Are your Healthy Foods Making you Sick?
Kurt Annaheim
Are your Healthy Foods Making you Sick?
Transcript: Oxalates, Diet, and Health
Editor’s note: This transcript has been paragraph-formatted and lightly cleaned for readability.
So actually with me I got diagnosed with Graves disease 12 years ago and since that diagnosis I started a gluten-free diet and then I I start then I went into paleo and keto after that. So for 10 years I was paleo and keto healthy diet following you know eating sweet potatoes and spinach and all all that and lots of almonds and almond meals because a lot of the paleo recipes have a lot of nuts. Mhm.
Yeah.
The gluten-free is going to be higher in oxalate than the paleo is going to add in more nuts and spinach and sweet potatoes.
Yeah.
Wow.
So then what happened in 2024?
I had some signs of imbalance. I started to get more bloating and my skin started to break out. and there were just some signs that didn't feel right to me and I thought, you know what, I'm just going to strip back even more and I'm going to go full carnivore. So, I've been strict carnivore since September 24. And then that's when I stumbled upon your book toxic superfoods and I was reading the book and I couldn't it was actually it mixed emotions with your book like I was so excited to find it but at the same time I felt sick thinking oh my god I've been eating beetroot and I've been eating sweet potato and I've been eating all these foods and I'm thinking wow things were starting to make sense why I was starting to notice some things that weren't quite right And yeah, so ever since then I've stopped eating vegetables obviously and I I don't think I can go back now.
I I look at them now and I think oh I can't have that in my body. It's like poison. Uh so yeah that's how it all began for me.
And whenever I bring this up with people they'll say oh what what are oxalates?
What's that?
And sometimes I find it a little bit hard to explain. Like I I know that I know it's quite simple. Um but yeah, because it's something that is hard to test as well. People find it a little bit hard to believe.
So very so I thought that let's just begin really simple and what are oxalates?
Well, it's a tiny natural chemical. Uh it's actually the parent compound is called oxalic acid and plant foods have it. Plants make it and this chemical can mess up your minerals, your membranes, your mitochondria, all the good stuff in your body. And this has toxic effects that double and triple and can eventually explode.
Um because this thing plays for keeps. So first you have an initial exposure from these foods like you mentioned sweet potatoes and beets and almonds and so on. There's a price for that initial exposure that's under the hood that you don't notice. And but there's this accumulation problem where it will grab minerals and form crystals in that often it grabs calcium and creates these little calcium oxalate crystals that tend to stick to tissues and then the body's holding on to them and protecting vital organs and vital tissues. and then the tissue damage that's going on, which you may not notice, and the crystal deposits, which you don't notice either, are underneath the hood, exposing your immune system to problems and can start generating immune system problems.
It's also causing deficiencies that can lead to weak bones and other problems. and so, but it's like you say, it's all hidden and invisible to us. We didn't know we were doing this to ourselves when we started eating a lot of sweet potatoes and nuts or whatever. And then there's this big hurdle warning people that this is dangerous to over consume these foods that are particularly high in oxalic acid and calcium oxalate crystals as well. Um people are not really open to the idea of it.
So therefore we've got this potentially explosive problem that can build up over years invisibly and nobody knows about it. And a lot of us are kind of like I don't want to know about that.
I know.
I mean, I have to throw out all my recipe books now. I have a such a beautiful collection. It's like I I can't cook these foods anymore. And even in my pantry, when my kids open the pantry, I have I have it all written like high oxalate foods, moderate and then low, just so it can sink into their brains as well because they think I'm mad.
Well, I do have a cookbook on my website with 200 recipes and I'm coming out with a new cookbook in the fall of 20.
Amazing. 2026.
So can help for people because everybody in the carnivore space has friends and family members that aren't old classic like intense just ribeye carnivore. They want some more diversity in their diet and that that really these are intended to serve that need so that your friends and family can have a diet that's so much better and we don't have to fight over what percentage of your diet is meat necessarily to help people.
Yeah.
Amazing.
That sounds amazing. so what are the some symptoms that oxalates contribute to?
Well, it's a very slow metabolic stressor when you're just kind of eating sweet potatoes. Then it's as subtle. So, and it tends to hit you in places where you're vulnerable and it may not be right away. but the they're often very common and annoying symptoms and none of them seem diet related. So almost anything because this is affecting basic cell function when it starts messing up the minerals that the body that each cell needs to function and operate and it starts messing up pH around cells and other things that it's doing.
Um it could be anything really. Aches and pains, pain, connective tissue issues like arthritis and carpal tunnel, back pain, urinary tract issues if you're getting up at night having to pee a lot. If you got bladder pain, itching, burning pee, that that could be a problem. If you had a kidney stone, that's a classic sign that you got too much of this in your in your body.
But you could have the same material that's a kidney stone anywhere in your thyroid gland. So if you have low thyroid, if you have energy and fatigue problems, it can be either messing up your mitochondria at the cell level or messing up the major glands like the pituitary or the thyroid gland or the the pancreas and even your sex hormone sex glands. It can mess with nerves. nerves are very sensitive to calcium and so on including the pacemaker which needs just the right calcium level in the blood. So if you get arrhythmias and funky heart things or sometimes suddenly feel out of breath, face pain and sinus infections, if you get chronic sinus infections, chronic UTI, that can be a sign.
Uh it goes on and on. It's basically infection stuff, immune system stuff, connective tissue stuff, your nervous system, your mood, some people anxiety and just, you know, having trouble caring about things or being emotionally even or being positive. This can be hard for people when your nerves are poisoned.
Wow.
This sounds crazy. It is. It's terrible. And it's avoidable.
That's the cool thing is it's one exposure of a toxin that you have total control over.
Yeah.
Not like air pollution and a lot of the heavy metals and things and the pesticides are getting into food and whatever. It's way beyond your powers. But this is really it just needs you to work on the process of learning. engage and learn like you've done with your children. Give them that list.
So it's in their environment and then that's something you can't take away from them. When somebody says, "Oh, I think you got carpal tunnel because of your oxalates." They'll be like, "Oh yeah, I just started eating spinach again. I forgot it was." Oh yeah. At least they're like they can help themselves with knowledge, but as long as we're ignorant, we're just mystified by our suffering.
We've just like normalized eating modern foods that are actually really toxic for us, haven't we?
We have. We have. Concerning from I'm a public health mommy. I've always wanted to help people not get sick since I would I decided that would be my career in seventh grade and that's a real like nurturing concern that people deserve good information and to be able to make good choices and then be supported in good choices.
But now if you tell people to quit spinach, they just they just have meltdowns. They could have tantrums. That can't be true. Well, let's debunk actually some health statements by playing a quick true or false.
Okay.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Okay.
So, spinach smoothies are one of the healthiest breakfasts you can have. Oh, false. Some superfoods can contribute to kidney stones, joint pain, and vulva. I can't pronounce that word.
Yeah, definitely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If your bottom side is burning.
Yeah.
Cooking destroys oxalates. No. False. Oh, okay.
Almonds are good for you. False. Vitamin C can increase oxalates. Very true.
Okay.
Oxalates can affect children. Definitely true. People on carnivore diets often discover oxalate issues. True.
Okay.
And can we go a little bit deeper into that one now?
Yeah.
So, in the research, I've spent a I'm a kind of bookworm person, likes the library, likes medical articles, and the medical people who are studying the problem of oxalates in the body, particularly the kidney stone problem, are like, well, you can't really do a no oxalate diet.
Well, yes, you can.
You can eat a carnivore diet if you cut out all plants. That's the simple most, you know, rudimentary way to just kick out all the oxalates because animal foods have essentially no oxalate in them. and we probably need a little more testing of some toxic snail in in Australia, but other than that, there's a giant toxic snail out there that's high in oxalate, but other than that, pretty much the animal foods are no oxalates. So, the carnivore world is suddenly switching from a modern diet that's pretty high in oxalate because some three basic foods we all grow up on what no matter if you're interested in health or not are potatoes, peanuts, and chocolate. You can't get past your first birthday without being presented with potatoes, chocolate, and peanuts.
And then it's so normalized that we do that every day. So, you can be a Pringles French fry chocolate milkshake loving person and getting in trouble with oxalate. Now you go carnivore because you don't know what's wrong with you and suddenly you've switched and well like I said before there's this accumulation problem and now the body's in a different situation that's really again it's it's sort of a very complicated story when the body's been holding it in this bioaccumulated state because you're eating it every day. There's no there's never been room for you to stop holding it because you keep adding more and more.
Now with a carnivore diet, suddenly you've switched to a zero-oxalate diet without warning. And a lot of people come to me through carnivore. Sometimes people say, you know, your book was the reason I went carnivore.
So it's either way.
My book might tell you meats are safer for lots of reasons. They don't have a lot of plant anti nutrients. They also don't collect as much toxic chemicals from the environment like the heavy metals and the glyphosate, all that. So that's another reason why going to a meat-based diet is so healing because it really lowers the toxic load in the body.
But with the oxalates, there can be this release of the accumulated oxalates from the body and you can get sick going too low too fast or staying too low too long. Eventually the body starts kind of vomiting this stuff in a way that's quite dangerous for some people.
Okay.
Wow.
So I'm wondering why some people feel worse when they like you remove the oxalates but then some for some reason they feel worse.
Why?
Right?
Because there's now an immune engagement going after this deposits these deposits in the body that creates additional symptoms of inflammation. It's it's a healing response. Now, if you think about a a bug bite, if some if some insect bit your arm, you're like you find the insect, you brush him off, you kill him or whatever, oh, I got a bug bite. And then you wake up the next morning and it's a big raised swollen red lump that's itching you and driving you crazy.
Those symptoms are not coming from the bug bite. They're coming from your healing response to it.
Okay?
So when you start healing, let's say a toxic deposit from an insect and tissue damage there, you're going to have itching, swelling, and unhappy symptoms from the bug bite. But that's your immune system creating the symptoms. So, when your immune system is going after 10,000 mini little bug bug bites sitting around in your jaw, your eyes, your brain, your shoulder joint, your wherever where the oxalates have been collecting for years, you're going to have pain, itching, skin rashes, skin peeling, joint pain, gout, grit coming out of your eyes, tartar on your cloudy urine with crystals coming out of the urine because you tend to pee out oxalate. It's a water- soluble set of compounds and crystals and so you're peeing them out.
You can get nighttime arousals, having trouble sleeping from this stuff. You can be have a bladder that's annoyed by the release of the crystals. So, all kinds of craziness can occur, but you got to think about that as postbug bite. So, now you're trying to heal the problem because you've removed the bug.
You you stopped letting the bugs bite you by changing your diet, but you still have the after effects.
Is there something we could do to kind of ease this reaction?
Yes. Yes, you can put back a little oxalate in the diet. So, you don't want to go from a thousand RPMs of oxalate eating to zero and leave it there too long because the body will get like, wait a minute, the blood is empty of oxalates. There's no oxalate coming into the kidneys anymore.
No coming blood. There's room to unload this stuff. Hey guys, let's get rid of it while we can. Because what you've done is you've basically created what I consider winter.
In the wintertime, before modern electricity and refrigerators and all that, we relied on hunting in a few dried fruits and really minimal plant foods in the wintertime for a million years. While before we had houses and stuff, so in the winter time, you just weren't eating as much oxalate containing foods. it's really when you're just hunting and living on animal foods, that's your opportunity. So in the past you couldn't accumulate oxalates for more than 9 months every year you'd have a couple months of carnivore in January and February or something right and in some parts of the world you know that we got more and more away from the warm climate areas of the world so you have less you see less of it in theory unfortunately it's not getting studied enough but you're going into the body is trying to unburden itself and you need to make that go slower so you have you need a way to have. You don't want a race car without a gas pedal and a brake.
You need a little bit of gas pedal control over how much of this and a little bit of braking. So, by adding low oxalate back, you can tell the body, oh, it's not winter. Is still summer or fall when you're eating Swiss chard and sweet potatoes, but small amounts that won't accumulate so badly. So instead of eating it every meal too much and like huge smoothies, you could eat three spinach leaves and calm down your symptoms or two cups of tea and calm down your symptoms and be done like for now for today.
But you might need to keep a little bit of something, a little chocolate, a little bit of tea. Well, strong tea, you'd probably need two tea bags worth of tea to get enough of an effect. Just having a tiny bit of background oxalate doesn't have this signaling effect, this communication. We're trying to communicate to the body that it isn't just carp launch just vomit oxalates all over the place and get inflamed everywhere and get sick and maybe have a heart attack because you could see it grabs calcium.
So if you pour oxalic acid from your shoulder joint or your sinuses back into your bloodstream too much too fast too soon, you lose enough calcium in the blood in the short term to cause the pacemaker to not work properly and then you get arrhythmias and hypertension, get nerve reactions and it can be dangerous.
Yeah.
Right.
So calcium is really important on a carnivore diet is really helpful if you can eat cheese and milk and get plenty of calcium every day.
Okay.
So, when I posted your book on my Instagram, I had a comment that said, "But hang on a minute.
Our body makes oxalates naturally." Is that true?
Yeah, it is.
Your your liver turns one of the amino acids, hydroxyproline, some like 3% of it when it's getting rid of it because you're turning over cartilage or connective tissue into oxalate. So, you can make about 12 milligrams a day from your liver. That's why the body knows what it is and knows how to deal with it. Knows to pee it out.
And you have the capacity to pee out about 26 milligrams of oxalate. So you make about half your capacity. There's a little room there to eat oxalate and get rid of it. The problem is you're eating the amount that is 10 or eight or more times than what you're built to handle.
So it's a overload problem.
It's not a zero or nothing kind of thing. We're not saying zero oxalate in the diet. We're not saying that there isn't a level of oxalate that you can handle. It's just that what we can handle is an equivalent of about six or 10 baby spinach leaves a day.
Okay.
Like dear.
Okay.
So, what about when people say, "Oh, eat the rainbow.
If you don't eat the rainbow, you're not going to have enough nutrients in your body." What do you say to that?
I love this kind of like Disney World children's children's coloring book version of nutritional science versus actual science. It's fun to teach things like that and you can make it fun and that's why we're in trouble because we shortcuts to actual information that's truthful and that's investigative and that's openhearted, open-minded and really not ideological in nature. The rainbow is a propaganda tool for making fruits and vegetables attractive to us. And they have their own power to attract us.
It makes a very pretty cover on a magazine book.
It's beautiful, right?
Who doesn't want the rainbow?
Except your body doesn't care about the rainbow.
Wow.
Really doesn't.
Yeah.
Oh, wow. This is shocking.
Sorry.
Uh what's the problem with this?
You know, only one crazy devoted public health mommy would dare to violate all these social norms suspect spinach for causing problems. The sad part is it's all over the medical literature and I go for I'm very logical. I prefer medical literature facts that are truly understood and not just spun up and crafted for your ideology. I don't have a food ideology.
I don't need a camp or a club to belong to. I need a healthy body and that's number one. my body and my science line up. And luckily, it's way more than just me that whose life's been severely harmed by the not knowing this. And it's tragic that someone who has a nutrition degree from an Ivy League school would be able to do this to themselves.
What happened to me?
What's happened to you?
What's happening to people now all over the world?
Because we're promoting these things without awareness.
And I'm just saying, "Hey guys, what if you had a little more information and you did this in a more conscious way?" So, where should people start?
Well, I would say visit my website and AI wants to dish up nonsense. So, please visit a real website, which is bomb. Get the book. But fundamentally, what you just need to know is like some of the high foods are not should not be staples.
Do not make spinach and almonds and chia and chocolate and turmeric and cashews and quinoa staples. You start doing them every day and you're going to end up with some problem eventually. That's almost universal guarantee. Now, some people last until their 80s and then all of a sudden their kidneys fail or something horrible out of the blue happens.
Usually, it's because some trauma happens. you know, they fell off a ladder, they had a baby, they had a car accident, and that just drops the body, it just exposes how vulnerable the body has become, and yet playing nice and not really causing you obvious problems or problems you assume we're just aging. Oh, this is menopause. Oh, this is just you're getting older. You're supposed to get arthritis.
Oh, people start leaking and peeing on themselves because they're over 50 or they had a baby. Like, no. It's just too many years of peanut butter might be doing you in.
What are some surprising transformations you've seen after lowering oxalates?
To me, the biggest one is mental health, anxiety in particular. Many people have come to me and say they've had a lifetime of terrorizing anxiety that's just gone. Gone.
Wow.
To me, that's the worst thing you can have is some form of depression, anxiety, panic disorder, or even flat affect where you just don't care about anything and you just kind of you're not it's really painful to not enjoy life or look forward to things because your brain can't function correctly. So, to me, that is not only surprising and shocking, but profoundly important.
Yeah.
Wow.
I probably should have asked this question in the beginning, but I would love to know how did you become the oxalate expert.
Why?
Through great pain. Through great pain. It started as a 12-year-old getting back pain and arthritis and stuff like I had no idea. And then it got really bad in my 20s as I was vegan and no energy, no mental energy, no physical energy, just shot all the time, lots of arthritis.
Had arthritis so bad I some didn't have the strength to turn a key in the lock at times. It was amazing suffering. And I didn't know why. I was like this perfect little goody two shoes who didn't drink, didn't do drugs of any kind, ate all the right foods, went to bed, didn't party. like I was the most boring, perfect, healthy person and yet sick, sick, sick. and then it got so bad I had to quit my job and turned out that I needed a hysterectomy and I had endometriosis and didn't know it and all kinds of drama including they didn't know what was wrong with me.
So, I had a sleep study. My brain was waking up 29 times an hour. I was so exhausted. I didn't know I wasn't sleeping.
I was getting no sleep. No wonder I was having trouble writing grants and doing budgets and doing all my brain work. So then I like spent three years trying to solve that problem and I just ran into luckily I had an attack of vulvodynia myself. It was just a couple days of severe burning and itching and right away you realize you can't live like this. this is intolerable.
And my husband looked up on the internet what and found the Volvo pain volver pain foundation here in US in North Carolina, not far from where I used to work and live. And that like tipped me off, but I didn't understand it. So then later I figured out with the sleep stuff and stomach, I was just this big story like my digestion was bad. I couldn't sleep.
I couldn't work. I couldn't read the mail. I had a long history of arthritis and I finally get in my head like you need to really do this diet because I was experimenting again with kiwi and celery and my symptoms were coming back. My arthritis was coming back and all this and it dawned on me that I have to do this for arthritis which you do.
If you have arthritis you need this diet but then my sleep stud my sleep problem went away and a long-standing 30 plus year problem with my feet disappeared. Like I couldn't really use my feet for 30 years. I couldn't go barefoot or run or jump or think about tennis or games like that. I couldn't do it.
Now my feet are great. I can run barefoot on pavement now and I'm 62 years old.
Wow.
You sounds like an incredible transformation there. Yeah, that was shocking to me because I know the literature.
I know holistic healing.
I've been a professional in working in academia my whole career and teaching like holistic healing and and I didn't know this. And I knew I needed to know more. I'm just like I my brain was like I need an answer.
Why is this going on?
Why does this work?
What's happening?
And then I was like, well, I need to put this in a book because I need before I die. Before oxalates kill me, I'm going to leave a book behind some library and someday somebody will benefit from that and somebody will pick it up and do some research on this and quit neglecting the topic. So that's how I did it out of just fierce like protecting everyone else from the same ignorance that wrecked my life and my career. Well, thank you for writing that book because it and it was actually so easy to understand as well which makes it accessible to so many people.
So thank you.
I know that it sounds terrible what you went through but you know it always starts like that for a lot of people doesn't it?
It does because you're going to keep doing what you're comfortable doing and what everyone tells you is true. It's so much easier just to get along and believe what they tell you.
Why would you argue with your kindergarten teacher?
You're like, "Yeah, okay. You're the grown-up. You're right." And so, we pick up all kinds of of cultural truisms whether they're true or not. We don't really stop to question them.
And right now, there's a big strong push on these same foods that are really making people sick. And very few people are willing to slow down until they've hit their own brick wall. It's sad. It is sad because prevention is always better with all diseases, especially with this.
Especially with this, I would not wish someone to wait for them to break before they change their ways.
If someone remembers just one thing from this episode, what should it be?
Well, blind spots will eventually get us in trouble.
Yeah.
Deep breath. It's a hard set of things to think about and it's really worth doing. Sometimes the things we work the hardest for are the things we most value.
Well, Sally, thank you.
I love your work and I look forward to meeting you in person at Carnivore Live in September. Yay. I'm excited. I'm so glad you're going to be there.
Yeah.
I actually got VIP tickets, so I'm I'm going to be there on Friday night having dinner with you. So, I'll give you a big hug and I'd love a signature on my book.
Absolutely. any final thoughts before we wrap this up?
Well, I'm really grateful to you and anyone else who's willing to pass this message forward and I just honor you and everyone else who's interviewed me. But the people listening like if you slow down and actually pick up on this and start learning this, you are finding a really cool set of people who are open-minded, openhearted, and are interested in in just finding truth, not having to be in an ideology. And right now the world has got all this clubish stuff going on. You free yourself from that.
Just let yourself take care of yourself in a straightforward way. So everyone's invited to come learn. You are an amazing teacher. Thank you so much, Sally.