Beetroot & Spinach & Lovely Bright Berries
Rhubarb & Buckwheat & Baked Sweet Potato
Black Tea & Green Tea & All My Dark Chocolate Sins
These are a few of my favourite things!!
Sounds like a kitchen roll-call at my house…how about yours? And your patients?!! You see I’ve been working away researching Oxaluria – a condition whereby individuals end up with too many oxalates in their body and ultimately their urine – which can be a problem in a proportion of people suffering with kidney stones, vulvodynia, joint pain etc and anyone with CKD and on my travels I came across this article on how the regular intake of green smoothies could in fact turn someone with normal oxlate levels and handling, into someone who has an acute induced Oxaluria. Yup.
Nobody panic. Remember this is not going to be problematic in all patients but just might be in some. But it left me wondering if we ‘clean-diet-prescribing-practitioners’ know all we really need to about, who not to prescribe green drinks to (or beetroot juice for that matter) and cap ‘ye olde’ dark chocolate quota for!
Or…keep them eating all these fabulous generally healthy foods but mitigate any elevated oxalate risk through correct food preparation & combinations?
There’s so much more to this topic than meets the eye. Because on top of what you eat, there’s the huge variability in terms of what you absorb…think it’s as simple as, whether someone has Oxalobacter in their bowel or not? Nope. Oh…and then there’s the 3rd element: how much you make yourselves…that’s where we need to have a serious chat about collagen, high dose turmeric & vitamin C supplements in susceptible individuals, people. Want to read more yourself? Here’s somewhere to start on the giant pile of papers here.
Want to take a walk down Oxalate Boulevard with me, as we make our way back to talking about Getting to the Guts of Women & Joint Pain... well, check this out…
Oxalates are found in high concentrations in many of the ‘healthy food choices’ we promote and are even higher again, when these are organically farmed! Given the importance of individualising therapeutic diets are we able to quickly recognise those who need to lower their low of these naturally occurring plant products? Who shouldn’t be drinking green juices? And which of our patients might benefit from being educated about different food combinations and preparation to lower the oxalate load from these otherwise fabulous foods?