Sally Norton and the Trouble with Oxalates and other Plant Toxins!

welcome to the plant free MD podcast with Dr Anthony chafee where we discuss diet and nutrition and how this affects health and chronic disease and show you how you can use this to optimize your health and happiness both mentally and physically [Music] hey guys just want to take a second to thank our sponsor at carnivore bar I don't promote many products because honestly all you need to be healthy is to just eat meat for those times that you're out hiking road tripping or stuck at work and you want nutritious snack that is just meat fat and salt if you want it the carnivore bar is a great option so I like this product not because it's just pure meat but also because I want the carnivore Market to thrive as well and the more we support meat only products the more meat only products that will be available in the mainstream so if this sounds like something you'd like to get behind check it out using my discount code Anthony to get 10 off which also applies to subscriptions giving you 25 off total all right thanks guys uh hello everyone this is uh Dr Anthony Chaffey back with another uh podcast of the plant free MD today I have a very special guest someone I've been looking forward to speaking to you for a while now is uh Sally Norton who is a very uh well-known expert in plant talks and especially oxalates Sally thank you so much for joining me today it's exciting to be with you looking forward to our conversation yeah me too um can you for people that don't uh uh know who you are aren't aware of your work can you tell us a bit about yourself yeah I've been interested in nutrition since I was like kindergartner and and in seventh grade I decided I wanted to get a degree in nutrition because I realized that you could help people avoid cancer and heart disease and Trauma and being a patient too much if they knew how to eat okay that's cool and so I've been into this a long time because now I'm very old lady and uh was miseducated along the way and had to dig myself out of my own results that I got from adhering to an extremely healthy diet just how I was taught to limit animal fats and butter and salt and you know emphasize the vegetables and I was a train wreck and when I finally realized what I had done to myself I was turning 50. and okay so a life ruined why not study this and figure this out and help some other people I've been teaching oxalates now for quite a while and decided I needed to write a book because you know if you wrecked One Life maybe if you kind of get it down on paper someone else can benefit so I've been teaching about oxalates because I realized you know it wasn't just I wasn't some odd case where suddenly you know some people can't tolerate their sweet potatoes no like at some level we're all being somewhat harmed subtle or not and subtle harm is real harm and I think we forget that because in medicine we say you know we look for like lethal dose if you know if it didn't kill you it makes you stronger not true if it's subtly ruining your health slowly and letting you become a diseased person that's real harm harm that makes a big difference in your life and so I I realize that oxalator is doing that and it's in this common popular foods we grow up on like potatoes and peanuts and chocolate yeah absolutely so uh so you said you were 50 when you you came to that realization what sort of uh what was the the wake-up call that you that you saw well when wake up sometimes you trip a few times and then eventually it starts to come into um 2020 hindsight kind of thing so I I had uh lots of issues going on but I I had this particular moment in 2009 with a crotch burning kind of pain valvadenia type like crotch pain I was like it was bad enough that I had this sort of outburst moment I'm like asking somebody to cut off my genitals because I didn't want to live with them anymore and my husband heard me say that and he got out of line and he found that there's this Foundation right near where I used to work in North Carolina called the volvar pain Foundation who's been teaching the low oxalate diet for like 26 years now to correct pelvic pain and I was like uh I didn't learn that in school that's different uh and I bought all their materials and sort of tried to do the diet more or less I mean I was quite aware of oxalates because in school we learned that it causes kidney stones so I knew that kidney patients needed the low oxalate diet but even they resist the concept of that um well established reality so I didn't stick with it partially because I was still working and really quite fatigued mentally and physically and I wrote research grants in public health and submitted them to the the National Health Institute here in the U.S and you know really brain work it's very tough to work 50 hours a week doing budgets and writing up research reports and submitting them and dealing with the online units very intense brain work and I you know I didn't have a lot of space to really focus on how to do this diet right and really the significance of it while I was working and so I went back you know I was addicted to sweet potatoes I I became sweet potatoes were my carbohydrate of choice after I quit being a vegan and could no longer eat wheat and gluten and beans so you know vegans are very carb addicted types and broken metabolism becomes carb addicted oxalate actually will create a situation where you kind of need carbs because it interferes with uh gluconeogenesis and you have trouble and maintain have trouble maintaining glycogen and you have trouble meaning maintaining blood sugar when you're Oxley poisoned so you kind of need carbs because you really don't feel good you can get really fatiguey and brain foggy and crampy and hard to sleep because your sugar I mean low blood sugar is no safer than high blood sugar and no more Pleasants so I'm wandering around here a lot just I um was living on sweet potatoes and so I went back to them because when the low Oxley diet it actually can make you feel worse sometimes and you put the oxalates back in your diet and that can sort of relieve those symptoms which is completely confusing we'll get into that so I would go back to my sweet potatoes and eat them and be like hey I don't feel bad on them it seems okay and so I was like oh well the oxalates and sweet potatoes aren't the obsoles that bother me so I could have back my favorite addiction food right so I was playing a game that people do because I didn't understand it it's not because I'm looking for an out or an excuse It's because I didn't understand how the oxalate toxicity Works where by eating foods like sweet potatoes and swiss chard and nuts and so on you develop a bioaccumulation problem we are building up a toxic store of oxalate in our tissues thyroid glands bone marrow tendons all over and when you quit eating them the body's like oh geez it's about time we can finally clean house like your body's been waiting for this moment when you quit eating all these high oxalate foods and it starts breaking down the deposits and you're refilling your bloodstream and your kidneys and your urine and your body with mobilized oxalic acid so you re-intoxify retoxifying yourself in the release process I mean your body's digging up toxic stores like little waste Barrels in your tissues and sending them out on the roadways which is your arteries and veins and capillaries so that the kidneys can clear it out of your system so this is like having like radioactive dump trucks with not covers on them like spilling crap everywhere like it can be very unpleasant the whole process of this what I call surgery without anesthetic of getting rid of this toxic load that's been building up ever since your first peanut butter sandwich yeah yeah and and that's something yeah people don't really realize that you know these these toxins do build up say well you have it and it's just like your body clears it and gets rid of it but but it doesn't really you know a lot of these things do build build up so where do these things go is all your tissue or there's certain tissue that they really go in and cause uh more of a problem well you know we're talking about the oxides that come from your diet which is the majority of oxalates that are in your body your liver actually makes some oxalate it's a breakdown of vitamin C excessive amounts of vitamin C become uh oxalate in the body and certain amino acids can break down into oxalate in the liver so when you're eating them you're eating both oxalate in a form of a crystal because plants turn oxalic acid which is this parent compound into calcium oxalate crystals for the many purposes for their own use so you're eating crystals and you're eating oxalic acid and the oxalic acid starts going into your bloodstream from the stomach and the upper intestines so the circulatory system there is now picking up oxalate that hepatic circulation delivers everything that you absorb from the digestive tract straight to the liver and liver is kind of this open tissue of sinusoids where all the cells are being completely flooded with the contents of the blood which includes this oxalic acid and the liver cells are great at defending themselves from the toxic effects they can produce a lot of glutathione and they spend a lot of energy when your diet is high in oxalate you've just eat in a load of spinach let's say or a spinach smoothie or keto bread your liver is being flooded with this stuff that's really tough on the membranes and the mitochondria and so they're busy it's busy making and using up glutathione and you're actually wearing out your livers detox capacity it's having to just protect itself from that meal and then two inches up the inferior vena cava you got the heart that's the next place where the oxalates go right because this is just the way blood flows out of your stomach you know from your stomach it's moving to your liver to your heart then it goes over to lungs to pick up oxygen and comes back to the heart and then goes into General circulation so all that vascular tissue the endothelial lining of the of the vascular system is being exposed to oxalic acid in your heart your liver your heart and your lungs critical organs to survival right really critical like if your heart any of them stop your big doo-doo this is long before eventually the um the kidneys pick up oxalate and you pee out like 90 of it so in the meantime the body's got to like compensate for the fact that you can't leave this acid in your bloodstream because it's a chelator of calcium magnesium iron you name it but calcium and magnesium a door oxalic acid and vice versa those are matches made in heaven and post meals you can have dips in your magnesium and calcium levels in the blood well there's this little bundle of cells in the heart called the pacemaker they don't like that you're a neurologist right this was like nerves don't like their calcium metabolism disrupted obviously it's a great neurotoxin because it disrupts calcium handling in and around cells and other ions as well electrolytes in the management of electrolytes is critical to cell function inside a cell we use calcium ions they're called Sparks quarks blurps they got all these names for the endoplasmic reticulum stores calcium in the mitochondria need calcium and do a little bit of calcium management and storage they release little calcium ions to help the cell tell itself what to do in ions these calcium molecules are sort of the messenger that comes over in a certain part of the membrane and say hey do this for me bring me some of this do this for me this is how the cell's managing its function is with calcium ion Communications you add oxalic acid into a situation like that and you screw it all that up you're basically kidnapping the the messenger as he's trotting along from one Kingdom to the next you're just like wiping them out is kidnapping is not good in cell electrolyte management so the pacemaker doesn't like it the heart cells don't like it no cell really likes their electrolytes being messed with and that's what oxalate's doing and so any cell anywhere where we've got cells who are degenerating because they're just senile or because they've been injured by oxalate or something else this is the gross you know Catch-22 you injure oxalate Suboxone can now stick to these cells because um certain amino acids are very sticky to calcium and calcium oxalate or go together and so oxalate can stick to membranes that aren't healthy so whenever you've got inflammation infection cellular stress cellular death or regenerating cells those tissues are sticky to oxalates so the oxalate that's forming crystals starts sticking to certain cells or cell fragments so we've got cells in a different state of disrepair you get uh non-living cellular material that has zero ability to defend itself a really robust healthy cell can sort of rebuff oxalate crystals and oxalate ions and kind of manage it and survive it but degenerating inflamed and fragmented tissue is just a sitting duct and the if the local cells can't really contain it uh you're going to attract immune activity and increase inflammation and then that inflammation creates more of that kind of inflammatory state that makes those tissues more prone to oxalate accumulation so we see oxalate accumulation in cells with lots of turnover and anywhere we've got lots of wear and tear daily use because then you've got cells constantly being recovered and so on and wherever you've had infection or injury so if you had like frostbite good chance this where you have frostbite you've got oxalate crystals there collecting okay and then um we talked about sort of off camera but um we were talking sort of on the different ways that that oxalates damage uh your body and can probably precipitate cancers and things like that as well can you go into a little bit about that how you know damages membranes and precipitates um uh you know oncogenesis and things like that yeah the achogenesis is seen in in breast cancer and what's the other cancer suddenly I'm forgetting where they've actually documented both oxalic acid ions and oxalate crystals generating aggressive breast cancer and another cancer but the the thing is about this is we looked at all the Cancers and all the tissues I think we'd find similar uh outcomes we just haven't done the work um yeah so an ion or Crystal of oxalate getting in the vicinity of the cell can cause the cell membrane to completely scramble its structure so there's certain kinds of molecules that are on the inner leaflet normally that Flip ceramide Flip flips to the outer side of the membrane and when they're facing the outside of the cell the immune cells go oh damaged cell that's taken away and that process also increases free radicals in the cell of course a mitochondria is a double membrane structure and the same thing occurs with the mitochondria where you get severe damage to mitochondria this to stay flattened out and the um the mitochondria start putting out more free radicals and the more you get that oxidative stress the more it breaks down more mitochondria like there's this vicious cycle of tissue damage creates inflammatory interests in fact they're called a danger Associated or damps danger Associated molecular whatevers where the cell is leaking stuff like potassium ions all right potassium belongs inside a cell sodium is supposed to be an outside of the cell when potassium is leaking from cells that tells the immune system but come get this problem and so this is you know inflammasome turned on it Oxley it's a great turnarounder of inflammasones because it causes this leakiness it causes increases in um lactase dehydrinase and other you know and free radicals it causes the cells to put out more osteopotin which is you know helps to lower crystallization and kidney stones and the more you have kidney problems the more you know there's like all these layers of metabolic effects that you're having as you're stressing these tissues that when left to be chronic because hey you're having potatoes chocolate nuts and you know spinach and swiss chard and sweet potatoes multiple times a day not just every week or every day but like we're chronically exposing ourselves to plant toxins particularly oxalate because it turns out the foods that are high in oxalate have gotten more and more popular available here in the U.S for the last 20 years you cannot go out to a meal without being offered would you like chips or fries or bakes with that you know like you've got to have potatoes at every meal and now spinach is everywhere because of course you get to have your chocolate If You Eat Your Spinach or that's how we raise our kids you know you if you eat your vegetables you can have this dessert and nowadays chocolate which is very high in bioavailable oxalate every single ice cream flavor has got some form of of chocolate or nuts in it or both and this is becoming true for treats in general that chocolates and nuts are everywhere because they're both supposedly healthy so you can feel good about your sugar sugar and science fiction so I'm like all over the map here but basically cells in your tissues are under a fair amount of energetic oxidative stress that's not only disrupting electrolytes and cells it's causing energy disc metabolism where the cells are actually underpowered for energy that's really a bad thing and it's also causing a certain form of malnutrition and deficiency you know it's adding up to tissue damage and processes of disease that take a long time to really develop and manifest because the body is prioritizing your electrolytes in the in the blood and for prioritizing healthy blood doing its best to kind of manage things in the background and in that management it does require the body to pull oxalate out of the blood to protect the vital organs and it does have to sequester and hold on to this after meals that are pretty significant and oxalate it only takes like an ounce and a half of chocolate to create a big surge in in oxalate in the body it doesn't take giant amounts of these Foods necessarily yeah and then normally people that are eating chocolate aren't aren't eating an ounce you know they're eating babies like you know pounds of this stuff well and that's the thing with potato chips and french fries too it's like you go to like there's five guys here they give you like a pound of french fries I mean they're nobody sprinkled B vitamins or done any anything to compensate for the fact that there's no nutrition in its pure toxicity and it's considered a normal meal like it's acceptable to have french fries every time you go out for lunch yeah and and you know to your point uh about all this damn damaging the mitochondria especially inclining the Chris day um you know that's something that that we were talking about before but that Otto Warburg Nobel Prize winner in medicine back in 1931 he did decades of work after that um he showed that that cancer really you know it gets from damage to the crystal into the mitochondria and in in biology you know there's there's this idea of structure equals uh function you know and if you damage the structure the function is going to be damaged as well you can't you can't go about that process and so when you find out that Chris there or destroy them entirely like you get in in a lot of cancers like a glioblastoma um that I was specifically you know lecturing on today that you know you you cannot work properly you cannot go through oxidation oxidative phosphorylation and that is actually the the Hallmark of cancer it's not the genetic changes there are entire there are multiple every every cell on a tumor they'll have different genetics they'll have different uh mutations or sometimes they may not have any mutations at all their entire cancers that don't have any mutations that we found and I'm like oh that's very interesting I was like how can it be the the DNA driving like cancer if there are no mutations if it's a normal cell all of them have this Hallmark of fermentation all of them have damaged mitochondria and some sort of uh form or number or both and when they go through that alternate pathway of energy production which is a substrate phosphor substrate phosphorylation of glutamine and glucose that creates a lot of free radicals like you were saying those damage the DNA those cause uh uh you know um different mutations and again compound the issue with the mitochondria so you start you know you start pushing the rock down the hill and uh but then you know it just gets carried on and further on because you start with the oxalates it starts damaging the mitochondria then that damage gets more damage and more free radicals and uh and also rig and also stimulates the the the nucleus to actually pull in more glutamine and glucose to just throw fuel on the fire because they're like oh we're not respirating properly and this is why cancer cells pull in 400 times the amount of glucose as as normal cells and so that's that's very interesting I didn't know that about about oxalates damaging the mitochondria like that it's really sad that we don't know in the science we keep bumping into it and yet nobody's really funding more and more follow-up studies like a lot of the studies that showed interference with enzyme function how oxalates inhibiting the function of enzymes in the whole process of energy metabolism in cells a lot of the studies were done in the 70s and the 60s and really not pulling it Forward into modern science but you have to know that the that that was an ERA where medicine turned away from in science started turning away from science for its own sake for really understanding and we started to have to do science for the sake of developing products and we started to have to do medicine for the sake of making it a profitable Enterprise whereas in this country hospitals used to all be non-profit charitable organizations they were the Shriners and the Jews and the Catholics and this and that so it was it was nuns it's like volunteer people it was meant to help people um but the more we got into Public Funding assuring that bills would be paid the more potential for medicine to become a profit Center and we've switched from having Community Hospitals to having corporate hospitals that are owned by people not even in your own State owning up whole chains of hospitals and so that has really taken the heart of Science in the heart of medicine and warped it in a Direction that's allowing something like oxalate where there's never really going to be a drug solution it's only going to be about a true prevention solution so there's no money to be made and warning people to not overeat oxalate yeah or yeah or anything in general like you know if you um yeah the the the economic uh incentive is to have you buy a product as opposed to eat less of a product or use less of a product and so you know we have to sort of figure out some sort of business model that that goes the other way because you're right you know until we do that uh you know we're we're sort of swimming up River yeah yeah as a whole as of the way the system works the way the bigger system is supposedly working but what we've done we've got this deal with the devil now where whole economies depend on illness for a type of sort of GDP that's not a sustainable model to have people get sicker and sicker younger and younger on more drugs yes it's creating economic activity but it's not creating what the whole point of economic activity is for people to enjoy a prosperous life and there's nothing prosperous about needing to be on medications or crutches or needing a walker or requiring a car to get from point A to point B because you can't walk anymore and back to your point about structure equals function in just the fundamental piece of like these bad seed oils that have invaded the diet now for almost 100 years those seed oils that create elongated fatty acids and warp fatty acids in the wrong shape in your membranes that structural change to the cell membranes makes the active proteins that reside in the membranes that do all the work not function properly because they literally the proteins and membranes depend on the right shaped fats and membranes you know and the idea that saturated fat is bad and polyunsaturated is good just makes zero sense you put unstable fats that can become warped toxic fats versus stable fats that are hard to damage which are the saturated fats like fundamentally where did we get these ideas I have to say my conclusion is that most of nutrition was founded by ideologues who believe that eating meat was immoral and they were vegetarians it began the profession and the people have been attracted to the profession of nutrition share that kind of um ideological approach before they even understand their science and they use their science to try to prove their ideology versus the other way around so there's a lot of those personal ambition that's also interrupted the ability to think clearly about what's good for humans and how to teach that to the public yeah and then of course we see a lot of that sort of research coming out of places like Loma Linda and and Harvard they certainly have a an ideological bent uh where that comes from you know the obviously Loma Linda comes from The Seventh-Day Adventists they've been banging that drum since the 1800s you know they say this is like a well well lust is a sin and so you know eating meat makes you more lustful so obviously that's bad and then they've just stuck with it and uh you know at least they're they're consistent you know you have to give them that well and the irony of that is that's the justification for developing this whole process food industry that we've been Hook Line and sink are falling for for 100 years yeah and yeah and is bad I don't know where the where the Harvard people got there sort of ideological event but they certainly uh seem to like to put out a lot of stuff um you know in that that sort of vegan Direction I don't know where that's driven from maybe you have uh some some insights on that you know I really while he's still alive we should find ways to find out from Colin Campbell and Walter Willett and these major feature figures in the ivy league I went to Cornell have my own vegan professor and um well I don't know I don't know where they got this idea from and why they're sticking to it regardless of the facts yeah that's funny yeah I I often wonder like um after I took my mcats I just got um some like letters from different like grad school programs just uh it was I did quite well and so they were like hey why don't you come do this and so I got a I got an offer to get do a master's in nutrition from Colombia and I was thinking about it because I was really interested in nutrition I was really like nutrition and you know just for my own you know knowledge but also my own performance as an athlete and I was very tempted I almost went and I wonder if uh if that would have how that would have affected me because I already had already had the plan the you know the plants are trying to kill you thing from my cancer biology professor before that and um and I just wonder like if they'd sort of try that I wonder how that would have how that would have clashed in my head I don't I don't really bend that easily so like I would I wonder what I would have done on that but it's interesting I don't know if Colombia is the same I'm sure they are actually they definitely are it was that guy um covered Bailey his very famous nutritionist back in like the yeah yeah I think yeah and he um yeah yeah he's well he was very charismatic guy he was quite funny and he do these like big talks and lectures and you see him on TV my mom really liked him we saw him as a kid and he was funny and he said I remember one that one thing that uh stuck with me was that he said you know it's like all my degrees and all my research and everything I've done I can culminate in just three words don't eat fat and everyone started laughing and all that sort of nonsense and um and I remember I believed him too yeah yeah and he was from Colombia yeah it's convincing yeah he was very convincing we even even recently when you know five years ago or so when I sort of rediscovered all this and uh and then started eating more fat and like knew about the research how we flat out lied to about saturated fat cholesterol and how this is actually good for you and so I was eating all that and my brother if it said like but but cover Bailey said you know don't eat that and I was just like well that was 30 years ago and um you know and uh you know people get it wrong you know you know like Time Marches on and he was doing the best he could at the time with the information available but unfortunately it was it was flawed and um I don't know that's exactly the message that Cornell left me with when I finished my degree at Cornell that was causing all diseases every disease cancer parties that was the answer that I got from my time at Cornell I was like that's really what I was taught yeah it's sucking it makes no sense really and that's the sad part about my degree my studies in the ivy league of nutrition is that I really didn't get a chance to spend time with primary research and spend more time thinking about the meaning of what is our state of knowledge with cell biochemistry it was really like they were sent telling us their pre-digested conclusions like I one professor said to me straight up said to us a big classroom of people I'm not sure which class it was but he said that sugar is benign except for dental caries I'm like woohoo I can have all the jam I want on my Bagels as much as I want as long as I don't put butter on my Bagels I just put blueberry jam on I'm cool right that's the kind of thinking I came away with from going to Ivy League school for nutrition like wow yeah and uh yeah well I wonder what what if he was on a payroll for like Nestle or something like that I mean was well that's the thing I mean we have been letting uh industry affect our Academia to the point where we celebrated as private Public Partnerships yeah and uh well anytime you have those sorts of uh conflicts yeah first of all you have to you have to uh admit them and display them and a lot of people don't and then that's been a large problem especially with the the sugar shills like Ansel keys and then multiple you know other people around the world you know throughout history you know they never they never disclosed that they were on the payroll for these guys and the sugar companies were funding their research um there was uh you know Harvard just got under the microscope or in the the magnifying glass uh in the last year or so because they're professors at the medical school were so conflicted they had so many ties there's so many pharmaceutical companies and so I and it sort of played out because um a first or second year medical student at Harvard just asked a simple question you know they were teaching about about statins and basically just how these are just the most glorious things that have ever been created and uh and they just Can Do no harm they just give all good it's just this like the will come to Earth bless you and and this girl says like okay well you know so what are some of the side effects of of statins and the the professor like literally ridiculed her in front of the class and just yeah and and just like started calling her out and uh I don't know exactly what he said but it was it was it was portrayed as in being quite quite rude and and um and chauvinistic but like you see how in education you get shaped about what is okay and what isn't okay very quickly in medical school is particularly good at that by the time you finish medical training you're like a little soldier who's been to boot camp yeah you don't dare really think for yourself which is so weird aren't you supposed to be isn't this a thinking profession supposed to be yeah he's supposed to it's supposed to be evidence-based and I was literally talking to someone the other day because I was at a conference it was a low-carb medical conference or low carb down under um and it's and it's you know run by doctors for doctors and and researchers so it's you know it's uh you're trying to get a lot of the actual clinicians that are out here treating this like hey let's let's look at this look at the the data out here let's look at these different studies that don't get passed around in the normal circles and it's very good you find a lot of interesting things and I was speaking to someone there so I gave a talk there and they were they're up talking to me and they said that you know they they this has been a bit difficult for them in their practice because they're like head of an apartment uh is very much against all his stuff and they say well but can you just look at the evidence just look at the data like look at these studies and they just said I don't need to look at the studies I don't care what the study said I don't care what the evidence says I care what the guidelines said right well you're a good leader wow and that'll hold up real well in the Nuremberg trials it did before you know it's just like well this is just what we're told to do is which is what we have to do it doesn't matter if it's true or not like that's insane to me they don't want to get in trouble from the medical board who's gonna who's gonna uphold the guidelines written by 10 guys that have stock in whatever is affecting the guidelines this is happening in kidneys kidney stuff like the way to not get the next kidney stone is to quit eating the oxalates but is that anywhere in the guidelines no no and uh yeah it's uh it's quite funny that that the Harvard Professor that ridiculed the girl that's how it came to light because some people found that quite suspicious as they looked in his background and he was used based on the board of like 17 different like pharmaceutical places and like all these different places that you know made statins and things like that so this guy was just lost that's the kind of guy who gets on these committees that creates the guidelines that shape how doctors think and act and behave with their with their patients the options you get as a patient from your doctor are formed from these protocols that are written by guys who have all this stock and all these strings to Industrial you know into profit centers of some form or another yeah absolutely and and then they're the ones teaching the the future generations of doctors as well and and cookie cutter stamping them out to think the exact same way um I think that I was I was protected by that I went to medical school a little older and a little more jaded and cynical I guess and I just seen a lot more garbage in my life and um and I remember like going through my notes later on and I would just be sort of sort of reading through these things and then and then be like some some one note or whatever you know sort of like had some they would they taught everything PowerPoint which I hate I always hated learning at PowerPoint and uh so I'd sort of write notes like with the slides which it was it's a terrible way to learn and and I I didn't even like remember I couldn't like remember all the the uh the lectures with the slides because it's just not a great way of retaining like all my handwritten notes and I could go back to like my undergrad like I'll read that like I remember that now you know it's like it all comes back but these stupid PowerPoint slides I couldn't even remember them at the end of the term so I remember reading through these things I was like this is crazy this is such a dumb way to learn I don't I don't even remember learning this I don't remember writing this but then I would know that it was me because I would write some like smart ass remark like well this is stupid this this guy doesn't know he's talking about here's why like look this up you know prove this guy wrong all these sorts of things so I was always I was always I was always a bit cynical and so I think that that uh protected me a little bit because uh you know people just you know just like well this is what this is what it said in the book and so this is what it is this is what it has to be and um and that can get you in a lot of trouble and so you know patients are getting very frustrated with their doctors because if patients come with something that isn't just a drug answer or oh we can snip it here or clip it there uh the patients walk away with really well now what do I do do I find a different doctor you know and you spend a lot of time hunting for some input that's helpful yeah and yeah they do and then but I mean that I think that's why you know platforms like like this and then mediums like this have been uh becoming so popular because yeah well they're going to the doctor and like you know you went you went to New you know you got an Ivy League degree in nutrition and then you because of what you were eating you were getting sick and you were in pain and so people are seeing that they're like well I'm doing what I'm supposed to do and I'm getting hurt like this can't be the way and which sort of you know brings me to to another thought like how how much of your degree in nutrition do you now find very problematic is there is there anything you can still you use besides like the basic biochemistry of it [Laughter] first of all they're terrible teaching biochemistry you're terrible I had to take an auto tutorial biochemistry class which just means you don't have a professor you read the book and they give you a stack of of uh problem sets to do but you don't really know and the answers are there you don't really know what you're doing like all I could do is like look at the answers and put the answers over on the sheet like transferring the answer sheet to the question sheet was so stupid to me I just didn't even try like I can't make this work and I barely passed biochemistry because like wait a minute this is the ivy league way of teaching biochemistry this isn't working for me so you know I had to do some ketchup and figure it out on my own because it was hard to learn it there and that's why what was so left me with such Impressions was the opinions of the professors I spent I spent more time in the library studying the the literature for my sex ed class when I was writing my term paper on you know do the question that I was given for my term paper and sex that class was does taking oral contraceptives cause cancer and I studied heart I looked hard and I really got an A plus on that paper because I spent I really enjoy studying the literature and figuring out what they're trying to say and and seeing the different he took a lot of digging to come up with the right answer that yes if for if you're on them for more than seven years yes they cause lots of problems um but the short-term studies don't show that and they also don't control for you know age of menarchy and like there's so many you can see how weak the science really is if you get a chance to see it firsthand but at Cornell we didn't get from an attrition point of view we're not we didn't get anything firsthand we didn't get to go to primary sources and understand how the research is done I didn't even understand when I went to lab classes you have to take Foods lab and then Foods too you like do things like measure the energy in a hamburger I can figure out how you get it they bring you a Big Mac you slice it off you autoclave it you dehydrate it you do this and that and then you run it through this so you kind of get a sense of what's involved in a lab and then you write these reports and I never understood really that writing our reports was not just busy work it was a chance to learn how you structure a research report that becomes a published article I didn't even understand that like they didn't even give you context for how science should work what's the ideal way it does work and what can go wrong in science like you're not really learning it's kind of like not learning how to balance a checkbook like it should be fundamental that's not what you get in school yeah well I yeah that's a that's unfortunate and especially within in the realm of nutrition because there's been so much misinformation and it changes every every year almost but it's certainly changed every decade and uh and you know the whole sort of you know the fact it being you know the the evil of all evils uh is just uh phenomenal to me and you know and talking to people that are going through nutrition courses now I think I think they're even pushing even harder on the whole plant-based vegan angle on things and you know people ask me is like do you know of a nutrition place that's not just going to push that I'm like I have no idea I have no idea is there is there anyone teaching nutrition properly these days or is it still just going down the wrong direction yeah I don't pay a lot of attention to it but I I want you to when people come to me and tell me what should I do to get a career in doing things like what you're doing Sally with nutrition education and so on I say do get a conventional degree do go and get a commitment try to learn biology try to learn the basics of biology and biochemistry learn to think from yourself and get a get a stamp of approval on your forehead that says You must be okay because you went to a real school like having gone to Cornell gives me a certain amount of credibility like I'm not just some you know random person I've actually been committed to this field and for a long time and that helps give you some leeway to open doors and start doing some interesting things and make some good connections and build a career so I don't know what they're but the more you can focus on the fundamentals of Cell Biology how research works really getting into the stacks what we used to have to go to the stacks like so I'm old okay into the stacks like you had to go visit the physical papers on the shelves back in the dark part of the library that's fun actually and there's a lot of stuff in the old paper stuff and now it's all getting mostly it's not all digitized though you know we think it is but it's not there's still stuff to find in old stuff and the the older science actually was I think performed by people that were inherently more gifted than today any old anybody can learn to pass tests and graduate into a position where you're doing research and Science and in back before we had all this money in research it was really the smart people who were doing it and they were doing it out of a love of Science and learning not because they wanted to be famous for the next product and develop a profitable product but nowadays like I was reading about how milk breast milk you know natural raw milk naturally protects itself and all the mechanisms that are in milk to protect itself from contamination and infection and in three days after you express breast milk it has less bacteria in it than it did when it first was expressed and it was looking at the science and looking at milk and they would conclude that if only we could mimic what milk can do we could have magnificent products I was like wait a minute that's why you're doing the research that's why you're learning about milk so that you can have a product not so you can understand biology and really help us learn as biological creatures how to get along with our the world we're in to to thrive and don't don't we already have a product pretty similar to milk isn't it isn't it called milk milk you know when we use colostrum and extra extra milk that are still milk uh without needing to bottle it up and and make it a pharmaceutical or make it a special nutraceutical or something so yeah there's a lot of warping of the world that we're in now for commercial reasons for professional reasons I mean we've got to be sort of secretive with your research and you've got you know like we're having to force people to be open with their data and transparent and things like that and um yeah so there's human beings are flawed I think that's why we have religion because our natural flaws need some like you need some limits and you need some discipline and that's true for just thriving in life you need some amount of discipline and sort of a moral Center like a principle to live around like different theories and philosophies to to live your life around and so we um we're prone to lying to ourselves whether it's how we're eating or how we're doing our research or why we're doing our career we don't always know that we're out we're just doing it to prove to Dad that we're okay you know like whatever's going on with us we're flawed human beings and some of our motives and some of our behaviors are um you know less than an idea yeah um so tell me about your you have your toxic superfood book that's just come out uh there behind you um tell us a bit about that like is that focusing I would assume mainly on oxalates but is it is it just oxalates or is there there uh more you know toxins in in plants and things like that that you go into well when I wrote the book proposal my chapter three was about plant toxins generally with big tables about all the toxins and plants and really what what I learned from all that research it took me years to do that research took me three years to write my book proposal all those plant toxins pay them sapamins which is a soap that dissolves membranes or many others it's basically wrecking you at the gut first and foremost their main the plants want to kick you in the gut all of those different toxins so in the final book though it really is an oxalate book there's a lot to tell about oxalates and it's hard to jam it into a book this is a quick trip it's like 300 Pages or something I'm not good at numbers but even remembering a page count in my book the book is being held until December you want to pre-order it now and uh in November in December you'll be able to get a little free gift for pre-ordering the book but pre-ordering it is really important because it gives the book a chance to be a bestseller as it is it gets put in your mailbox on December 27th and that's the way that we can build this conversation because the Bots will start noticing that people are interested in this topic that this topic is worthy of learning about and and so this book talks about explains what the oxalates are it explains that really healthy eating isn't working the harder you try to eat healthy the less likely you are to feel great and um why we don't know about oxalate with the history of it why it's hard to test for it and how you know mistakes like lots of seed oils and high sugar diet will just make your obsolete poisoning worse and vice versa like that that combination of the seed oils High oxalate which is basically you know salad dressing on spinach and sugar throw some raisins and sugar dressing on there and dessert you know that combination is really quite bad for us and so the the book also tries to tackle all this mythology around the plants so chapter four talks a lot about how we're eating a lot more spinach nuts and sweet potatoes and why that's not a good thing and the whole the modern diet style that are supposed to help us feel better paleo keto pescetarian can really increase the amount of plant toxins that you're eating because oh now you have permission to eat darker chocolate more oxalates more toxins more nuts more chia seeds this is not good and there's plenty of researchers out there who actually are at the top of their game leaders in their field showing us that phytonutrients are dangerous we've known this a long time tannins I mean they tan leather right they warp proteins they turn nice soft skin into hard hide that you can make a saddle with you know you can turn that's tannins in berries and tea and so on these things it's clear that they're not the body's trying to avoid these toxins called phytonutrients phytotoxins in my view so we I get into that a bit to kind of help people get over the plant-based mindset if you have to cut back on spinach Swiss chard and sweet potatoes you will not drop dead it's okay inhale and exhale it's okay to get through life without spinach and chard and so that I've tried to do that with the book and then get into part two the specifics of how to transition to a low oxalate diet and a high leap off of a say vegan or keto diet that's loaded with Chia and spinach and so on to a carnivore diet is a very significant metabolic change but it's huge and the body's like oh I can hear that the body listens for signals it's reading what you're reading it's listening for what's going on it's like oh finally no Oxley it only takes about a week for the cells to change their proteins and their membranes and what their main activity is if they've been in this sequestration mode and managing oxalate toxicity and then you stop eating it only takes three to five days for the cells to start changing their mind oh okay they hear quickly this is a moment and you don't really want to mobilize it sequestered oxalate that's sitting in your thyroid gland and your bone marrow and your tendons and suddenly have it mobilized all at once that is quite dangerous people end up in the emergency room with severe afib and blood pressure out the roof because you it really is disturbing electrolytes which is quite neurotoxic so it's better to not do that some people need to hold on to some of these foods which hello it's easier you don't have to be doing I say abrupt changes are not only hard on your physiology they're a little hard on your psyche and you're like oh that's a lot to man a lot of change if you can work down more gradually it's sometimes easier okay well it's not too spinach for a while and then cut out the nuts and you know to find some Progressive way to do it and explains why and how to do that and then there's a whole big long chapter about why you need sunshine and mineral baths and why you probably need to supplement electrolytes and B vitamins and other things if you're oxalate poisoned because if your system is trying to unleash all this stuff you continue to lose potassium sodium and so on so it's real important to get electrolytes and so the book really tries to be share the the science as quickly as we can there's a whole big chapter 10 about the mechanisms of that at the cellular level how cells become energy deficient and the the ways the body has to adjust for that means that inside of mitochondria in a cell and a tissue your fundamental function of how to just get through the day is being interrupted and so that can blow up into any kind of autoimmune disease any kind of neurotoxicity disease whether it's anxiety that kind of stuff connective tissue breakdown you know urinary dysfunction and liver dysfunction you name it it can be anything so it's not that all diseases are always caused by oxalate it's just that any disease can be coming from oxalate toxicity okay and so this is the idea of oxalate dumping uh that that when you stop eating oxalates then the sequestered oxalates do come out at that point and then so would you then have a higher you know serum level of oxalates than you would from eating just oxalates on a normal basis it would seem that that's the case that you're on the way out is harder on your than on the way in not just because you absorb them over an eight hour period or ten hour period and it's coming in kind of slowly with a meal but also that the process of digging out the sequestered oxalates involves inflammation you have to bring in this is where the cancer comes in the little crystals the oxalate crystals that are in the breast tissue bring in immune cells that cause this mesochymal transition of normal breast cells and turns them into bone producing cells they produce hydroxyapatite so you in the tumor in the aggressive breast tumor you see this hydroxyapatite deposits and they think oh it's not obsolete but it used to be oxalate so where you've got oxalate crystals give it five years that will become in a person who's trying to get rid of the crystals it's that immune activity trying to get rid of those crystals that creates the cancer from the crystals now you can also create the cancer directly from the oxalic acid so you don't require the crystals to do it but you see that this removal of crystals is harmful or is is risky is a risky work so you think I I try to explain this is the immune cells are these Hazmat workers they're coming along dealing with hazardous materials buried in your like an old gas station they're digging up underneath the old gas station to get rid of these barrels and that is they're exposing the whole neighborhood to toxins and then the roadways are being vascular systems so you get vascular Decay you could continue to get capillary destruction in the eyeballs and other tissues if it's coming out too fast so you don't want your blood levels to be and so the body is clever it tries to do this in little Cycles so it tries to turn it off after it it's been on for a while it goes on and off and on and off and people who are experiencing this on a low Oxley diet they'll suddenly feel awesome like everything quiets down and they'll have a moment where the sun opens up on their head and their mind is clear their energy is good they don't feel pressured but they know they can get through their to-do list today and then back with the Oxley coming back and then they're like oh my God I can't think straight I'm dropping stuff I'm I'm discouraged I'm exhausted or whatever you know and you can see it sometimes with a cloudy urine that's Crystal urea coming out so if you see waves of cloudy urine chances are that's Crystal Uria where your tubules and your kidneys are good I mean when you can do when you can produce crystalline urine that's a sign of kidney health because now you're we can see that your tubules can in fact dilate when they start filling up with crystals and you can release it other people who have kidney problems this gets stuck up they get nephrocalcinosis or they end up with kidney stones and you can produce kidney stones on a low oxalate diet because of this heavy clearing that can happen and The Dumping is when the clearing from the tissues is so heavy and probably multiple tissues at it where you get quite sick from it okay and so uh and and how would you combat that then just having sort of low levels of oxalates in your diet for a period of time sometimes people can add in a cup of tea and feel better quickly so sometimes it doesn't take a lot of oxalate added in to tell the body to stop uh because if you're already high in the blood levels and it's going up higher that might be enough to just tell the body to turn it off but it tells me that tissues along the GI tract from your mouth all the way down we know they're sensing things that's why you can taste in the tongue you know consciously you're sensing flavor in the mouth but in an unconscious more chemical level throughout the GI tract it's sort of interpreting what's there and so something in the God is saying hey we're back into spring and summer again guys we can't do this winter clearing I think of clearing as the winter diet because in most places around the globe you wouldn't be eating oxalates in the winter time you'd be surviving on Antelope and bear meat and whatever right you'd be in a carnivore diet in the winter so the body knows when you've switched from Winter to Spring again and you're eating and it knows how to oh okay well we'll wait till next winter and then we wouldn't have this oxalate accumulation if we had that sort of seasonal diet where you were carnivore a couple of months or more every year you could kind of clear out last year's vegetable toxins a little bit um so yeah adding back in I have a whole chart that's also in the book of how to dose oxalate so if you need 20 milligrams of oxalate 30 or 50 you can use this chart to know oh you know actually half cup of beets with this dinner might be a good idea you know you could use things like that some of these high oxalate foods you can use them uh therapeutically to get this clearing to slow down which is important you don't it's better to leave it in the tissues than to have too much of it moving around and it's going to take 10 years anyway to clean out tissues it's there's a lot of oxalates sitting in your bones a lot and you're just not going to get it out fast there's no point in rushing through it like you're not going to become Perfect by poisoning yourself first like Let the Body do it slowly and feel comfortable with adding in a few bites of sweet potatoes or a cup of tea or something with oxalates in that just to save your butt you know really to not produce the breast cancer but people who do get breast cancer on the low Oxley diet usually recover pretty well but they usually need treatment you know you have to go through that yeah but it does happen so it's been taking an oscillates um you know enterically like that will raise your oxalate level to a certain point and that will suppress the the release of it so is that is that why this is cyclical your body releases enough and it gets up to a certain serum point and that will in in turn suppress itself is that sort of what's going on there I wish we knew I wish someone cared enough to study it that's a very reasonable hypothesis that we could test maybe it's very hard to study what's going on at that level in the body you know you really have to use animal models to do it in in uh often like you use radioactive the best way to see where it's getting is you use radioactive and you can trace it because it's so minuscule um and uh so it's really tricky science it's nice that we do know as much as we do know about oxalates and it's because of kidney stones most of the research in the last 30 years or 50 years really has been coming through kidney research and kidney researchers although you see it all over the literature you see it in the nanotoxicity literature and the the oxidative stress literature and all over the place but the majority of the funding has come through the it's about kidney cells so sometimes hard to generalize from that so it would be great if science would recognize the need to fund this to attract Brilliant Minds to it and really ask so many interesting questions about how is the body managing this but that's the reasonable um explanation and the immune system itself is so complicated and it's a big piece of this management it's the immune system sending out cytokines and Messengers and being capable of turning itself off and some people lose their capacity you need I think it's um palmitic acid is one of these compounds in the cell membrane this is one of the most abundant compounds in the cell membrane the cells use that to make the turn off the inflammation signaling like if you're low on palmitic acid you don't have the right fats in your membranes if you've worn it out because you've been under so much inflammation I think when you've been under chronic inflammation for a long time your ability to turn it off metabolically becomes harder you get stuck in this Loop yeah and so what is your advice really for for people going this because when I transitioned to Karma you know I just thought like like plants are toxic I'm not going to eat them I'm not going to put poison in my body uh I I I did fine you know but not everyone does and um uh so would you how I mean how how prevalent is this the oxalate dumping if you're having problems problems with this um and you said you can sometimes show up you know years down the down the track as well um so how do people look at this in a practical way and say okay this this is what's happening to me and this is what I need to do about it well um I I do have a self-assessment quiz on my website that gives you a sense of if you have a long history of eating hot sleep foods and you have several body systems that are showing stress um and we don't know why some people can switch to a carnivore diet and not to seem to have any of this oxalate clearing symptoms sometimes for a very long time I had one client I mentioned to you earlier he came to me at year three on Carnivore he and his wife had been keto and they've been using a lot of almond flour and eating almond muffins and that sort of thing all the time and they abruptly shifted from that three years prior and then all of a sudden in year three he was so sick you could barely work and he's a health professional and he has little kids and about to have the third kid um and so I don't know why some people start dumping in the first week usually there's this honeymoon of one to about 20 weeks where you feel amazing on a low Oxley diet like carnivore it's like wow and then some things start creeping in so if things start creeping in it could very well be the oxalates so one of the ways some people there's three major systems where the body is pushing oxalate out of the body the urine being the principal one that everybody knows about right so you can see it in nighttime urination because it's so much oxalate coming through it's irritating your bladder and you can't hold your urine anymore any kind of leaking or the crystalline urine or burning urine any kind of bladder unhappiness could be oxalate dumping um colon has excreters that turn on when your system acidic and high in oxalate and kidneys are stressed you get colon clearing so if you get burning rectum burning stools crystally stools sometimes you can see and feel the crystals hemorrhoids irritation constipation diarrhea those are all happening because the the nerves and the muscles are is oxalates passing through past these muscles and nerves that control the rectum in the colon and so they'll get dysfunctional and you'll either get what feels like intestinal obstruction where you can't poop at all or you get this what feels like a stomach bug where you've got chronic diarrhea those can both be signs of oxalate clearing and then the third place that's well there's more than three there's the skin some people get these rashes and boils and some people shed this white dust like they feel like they're snowing that can all be oxalate pushing out to the skin that's fantastic because that means the the body's pushing it out without stressing the vascular system you can just use skin that's naturally meant to be renewable resource and get rid of it that way that's I wasn't really good at that I just had peeling feet if you have peeling skin if you get bouts of little gout that's oxalate clearing if you get eye issues if you wake up with crud in the eyes that's sticking shut or you get Crystal or grit on the side of your face or you get watery or dry eyes that can be a sign if you get tartar on the teeth the so saliva concentrates oxalate from the blood about 10 to 40 30 times the amount in the blood so you tend to get more tartar you can check the backs of your teeth every morning if you're getting a lot of tartar that could mean that your obsolete levels have been higher recently or last night overnight is when you do a lot of this repair work so you're likely to get symptoms at bedtime and overnight and sometimes wake up feeling exhausted like you didn't sleep well we're busy being toxic all night and if you wake up with um sick or you know circadian symptoms that's also a sign okay and then and then what's the best best approach for that what would you recommend people do in those circumstances well start taking calcium citrate at bedtime and maybe magnesium citrate as well depending on your bowel function to give your body what it needs to release Oxley the calcium is meant to be sitting there in the colon as a attractant and as a binder to let you release oxalates through the body so calcium really promotes the oxalate clearing so you have to be careful with it because taking enough of it might give your body like just what it needs to do this dumping level of clearing so you have to watch that but calcium really lowers pain usually lets you sleep through the night better and helps your body actually do it productively instead of just make you sick potassium and salt are really helpful too because you're you're spilling them a lot the kidneys when you high oxalate the kidneys don't retain salt that well and this the tissues seem to lose potassium with all this inflammation that's going on so replacing all those electrolytes especially you can take your potassium with calcium that produces um greater tolerance with the stomach irritation some people are a little sensitive to count calcium or potassium citrate but taking it with the calcium makes it easier to take so those are good things to do and then have a cup of tea you know have some oxalates to tell the body just chill quit with the clearing yeah I'm just sort of thinking about that you know a couple a couple carnivores you know like like Dr solidino Who started having problems with carnivore after about like a year and a half those are specifically the problems he had was with with electrolyte issues and then and they said he was having some some amazing hormonal issues but thyroid issues specifically and he attributed that to not eating carbohydrates even though you know people have been in ketosis for decades in America and elsewhere without those issues I just sort of wonder what would your I don't know if you know that situation but it would could that have been he was a vegetarian you know so compare Paul to son right Sean has never been a healthy vegetarian he does great for years slamming himself with exercise and steak Paul former vegetarian has a lot more oxalate poisoning going on he he also has what I have which is some kind of broken metabolism that makes it impossible to stay keto all the time and this happens with oxalate poisoning oxalate is messing up your ability to produce muscle glycogen and keep your blood sugar even and those people need some carbohydrates so it's quite reasonable I mean that's the two of them are a great example of your history might have a long tail like I don't know if or when I'm the same way as Paul where I need some carves you know I I started doing full carnivore I was down to like lemons and coconut and one or two other things and I'll meet anyway and when the carnival world started interviewing me in 2019 I decided on April 1st would be my carnivore start date and by the time I got to June and I was at keto fest with Sean I'm like Sean I gotta go get a mango or something I can't sleep anymore my leg cramps are driving me crazy and nothing would fix that and give me a really good night's sleep until I was adding some carbs back in my diet so it's okay to be mostly carnivore and need some carbs you can have it both ways you we don't have to be ideologues like vegans and so you have to do it this way no your Macros need to be highly individualized and customized it just because it works for you doesn't mean it's the prescription for everybody I do think that a meat-based diet is really critical to health and healing and recovering from oxalates and I really think that a full carnivore diet is a nice stage to get to and you play with it as much as you can but you're not a failure if you need to add in some sweet potato some squash or some some pineapple or something it's okay it's it's there's we need to be listening to your body this is the key thing we have to individualize this as much as possible and in the context of understanding Oxley poisoning it all makes perfect sense and then you can feel sane about it like yes you're doing something that's rational that's based on science and it's based on a compassionate respectful relationship with yourself if you can't sleep and you've got a lot of cramps going on and issues going on and if you get any of these signs of clearing like the tartar on the teeth and the gritty eyes okay you've got Oxley poisoning come join us and learn about that because it's so it's just the reality we're all a little Poisoned With oxalate that's why there's all these diseases like kidney disease has been the fastest growing disease for the last 35 years and osteoporosis is everywhere now that's an oxalate thing you name it gut problems neurological problems mood problems these can all be the end products of oxalate poisoning it makes sense it makes sense we don't have to like shame people into doing it right excuse my fall allergy sorry it's you know so I think also athleticism this is another example of Highly they're both athletes but if Paul wants to keep up a very active lifestyle and sleep well and function well for him having his fruit is working I would never advise honey and stuff I wouldn't necessarily do that that way but it's it's okay for him it just doesn't mean that you have to like specifically do exactly what your inspired leader is doing you can just keep listening to both yourself and getting informed and you can find a path where you can regain your health and that's the key thing the key thing is regaining your health and understanding that there's bumps along the way yeah definitely and um I do think that that sort of situation can heal over time and you know maybe you use certain carbs as a bit of a of a sort of a a bridge to get you where you need to go and eventually when you get this gunk out of your system where your will your body sort of work properly at that point or will you perpetually need to use I don't even love the idea that full keto is a sign that you're working properly um because I think periodic carbs have always been the case for humans we've always run into honey and roots and we've always dappled with them but we've always entered where we didn't have them you know we've always so being able to be metabolically flexible and pulsing on and off and having control I think that the real fear of carbohydrates is that you can quickly lose control around carbs if you don't have a disciplined mindset and if you're not really being conscious about it you start dappling in carbs and you can become like hooked on them and they start taking over your diet and that will get you back to where you started just like with oxalates if you have this thing oh I want my chocolate I want I can have it back I'll just do oxalate for a year and then I can have it no like don't go back to what makes you sick the highly processed or excessive amounts of carbs overuse of foods with oxalate in them you can't really go back to that them but it doesn't mean you can't have fruit or some carbs you just have to like I tell people if you need carbs have it with a meal at dinner time that that carbs will help your sleep better you if you get that kind of result where now you're sleeping deeper and longer for me my body if I stay two keto too long my brain is like how dare you lay in bed when you should be up hunting you know like my body will not sleep if I don't if I'm depleted with carbs when I'll ever be quote cured of that abnormal thing I don't know I'm not going to worry about it I'm going to continue to wanted to minimize carbs but feel feel comfortable and not guilty for needing to eat them or even wanting to have them but having that discipline I never start my day with carbs I would never start a day with carbs you just if I wake up from a carb hangover that says I gotta have more carbs today I mean like hello that's silliness you know I can parent myself beyond that oh I want carb no you don't you really just want a can of sardines that's what you really want um so you know there's we need to loosen up I think a little bit about oh there's one way to do it right and you've got to get back I would love to see Paul talk about he can do three days a week with zero carbs zero honey zero fruit and be great and then have his fruit days or whatever like you you should be capable of getting both ways but it doesn't mean that chronic keto is necessarily healthy for everyone I think being capable of being in ketosis and doing it frequently is great but having to do it all the time isn't necessarily appropriate for everybody it can be metabolically stressful for some people to try to stay there all the time it's okay to go in and out your cells do a better job of absorbing that potassium that we're trying to get back into your muscles and back into your nerve cells when there's insulin around insulin tells your cells to eat so having little spikes of insulin I mean eating enough meat will spike your insulin like you do need to go up and down and in and out I mean honestly you would feel better if you never ate at all because you wouldn't have the inflammatory Spike of eating eating creates a little bit of inflammation and a little bit of one plus tree but if you continue to never eat it won't be long where you're not with us anymore yeah true um okay great well sorry I'm just uh conscious of the time um but it was absolute pleasure talking to you I'm really glad we were able to do this uh you please tell us uh where we can find you and support your work well I have a website sallyknorton.com that's the best place to communicate with me is through the website and there's lots of free information there and soon the uh there's a one page about toxic superfoods the book which is being held for release until December 27th and in November and December you'll be able to through my website get to a free bonus gift for pre-ordering the book which I would be very grateful if people would do that you can find me on Instagram I'm ever since I got hacked earlier this year I'm reluctant to devote a lot of time to new posts although I really want I have a million things I'd like to be putting on Instagram for you guys but I'm making myself do a little bit more on the blog so that I have that's an area I have more control but look for me on Instagram because there's tons of information there if you like little science and pictures on the SK Norton SK Norton at SK Norton is the older account that has a lot of that stuff and then there's a newer one called toxic super Foods underscore oxalate underscore book and that's um two of them to come come hang out with me I don't spend a lot of time on Facebook or on any of the other sites I I'm a research geek and I'm teaching people directly through my classes you can come to a cheap class and learn more about oxalates awesome well good we'll put all that in the in the description and people can uh find you there um Sally it's an absolute pleasure I really enjoyed talking to you thank you so much for coming on um I'll have to hope we can do it again I look forward to it I think we are birds of a feather and I'm really glad that we're getting a chance to connect so thank you so much me too all right well thank you very much we'll see you later [Music]