asking your immune system to manage a mess. And these nanoparticles, and crystalline particles is pollution starting to contaminate your bones, or your joints, or your tendons, or wherever your particular tendencies are. And they get hung up in tissues that have inflammation already, or have infection. So, that might be someone’s jaw, or someone’s sinuses, or somebody’s whatever. And then those same places that have inflammation, start getting crystal deposits from oxalate, become really prone to chronic inflammation, and infection.

Sally K. Norton:

So there’s this kind of vicious cycle, where you’ve got an unhappy immune system that’s turned on all the time, and yet you’ve got chronic, either like yeast, or moles, or sinus, or candida, and various problems. It makes no sense, you never respond well to the treatments, because the fundamental problem is that your immune cells, and your fundamental resources of your nutrients, and your cell energy, is going to this defense, and trying to manage this mess.

Sally K. Norton:

And it’s starting to suck the life out of your cells, and you get a problem with low functioning mitochondria, that are prone to inflammation, because they’re so stressed, with too much toxicity, and this kind of depletion of the B vitamins, and the minerals. And minerals are so critical to mitochondria because they’re cofactors on enzymes that allow you to create your ATP, which is what’s running the show. If you don’t have ATP, you’re tired, and so is the cell, and then they’ve got inflammation, and disease.

Carole Freeman:

So, let’s cover… So people right now might be wondering, like, “Okay, so what are the common culprits of… Are all vegetables bad? Do we need to cut them all out? What are the most common offenders of the Oxalate Outpost, as we’re calling it?”

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, out here in the outpost. Yeah. The feedbag that we’re sucking down, that’s delivering these lovelies, includes our favorite greens, spinach, Swiss chard, and beet greens, and also sorrel, which people don’t eat very much of. And then the Mesclun lettuce mixes the have a lot of little baby beet greens, and baby Swiss chard because they’re cute and red, and the baby spinaches.

Sally K. Norton:

So, the mixed salad greens have less oxalate, because it’s watered down with some romaine, and some nice peaceful greens, because the lettuces are low. Most of the other greens are low. The cabbage family vegetables are generally pretty low. The really bad ones, it’s like four of them. That’s it. Spinach, Swiss chard, beet greens, and sorrel.

Sally K. Norton:

And then of course, things that contain those, which are lots of things these days. I mean, spinach is put in everything. You can buy spinach pasta, spinach this, spinach that. Spinach chocolate bars is probably the latest innovation. I haven’t seen it yet.

Carole Freeman:

Double whammy.

Sally K. Norton:

But it’s everywhere. And in chocolate Of course, chocolate is full of toxins, including a lot of oxalate, and it’s pretty bioavailable oxalate. It only takes about an ounce and a half of chocolate to be causing enough oxalate to get into your bloodstream that you get a spike in

levels in the bloodstream, that helps promote this tendency for oxalate to get stuck in your tissues.

Sally K. Norton:

That’s a trigger of accumulation, just an ounce and a half of chocolate. And some people are thinking, “Oh.” And now on keto, people go to sugar free, and the darker the chocolate, the less diluted it is with sugar and milk, the more oxalate, because it’s in the cocoa, right? It’s not the butterfat, or the cocoa butter. It’s in the cocoa fraction. And so, the more you concentrate that, in like 100%, zero sugar keto chocolate, you’re just supercharging the oxalates.

Sally K. Norton:

And unfortunately, in keto world, the other big problem is the almond flour, and using nuts left and right, because they’re low carb. Of course, they’ve got a lot of omega sixes, they’ve got a lot of other toxins, they can go rancid. They can be full of aflatoxins. These are after effects, but inside them, they have arsenic, and heavy metals. And just again, because this is the seed of the plant. The plant is toxic, and where is it going to put its protective toxins, if it isn’t in the seed?

Sally K. Norton:

So the outside of a lot of seeds have oxalate crystals, and many other chemicals there, that help protect the seed, help keep it dormant, and then also help it in its transition from dormancy, into being a green something or other. Becoming a little sprout, a little baby tree, or baby whatever, that transition period requires a certain chemistry, and oxalate helps to do that. Oxalate holds on to that calcium for the seed, and then oxalate will break off, and you can use the calcium to run enzymes, to build a little sprout.

Sally K. Norton:

So, there’s a lot going on chemically. I mean, it’s a miracle that a tree nut or a seed can hang around for five or six years, and then suddenly it gets a nice rainy spring, and it knows, “This is my time to become the next tree.” And it’s doing it with so much cleverness, plants are brilliant. But we’re not so brilliant to make seeds our major thing on the plate, and make that a daily staple, and become a squirrel, instead of a human. That’s getting us into trouble.

Carole Freeman:

Another one that is, I think a pitfall, is the chia seeds, right? Like a lot of people think, “Oh, I’m going to make this chia seed pudding.” I was experimenting with that my early days, until I met you, and then I was like, “Nope, nope, I don’t need chia seeds anymore in my life. Those are cute plant things, but not food.”

Sally K. Norton:

Cute plant things, not food. Really, we’re not really good at eating seeds. I mean even birds who have the beaks, and so on, designed to kind of peel seeds, and get rid of some of the harder parts to digest, they have a special crop for grinding them. We have teeth, they have

the crop. But they also pee out, and poop out a lot of oxalate crystals, the birds do. And their metabolism may be even better at that than ours is, because they’ve been eating seeds for a long time. Our idea of seeds as human food is a pretty new concept. We don’t realize that, but we really were not hanging out in trees, waiting for the nuts to ripen before we ate dinner. No, we were not doing that.

Carole Freeman:

Well, and I even explain to my clients the absurdity of just how hard it is to even get one nut out in nature. If you had to go and pick a walnut, and clean the crap off the outside, and crack the shell, and pick that one nut out of there, and it tastes okay. It doesn’t taste amazing, like it’s roasted, and salted, and soaked in sugar we can buy at Costco in five gallon buckets. But, the amount of work it takes, you would maybe eat one or two, but you wouldn’t eat a handful even.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah.

Carole Freeman:

You wouldn’t eat a pound of it, that’s already roasted. And so, usually when people do that experiment, they’re like, “Oh, you’re right, you’re right. We wouldn’t eat very many if we were having to harvest them ourselves.”

Sally K. Norton:

No, and it’s so much work. I mean, this is almost Christmas, like a week from now is Christmas, right? So, when I was a kid… My mom’s family was German by descent, and so there’s a thing that Santa does, he does the orange in the toe of the stocking, and then he throws in a handful of nuts that are… They’re the whole nut in the thing.

Sally K. Norton:

And Santa, for five kids in the house, could buy one two pound pack of whole nuts, and that was enough for the entire family, because when we’re all hanging around with our nutcracker, passing around the nut pick, and the nutcrackers, and going, “Hey, mom, can you get this nut out of here? I’ve just been working at this for 10 minutes, could you help me?” It’s a project to get the nuts out. And Brazil nuts, a lot of them went in the garbage because their shell is so hard, you need like a massive rock on a bigger rock. It just is impractical at the dining room table.

Carole Freeman:

Same thing at my grandparents’ house. I remember, they wouldn’t put them in the stocking. But I remember, you go over and the coffee table had the big bowl of non shelled nuts, and the nutcracker, and the pick, and all that, and was like, maybe for a fun little project as a little kid, because I’m bored by the adults talking, I would try to crack one open, and pick it out. But it was just like, “That wasn’t worth all that work.” And it didn’t even taste that good. So, they just would sit there.

Sally K. Norton:

Sit there and get stale. Yeah. And human beings, for a long time, even before we were really great hunters, if some other animal took down some animal for dinner, we would go scavenge the rest of it. That’s a lot easier than cracking open and nut, and you’ve got a fire going anyway to stay warm, so sticking the leftover leg of whatever poor animal that other animal was eating in the fire, just was really easy, and practical, satisfying, nutritious, and made a lot of sense. And so, our metabolism is more set up for that than hanging around, and waiting for the nuts to fall out of the tree, or figuring out how to process them. That’s technology that’s allowed this to happen, and technology is taking us into places that is too far afield from what’s really supporting long term health.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, and we’ve gone through this period of, well, fat is bad, and salt is bad, and meat is going to kill us, we’ve been told all these wrong things. And so, the only thing left to eat were fruits and vegetables. And so, the American way is if some is good, more must be better. And so, then we’ve created all these ways of trying to choke down really highly concentrated forms of plants, aka oxalates, and plant tox toxins. So if some spinach is good, let’s make a smoothie of it, and take five pounds of spinach, and drink it down. Or, if almonds are better than white flour, let’s puree it, and put it into a flour, or almond butter, and then eat two cups of that a day.

Carole Freeman:

So, we’ve come into a time where people are starting to have a lot of these symptoms of this, and they don’t really know what it is. And I want to acknowledge what you said about how there are genetic differences. So, some people may be able to eat this stuff, and not really notice any differences, but other people are going to have a lot of symptoms.

Carole Freeman:

And I want to talk to you next about… So I’ve noticed this in my own clients, is some of them that likely are genetically predisposed to this, is that as they clean up their diet, as they They transition to keto, they’re actually eating much healthier foods, and in better process for their body. They start to have these flare ups, they have these oxalate symptoms, and I’ve referred them to you when I see kind of the picture.

Carole Freeman:

Basically, if they don’t feel better within a few weeks of doing keto, and they’re starting to have flare ups of pain, and things like that in different areas, I’ve recognized like, “Okay, I’m going to send them to Sally, because I think this is what’s going on.” And so for example, the ones that I’ve noticed is, maybe they’re having joint pain flare up, which typically gets better on keto, or they’re going to have just random body aches, and pains that they don’t really know what’s going on.

Carole Freeman:

Another one more recently was a lady would have… She tried to do keto on her own, had the same issue, and then when she started with me, the same thing, she had a pancreatic flare up. And so, her doctor told her it was, “The fat is bad for you, you need to stop that.”

But I was like, “I think this is just a sign of oxalate toxicity detox.” So, long explanation of, can you talk about how it is, why is it that we start to clean our diet up, we may get some of these detox symptoms of oxalates?

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, so this is so important. This is the heart of the matter, and why I’m doing the work I’m doing. A, you made the point of, you could go toward a healthy diet that could be higher in oxy, because you’re doing more spinach, or more almond bread, or something like that. And it’s great you’re not doing Coca-Cola, and sugar drinks, and all those blue cupcakes, and Pop Tarts, and garbage that people literally try to live on, and become this big addictive problem.

Sally K. Norton:

So yeah, great. Move over to some whole foods. But sometimes you go to whole foods, and you go into high oxalate foods, and it can make you feel worse. But, even if you went to a low oxalate diet, if you’re suddenly now getting nourished, you’re getting the energy you need, and you’re not adding more oxalate, it doesn’t take long for your body to go, “Oh, this is my chance to clean house and get stuff out of here.”

Sally K. Norton:

And unfortunately, if you have grown up on high oxalate foods, which by the way includes potatoes, that’s potato chips, baked potatoes, potato soup, french fries. And now, I mean, for the last 10 or 20 years, people have been going out to eat at lunchtime, or dinner, many days of the week, and your side dish of choice is either fries, or chips, or baked. We’re eating potatoes way a lot.

Sally K. Norton:

It really is… We invented them like in the 1950s with the commercial potato chips, and the commercial french fries, and now we think they’re food, just like the idea that pizza is food. We’ve been doing it long enough people actually think that’s food. That was meant to be a treat, or dessert, or a snack between meals, not a meal. Because of course you combine high fat, and white flour, and that’s not a good idea.

Sally K. Norton:

So yeah, the problem is, if you’ve been around on this planet eating peanut butter, potatoes, any chocolate, basic stuff, chances are, you’ve got this oxalate accumulation somewhere. It could be your teeth, your sinuses, your bones, your joints, your thyroid gland. Something like 85% of us have oxalate crystals in our thyroid gland by the time we’re 50 years old. That means everybody, right? We’re all filling up with oxalate.

Sally K. Norton:

when you stop eating this stuff, if you got enough nutrition, and energy, and B vitamins, your body will start trying to remove that. Well that is also an immune system event. So, the immune system has to come along, and try to get this stuff out of there, and then it’s

got to break it down from, I mentioned before that the body will try to sort of mask it, and hide it. It wraps it up and dead DNA, and dead cells, and just makes it quiescent, and quiet.

Sally K. Norton:

So you could have no symptoms whatsoever, and be filling up with oxalate crystals. We see this in the genetic form of this disease. Okay, so someone can have an oxalate production problem in their liver, where they’re producing way too much from a genetic defect. Very rare disease, very rare. But, you probably could have subtle versions of this. And we know if you’re deficient in B1, and B6, especially B6, the chances of you over producing oxalate, because it’s also a metabolic byproduct, which is why you’re always going to pee out oxalates.

Sally K. Norton:

But it also tells us the body knows something about oxalate, and how to deal with it. Except, in today’s world, where we’re eating it every meal, that’s just not done. We didn’t used to be able to have a high oxalate food year round. We used to have fruits, and nuts at a certain time of year. Literally, nuts was December, maybe to Easter, and that was the end of it, and you at least had summer off from the nuts, and so on.

Sally K. Norton:

But now, Costco is making sure you get bucket loads of whatever you want, anytime of year. I noticed in a store, yesterday was it? Or the day before? Raspberries, and strawberries in December. Okay. Human beings didn’t do that. As you mentioned, you’re out in the woods, you get a few little berries you can fit in the palm of your hand, because it happened to be June. Not now.

Sally K. Norton:

So, there’s all these things, we’ve been living now for 30 years in a world with interstate highways, refrigerated trucks, year round produce, 24 hour grocery stores, we’ve been eating too much peanut butter and potatoes, plus these healthy things. So, your body is loaded with it. And now, when you change your diet, and you stop eating… Let’s say, you really want to do a low toxicity diet, and low oxalate diet, you stop the spinach smoothies, you switch from keto bread, to maybe cheese, or meat or something more human oriented food, and then your body goes, “Okay, okay.”

Sally K. Norton:

The body is reading what’s coming in your stomach, what’s coming in your bloodstream. And it’ll say, “Oh, okay, we’re going to clean out the kidneys.” The kidneys will clean out, sometimes people, it takes a while. But then they’ll get arthritis, or something like that, or they start getting headaches on and off, or on and off sleep problems, or restless legs, or tooth pain, all kinds of stuff, because oxalate, of course can affect your digestion, your basic metabolic health, but it can get into any tissue.

Sally K. Norton:

And when the immune system has to come into that tissue, and drill out these crystals, it’s like getting surgery, but no anesthetic. So, it’s got to get in there, and do micro surgeries in your teeth, or jaw, or sinuses, or shoulder, or hips, or tendons, or spine, and that’s not going to be pleasant, because it’s turning on inflammation, and it’s the body’s response to the toxicity, and the work that it has to do to get it out that turns on the symptoms, because that inflammation has these collateral effects, that harms nerves, and connective tissue, and causes some fibrotic recovery.

Sally K. Norton:

And if you’re healthy, and you’re not adding more of these toxins, eventually the body will clean up the scar tissue, and clean up the fibroids, and repair the bones if you know what you’re doing. but the process of getting there can be very unpleasant, and quite toxic, because you’ve got to take them from the big crystals that are now in your shoulder joint, down into ions, which are the really toxic form, and run that back through your bloodstream, and inflame your bloodstream in the process, and get it back out through your kidneys, which is stressing your kidneys.

Sally K. Norton:

So, you can actually create kidney stones when your body starts flushing out the oxalates. You stop eating oxalate, and then you get your kidney stones. I’ve seen that in a few people, because now the body in a somewhat disorganized way sometimes, is sort of puking out oxalates, at a level that it’s toxic, or more toxic than your two spinach smoothies every day. It might be like the equivalent of three or four. And actually, if you were to eat like six or seven spinach smoothies, you literally could kill yourself.

Carole Freeman:

Wow. Wow.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, it is possible to die from oxalate poisoning.

Carole Freeman:

Well, just like we recognize that in dogs, if they eat too much chocolate, they could die. But we don’t recognize the fact that that same compound is toxic to humans, we’re just a little bit better at detoxing it. So we could also die from excessive chocolate ingestion as well. It would take quite a bit, but the same thing, these other plant toxins truly are toxic.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah. I was really fascinated, I ran into articles in the literature, because I’m constantly doing research, really since I discovered this for myself in 2013. I had my head in the medical literature ever since, and I’ve been reading thousands of articles, and I’d spent a long time reading about lectins, and other plant toxins just in general, just to kind of understand the whole landscape of this.

Sally K. Norton:

I was surprised to see that chocolate, a pregnant woman eating chocolate, can create diseases for her unborn babies, including future testicular cancer in the boys, and malformed penises, and stuff, which is very common now, actually to have the urethra in the penis not be quite right, and little infants need surgery. And this comes from poisons like the plastics, in all the food, and the plastics in general, and things like theobromine in chocolate, is quite toxic to fetuses, and I don’t think pregnant women get warned, “Hey, you should not be picking out on chocolate while you’re pregnant.”

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, no sushi, or brie cheese, but go ahead and have all the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups you want, huh?

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, yeah. Truly our nutrition advice is not good. We have a lot to get it together. Unfortunately, there’s some very strong certainty about, “Oh vegetables are great for you.” In every department, whether it’s mainstream medicine, whether it’s the DASH diet, or the keto diet, or the whatever. Everybody thinks you need to do more and more vegetables, and if you don’t distinguish the difference between romaine lettuce and spinach, that’s a very dangerous piece of advice. It’s just too crude, and not really… We just haven’t wanted to notice the plant toxins. It just hasn’t been cool in our minds and culture, so both at the science level, and then the interpretation level, and then now in the cultural level, there’s been a long pressure to promote plants as noble, and moral for 200 years. There’s been a long, long history of this.

Carole Freeman:

Oh, yeah, it goes back at least… What’s that movie about Dr. Kellogg, and his sanitarium that he started? I think it’s Matthew Broderick that’s in that one, have you seen that?

Sally K. Norton:

I have not seen that movie, but I have read all this stuff from way before the Kellogg era, and he picked it up from Ellen White, and her husband who founded the Seventh Day Adventist church. He was a Seventh Day Adventist, and as a 12 year old boy, he was helping to lay the type for the books they were writing.

Sally K. Norton:

And Ellen White was very productive as a writer, she wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote and she taught people all kinds of fabulously weird ideas. And he learned as a 12 year old that it’s very nasty to touch your genitals, or anyone else’s, and that you will go to hell if you do that. So, any self pleasuring, or self touching will send you to hell.

Sally K. Norton:

So, he remained celibate from what I understand and and did not have sex with his wife. They adopted all their children, so that they could all go to heaven. And he spawned off the… He had this… The sanitarium, and the Kellogg sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, the Battle Creek Sanitarium became the Kellogg’s Company that is brother spun off the

cornflakes. They were developing cornflakes, and these high bran, or actually it was initially very refined grains, because they felt like the infirm people, sick people had to have simple carbs, and simple, highly processed things. So, they developed the cornflakes, which were really popular with the guests at the sanitarium, and became this big product.

Sally K. Norton:

But the sanitarium grew and grew. He attracted presidents, and the fancy people. And so, he was a very fancy [inaudible 00:42:07], he made a lot of money. And he used students, nursing students, and medical students who could come work there for free, because they were interns. So he could make it a very profitable thing, and with that profit, he formed a nursing school, a medical school, and all these spin off things. And one of his nursing students founded the American Dietetics Association. She was also a very rabid, religious, Seventh Day Adventist vegetarian, and that was who founded the American Dietetics Association. So, [inaudible 00:42:37] the birth of nutrition, it came out of this moneyed, affluent elites telling everybody that you should eat garbage food, and that’s better for you, because it’ll keep you from going to hell.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah. Well, it hasn’t worked yet. So…

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, but see, the moral tinge on this is-

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

The religious moral tinge, that somehow eating meat gives you carnal desires, and if you eat meat, you’ll masturbate, and then you’ll go to hell.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

So you better not eat meat, was kind of the underlying theory of that. And we’re doing the modern version of that, if you eat meat, you’ll send the planet to hell, and we’ll all burn up.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, yep.

Sally K. Norton:

But that’s not true.

Carole Freeman:

I know. Yeah. We’ve turned the ship around in some ways about nutrition, but then it’s like, “No, no, it’s going too far the wrong way, too.” We’ve got to keep doing these course corrections, and we’ve got a lot of work to do about… It’s so confusing, right? People are so confused about like, “Okay, so if too many plants are bad, what’s the option?”

Carole Freeman:

So a little bit, it’s for some people, and I want to talk now about, because we might have made some people a little bit worried, like, “Okay, wait, so if I clean up my diet, I might have these horrible aches and pains in my body? Should I just keep eating the Pop Tarts?” Is there hope for those people to be able to detox, and get to the other side, and feel better?

Sally K. Norton:

Well, hopefully most people, when they get their nutrition straight, and they are getting the B vitamins, and they’re not eating a lot of high oxalate foods, and plant toxins, and kind of overdoing the all the bran, and all that stuff, their bodies pretty much… Then that’s when their arthritis finally clears up, or their weird eye problem, or their… They always thought they were prone to something or other, and that usually clears up.

Sally K. Norton:

So I think most people have a pretty easy time of it, where suddenly their carpal tunnel, or their aches and pains, or their somewhat restless nights, mostly get better, but there’ll still be a background process of your body cleaning out, and when it’s doing that work, it will add inflammation, and you’ll get little flare ups of minor hip pain, or even a couple… It’s kind of like gout. So people with gout, and gout is… There’s an oxalate gout. I mean, people think of gout as uric acid, but gout is this gouty arthritis that usually is periodic, and it lasts a few weeks, and then your immune system turns off.

Sally K. Norton:

And there’s like five versions of gout, but everyone’s kind of forgotten about oxalate gout, and the other non uric acid gouts. But again, what happens there, is somebody will get these periodic flare ups for two weeks, where some body part is so dysfunctionally painful and swollen, they can barely use it, and they need a crutch or something, and then it resolves on its own, because the immune system is trying to clean out something, and then it realizes, “This isn’t working.”

Sally K. Norton:

And then it sends out these enzymes, it breaks up the cytokines, and the things that have been promoting this inflammation, it just shuts it all down, and then you’re fine again. So, you get this with oxalates, where it’ll turn on on a crystal, and try for a while, and then it might stop. But, some of us who really grew up on not only the peanut butter, but also the rhubarb, rhubarb is one of these really high oxalate foods, worse than spinach. We’re pretty toxic with it, and we get into this oxalate clearing illness, and it’s about a 10 year or something process, for your body to remove all these oxalates.

Sally K. Norton:

So, you can go through several difficult years, but hopefully most people don’t. But the fact that we are suffering so badly, those of us who are very sick with oxalate, we should be a warning to you guys, “Hey, don’t become us.” Why would you wait until the symptoms break through? All disease is silent until it’s not, including the genetic form of this disease.

Sally K. Norton:

A lot of people have no symptoms for a very long time, and then all of a sudden, they give birth, or have some little trauma, some infection, something that turns the immune system on, because of stress, or mast cell activation, or something. Because this is a mast cell disease, you get high histamine problems, you get all this kind of stuff. It’s all immune activating, the oxalate, ultimately what it’s doing is it’s screwing up your repair processes, and screwing up your immune system, until you end up with all that crazy stuff that leads pretty much anywhere it can go, in some of us. You don’t want to wait until you have symptoms to worry about oxalate. We should consider high oxalate foods as fundamentally inedible. They certainly shouldn’t be a daily food.

Carole Freeman:

Oh, man. So, I just had, as you’re talking about that, too, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, is this symptom?” I don’t think I asked you about this before, but on my initial six months of keto, I would notice that about every 10 pounds, I would have like some kind of a skin eruption, and that’s what I’ve seen, is that people kind of have their… Their body has their go to detox area. Some people end up with…

Sally K. Norton:

Diarrhea, or something.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, diarrhea, or some people have kidney pain, or maybe they’ll have, like you said, the joint pain, or something like that, or headache or something. For me, it was skin eruptions, so I’d have large, not quite cystic acne, but large, almost a boil like thing on my face coming out, on my inner thighs, like on my back as well, about every 10 pounds. And now I’m like, “Huh, was that what that was? My body was releasing, like, ‘Here’s a little pocket of stuff we’re trying to get out of the body.'”

Sally K. Norton:

Yes.

Carole Freeman:

“Here you go, get rid of it.”

Sally K. Norton:

No doubt. And we see this a lot with the oxalate, and you’re exactly right. I mean, there is these sort of types. Some people will dump a lot of oxalate through their skin, and they’ll get these boils, these little boils everywhere. And some people literally, each one is pushing out a crystal, and they can tell it’s crystals coming out.

Sally K. Norton:

Other people, it’s their eyes, and their eyes are watering like crazy, which is a way of removing this particulate pollution that’s in the eye area, with the tears, mucus, high mucus will do that. The crystalline urine, or the kidney problems, or the diarrhea, those are different departments in the body that’s getting really good, an area where the body is good at pushing it out. The skin eruptions is really quite brilliant, because then you don’t have to dissolve the crystals down, you can just push them out, which is saving your kidneys from having to pee them out. So that’s pretty cool.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

Some of us just get like a heat rash early on, when we first start this diet.

Carole Freeman:

Oh, yeah, the keto rash, this mysterious keto rash that flares up, yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

That is very much an oxalate rash. That’s the immune system going, “Whoa, found something here.” Something’s triggering, turning on immune system. And we see that very, very common when you first start a low oxalate diet, if you’ve been eating these high oxalate foods, and this, immune activation is one reason we want you to go slow, not go from two spinach smoothies to none.

Sally K. Norton:

You want to kind of find a way to come down, down to half a spinach smoothie pretty quickly, but stick around with that for a few weeks, and then work your way down. Because if you go all the way really low, if you figure out… The cool part is there’s enough oxalate hanging around, you can accidentally keep some around for a while. Which is helpful, because it’s really when you get super low with it, where the body goes, “Oh, okay, time to clean house.” And we don’t want to clean house.

Sally K. Norton:

So, there’s this place, where a lot of people are in what I call the danger zone, eating too much nuts, and spinach, and you’ve got to get out of the danger zone, and come down into some more moderate zone, but not all the way down to the clearing area, where you’re eating so little, the body starts clearing, we don’t want to start that right away. You want to build up your nutritional well being, your metabolic well being, and get that in place. And eventually, you can go down to a really low oxalate diet, like a carnivore diet, is the ultimate zero carb diet.

Sally K. Norton:

But a lot of us who are sick with oxalate, we have the enzymes that produce glucose are damaged, because the minerals aren’t there, because the oxalate are holding them. So, a lot

of us, we can only do really super low carb for like four or five days, and then we need a little perk up, we need some carbs. And you can get your metabolic flexibility going, you can wear out your muscle glycogen, and liver glycogen, that’s a good thing to do.

Sally K. Norton:

But, having some carbs, and getting a little shot of insulin can be therapeutic, and helpful. In fact, the research suggests that staying ultra zero low sugar is bad for oxalates. It increases your internal production of oxalates. So, keto is great, but you don’t need to make a religion out of it, and do it 24 seven. If you need a pile of rice on Fridays, once a week, that’s fine, you’re listening to your body, that’s probably going to help you sleep better, and so on.

Sally K. Norton:

So, it’s important that you know about things like oxalate, and know a little bit about these mechanisms behind the scenes, so that you can interpret what’s going on with your own body, and make some smart decisions. The tricky thing with the carb control is that we’re so addicted to carbs. There’s some people in the early days, the least little bit of carbs, and they’re off to the races again. They’re like [inaudible 00:51:56] for sugar all over again, and it’s a real battle.

Sally K. Norton:

It took me three years to get off sugar when I first tried to do it, about 18, 20 years ago, because I had been a vegetarian, and I was so… Vegetarian diet has to fundamentally be a high carb diet. I mean, it’s very hard to eat a low carb, vegetarian diet. And so, a lot of us who tried that, ended up being sugar nightmares, and sugar addicted badly.

Sally K. Norton:

But that came out of the low fat advice. I mean, you were saying, we went through this era. We went through the 35 years of being told we should be low fat, and that’s promoted all this metabolic derangement. That’s why we have all these problems with sugar addiction, and obesity, and diabetes, because that’s not quite right. And if you need to do a low fat diet, it almost has to be a vegetarian, low fat diet. If you need to do a meat based diet, it needs to be a high fat diet. You can’t do a low… I mean, there lots of issues with nutrition, again, so it’s all confusing, but I think we’re on the way to figuring this thing out. Honestly, I think we’re on the edge of having a much better breakthrough, if we can get over the profiteering that’s going on behind the scenes, that’s promoting the wrong information.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, there’s a lot of political stuff there, for sure. So, yeah. Let’s see. So, gosh, we’ve covered so much great stuff. I would just love to kind of wrap this up, and just kind of talking about the evolution of your diet, with going from low oxalates, low carb, I know, and then you’re currently primarily meat based. Is that still true, or?

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, it is still true. It is still true. I think I cooked… Today I threw some pork roast in the oven last night, so I think I now have about eight pounds of cooked pork. I also have a rib roast waiting for me, and I have one on order for next week. Yeah, so I eat a very meat heavy diet. True enough. I really think it’s helping me rebuild my spine, my spine has been completely messed up from the oxalates, and it’s really bringing me back. So, I’m quite pro meat.

Carole Freeman:

And we didn’t cover this, but animal based things are virtually oxalate free?

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, yeah, just consider them zero. Consider them zero, because the little bit of traces they have don’t really matter.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah.

Sally K. Norton:

Yeah, so that’s a really interesting thing. The folks who are doing this all meat diet, which is just considered bizarre by mainstream people, are the ones who are discovering this oxalate thing, because a subset of them, I wish we knew the numbers, like is it 20%? Is it 15%? Some subset of them get into big trouble pretty fast with oxalate clearing, and they’ve got crystals popping out, and they’ve got weird symptoms, and they’re having panic attacks, and just all kinds of stuff.

Sally K. Norton:

Because behind there, there was this oxalate toxicity disease, that you don’t notice until you get off the stuff. So, a really good test of whether you have an oxalate problem for real, is to go on a low oxalate diet, or get there in a smart way, don’t just jump off what I call the high diving board.

Sally K. Norton:

Instead of jumping off the high diving board of spinach smoothies, keto bread, and dark chocolate every day, start cutting those out, and then gradually learn how to get on the low diving board, and jump into the pool of low oxalates from a little elevation. That’s the time to go down. So, but yeah, the carnivore world has done a great job of going, “Hmm, oxalates are a thing.” So, it’s a big conversation there, in the carnivore world.

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, because it’s… I know the people that follow that way of eating, they just feel better. And most of them have tried low carb, and or keto, as an interim, and they’ve gotten carnivore curious, and done a trail of it, and most of the ones I’ve heard speak, say that, “I just felt better, so I went back to my low carb-ish ways after my carnivore trial, and I didn’t feel as good. So, I just keep doing what feels best for me.” It may not be right for everybody. And as you pointed out, it isn’t something you probably should just start from vegetarian

green smoothies and go 100% carnivore, that may not work very well. But, for some people, they find it does help them feel the best possible.

Sally K. Norton:

And see, what I think the biggest innovation that I noticed is that once you go low oxalate, your body will tell you what you can eat, what you can’t eat. Your ability to know what’s working for you is much better. Beforehand, when you’re eating a high oxalate diet, you cannot tell that these things are harming you, and you cannot tell that you would do better without them, until you’re really totally without them, in a good, thorough kind of obvious way where you’re conscious of what’s going on, and you’ll be able to see better, and observe.

Sally K. Norton:

I mean, it’s so confusing your body to be so toxic, that it really can’t tell you in the short run, “Hey, that sweet potato just really hurt my stomach.” It just can’t even tell you. But once you go carnivore, and you’ve cleaned out the plant toxins in general, and you start adding them back in, you will get some messages that will be hard to ignore.

Sally K. Norton:

So, I mean, to me, that’s the best use of that carnivore diet, is to use it as an elimination diet, and get there gradually, do it consciously, because you’re changing your microbiome over, you’re changing so much when you do that. It’s not good to traumatize your body, and jump from one idea to the next. You need to have a plan to do things consciously, and gradually, when you make these dietary changes. Otherwise, you’re just going to hurt yourself more. So, take a deep breath and learn more and before you jump.

Carole Freeman:

All right. Well, I think it’s almost time to wrap this up. Any last parting words? Anything else you were hoping I would ask you about this time, Sally?

Sally K. Norton:

You and I could chat forever about all kinds of things. I think, unfortunately, the nutrition world has gotten very politicized, and people are very hung up on their school, or belonging to a club, and I’m not a club person. I don’t belong to any group, any label. I’ve just been studying oxalate like crazy, and trying to let people know this is a possibility. If you have health issues, and you can’t figure it out, your doctor says you’re crazy, the things that you go try to do to help you maybe help for a week or two, and then you realize it’s not working.

Sally K. Norton:

So, you’ve been to every chiropractor, and every acupuncturist, and every this and that, and it’s not really working for you, then you need to be studying what’s on my website. Really, if it’s nothing’s working, oxalate, the chances are that it’s oxalates I would put a 90% guarantee on that. So, come to my website, learn about oxalates. There’s free stuff there.

I’ve got free information on Facebook, and Instagram, and I’ve got an inexpensive PDF book that teaches you about the low oxalate diet, and gives you, I don’t know 180 recipes.

Sally K. Norton:

It has mostly low carb, there’s like two or three rice recipes, and the rest is all low carb. Eggs are relegated to a small chapter, and it’s very allergy aware, it’s gluten free. It’s all the stuff, so if you feel like you have to thread this needle, you can’t eat gluten, you can’t eat beans, you can’t eat this, you can’t eat that, everything’s bothering you, my cookbook can help you with that, because I’m like that, basically, so I figured out I cook around all that mess.

Carole Freeman:

Is there a book in the works, Sally?

Sally K. Norton:

There is. I’m working on my manuscript. I’m hoping to get it into Random House in early January, and then we’ll be fluffing it up, and doing all the polishing, and deciding for sure what images, and getting it all set up. So, by this time next year, there will definitely be a book out there.

Carole Freeman:

Yay.

Sally K. Norton:

And I’m really hoping that everybody will make a point of getting a couple of them, and sharing the message, because this needs a bigger… It needs all of us to kind of share this information, because a lot of us are unnecessarily hurting our children, giving baby smoothies, and keto bread, and very popular people online are showing how you could make gluten free almond whatever, and give it to your one year old child. I think that’s [crosstalk 01:00:47].

Carole Freeman:

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. All right. Well visit-

Sally K. Norton:

Thank you, Carole, it’s so fun to be with you.

Carole Freeman:

You too. I’ll put links to Sally’s website below, and her PDF, and cookbook, we’ll put that all in the notes below. So, thank you all for watching. Just to recap, oh my gosh, I can’t even recap everything we’ve talked about. Plant toxins, why more plants are not necessarily better, and probably worse for your health than you think. All the myriad conditions that could be related, or signs of oxalate toxicity.

Carole Freeman:

We talked about how, when you clean up your diet, you may experience worse symptoms, and some of the most common foods on keto, and otherwise, that are really high in oxalates, less of those initially is probably better for you, and then transitioning towards those, and how to know… You gave a very short synopsis of how to know if you may be suffering from oxalate toxicity.

Carole Freeman:

If you’ve got all these random symptoms, you’ve seen every practitioner you can see, and they can’t figure out what’s going on, it may be oxalate toxicity. So, thank you again for being here, Sally. It’s always a pleasure. Thanks, everyone for watching. If you’ve enjoyed this, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe, hit the bell for all the notifications, for future episodes, and thanks for watching everyone. Bye.

Sally K. Norton:

Bye.