Latest / Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease / 137 // Oxalates, Hashimoto’s, and Diet Stress: How to Make It Work for You

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137 // Oxalates, Hashimoto’s, and Diet Stress: How to Make It Work for You · Health with Hashimoto’s - Thyroid or Immune Education for Autoimmune Thyroid Disease

0:00
That last episode, 136, was kind of a mind-bending episode, right?
0:04
I received a bunch of messages about how I don't know what to eat now.
0:09
Let me read you one of them. Maybe you can relate.
0:12
This person messaged me the day the episode came out. She said,
0:15
I did, however, listen to your podcast today, and I was kind of disgruntled
0:18
afterwards, and I wanted your take on the call with Sally.
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I feel like I can't eat anything now, and I'm lost after listening to what she
0:25
said, quite honestly. She's not alone.
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Other people messaged too. And I wonder, what are your thoughts?
0:31
Now, I have had a little bit more time to wrap my head around these oxalates
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than you have, at least if last week was your introduction to it.
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And I debated talking about this on the podcast.
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In fact, I debated reading the book that Sally wrote, because part of my brain
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was thinking, I don't want to know. If I don't want to know,
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then I have blissful ignorance and I don't have to change my diet.
0:58
I have already upended parts of my life to support my body and my body's fight against Hashimoto's.
1:04
I have already changed so much stuff and I don't want to change something else.
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So I don't even want to know about oxalates.
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I absolutely don't want to go through this again. And this being upending my diet.
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Maybe you feel the same way. somebody messaged me and said do I even want to
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listen to the episode blissful ignorance or ignorance is bliss is what she said.
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I understand. I really do. And then while I was thinking that those thoughts, I was also thinking,
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okay, if there's something out there that can help me, that can help everybody
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who listens to my podcast,
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then I really have a responsibility to myself and to my listeners to explore
1:50
this, because maybe it will help.
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And so I did pursue it. I bought the book. I bought the audiobook,
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and I reached out to Sally's team to schedule an interview and I'm so glad I did.
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I'm not saying that this has been easy but I think really good things can come from it.
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So welcome to episode 137 of the Health with Hashimoto's podcast.
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My name is Esther. I'm a registered nurse and when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's
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I was completely overwhelmed. I looked online.
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I you know I've gone through nursing school and then I went back to school for holistic health.
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So I'd had a lot of information about thyroid and about autoimmune stuff.
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But at the time when I got my diagnosis, I had no idea what to do next. No idea.
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And so I went searching for answers. And out of that search for answers,
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I created my Holistic Hashimoto's program for you.
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Because I don't want you to have to struggle through sifting through all of
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the answers and figuring out, okay, this person and this person,
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they're both saying the exact opposite things.
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What applies to me. Like, that's confusing.
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And I don't want you to have to go through that.
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Because who wants to be overwhelmed and confused while you feel miserable?
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No. Oh, we just want to feel like ourselves again. And we want to do it simply
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and easily. And we want results quickly.
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Now, it took a long time to get to where we are. We understand that.
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And we're not going to get an overnight fix.
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But we can start making progress, right? And that's what I want for you.
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That's what I wanted for myself.
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It took a while to get there. And I'm still working on things.
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And that is where this last episode came in.
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It was about a month ago that I heard an interview with Sally Norton on a different podcast.
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And I was intrigued. And quite honestly, I wasn't sure if I wanted to even listen
3:37
to that podcast, because I try to avoid things that are very rigid,
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like black and white, because I understand that every person is an individual.
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And in a very few of my podcast episodes, will I say, this is going to work
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for everybody across the board.
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Now, there are a couple of things that I will talk about that,
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like protandim, NRF2, the synergizer, the activator, to activate your body's
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pathway, that NRF2 pathway?
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Well, we know from the research that it works in 100% of mammals.
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So I can tell you that that is going to work for you if you're looking for something
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to help your body clean up, to help your body create more antioxidants,
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to help lower oxidative stress, to work as a nutrigenomic, like nutrition,
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working on your genetics.
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That is something I could tell you it will work because research says it works in 100% of males.
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I can't tell you what the results are going to be because everybody's journey
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is a little bit different.
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How oxidative stress, that's kind of like rusting of the cells or the browning
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of a banana, how that works in my body is different than how it works in your body.
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Like for one person, that oxidative stress might attack the joints more and
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they're going to have more arthritic system or symptoms.
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For somebody else, that oxidative stress might attack the brain a little bit
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more, then they're going to have more brain fog, or maybe they're going to have
5:02
some more Alzheimer's, things like that.
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There's oxidative stress that can happen on any cell in our body,
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and you have trillions of cells.
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So I can't tell you how it's going to feel or how it's going to appear in your
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body, but I can say across the board that protandine NRF2 is going to help your oxidative stress.
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Research says it lowers oxidative stress by an average of 40% in 30 days,
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which is pretty phenomenal.
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So that I can say it works across the board. But for most things,
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we don't talk about across the board black and white because you are an individual.
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So when I saw this book, it's called Toxic Superfoods, and I saw the interview,
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I was like, this seems like a really black and white approach.
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Do I want to investigate this? But at the same time, I kind of have a responsibility to investigate it.
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If it's going to help me, if it's going to help my podcast listeners, let's see what it says.
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And then poof, my mind was blown. How about you?
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When you listened to episode 136, did you feel hope?
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Did you feel like even though you've been doing all of the things,
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something still seems to be just out of reach and maybe this,
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maybe oxalates, is that thing that's been missing from your puzzle?
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It's like my kids and my husband love to do puzzles.
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They had several puzzles underneath the Christmas tree and they're still working
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through them. I don't do puzzles, but it's like 2,000 piece puzzles.
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They're huge. And they were almost ready to finish one the other day and they
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were missing a puzzle piece.
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It was all done except for, I think, three puzzle pieces. And they had two of them.
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And people had claimed, like, I get to put that one in.
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But the third one was missing. And they looked all over. It ended up to be underneath
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the puzzle table. It blended into the carpet.
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But they were looking for a couple days for that piece. That's just a puzzle.
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For your health, you don't want to be looking for days, much less weeks or months or years.
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People look for answers for Hashimoto's for years.
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They know, maybe they know, that their thyroid isn't producing enough thyroid hormone.
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They don't know why. They don't know that their thyroid is under attack from their immune system.
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And once you do finally get that diagnosis, you find out, oh,
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this is the name for what's going on, then you still don't know why.
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Why is my thyroid under attack? Now,
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in the Hashimoto's Decoded Root Causes mini course, I take you through all of
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the most common root causes of Hashimoto's so that you can say,
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oh, this is what's going on.
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This is my history.
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And so this is what I need to do. I try to make it so simple for you.
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And in the full program, the Holistic Hashimoto's program, then I'll take you
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by the hand and lead you through exactly what to do because again I don't want you overwhelmed.
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I don't want you struggling to figure out what to do.
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I want to make it so easy for you so that you can find answers so that you can
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feel like yourself again.
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So where do oxalates come into this? Well like Sally Norton explained last week.
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Oxalates are little tiny like toothpicks or cactus spines in some of our foods
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and the oxalic acid did I say that right? I think so.
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It combines with calcium in our body and it makes these little crystals and
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in our kidneys, they're kidney stones, but we can also have them build up in our thyroid.
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And then our body is trying to clean it up. It goes to that site and then we
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have some inflammation.
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We have inflammation in our gut because the oxalic acid and the oxalates can hurt the gut lining.
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And then we have, you know, an
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attack on our thyroid because our immune system is trying to clean it up.
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When I heard this, I was like, huh, that's super interesting.
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And I don't know if I'm ready to hear more. But I continued reading and I continued
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listening to the podcast.
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And I discovered that the foods that are highest in oxalates are foods that I eat all the time.
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Because when I went into nursing school, four years, you know,
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right out of high school, went to college, I had one nutrition course and basically
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was you can get whatever you need from your food and eat the food pyramid.
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I think it was still the food pyramid when I went to college.
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It might have been the healthy plate.
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Either way, it was the standard government propaganda, which we all know is pretty false.
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If you eat the food pyramid, if you eat the healthy plate, you're going to be
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putting an emphasis on too many processed things.
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So that's a whole other conversation.
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But that was the message I had in nursing school. When I went back to school
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for holistic health, the main message was get enough protein and eat living foods.
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That is what I heard over and over and over. Eat living foods,
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fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. It wasn't animal products necessarily.
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They didn't vilify them, but they also did not encourage animal products.
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It was, they called it living foods, and they said it was fruits,
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veggies, nuts, and seeds. So what do you think I've been doing for 10 years
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since I went back for my certificate in holistic health?
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Well, of course, I've been focusing on eating living foods.
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If I'm going to have a snack, I always try to make sure it has a protein in it.
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And if I'm going to have a snack and have a protein, what am I going to use for that protein?
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I'm going to use almonds. I'm going to use cashews.
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I'm going to use chia seeds. I'm going to use the nuts and seeds and beans that
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I have been told are super healthy. But guess what?
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They're high in oxalates. So the highest thing of anything is spinach.
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Spinach is super, super high in oxalates. Raw spinach, boiled spinach, doesn't matter.
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Super high. Some people say that boiling spinach actually reduces the oxalates.
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From what I can find, it doesn't. That might come from one source.
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But either way, like raw spinach, one cup of raw spinach, that's not a ton.
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It's 3,000 milligrams of oxalates in one cup of raw spinach.
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So even if boiling it reduces the oxalates a little bit, you're still going
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to have way, way, way more than the 200 milligrams that your body can handle in a day.
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So spinach is the highest, but let's go look at the nuts and seeds.
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Yep, they're high. Guess what's the second highest? Almonds.
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On my list, now I downloaded a list from Harvard.
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Sally did say in the interview, and she showed us if you watched the video, she's got a flip chart.
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Now, I bought my book on Amazon, and I did not see the flip chart in Amazon,
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and so I just wanted to get the numbers, so I downloaded this one from the Harvard study.
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I did have to search around for it, but I'll try to put the link in the show notes.
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I separated it out. It's an Excel spreadsheet, and I separated it out by proteins,
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veggies, fruits, beverages, because I wanted to be able to look at a glance.
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Okay. If I'm having, you know, cereals, which I don't eat cereal,
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what's high, what's low. If I'm going to have protein, what's high, what's low.
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Almonds are the highest and then cashews are also super high.
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What's not low or what's not high? So what's low? Coconut. Coconut is very low.
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Flax seed, thankfully, is also very low. Sunflower seeds are pretty low.
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So, you know, I have switched over this last week from having peanuts and almonds
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in my granola and mixed into my yogurt and mixed into my whatever, my snacks.
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I've switched to sunflower seeds.
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I don't have flax seed yet. Next time we go grocery shopping,
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I need to get some of that.
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Animal products, beef, chicken, fish, what else is there?
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Dairy, eggs, all of those are super low or zero.
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So that is good to know. But most of my day, all of my meals had high oxalates.
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So you heard me say in the interview that every morning for my breakfast,
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I added two tablespoons of chia seeds because I have heard so many times that
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chia seeds are healthy and they are a really good source of healthy fiber and
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healthy fat and protein.
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So you think of it as the perfect food, right? Well, they're also super high in oxalates.
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I think Sally said they were 300 milligrams in a tablespoon and I was having two tablespoons.
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I was also putting cacao powder into my morning smoothie because again,
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I have heard that the flavonoids are really good for you.
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I did not realize that a lot of the things that are high in flavonoids or colorful
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parts of food, they're also high in oxalates.
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So chocolate and cacao powder and all of that is high.
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Hummus, a lot of my, you know, my snacks, I pair a vegetable with a protein.
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And what's my favorite protein to pair with?
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Hummus. What's my second favorite protein to pair a fruit or veggie with? Peanut butter.
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And when I make my peanut butter because I make my peanut butter.
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I mean, it's just peanuts and salt, right?
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So throw that into a food processor, whir it up, and you get in six minutes, you have peanut butter.
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Well, to make a better consistency and to make it what I thought was healthier, I add almonds.
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And my ratio is about one quarter to one third almonds to the rest peanuts.
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And it's so good. And I've been eating that for years because I love some peanut
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butter, peanut almond butter.
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Well, almonds are super high and peanuts are also high.
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As far as beverages, you're pretty good as long as, you know,
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you're having just water.
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Oh, you know what? She did say tea. I do have tea. I don't know about you.
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I like some tea. I like some kombucha.
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Lemonade is also high. And then all candy that has chocolate it is high in oxalates.
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So what I'm really telling you is my brain was blown and not in,
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an I'm happy way, in a this is going to upend my days way. I was not happy.
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And I think I read it to you at the beginning, but one of my friends messaged
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me and she said, I listened to your podcast and I was kind of disgruntled after.
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I feel like I can't eat anything now. I'm lost after listening to what she said.
15:35
Somebody else said, I thought I was alone in my feelings.
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I mean, yes, it's good to know there's an explanation to why my symptoms aren't
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always great, but also yes, what do I eat now?
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I look forward to next week episode when I, Esther, am processing this information.
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And then there was another message. She said, I ate a spinach salad every evening
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and I didn't skimp on nuts.
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So I wasn't doing my body any favors.
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Being aware of oxalates in different foods will help me moderate it more.
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And then she also mentioned, Colleen mentioned that Sally does say don't stop
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cold turkey because then you could have some oxalate dumping.
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Now there is good news. I also heard from another friend who saw my story about
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the book and she said that she read the book a couple years ago and it changed her life.
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It was so encouraging to hear that. She said she used to be vegetarian and she
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reduced her oxalates significantly. She did it too fast is what she said.
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She had some oxalate dumping, but she said so many of her symptoms have gone away.
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Also, she was struggling to lose 35 pounds. She said they were just stubborn,
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even being vegetarian, eating super healthy.
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When she went off of oxalates and she started focusing on animal products,
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she lost those 35 pounds.
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They just melted off. She wasn't even trying.
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They just disappeared. as she feels so much better. And I hope that is encouraging
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to you. It was very encouraging to me.
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So I have had some time to process this. And I,
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You know, it was kind of easy to take the chia seeds and the cacao out of my morning smoothie.
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Although I will tell you that my bowel movements, I was a little bit more constipated
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because all of a sudden I had reduced my fiber by a significant amount.
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So I had to regulate that. Once I get some flax seed, I'll get that back up. I have regulated again.
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My body just had to figure out that this was a different new normal.
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And then I had to figure out some snacks. So now my go-to is yogurt.
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If you follow me on Instagram, I'm health.with.hashimonos.
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I showed in my stories that I was making granola again for the first time in
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a long time because a lot of pre-made granolas have almonds or peanuts or cinnamon.
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And cinnamon is also high oxalate. I'm not really going to worry about that one. It's a spice.
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But, you know, I don't have to put it in mine.
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So there's a lot of simple things that we can do.
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And I think the main thing that I had to do, and I don't know about you,
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but what I had to do is I had to switch thinking to these are the foods I can eat.
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Instead of looking at all of the oxalate foods and thinking,
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okay, I can't eat this and I can't eat this and I can't eat this.
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That was overwhelming me. It was stressing me out. I went through a couple of
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days where I know I did not eat enough food in general because I was so stressed
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out about, you know, well, what can I eat now?
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All I could think about was the foods that I couldn't eat.
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But I printed out that list from Harvard and I focused on the low stuff.
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I focused on what I can eat.
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You can eat animal products, chicken, meat, fish.
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I've been doing a lot of ground beef, and then I'll just keep it in the fridge.
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And I, for my lunches, instead of peanut butter and jelly, which I love,
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I'll throw some ground beef in a pan that I already browned up.
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And then I'll top it with a couple eggs and some cheese. And then,
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you know, if you eat gluten free bread, you could have that.
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I've been having it maybe with a couple of crackers that I don't know if it's
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low oxalate, but I figure the rest
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of the meal is low oxalate because it's animal products. So it's zero.
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So for me, I'm focusing on what can I get in that is good instead of focusing on all the bad.
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I don't know if that will help you. I hope it helps you because with Hashimoto's,
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we already have to deal with so much that we're figuring out what's going to
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work for us. We're taking gluten out of our diet maybe.
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We're making all of these changes. And to hear one more thing that we need to
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change, it can be demoralizing.
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So I encourage you to look at the foods that you can eat.
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Fruits, they're good. Vegetables, just not, you know, spinach.
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There are a couple other high veggies. Like I said, potatoes,
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like baked potatoes, which means all of the potato products,
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french fries, hash browns, all of those.
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But what is good?
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Mushrooms, onions, lima beans. Why are those a vegetable, not a bean?
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I'm not sure, but they're in the vegetable category. lima beans,
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radishes, water chestnuts, arugula, garlic, regular lettuce,
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which is romaine lettuce, iceberg lettuce, cauliflower, peas, squash, kale, seaweed,
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corn, parsley, cucumber, pickles.
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Cabbage, peppers.
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I remember reading in the book that green peppers are higher in oxalate,
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so red and yellow are okay.
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And I do see that on this list.
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And Sally said that there's some lists that differ. So her list did differ from the Harvard list.
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So fruits, pretty much they're all good. I'm not going to read them off because
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it's 35 lines of good fruits.
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The highest one was rhubarb, and I do love rhubarb. I have a couple plants out
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in the garden, so I probably won't make a lot of rhubarb crisp this year,
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which is fine because rhubarb crisp, while delicious, it is pretty high in sugar.
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Blueberries are also pretty high, but everything else is good.
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You know, apples, watermelons, papayas, cranberries, nectarines,
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pomegranates, mangoes, apricots, plums, limes, strawberries,
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cantaloupe, cherries, pears, raisins, raspberries.
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These are all, these are all good.
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Somebody, okay, so this list from Harvard says raspberries are good.
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I was watching a TikTok from somebody else, an expert, and he said raspberries are high.
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If I just followed the list from Harvard, I will not confuse myself.
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It sounds like there is some argument among the oxalate community.
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This one says raspberries are low.
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So does this perspective help you? Or are you still feeling overwhelmed?
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Come over to the school community and let's talk through it because I never
22:10
want to burden you with any more overwhelm or any more restriction. friction.
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I want to help you focus on things that help you heal. And for me,
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oxalates is something that I've been eating a lot of over the past decade.
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And so I do need to see what it's going to do for my body to reduce my oxalate load.
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How about you? Have you been eating a lot of oxalates? What could be different
22:37
once you remove those from your diet, or at least lower them significantly?
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I'm excited to see what happens in my body because I know that there are still
22:47
some missing puzzle pieces and I think,
22:50
Oxalates could be a huge missing puzzle puzzle piece Come over to the school
22:55
community and let's talk about it I would love to hear your story and i'd love
22:59
to hear what are you going to eat now?
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Music.