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Oxalate content - grains, legumes, nuts and seeds
@romaine I stopped curcuma too and many spices, I was drinking "turmeric latte (golden milk)" almost every day. Before low VA diet, my diet was high in oxalates - buckwheat, almonds, tahini, carrot, beet juices... I had oxalate dumping befor low VA diet for many months but I didn't know it. Now my strong oxalate dumping ist fast over (I have now very low oxalate diet and the dumping symptoms are very mild) and I can now benefit from low VA diet. Oxalates can be stored in the brain and I had many brain symptoms. There is a connection between heavy metals and oxalates. And I think, after I finished heavy metal detox, I started to have this oxalate dumping.... The more healthier and less toxic my body is, the more detox capacity it has. When I occasionally took the chelating agents - DMSA and ALA, those symptoms of oxalate dumping became much stronger - many people describe this in low oxalate group. When the dumping symptoms were very strong, I ate high oxalate foods and the body stopped detox and I felt better. You can feel badly because you are eating too much oxalate or because you are dumping. I was very sensitive to high oxalate foods when I was dumping. When I was dumping I got anxiety and I was very agitated and very irritable, in the past I had adrenal fatigue and I felt with dumping as if I had waves of adrenaline - internaly tremor. I know every toxin as mercury can irritate the adrenal glands, they can produce more adrenaline and cortisol and over time the adrenals eventually become exhausted - therefore the most people with heavy metals toxicity have adrenal fatigue. I had yeast issues (oxalates inhibits biotin and biotin is beneficial for controlling candida, I used biotin in the past ) and it is much better now.
What good info in this thread, I have a loved one who is concerned about oxylates thank you so much.
I was not sure what to make of oxalates. I'm now thinking it does matter in my case and in that of my child. I have had a couple of different anecdotes that didn't pan out completely with the low A diet which I had success with at the beginning:
- I had no adverse reaction to a big serving of spaghetti squash which would be quite high in carotenoids.
- I failed introducing beans more than one time, they caused digestive distress and lowered my energy. I was eating pinto beans.
- Mixed results with berries which are not high in carotenoids, I tolerated an occasional tomato sauce which is way higher while my daily cup of berries seem to cause issues. The mix was raspberries, blackberries and strawberries.
As for evidence against oxalates, yesterday I started the day with half a grapefruit, had some cooked spinach with rice and white beans for lunch and I ended the day with falafels made of fava and garbanzo beans. As the day progressed, I felt I was coming up with a cold and I felt very uncomfortable in the evening. I felt a bit better after my baking soda bath which correlates with this article mentioning chloride, sulfate and bicarbonate as competitors to oxalate within the body. It also explains why carbonated water seems to have a dramatic immediate effect within my body. Also, this morning I woke up the stiffest I had in a while.
There's also my toddler which was fed a lot of colorful fruits and vegetables when first introduced to solid food. I also had buckwheat as a regular part of our diet. His eczema went away when I cut out carrots completely which could be explained by both carotenoids and oxalates. Another key point that seem to help him a lot is 1/4 cup of baking soda in his bath which according to this could have a double whammy effect by competing with oxalates and by decreasing fungus infection that produce oxalates.
Interesting from FB group:
"The crystals on the right came out of this woman’s hand 12 days after she stopped eating high oxalate foods.
For the past two years she has been eating keto. Prior to that she was doing “Paleo“ for several years but this wasn’t working. She developed chronic depleted sodium levels, heart irregularities, anxiety, low blood pressure and was passing out regularly.
On the keto diet she was using almond flour to make bread, cookies, and crust for cheesecake. She thought it was healthy.
Soon after she cut back on the high oxalate foods, her hand rash appeared. Her skin became very dry and scaly and her hands felt like they were burning hot inside. When she applied several natural skin cream products, if reacting to the products, the skin got extremely red, itchy, and burning. On Thursday, it felt like the back of her hands were loaded with shards of glass. On Friday those shards rubbed off. That was 12 days after she started avoiding high oxalate foods.
She managed to get this photo of the biggest crystals. There were many more small crystals too, but they are hard to see. The crystals left a little scabs behind. She says it feels like there is more to come out. The areas which haven’t released anything or much more red and itchy then the areas they came from earlier. She also says that she feels like she has the flu and she has had a headache for the last four days."
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Here's my question about reducing oxalates (which seem, like Vitamin A, to be very difficult to remove completely): what does one eat for starch? I have tried various lower-carb diets within a WAPF/Paleo framework over the years, and apart from the short-term therapeutic potential of GAPS etc., I do NOT think that low-carb is healthy for my family or myself. But all the starches seem to be higher oxalate, especially when they become the basis of ones diet.
Bludicka thanks for this truly helpful thread. It was easy to forget about the oxalates in food as an issue, as a low ox diet alone did not help me feel better.
Going low A really helped. And as this simple diet reduced the types of foods ingested daily, after several months of feeling SO much better that its very easy to track a flare of pain. The flare ups I have had, for pain, insomnia, were a day after eating more beans than usual,potatoes, potato chips, chocolate, tahini, figs or almonds which I don't eat often. They have only one thing in common. Oxalate. After 5 months eating low A with trial and error it should be easy to craft a low A, low oxalate diet.
Sarabeth I have been eating organic white rice, for starch, will one at a time try turnip, lima bean, parsnip occasional cous cous, other low A low to moderate Oxalate starches and roots. Bludicka did you take the Calcium Citrate they recommend? I am kind of scared of calcium supplements might try lemonade.
This can be very helpful, from low oxalate FB group:
"I'm starting to think we need a document on how calcium helps - and what "binding" oxalate means... 😉 This is what we mean: when you take a calcium with a meal (and it can be any form - does not *have* to be citrate), the calcium and citrate will "uncouple" in the gut, and the calcium ion is available then to be chelated by a free oxalate ion. What that means is that the calcium oxalate is formed in the gut - not the blood stream. This means that you are more likely to excrete the oxalate rather than absorb it. So, do you want calcium and oxalate to meet up in the blood stream? No! But do you want calcium and oxalate to meet up inside the gut? Yes! And the reason is that you are then less likely to absorb that oxalate, and instead simply excrete it.
Further though - do you have to do this? No. In fact, you can use magnesium instead of calcium to perform this same function, and that's very helpful if you are prone to constipation. Calcium can contribute to constipation. In this case, magnesium is a better choice. Admin, LOD since 2008"
Awesome Bludicka, thank you for sharing your expertise and knowledge about oxalate and A detoxing. Sounds like you have been thru a lot and I hope you continue to feel better always.
Quote from joshz on December 20, 2019, 8:49 am@bludicka, I see you have almonds as highest nuts, but doesn't soaking for 12 hours and peeling the skins remove most of these? If you have any good links to oxalate food charts do share! Thanks
It doesn't matter, soaked or not, they will be still too high to eat.
The best oxalate food charts are in facebook group "Trying Low Oxalates" - they have a special group only for this.
https://regepi.bwh.harvard.edu/health/Oxalate/files "oxalate content of foods.xls"