How Safe Are Your Favorite Superfoods with Sally Norton

It's been fun, the research. Sometimes my reaction I'd be in the basement of the medical library was so emotional I just had to like leave. It would make me kind of exhausted. I'll come back next Sunday. I spend every Sunday afternoon in the library for years.

Welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. Part of the Pharmacy Podcast Network. I must have resource for pharmacist entrepreneurs seeking to enhance patient care while enjoying career and life. Join us as we pivot into Nutrigenomics, using pharmacy and nutrition for true patient-focused care. Explore how to improve chronic conditions rather than just manage them. Celebrate entrepreneurial triumphs and receive priceless advice. Align your values with a career that profoundly impacts patients. Together, we'll raise the script on health and pivot into a brighter future. Hello and welcome to Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. I'm Dr Tamara, lawful Doctor of Pharmacy and Certified Nutritional Genomics Specialist.

Are you struggling, or ever had a patient who's struggling, with unexplained symptoms like fatigue, joint pain, anxiety or gut issues? Have you been told it's all in your head or that you should just accept these problems as a normal part of aging? The truth is, the foods you eat every day could be silently damaging your health. In this episode, I interview Sally Norton, nutrition expert and author of Toxic Superfoods. She shares how oxalate and natural toxins found in many plant foods like spinach, almonds and sweet potatoes, can actually accumulate in your body and cause serious issues. The good news is, with a few simple diet swaps, you can significantly reduce your oxalate intake and find relief from your symptoms. So if you want to uncover the root cause of potential health issues and learn how to optimize your wellness, you absolutely need to listen to this episode, because our special guest, sally Norton, brings a wealth of knowledge.

She 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 personal healing experience inspired years of research that led to her book Talks at Superfoods how oxalate overload is making you sick and how you get better, which is available everywhere books are sold. It's a pleasure to have Sally stop by and graciously share her expertise with us. Let's listen in. Sally, thank you for joining us on Pivoting Pharmacy with Nutrigenomics. Let's start off by diving into your story as someone who's walked the walk. What was your personal experience with health that sparked your passion towards holistic healing and the journey towards becoming an expert on dietary oxalates?

Well, you know, people get into holistic healing either because their mothers were into it or because they had some really serious challenges. And you go to standard care and you don't get answers and you're wobbling along, not really getting better. And that was me. I think that started when I was a little kid and I had strep a lot and they ended up taking out my tonsils and so by the time I was 12, I was having issues and I was a very health aware kid by the time I started elementary school. And so by middle school the science teacher showed us that if you eat a certain way, you could spare yourself of cancer and heart disease and diseases. If you eat this other way, you're more likely to get those problems. I thought who wouldn't want to know how to be healthy and great? So I've been doing a health geek thing for a long time.

It didn't work out that well. I started college, I started limping around with foot problems and it got so bad that I had to leave Cornell where I was getting my nutrition degree and a medical leave of absence, and even the surgery didn't really correct the problem. So you keep going from you know orthopedist, orthopedist to physical therapist and then you're ending up going to the car impracticals and the acupuncturists and everybody, because no one's fixing you. So you get pretty wholess out of desperation, and that was me. But the truth is right under my nose my own profession had failed me and we don't pay attention to the toxicity of oxalate and the fact that so many foods that we think now are okay to eat in unlimited quantities are so high in oxalic acid that they become quite toxic. So health geeks like me tend to overdo these foods because they have this stellar reputation.

Even though you know Cornell, they told us the tannins and the oxalates in tea bind calcium, so you shouldn't eat it with your meal so you don't lose calcium and maybe iron absorption from your meal. So have tea, otherwise. That was like the entire lesson on anti-nutrients was don't have tea with meals. That was not adequate, to say the least. So I ended up getting in big trouble with oxalates unawarly, and apparently had probably been in trouble with them since I was a very young child and figured it out just at the end of being 49 years old. And by the time I was 50, I was like suddenly enlightened through hard-knock personal experience.

Wow, thank you for sharing your story with us. So I'm hearing from you that not all healthy foods are great for us. They can be bad, and those is oxalate. So can you share with us some foundation on knowledge? What are oxalates and why are?

they so bad so it's a natural toxin and they're made in lots of places in nature, including plants. Plants need them for lots of purposes. It helps the plant manage calcium, because calcium in the wrong place and the wrong quantity goes from being a nutrient to being a problem and plants live in very calcium-rich soils often and have to manage their calcium and we also have to save the calcium it's important cofactor and enzymes that permit germination and allow a seed to become a plant later. So they use oxalic acid to manage calcium, to store calcium, to build calcium oxalate crystals. Because you see, oxalic acid, which is a two-carbon molecule with four oxygens on it, is a tremendous key later of calcium and other minerals. It has a negative charge and it's attracted to the positive ion charge of calcium, especially because it can have two negative charges and that calcium bond is quite rigid, quite substantially stable and so stable that they can build these calcium oxalate crystals in a number of shapes deliberately. By the way, plants are really clever. They lay down this scaffolding of amino acids and amino acids have bonding sites that attract calcium and so that automatically attracts the calcium oxalate molecules and builds these beautiful crystals that are double pointed arrows like weaponry or these other shapes that they make like blocks for the bark of trees, because these crystals are harder than your teeth. So if you're a tree and you're trying to keep the insects from boring holes in you, you make this armor, this invisible armor of little blocks of calcium oxalate up and down the bark.

So cinnamon is a great example of a bark that we eat and it's full of those blocky crystals, which is pretty abrasive, so you can be eating crystals that are abrasive enough to wear down your teeth. We see this in old skulls. When we're digging around and looking at history of humans, we look for these little crystals. That tells us what kind of plants we were working with. Then we look at the teeth and we see the worn down teeth. And if people were eating a lot of cactus, like they were in Southwest Texas, their teeth are gone, their molars are gone. They've lost their teeth by the time they're 25 years old. Because all that oxalate and the crystals destroyed the dentition, because it pulls the calcium out of the teeth and causes tooth loss.

Wow, so we have the tooth loss because of those crystals? Are there any other health issues that will present when we have overexposure to these oxalates?

Yeah, so you're eating not just the crystals, you're also eating oxalic acid, which is so small it's a two carbon molecule, as I said, really tiny. So it's a little ion that's dissolved in the fluids of your food and your digestive kind and so on that easily travels between the cells of the gut when you're absorbing your other minerals, healthy things, but it comes along without in the water between the cells and gets into your bloodstream. So the crystals stay in the gut and cause abrasion and inflammation. The acid at least 10 or 15% of what you're eating there in oxalates ends up as acid in your bloodstream. So right away it starts interacting with membranes of the vascular walls, the white blood cells and the red blood cells and within 40 minutes of eating a spinach smoothie they see damage to the circulating macrophages and they now become unable to fight bacterial infections and so on. Within 40 minutes of a spinach smoothie they're struggling and they're putting out cytokines and pro-inflammatory molecules, which affects the entire body. Then that oxalate comes straight from the gut through the blood to your liver. That's hepatic circulation. The liver has open sinusoidal structure, so all the cells of the liver are directly hit with oxalic acid, which causes them to use a lot of glutathione to protect themselves from the pro-oxidative effects, the membrane damage that it can cause and so on, and the liver has no chemistry for disarming the oxalate at all. In fact, the liver makes oxalate from vitamin C and from collagen, amino acids, the proline, hydroxyproline, and the liver adds more oxalate. So now the blood this left your gut going to the liver, picking up more oxalate, leaving behind a glutathione deranged liver, goes straight to the heart and it can enter tissues there. It can enter the heart muscle and then it's pumped to the lungs and then the heart and then out into general circulation. So you have a fair amount of exposure with the vascular tissue, the blood itself and critical organs.

And at some point down the line this oxalic acid comes to the kidneys and the kidneys try to excrete it and most of it leaves the body through the urine and you can get problems with the urinary tract for sure. Oxalic acid binds with calcium in the urine formation process in the kidneys and can become kidney stones and nephrocalsinosis. The oxalic acid in the blood and the urine together can be very stressful on the bladder wall. If you're eating a lot of oxalate at every meal repeatedly, then you can end up with bladder problems, nighttime urination, painful bladder, leaky bladder and some of this stuff can get so chronic it can ruin your life because you're not getting good enough sleep and you're paying 15 times a day instead of 7. It can get very disabling with the urinary tract.

But in the meantime it's a neurotoxin and the neurotoxic effects can have a lot of downstream effects because other mechanisms of damage. Now it's damaging cell membrane structure. It's causing oxidative stress. It is an enzyme inhibitor, so in a red blood cell it inhibits the last stage of glycolysis and so you have low ATP production in red blood cells and they end up having sodium stuck in there because the sodium pumps break because they need ATP and you get this exploding red blood cell problem. But similar problems with enzyme interference is causing problems with mitochondria in the electron transport chain. Complex 2 is blocked and so that's affecting energy production as well. But this oxidative stress from the cell damage turns on immune activity. So it raises immune activity.

Having to deal with these damage in the tissues and in the nervous system you also get electrolyte disturbances as well. Because it's a chelator of calcium it causes cells to leak out their potassium. It causes a general draining of mineral resources. It affects sulfur metabolism as well and so you end up with electrolyte problems, with calcium that can cause, and the other minerals and electrolytes that can cause, the nerves to be in a stuck-on position and you have this agitated on nerve and that can create anxiety, depression, tremors, all kinds of things that cause muscles to fire when they shouldn't like gut problems, dysbiosis, the peristalsis problems. It's amazing how one little thing that's messing up electrolytes and cell membranes and enzyme function and mitochondrial function can blow up into various things in different people. It's crazy.

Well, it's affecting a lot of different systems from what you're explaining to us. So typically, what would someone present with if they have oxalate overload Often?

nothing. Wow, you can have a problem with oxalates for 30 years and not recognize the symptoms and you seem okay on the surface. I have several clients like this who are just falling apart in their 70s and all of a sudden they've got severe osteoporosis. They have severe mood problems and brain function problems and all kinds of things falling apart, and now they can see in retrospect that their body put up with this and quietly was trying to cope and not letting them know how toxic this diet was. So that's the biggest problem with this is that you may not have symptoms.

But if you do have symptoms, it could be just fatigue, mood and irritability problems, running to the bathroom too much, occasional itchiness or pelvic pain of some kind. You would have, maybe cloudy urine, because if the calcium oxalate is forming crystals large enough, the light rays that normally when you look at something bounce off of it and give the urine this milky appearance. So if you have cloudy urine, that would be a sign of crystaluria. So that would be something to pay attention to, which doctors don't pay attention to. In my day they used to do urine analysis when they give a physical and I'd be passing in this cloudy little cup of yellow white soup and no one ever said, hey, that cloudy urine means you have a lot of crystals in your urine, unless you have a major bacterial infection or you're shedding cells. And this is the other thing too is that the kidneys and the bladder will start shedding cells when the crystals and the oxalate are killing them off, and that's a way of making sure that the crystals don't stick in the kidneys and cause of blocking stone or something like that, so you will get additional cloudiness of cell shedding as well. You can also get problems with chronic infections. So if you get repeated sinus infections, utis, yeast infections, things like that, that could be a sign of oxalate problems. Oh, interesting.

Thank you for sharing that with us. That's a good thing to know that they should consider that's oxalate issue with those crystals.

Well, the other thing is the joint problems, because the crystals set up the shop in joints and you end up with either gout or arthritis of some kind as well Inflammatory any, whatever name you want to put on it, because there's these inflammatory reactions to crystals. There's also tissue damage, where the repair of the joint structures is impaired, and so the repair of the meningial or not meningials, but that's another thing. In the brain, the spinal column is the meningial tissues and the vascular system that feeds them tend to collect these crystals and get in trouble with astral meningitis and problems there in the brain. But in the joints, all the cartilage and other structures are all potentially in peril because the oxalate is interfering with the maintenance of the tissue.

So when it comes to inflammation, how do you know if it's just inflammation from another source versus oxalate overload?

Well, with inflammation it could be one area like, say, the crystals causing gut inflammation. You can put out enough cytokines that you can. Kind of it's like one baby starts crying and the other one starts crying, like you can start getting a chain reaction of things. Now, to me, the major problems that really get us in a decline with our health are related to toxicities and deficiencies. Those are the most prominent things that are going to interfere with cell function and tissue maintenance. So some types of toxicities and deficiencies are going on, and oxalate is one to really put near the top of the list, because, a we're eating it all the time and we're not aware of how much we're eating and, b it causes both toxicity and deficiency because it's pulling minerals out of the system and it's also using up B vitamins, especially B1 and B6.

So let's take it to the nutrition. Then I'm curious to know what is it that I may be eating that is playing a role in having these high oxalate levels, or oxalate overload? What foods are rich in oxalates?

Spinach, chard and beet greens Chard being the worst of all of them, which I used to eat all the time I grew up, growing it. Spinach is very popular right now. Then there's the nuts, the worst ones being almonds, cashews and peanuts, potatoes and sweet potatoes, dark chocolate and cocoa, kiwi, blackberries, starfruit, chia seeds, sesame seeds, several of the seeds, things like poppy seeds, brands, so whole wheat breads and brand-based products are high. And then the black beans and pinto beans and a lot of the beans, the white beans that you make like a Boston baked beans with. They're really high too. Oh, and I forgot, when you go gluten-free and you start using buckwheat and the gluten-free stuff, arrowroot and a lot of that stuff quinoa, taff those are really high. Can you want terrible buckwheat? Bad news.

Oh, ok, so I've crossed off a lot of foods off my list. Now what am I supposed to eat? I'm trying to eat healthy. We're encouraging our clients to eat healthy, right, and a lot of those foods that you listed on those lists of healthy options. So what can they swap out instead?

OK, yeah, let's think specifically about so, hypothetically, on a daily basis. Which four or five foods would you tend to see show up in your menu on a day? Pick those, but what would yours be?

I would say spinach, the sweet potatoes. Then I do proteins like chickpeas and maybe like a chicken or something. Yeah, yeah.

So the really, the only, really only worried about spinach and sweet potatoes at this point is you name the two really high ones. So sweet potatoes I was addicted to them. I was using them as my starch. I could put them in the oven at night on delay cycle and they'd be all hot and ready for breakfast. I could take them with me for my lunch. I could have them for dinner, have them left over. You know like they're so easy and delicious and they hold butter and salt just beautifully. Big bad mistake. So I would switch over to winter squash.

There's many kinds of winter squash and it's basically requires a similar baking time. You know it's a similar process of having to throw it in the oven and cook it really hot, and it makes a good leftover. It's very versatile. You can turn it into soups and do other things with it. So the winter squash is the easiest direct swap where it's kind of the same color, similar texture, holds butter and salt pretty well, Right. So that's pretty easy to do. You just have to find a grocer that has the best squashes. And then the spinach, depending on what you're doing with it. Most of the greens are not that high in oxalate. All the lettuce is low, All the cabbages are low. Watercress, arugula, the little tatsuoys and the little Asian greens they're all in the cabbage family. That's all really low. Kale is not that high. As long as you can digest that stuff and you're properly cooking it, they're easy swap. So actually those two are pretty simple.

Thank you for that. So I'm going to switch your squash and do more kale, yeah, so the swap.

Like what's the big deal? A couple of little swaps that might save your teeth, might save you from becoming demented old lady, might give you more energy, make you happier, yeah, now one thing in the pharmacy world that has oxalate in it is lexapro, and you guys could teach me. I'd love to learn from you. But drugs are really designed for 100 percent absorption and direct, targeted access to the tissue we're trying to affect, right? So one little lexapro might have like five milligrams of oxalate, but that's the equivalent of maybe 500 milligrams of of a food, so it's like a whole spinach salad to take a lexapro. So that's an interesting issue, because I've said surprise, how many people have come to me and said their lifelong anxiety and depression are now gone, they're now calm and they don't need therapy and they're getting off their medication. But before they get off of it, they might switch to a low oxalate medication instead of taking lexapro Interesting Now.

Is there any way to tell if more people are just more sensitive to oxalates than others?

We don't have enough good science and enough way to manage even if we had more science to really manage to so many factors that influence this. But to the extent of your leaky gut is going to affect your absorption rate. So if you have a really great gut you're only absorbing 10 or 15 percent, and that number they used to think it was only like five to eight percent, but better studies in the more recent 15, 20 years suggests that a healthy situation, ideal situation, is a 10 to 15 percent absorption rate. But many, many people more than half the population are absorbing 60 percent or better. So you don't even need a super high oxalate diet if you have a leaky gut. So then it's hard to measure that, except for, maybe, antigen tests. If you're more allergic to foods and stuff, you have to assume it's because of leaky gut and so you may be a hyper absorber. So that's an issue.

How will your kidneys work is another risk factor, because some people are really great at peeing out oxalate.

I'm pretty good at that too.

I never hurt my kidneys or bladder with eating too much oxalate, which is too bad in a way, because at least the doctors recognize that if you have a kidney stone that it's an oxalate issue, because 80 percent of kidney stones are made of oxalate.

But if you have a family history of kidney problems, your your quote sensitivity would be higher because your excretion powers are less and there's also excretion abilities in the gut and that's probably very genetic and also tissue functionality and microbiome affects that as well. So there's lots of factors and but the truth is it's like mercury and other toxins, it's still universally toxic to human beings and anyone who wants to optimize their longevity, their health, their youthfulness, would minimize toxins generally. So it's always an important precaution. Very, very bad news for young children, fetuses, elderly, sick people, anybody with metabolic stress. This is just going to make things worse, not better. I would say from a public health point of view, it's really important for young people who are trying to get pregnant and want to be fertile, want to carry a baby to full term and deliver a full weight baby and have a healthy, easy baby. You would want to avoid poisoning yourself and your kids with oxalates.

Yeah, of course, Of course. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on this. We did talk about it a little bit earlier before we got on that oxalates. They seem to just have flown under the radar of the medical profession, at least until your book that we're going to definitely get into toxic superfood soon. But what reasons come to mind for such limited coverage in a medical field?

Yeah, I had to scratch my head about that so I wrote a whole chapter about it, because people are just surprised, like my doctor should know about this or they think, since my doctor doesn't know about it is probably not a thing and you're just some kind of weird internet influencer. No, I'm actually a little library geek, academic and public health Like. I have no interest in being an internet influencer, but I do have an interest in vulnerable populations and illness. And when I got sick and when I finally dawned on me what was wrong with me in destroying my health and my career and my life for decades and decades, I realized that no one's going to know about it because you can't go to a medical professional. You can't go to a doctor or other kind of health care provider and they're going to say, hey, what are you eating?

And I think at the moment Most people who get into the medical profession don't get in the medical profession to ask you what you put in your salad. That is not what they're there for. So that's the most superficial where there's many other systemic problems in our whole institution of even research, let alone the clinical practice, and how research isn't being properly translated down to practice and how we learn to practice health care and how we carry on through our culture in these spheres, whether we're researchers or clinicians. There's a lot of problems in that, and there's other people who have written critiques about what's wrong with the science and the health care establishment that we have now the skinning in the way of really helping patients.

Yeah, it's a thank you for sharing that. So can we talk a little bit more about your fascinating books, super foods you definitely challenge the traditional health wisdom and, when it comes to research that you did, was there any turnaround point that you came across in your research?

I was often so surprised In the beginning. It's very hard to find this because one of the early revelations you have living this, is that the body has been accumulating oxalate all through the body and you're peeing out cloudy urine for years after you stop eating the oxalate because it's now coming out of the body, which in itself is more toxic than when the oxalate was coming in, because it requires so much immune engagement to dig this junk out of your tissues and causes quite a bit of disruption and to sort of re-poisoning, re-putting more oxalic acid back in the bloodstream, back into those kidneys, back into the body. And so I was looking for where's the evidence of bioaccumulation of oxalate, and it was hard to find it. But then you see that 85% of thyroid glands over the age 50 are full of oxalate crystals. Frank obvious to see ones, not the little lipid oxalates that are invisible, or the nano crystals that are invisible like massive oxalate crystals enough that you can actually see them under a microscope. If you know how to properly stain, properly slice, properly, use the polarized light, you can see them. But it requires really skillful pathology, which also doesn't happen in the clinical setting. It only happens in the research setting. So that bioaccumulation took a while.

And then I found all this history. There was a whole diagnosis of the oxalic acid disease coming from diet. That started in the early 1840s and one of the very earliest truly experimental style study was done on oxalic acid in published in 1823. The dawning of toxicology. The first major toxicologist in Edinburgh and in the Western world did his first real big deal. It's a 50 page write up about 50 animals that they poisoned and then immediately autopsied to see the effects of oxalate. And the reason they did this toxicology study on animals is because they recognized that oxalic acid, which was a household cleaning chemical at the time and still is, if you use Barkeeper's friend, could be used as a murder weapon. And in his role this guy was like well, we have to be able to tell if this man was murdered by his wife or his brother. We have to be able to recognize oxalate poisoning in autopsy.

So they did this experimental study and found some interesting data. But we knew how toxic oxalate was, because you can die eating rhubarb leaves very high oxalate. You can die eating star fruit very high oxalate. You can kill your lover with oxalate. And so we've had that science for a very long time. That was 200 years ago. Interesting, Interesting, it's been fun, the research. Sometimes my reaction I'd be in the basement of the medical library was so emotional I just had to like leave. It would make me kind of exhausted. I'll come back next Sunday. I spend every Sunday afternoon in a library for years.

Wow. Yeah, I could see like something that was out there for so long, but it just, in a way it was kind of hidden right. It wasn't put to the forefront that this is an issue.

It was never given the attention it really needed, maybe because oxalic acid has been used in chemistry since the 1700s. It was used to help figure out what are the elements in various compounds. It's been used in industry as a cleaner since the 1700s. It's used in the vial that you use to measure blood glucose. It's the preservative, because it prevents the cells from using glucose. It sits on the enzymes and breaks the cells ability to metabolize glucose. So you use oxalic acid in the test tube. It's everywhere and nowhere all at the same time.

That is interesting, absolutely amazing. Thank you for the work that you're doing in bringing this to the forefront and letting those in the healthcare world know that we need to proceed with caution. With your nutritionist background, can you share how pharmacists in their positions can better incorporate nutrition advice, particularly surrounding around dietary oxalates, to their patients?

Right? Well, people comment this from different places. Emotionally, they often are doing more spinach and more nuts and so on, trying to go keto and fix their diabetes and get their waistline down and do all these good things. They're trying hard and sometimes they're so committed to that way of thinking it takes a while to get them around. Others would be like if I have to get up to pee more than once a night, that's a problem.

If I'm having headaches, it could be my food, and if I'm tired all the time, or if I have stomach aches, I can't get over my bloating, it could be oxalates. They want to know that. A simple question Sometimes, if people say I got this shoulder, it's like a frozen shoulder and I have this neck pain. My teeth sometimes bother me and I get these headaches. You could just ask them do you eat spinach and almonds a lot and you love dark chocolate? And they'll be like yeah, yeah, yeah I said have you been eating more of that recently? Do you think your symptoms are getting worse the more you eat those things?

And help them think about how, when they've added their keto diet, or they added their gluten-free diet, or they cut out the calcium, when they cut out the dairy foods that they didn't help them. They didn't help them because they probably started eating more oxalate. So if you can walk them through their own food and behavior, you can select what we did. We found two foods that you need to substitute, found easy substitutions and you can find that substitution list in the book. On my website there's a beginner's guide with the low oxalate foods and the high oxalate foods and what you can swap with, and you can become good in just saying what do you put in your salads? Have that conversation that isn't happening enough in healthcare asking people what they're eating and help them see a connection between their symptoms and their food.

Yeah, so you hear that everyone, sally, has some great resources for you to educate yourselves on oxalate, as well as share with your patients that might come to the pharmacy, and, if you're a fellow entrepreneurs like myself, share with your clients as well when it comes to their nutrition. And, sally, I have one last question for you. Considering your extensive background in mainstream healthcare, how can physicians and other healthcare practitioners be empowered to actually adopt a root cause oriented perspective in their practice?

Wow, you know, unfortunately the 10 minute visit is not great for root cause, so you need to get a little fancier with your intake forms.

For one thing, I have a risk factors, symptom and exposure inventory that could be used as an intake kind of sheet, and then that intake sheet is already starting that conversation with the patient or client as to what their diet is, what their symptom pattern is and whether they have additional risk factors like a history of NSAIDs which will lead to leaky gut and problems with kidney and gut function.

And so I think in this world you have to find ways to sneak it in, and if you have accessory facilitators like nurses or so on in your practice, they can also help with that. And I think eventually we have to move to a model where we offer some kind of group classes or support some kind of support group process so that people can find social connections and find ongoing support, because it's very easy to slip back into oh, dark chocolate's so healthy, I need beet juice and these other hi-oxy foods and get really confused. So they need long-term support and the healthcare provider needs to find a way to make it efficient enough to be sensitive, to pick people up and get them engaged, and then find a way to make more time for your clients.

Definitely that 10 minutes is not enough, never enough. You can't get anywhere in 10 minutes.

So I can barely get anywhere in a half an hour. Most of my clients need an hour multiple. You know, every month for a while they really need time to think it through.

Exactly, yeah, if we really truly want to help them get through what they're going through, we need to spend more time with them. So thank you for those pointers. It has been a pleasure having you on Sally Norton and I'm looking forward to continue diving into your book Toxic Superfoods.

Super. Yeah, and check out my cookbook on my website, because that might help give you some more ideas about living without spinach.

No more spinach smoothies for me. Yes, my day is complete. Okay, thank you. It was great having you on the show.

Appreciate it.

In the riveting journey of this episode, we've had the privilege of hearing from Sally Norton, a renowned nutrition expert and author of Toxic Superfoods. Her insights revealed how oxalate, a natural toxin, and many familiar plant foods like spinach, almonds and sweet potatoes might be staged in an insidious siege on our wellness. However, the rainbow after the storm is within reach. A few intentional diet adaptations can drastically curtail your oxalate intake, offering sweet relief from these persistent symptoms. If today's discussion sparked a question or if there's a particular topic you love for us to cover, please reach out.

This platform thrives on your feedback and curiosity for us. Together, that will shape the future of healthcare. Your five star review and comments can guide others on a similar journey. Please subscribe, rate and download this episode to ensure you're always in the loop. Next week, we're diving into transformative communication techniques for healthcare professionals, so you can confidently express your unique value to your clients and colleagues without the fear of being misunderstood. Talk to you next Friday. Until then, always remember in your journey as a healthcare professional, always raise the script on health, because together we can bring healthcare to higher levels.