Cook your greens

For more than 30 years, WDDTY has been advocating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables—the best approach for most people most of the time.  But a small minority of us suffer from a chronic health problem even when we are eating a healthy diet. When this happens, the very healthiest of foods could be doing us harm.

Some vegetables, fruits and nuts contain oxalates, compounds that can cause kidney stones plus other issues, and this could be the unsuspected cause of a chronic health problem. But there’s an easy solution that doesn’t require giving up plant foods.

For at least 70 years, the West has been consumed by the notion of healthy eating, but what exactly constitutes “health food” has been a highly moveable feast, with a new theory emerging with each new decade.

The centerpiece of all modern healthy diets—from low-glycemic diets to vegan diets—is plant foods: dark greens like spinach, sweet potatoes instead of the white variety, plus nuts, especially almonds, and for treats, dark chocolate with cocoa content of 70 percent or more.

Every last book on diet and nutrition now emphasizes drinking regular green smoothies packed with almonds, chia seeds and protein powder in the morning; baking with almond flour instead of wheat flour; consuming lots of legumes; and filling your plate with dark leafy greens. But as our Special Report Why You Need to Cook Your Greens points out, in some susceptible individuals, this can be a recipe for ill health.

“Superfoods” often contain high levels of compounds called oxalates (the common name for oxalic acid and its salts), naturally occurring substances in many plant foods like leafy greens, nuts, and soybeans and other legumes—a plant’s natural defense against herbivores and other pests and its mechanism to manage minerals.

Humans also make oxalates as a metabolic waste product, particularly from the breakdown of vitamin C.

When consumed in high amounts, these antinutrients can bind to calcium and other minerals during digestion, preventing absorption of vital nutrients and causing a raft of problems, from joint pain and irritable bowel to skin issues, sinusitis and, most problematically, kidney stones.

The toxicity of oxalates is nothing new. Oxalic acid was used in the 1700s as an industrial substance and cleaning powder, and medical reports discussed cases of accidental poisoning with it—some even causing kidney failure. In the mid-1800s, doctors connected oxalates with everything from fatigue to bladder pain and arthritis.

Nevertheless, in modern times, it is mostly only doctors specializing in kidney disease who have made the connection between kidney function and high-oxalate foods because most kidney stones contain calcium oxalate.

It’s been left to arcane organizations like the Vulvar Pain Foundation to make the link between high-oxalate foods and disparate problems such as genital pain and itching, irritable bowel, fibromyalgia, interstitial cystitis and various skin conditions.

Our dear friend Arielle Ford, a best-selling author and relationship expert, first put us onto this silent and little-known poison. Arielle was careful with her diet, downing green protein drinks every morning; substituting sweet potatoes for white potatoes, which have a higher sugar content; and eating plenty of almonds, dark leafy greens and dark chocolate—all the things that are supposedly good for you.

And yet she was mystified: With such clean eating, why did she have such a bad gut and constant insomnia?

In her search for a cause, she came across the book Toxic Superfoods (Rodale Books) by Sally Norton. Even as a nutrition student at Cornell University, Norton, a committed vegetarian, was plagued by joint and muscle pain, an irritable bowel, exhaustion, genital burning, insomnia and excruciating gout.

After researching the effects of oxalates on the cellular level of the body, Norton slowly weaned herself off the high-oxalate foods, and her health transformed in two weeks.

After reading her book, Arielle also ditched raw high-oxalate superfoods, and all her symptoms disappeared.

If you’re eating healthily and suspect high-oxalate foods may be at the root of one or more of your health problems, the key piece here may be whether foods are raw or cooked; soaking and then boiling them can lower oxalates in many vegetables. It’s also important to wean yourself off high-oxalate foods slowly so you don’t cause oxalate “dumping,” which can make your symptoms worse.

And be sure to take a magnesium citrate supplement with meals, which will bind to any excess oxalic acid. Unlike calcium supplements, magnesium chelates oxalates in your intestines, forming soluble magnesium oxalate compounds, which reduces absorption in the blood and lowers the risk of forming hard stones.

Food fashions come and go—but so, apparently, does knowledge in medical science. The fact that the long-known dangers of raw high-oxalate foods are only coming into the public consciousness now is nothing short of scandalous.

This isn’t an argument against eating fresh organic food or for returning to processed, high-sugar foods.

But if you’re struggling with health issues and you suspect oxalates are to blame, go ahead and eat your greens. Just soak and boil them first, be careful which you choose and watch your total oxalate load.

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