MAKING YOU SLEEPY?

By: Sally K. Norton, MPH Author of “Toxic Superfoods”

Suffering from brain fog, fatigue, or other sleep issues?

You may be eating too many oxalates! (Especially if you are an avid health food enthusiast!)

Despite receiving a bachelor’s degree in nutrition from Cornell University and a master’s degree in public health leadership from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was never warned that a variety of vegetables, nuts, and fruits could actually cause sleep issues and other health problems.

If you’ve joined the ranks of conscientious eaters by loading up on almonds, spinach, turmeric, tea, or chocolate—you need to hear my story. If you know anyone with a diet featuring “wholesome” foods like blackberries and quinoa, which is not the picture of vitality and sturdiness, or if you’re suffering from gut problems, joint pain, inflammation, or other symptoms that are stumping your doctors, it is possible I can help point you toward relief.

What is the invisible culprit hiding within your favorite “superfoods”? Oxalates: chemical toxins that are produced by many plants.

What are oxalates, and why are they bad?

Oxalates are tiny organic salts that form when oxalic acid binds to mineral elements such as potassium, magnesium, and calcium. Oxalates ingested from plant foods are especially good at “locking-up” minerals in food. They grab and hold nutritionally valuable minerals such as calcium, zinc, and copper in the digestive tract, making it difficult for the body to absorb minerals in a useful form. Some ingested oxalic acid passes into the bloodstream, where it can also bind minerals already in the body. The twopronged mineral depletion can inhibit growth, bone development, and tissue repair.

Oxalic acid has a range of other toxic actions, including directly harming cells, blocking enzymes, and creating oxidative stress. Oxalate also builds up in joints, bones, glands, and even the eyes. The kidneys have to excrete oxalate—the major ingredient in kidney stones.

Even moderate, relatively common levels of oxalate in a habitual diet can fuel the customary aches and pains of life: digestive distress, inflamed joints, chronic skin issues, brain fog, or mood problems, as well as health declines associated with “normal” aging.

I had to learn about oxalates the hard way: through personal experience. My eventual enlightenment came after decades of striving for good health and painfully missing the mark. *Despite* my decades of enthusiastic devotion to healthy eating, I just didn’t feel right. I was beyond exhausted—unable to read with comprehension, unable to work. A high-tech sleep study showed that I was waking up 29 times every hour. Medications did nothing to improve the situation. I was stuck, and no one could help.

Once I consistently shunned my go-to high-oxalate foods (for me, mainly sweet potatoes and chard), multiple personal miracles unfolded.

Low-oxalate eating improved my sleep, energy, concentration, and mood! My debilitating sleep disorder vanished.

And I am not alone in the ability to recover from the mess that is oxalate poisoning. Many people have found some relief from—or even reversed—a surprisingly diverse variety of conditions simply by swapping their high-oxalate foods for low-oxalate alternatives. In the long term, avoiding oxalates can also potentially prevent kidney stones, injury, arthritis, and dementia.

New attention on oxalate toxicity is a breakthrough in nutrition that makes a real difference in human health. Most importantly, learning about oxalate toxicity is an opportunity for personal healing.

A high oxalate diet, one with spinach, potatoes, peanuts, almonds, and chocolate, slowly erodes the health you need and want. Thankfully, by limiting or completely removing high-oxalate foods, we can improve many aspects of our health, including our ability to sleep better.

What does a low-oxalate diet look like?

Many of our most popular foods, such as potatoes, peanuts, and even health food darlings like spinach, naturally contain tremendous amounts of oxalates. Love chocolate and spinach smoothies? Don’t freak out! Oxalate-aware eating is completely within your reach. “Low-oxalate” does not mean “no-oxalate.” The key is to know what you’re eating and how much and to choose your daily staples from nourishing foods with less potential to create chronic problems.

The basic approach to low-oxalate eating is to gradually reduce and then consistently minimize your oxalate consumption. Avoid the worst offenders. They are all optional, non-essential foods that are not in any way critical (or even helpful) to human health. Many are surprisingly new additions to the human diet. I would especially warn you to avoid chard, beet greens, spinach, bran, almonds, cashews, and peanuts.

If any of these are your “musthave foods,” learn to find and prepare new, safer ingredients from the safe-bets list. Try, for example, using romaine lettuce as a default green and occasional modest portions of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and chestnuts as alternatives to nuts.

Low-oxalate eating is not hard, even for people with food allergies and sensitivities or other reasons for avoiding certain low-oxalate foods. It does, however, require you to rethink your need for gluten-free brownies, keto cakes, and other fake “treats.” Imitation foods are not the best path to health. They are often just nutritionally empty, entertaining distractions. Promoters of these foods want you to think that you don’t need the discipline to eat healthily. Well, you do. Today’s world of food is loaded with toxic junk—you need to be a conscious choice-maker, now more than ever.

The foods you will be eating in place of your high-oxalate “frenemies” are widely available (though sometimes not as well known). It’s simple to select turnips and cauliflower in place of potatoes, to try pumpkin seeds or cheese in place of almonds and peanuts, or to use romaine lettuce or arugula instead of spinach or mixed baby greens in your salads and smoothies.

Remember, it’s important to go slow with these dietary changes, and it’s absolutely paramount to get support from professionals if you have serious health concerns. Healthy diet changes almost always include cooking at home and the subtraction of many harmful ingredients. Home cooking reduces the use of soybean oil, fried foods, excessive sugar, processed grains, and other low-quality ingredients used by restaurants. Healthy home menus also limit convenience junk foods loaded with addictive artificial flavors and preservatives, and they may include substantial changes in the routine use of alcohol. Not only may we rightly feel proud of ourselves for wrestling free from the addictive pull of these foods, but our bodies will also likely thank us for relief from manmade toxins with better sleep, mood, and alertness.

With just a bit of information, you’ll find it simple and inexpensive to swap out high-oxalate foods for low-oxalate foods. Many people experience prompt relief. Just try it for a few months and see what it does for you. You might be surprised how much better you feel!

Sally K. Norton, MPH, holds a nutrition degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree in Public Health. Her path to becoming a leading expert on dietary oxalate includes a prior career working at major medical schools in medical education and public health research. Her book “Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload is Making You Sick-and How to Get Better” is available everywhere books are sold.

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