Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh, I bet that you'll be fine without it.
You're listening to the Minimalist Podcast with Joshua Fields Milburn and T .K.
Coleman. Yes. Thank you, Malabama.
Hello, everybody. Today's episode is the first of two episodes about minimizing chronic pain, disease, illness, and inflammation.
Next week, I'm going to, for the first time, share my six -year story of healing three different autoimmune diseases, including three things that have really helped me minimize my own chronic pain and disease.
But first, this week, we're talking about the foods that are making people sick.
Joining us in the studio to help us address this topic is Sally K.
Norton. Sally received her bachelor's degree in nutritional science from Cornell University, and her master's degree in public health from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Her latest book is called Toxic Superfoods.
Please welcome to the show Sally K.
Norton. Yeah, all right.
Now, Sally, this is a listener driven show, and I'm so grateful you decided to spend this time with us today while you are in Los Angeles.
Before we turn to our callers, would you please explain to our listeners what is a toxic superfood, and how are those foods making us sick?
Well, toxic superfoods are the foods that are high in this chemical that no one's talking about.
Hardly anyone's heard about called oxalic acid or sometimes called oxalates, which is the main ingredient in a kidney stone.
That's one place that you might hear about it.
But unfortunately your kidney doctor probably told you it was a calcium stone, and you didn't even know that there's this chemical, oxalic acid.
And that little chemical is a real troublemaker.
The membranes of your cells don't like it.
The mitochondria that give you energy and keep everything working don't like it.
Your vascular system, the capillaries that deliver nutrients can be damaged.
And almost any tissue in the body can be affected by this chemical that we are ignoring.
In the book you have this whole chart early on.
This is from page 32 of some of the worst offenders, things like, well here's the thing.
I know I started experiencing a lot of symptoms as I started to improve my diet and make it much healthier, right?
I remember every day I was eating these big smoothies, these giant smoothies that were full of raw beets and spinach and chocolate as well.
And I realized later on that oh, wow, this wasn't a health smoothie, it was an oxalate smoothie.
Yes, as one person has said on my YouTube channel, a bonanza, Oxley!
Which is a complete accident!
You're doing everything you're being told to do, and it's not the right thing.
The man that drove me here today was trying spinach and it made him sick.
His sister is sick with Autoimmune problems because she's eating these foods.
Everywhere I turn, a man I knew for 10 minutes is telling me this problem, this spinach makes him ill.
And yet people are recommending it.
Well, can you talk – So spinach is one of those foods that's really high in oxalates that may lead to kidney stones and other issues.
Can we talk about what some of those other foods are that may be high in oxalates, even though they are so -called superfoods, they might be toxic for us?
Yeah, starting with spinach is exactly the right place to start because it's the poster child for these high -oxalate foods.
And there's a couple of greens that are even worse.
And that's chard and beet greens.
But all the other greens are pretty much fine, with the one exception of sorrel, which hardly anyone eats.
So it's not greens, generally, just those three, spinach, chard and beak greens.
And then there's the seed and nut department, they're kind of a bad department because seeds and nuts are well defended, have full of chemicals that make them indigestible.
The ones that are particularly bad in oxalate are almonds, cashews and peanuts, chia seeds, hemp isn't so great either.
And then, you know, you really want to minimize nuts and seeds, generally, for your health.
The other high oxalate foods include things like potatoes, sweet potatoes, buckwheat, blackberries, kiwi.
As you said, dark chocolate, regular chocolate, cocoa, anything with chocolate, including your favorite chocolate dessert, it's all still high oxalate as long as it has that brown factor in it.
Because the oxalic acid is 8 -ion, it's a water soluble molecule, and you don't find it in the fatty part of the chocolate.
So the white chocolate doesn't have it, the peanut oil doesn't have it, it's in the whole foods.
And with turmeric, this is another high oxalate food, the whole root turmeric is the one that has all the oxalate in it versus the cecumen extracts don't.
Now you have a whole chart in your book that goes through the different oxalate levels of a whole bunch of different foods, and it was surprising to me because all of these foods, they seem to be health foods that I would gorge on once upon a time.
And then several years later, Or I started to experience a lot of inflammation in my body, these three autoimmune conditions, Rheumatoid Arthritis, IBS and IBD.
I started getting a bunch of ulcers in my small bowel.
At one point I had a hundred ulcers in my small bowel and it felt like I was swallowing glass.
And I found for me that removing a lot of these foods was allowing my body, giving my body the environment in which to heal.
But I'd love for you to talk about some of the symptoms that might point toward oxalate overload?
Well, these symptoms that you're describing were pretty well outlined in 1842 when we first named this food induced illness that destroys your gut health.
Yeah. So somehow we didn't get the memo in modern times that we've known about this thing for a long time.
So the digestive tract issues back in the day was considered a primary sign of oxalate problems when you also had either neurological problems, which can be mood disorders, changes in your personality, changes in motivation.
It can also be nerves do a lot of things for us.
They inspire muscles to move, so you can get twitches and tremors and hiccups and belching and stuff that looks like digestive problems such as reflux or diarrhea or constipation.
They're actually nerve toxicity problem and nerves do a lot of other things so the neurological stuff you could even end up with a neuropathy.
The other department in the old traditional 1842 definition of this disease, digestive issues plus either and or, those neurological factors or rheumatological factors which means your joints, muscles, bones, tendons connective tissue are complaining with inflammation and you get all kinds of arthritic and gouty and really miserable sensations which I started having when I was 12.
Oh, wow. And it was terrible in my 20s.
We had times I didn't have the strength in my hands to turn the key in the lock.
It's debilitating because I know that, I could tell right away, I was sort of the canary in the coal mine, my wife who's the healthiest person I know, and she can tolerate so many of these foods, but she never gorges them in overabundance either, and there's probably something behind that.
But what I've noticed is that back in the day when I had the worst just sort of got problems before I dealt with it through diet and a few other things that I did, we're gonna talk about next week.
But what I noticed is I could eat a sweet potato at night, supposedly healthy food, I wake up the next morning and it felt like my ankles were broken.
And so that to me was a sign that my food is directly related to my wellbeing and living a pain -free life.
How did you connect a sweet potato, a perfectly innocent sounding food that's healthy me to then ankle.
Who would do that? Like, what is it that you figured that out?
A lot of trial and error.
I mean, it really came down to like, I realized when I was fasting, if I would fast for a prolonged period of time, 24 hours or longer, a lot of my symptoms would go away.
And so I realized like, Oh, wait a minute.
If my symptoms go away, when I stop eating, it must mean that something that I am eating, I don't know what it is yet.
Maybe it's tomatoes, maybe it's the chocolate, maybe it's sugar.
And there are problems with of all of these things, but I knew that there was something there.
Otherwise I would just kept fasting in perpetuity, but that is not a sustainable diet plan, right?
Hardly. And so I wanna talk to you today, we've got some callers here as well.
And I know folks listening to this might wonder like, how can we apply minimalism to our diets?
What does this have to do with minimalism?
And for me, it has to do with removing anything that decreases our wellbeing.
Often on the show, we talk about the material possessions in our lives that get in the way that calls clutter to our lives, the physical clutter, the material clutter.
And a lot of that stuff is making us miserable, right?
But there's other forms of clutter that are making us miserable as well.
And one of those types of clutter is food clutter.
We don't realize that many of these things are decreasing our wellbeing.
I got to flag this conversation.
Is that why you're doing football?
You throw down a flag.
Like, wait a minute.
We're not just gonna keep playing, like nothing special happened here.
we are saying things right now, so casually and informally, but this is some of the most controversial stuff I've ever heard in my life.
So let me tell you how I'm hearing this.
I'm hearing this as if you were saying to me, yeah man, you know, like the letter A, that's actually not even a letter.
It's not even useful at all.
Every time you say it, part of you dies.
And that's actually true of E, I, O, and you.
Now, I'm intrigued by what you're saying.
I wanna hear everything that you're saying to me, but I'm also like, well, I can't even talk at this point.
I can't even talk because you are taking away from me or challenging to the core my very concept of what makes the alphabet useful.
So you're not just talking about a tomato or a sweet potato.
You're not just talking about, oh, this one thing that everyone's hyping up as the ultimate vitamin.
No, you're literally talking about the concept of health food.
And I don't know if anybody else listening feels like this, but the question I'm asking is how is eating even possible?
If you're right. If you're right, how do we even eat?
I can't have a smoothie anymore.
I can't talk to a plant anymore because I don't have any vows.
Yeah, I don't think this is in Sally, correct me if I'm wrong.
And this is not an indictment on plants or plant foods.
It's an indictment on the oxalates that are in many of our foods that are making people sick.
But, Sally, tell me, you empathize with my plight.
Oh, my gosh, do I ever as an ex -vegan, an ex -vegetarian?
And, you know, I learned so much at the foot of my professors and everyone around me and every book and every bit of media and everyone's saying this stuff is fine, which is why they get away with murder.
if you're a good Agatha Christie student, it's the most innocent looking character that's ultimately the criminal.
And that's what's happening right now.
Wow. I remember my mother -in -law was over at my house up in Ojai a few months ago.
And I was showing her your book and she had never heard of oxalates and she's in her 70s and she's really healthy.
Just like my wife is and she's like, oh, is this something else I have to worry about right now?
I'm like, no, I don't know that it's about worrying about.
In fact, I think the worrying side of it is not very useful.
But becoming educated about it, especially for those of us who suffer with chronic pain, chronic illness or chronic disease, inflammation all throughout our bodies, neuroinflammation, maybe you have brain fog.
This is something that we want to think about.
What am I putting into my body?
And is it getting in the way of my wellbeing?
I'd love to move on to some callers here.
If you have a question or comment for our show, we'd love to hear from you.
or our phone number is 406 -219 -7839, or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcast, at TheMinimalists .com.
Let us know that you're a Patreon subscriber so we can prioritize your message.
By the way, big thanks to our Patrons.
Your support keeps our podcast 100 % advertisement free because sing along at home, y 'all.
Advertising suck. Our first question today is from Becky in California.
Hi, my name is Becky, and I'm a Patreon supporter.
I'm calling for the health conversation, and I've personally had a lot of gut health issues myself, and I would love to hear more details about what is actually meant by processed food.
I hear that a lot, and I don't disagree that they should be limited.
But technically, cutting an apple or cooking meats consider processing it.
Avoiding preservatives is also confusing, because lemon juice is often used as a preservative, but that seems healthy.
Even saying just to avoid packaged food It feels too broad because there's a lot of really good healthy options out there these days that come in packages.
Well, are there specific ingredients to avoid?
What details can you give around the term processed?
I would also appreciate a conversation around getting support for making these life changes when things aren't really that clear from the medical testing when you have to start experimenting.
I'm personally allergic to environmental grasses, so I cut grains because they're related and it helped, a lot, but my food allergy test came back clear.
So cutting grains caused a bit of family drama around holiday meals.
I first started with cutting gluten.
I let my family know.
My husband was very supportive and especially around changing up home meals, but my parents felt like I was following a fad diet and making an unreasonable request of them.
Later, when my health got worse and I had to start cutting more grains such as rice, I also had to switch from coffee to tea.
My family became more supportive because they felt that cutting coffee was the ultimate sacrifice and not a fad diet.
What conversations with your loved ones help you navigate finding support and how in return can we contribute to supporting our loved ones as we ask them to make changes that affect them as well.
If I could give away a million dollars for a question that just based on how good it was, this will be the one.
What a great question.
I think it's a wonderful place for us to start with our first caller here because there are There's several questions embedded in this.
Let's start with the most practical one, because I totally identify with what Becky's saying, and I'm an overthinker like Becky is too here, right?
Because it's like, oh, you know what?
Processed foods. If I slice an apple, I guess technically it's processed, right?
But that's generally not what we mean by processed foods.
And it's not what we mean by preservatives.
Can you maybe shed some light on that?
Certainly. Obviously you can't eat a food without processing it because every food needs a knife.
I don't care what food it is.
You're gonna have to bite into it somehow, but really the concern with the factory -produced foods is that the high heat and the chemicals, and that deranges the carbohydrates, the fats and the proteins and damages them and makes them potentially very unsafe and a potential cause of cancer and other chronic diseases.
So we're really concerned about extruded breakfast cereals.
I mean, isn't it obvious that Lucky Charms is not a health food, and then we've got this seed oils like canola oil and soil oil that are in everything, including the salad dressing.
So you think you're eating healthy because you've got the salad, but then you're dumping this highly toxic oil that's been so cleaned up with solvents and heat that makes those polyunsaturated fats damage probably already rancid.
Those rancid -damaged fats become part of your cell membranes and disturb how well your cells work and may be related to problems like chronic inflammation, diabetes, cancer, and heart disease because your poor membranes are running the show.
All of life is happening on a membrane.
Every enzymatic reaction that is life itself is a membrane function.
If you have the wrong fats in your membranes, you're in trouble.
So I think we can simplify it and say, a big red bag of Skittles and a beautiful box of breakfast cereal.
Those are obviously processed foods.
Now, contemporary breads are very processed.
They're quickly made versus as old school, slow prepared, you know, the slow food movement tried to make us a way another lens for thinking about processing in a traditional way.
There's many traditional, very old, thousands of years old processes, making yogurt, making cheese, making bread that are important ways to make food more digestible and safer to eat.
That's safe processing.
But industrial factory processing.
And there's many layers of this, cause you could talk about CAFOs, which are these confinement operations for the production of eggs, chicken, meat, pork, and so on, those are problematic for other reasons, yeah.
I think there's a lot of problems here, and we're trying to just navigate through it.
Obviously we're just scratching the surface of what's going on in your book here, and on your website as well.
We'll put a link to both of those in the show notes.
Because I think this is one of those things that if you don't know that seed oils are bad for you, you're actually taught that they are good for you, right?
Or at best they're neutral, right?
And so you'd mentioned the seed oils.
I like to talk about if there are other foods that are toxic or problematic.
What is the problem with seed oils and where they found?
Right, so the seed oils is a series of oils that have been promoted since the 70s with like the corn oil margarine.
And the worst ones were the ones that were hydrogenated into solid fats.
As polyunsaturated fats are meant to be liquid like your Crisco salad dressing and they look like olive oil but they're clear and tasteless.
Those oils are used in everything.
They even change from using the traditional fats of tallow or lard for frying potatoes and things to horn and soy oil.
And canola became real popular.
These are said to be, there was a theory that the polyunsaturated fats were somehow healthier than saturated fats, which is an inside out, now disproven theory.
But theories have a life of their own.
And we build upon them and we build these house of cars that become mass confusion.
And that's what we have around fats where we're all afraid of saturated fat and meat and butter and still grabbing salad dressing.
And almost any cookie and cracker on the shelf is full of these seed oils.
It's everywhere. That's right.
And every restaurant you go to, there are a few, but you have to ask them.
In fact, there's even an app now that will show you where the restaurants that cook without seed oils, but they're few and far between at this point.
And so you have to realize that going to your average restaurant, they're gonna be using canola oil or - Yeah, soy oil.
Oh, I'm actually allergic to soy, so I was get these horrible outbreaks.
I didn't even eat any soy, I didn't have edamame or a soy latte or something.
Well, no, it happened to be in the oils that the restaurant was using to cook.
And so now I just ask a simple question.
I go into a restaurant, what is that cooked in?
If I'm having some sort of grass fed burger there.
Hey, do you use any oil on the grill or sometimes they add oil to certain things in which that is not a requirement.
Are there any other foods besides seed oils that really stand out as toxic or problematic?
Well, I'd less like to first underscore the restaurant idea because we are now so dependent on restaurant eating.
Everybody's going to some form of restaurant on a routine basis and getting these seed oils in those of us like you and I who are so allergic literally can hardly eat out at all.
You have to go to high end places that we use butter and olive oil and still grill the manager sometimes at three in the afternoon to get them to pay attention and go read their labels because they won't even give you a true answer because they think vegetable oil is not soy oil.
And they'll say, Oh, no, no, we don't use soy.
We use vegetable oil.
They don't understand that vegetable oil is the same thing is soy oil.
I've had that same conversation multiple times.
No, we don't use canola.
No, we just use vegetable oil.
Oh, you don't realize that's actually the same thing.
So all of these seed oils have an inflammatory effect because of the linoleic acid content.
Yeah, that's really the current understanding.
And so are there any other foods that really stand out to you as, oh, beware?
In terms of the processed foods.
Yes. Well, you know, by default if a factory made it versus a small business or a home cook, then you need to lift an eyebrow and think carefully about the ingredients.
I like this idea, TK, of we all have heard about the downsides of factory farming, but also just factory foods in general.
It doesn't mean they're all inherently bad, but raise an eyebrow.
Now, I'd like to wrap up this question, TK, by talking to Becky specifically about dealing with the other people in her family.
I know with me this was difficult about trying to explain my dietary choices to other people and not just explain them, but justify them to other people.
Often justifying them to other sick people.
And so I would do it in a way where I was trying to convince them that this is not just the best thing for me, but also you should change as well.
As soon as we learn about something, what do we do?
We want to then, yeah, we want to proselytize as opposed to just better understanding it for myself.
I found for me, one of the best ways to do is say, you know what, this way of eating just makes me feel better.
And that's a really difficult point to argue with, but do you have any insights for Becky?
Sure, so there's another dynamic that underlies that kind of back and forth in family life as well.
And that is the story that I have to tell myself is affected by the story that you're telling me about your life.
And so, if you say something like, we work at the same company and you say, I'm leaving this job, man.
I just don't think this is a good work environment.
well, now I have to reconcile your experience with the story that I'm telling myself about this job.
Is there something I'm overlooking?
Is there something that I'm lying to myself about?
Is this just sort of like a subjective experience that this person is having that's entirely unique to them?
And diets and exercise are two of the biggest areas where people can feel threatened, even if you are not trying to make them feel threatened.
You walk into a room and everyone's eating something very casually, having fun.
And you say, yeah, I can't eat that anymore because I've done my research and I don't like what it does to my body.
And you can try to say it in the most personal, neutral, non -dogmatic way ever, and people will still feel like, oh, oh, so what are you saying about me?
Well, what do you think of me now?
Do you think I'm some kind of loser?
Do you think I'm killing myself?
Also, if I accept what you say as true, well, then that means I've got some research to do.
And maybe I don't feel like doing that research. Maybe I just want it to have a good time.
I mean you walked in here dropping this bomb on me that makes me feel obligated to study.
I think the easier path here is to just harass you for a little bit since you're my brother or my cousin and get you to eat the M &Ms with the rest of us so we can get on with our lives.
And so with Becky, she's having this tension between her and other friends and family members who may be suspicious of her quote unquote dietary fad, right?
And I get it. There are a lot of fads out there.
Sometimes it's a weight loss fad.
Sometimes it's just a new dietary way of presenting an old idea, right?
Putting a new name around it.
But when Becky is interacting with her friends and family and maybe they're even judging her, what do you think the best way to approach that is?
I say three quick things.
Number one, just be gracious.
Understand that they are going through their own process, wrestling with tension and insecurity.
And so be gracious and compassionate towards them.
Secondly, don't justify, you know, just stay succinctly.
This is what I'm doing because it's best for me.
And it's not accompanied by any negative judgments that I have about you.
And then I think I forgot what the third thing was.
I thought it was my best point too, but I forgot.
Well, we got a lot more questions.
I'm sure we will circle back to it.
Of course, quick note for everyone.
I'm not a doctor. This is not medical advice.
You'll want to do your own research and understanding.
and if necessary, you consult your own physician or yoga instructor or Pilates instructor or a ghost whisperer.
Whoever you feel like you need to consult in order to make any changes in your life.
But none of this should be construed as medical advice.
In Alabama, we're going to save the lightning round question for next week so we can answer some more audience questions with Sally Norton here on page one.
I printed out a whole separate page.
Actually, AB printed out this page here.
or Wendy has a question for us.
My blood tests were showing a low vitamin D count, but my doctor didn't seem too concerned about my other symptoms, claiming my body could just be getting ready for menopause now that I'm 50.
Since going on an animal -based diet for almost one year, all my pains and brain fog have completely disappeared.
Now, vegans don't worry, We have a vegan question coming up next.
So, I know this is one of those topics, Sally, that is so contentious.
and I want to be clear that I'm not recommending a one size fits all.
And I see the same thing with you.
You don't recommend that.
You have a really nuanced approach and that's frustrating to me because I want the answer.
Give me the pill or the exact thing that I'm supposed to do that cures me makes me better.
And it's like, well, actually it's way more nuanced than that.
So I found for me blood tests are something that I've changed my mind about over the years, just because I've had so, so, so many of them, and most of them have not been very useful.
There are a few exceptions.
One of them can actually be a vitamin D blood test to see how deficient you are with vitamin D, but quite often we're spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on all of these different blood tests.
And they may not be pointing toward the direction in which we want to travel.
So when are blood tests a waste of time and money?
Much of the time. It's to cap and degree with you a lot, especially when you're in a disease state.
And I see this with those of us who have lowered oxalates in our diet, we're not eating the toxic level that we were before.
And the body is adjusting to now having to recover from this oxalate overload because this oxalate builds up in your tissues.
And when you stop eating it, you have to release it.
And so the body starts doing all kinds of backflips, producing more uric acid, the liver starts working harder and your numbers can go all over the place, even your EGFR, which is an estimation of how your kidneys work can be completely irrelevant and not reflective of how well you can either working so we don't really understand the tests we have and we don't understand them in the specific context of your disease often so there a tendency to treat the test and try to get that number better and i'm not interested in that i want to see somebody thrive and do well well sounds like wendy is thriving
and she's eating what she's calling an animal based diet That's a term that was coined by our former podcast guests or previous podcast guests, Paul Saladino, Dr. Paul Saladino was once upon a time known as Carnivore MD and he ate a carnivore diet, but has since changed his mind around that and realized that adding different plant foods, a lot of fruits specifically that are low and oxalates and in your book even talk about some of the fruits like mangoes that have lower oxalate content.
You can replace certain foods with lower oxalate foods if that's something you're struggling with.
But with Wendy, I'm just really happy that she's found something that has radically reduced her pain and suffering and the brain fog that she's experienced.
For the average person listening to this, Sally, will an animal based diet help with chronic pain and brain fog?
Well, you've cut out a lot of plant foods and you've probably cut way down on oxalate poisoning.
And so you're no longer poisoned with oxalate and Boyd is the nervous system, appreciate that.
But we can see reversals of a lot of problems that involve the nervous system, so it makes sense.
It also makes sense because meat and animal foods are inherently digestible and bioavailable despite the propaganda that suggests that there is a huge amount of necessary nutrients in meats that include not just the minerals and the vitamins but other nutrients we don't even give much attention to.
they are available in meat foods, milk, butter, and eggs, have nutrients in them that we need.
And so, the two keys to feeling well is not to be poisoned and to be well nourished.
And animal foods helped on both scores.
And I think that is one of the key points here, when we talk about minimalism, it's about removing those things that are effectively poisoning you.
And I like what you talk about in the book, that different people have different reactions to those things.
See, my wife who has never taken an antibiotic in her life and she grew up on a farm and she's 42 but she's fit like a 20 -year -old and she is able to eat just about anything she wants within moderation without any symptoms. And for me, I've realized that that's not my life.
And anytime I try, I'll experiment maybe once a quarter, we'll go out to dinner or something and I will try whatever she's having.
And I can feel it even with a little bit, but I also realized that the dose is in the poison as well.
One last thing to say about tests.
I'm going to talk about this on next week's episode.
A lot of gut tests are just total nonsense.
We know very little about the gut microbiome.
And I have become an amateur expert on the gut microbiome over the last six years.
The one test that has really helped me is from a company called Para Wellness Research. I'm going to put a link to it in the show notes.
I have no affiliation to them whatsoever.
BAM, in fact, I have a link here in the production notes for you.
Their recommendations really helped me.
It's a stool test you do.
I had pretty significant fungal overgrowth in both my small bowel, the duodenum specifically, as well as the colon.
And I had to do some relatively mild herbal remedies, non -prescription related remedies that really helped me out.
There were also a whole lot of prescriptions that were given to me, some very expensive prescriptions that were given to me that ruined my wallet and sometimes made me feel worse and even made me dependent on those prescriptions.
I do think there's a time and place for many of those things.
We'll talk about that next week.
We have another question here.
This one is from Angel.
Eating vegan and including yoga and dance for 20 plus years has been a healing tool for me.
But a dear family member has experienced healing with a paleo diet and a program of lifting for about 10 plus years.
I think sharing what works for us can be valuable, but what is a tonic for one, can be a poison for another.
I think that's a fair point, Angel, I'm really happy to hear that your lifestyle and not just the diet itself, but it sounds like a more holistic lifestyle has been really helpful.
And if you are thriving on a vegan diet, I'm certainly not gonna bust into this podcast and say, how dare you, right?
No, of course not. Now, of course, 99 .6 % of us, we are omnivores wheat, an omnivorous diet, meaning animal foods and plant foods of some sort, but I'm wondering, Sally, when is a vegan diet helpful or, and when is it harmful?
Well, we don't really study it in a way where we have a solid answer and we can use principles to be thinking about how well humans are set up for those foods that tend to be high in fiber.
It's hard to get enough protein on a vegan diet.
It's hard to get enough choline and some other critical nutrients.
And it is particularly risky for pregnant women and for young children.
It was outlawed in Italy to feed children vegan diet because there's enough science to show that it's pretty dangerous.
So there is a small fraction of us that seem to do all right on the vegan diet for a while.
However, your body is redundant systems of coping and it will not complain.
It is really stoic.
And you won't necessarily know when disease is going on until late stage.
You have hypertension, you need a blood pressure cuff to tell you that.
If you have hyperglycemia, you need a glucose monitor to tell you that.
So you don't always know what's under the hood.
And because we have such a belief now in plant -based eating and veganism is a superior concept.
In the minds of our culture now, you get a huge boost from that placebo effect and all that hard work you put into that diet, it does take real effort to eat a healthy vegan diet.
And so you're investing so much of your energy that in itself is healthy.
Right. And so I have at least one friend, and she's been… I have at least one friend that sounds hilarious.
But I swear, I have friends.
And it's me. It's me.
TK is not this friend, but she's actually a previous guest on this podcast, Dr. Joanne Kachaturi and she's wonderful.
She even has an animal farm out in Arizona and she's been a vegan for I think 25 years.
She's the only person I know who's been a vegan for more than a decade, who seems to be thriving on that type of diet.
I have other friends who have tried it.
and we've all tried it at some point.
Ryan and I did it for 11 months.
Well, I did it for 11 months.
He did it for a full year.
And I actually did see some benefits because I was cutting out a lot of the processed meat and processed fast food.
And so I conflated.
Oh, I was cutting out some of these poisons.
So therefore these foods must be the best for me.
Not knowing that many of the foods I was putting into my smoothie were just riddled with oxalates that would haunt me later in life.
There is that delayed effect of toxicity, where you don't know when you're being poisoned.
And there's also the benefit of a vegan diet in a short run is the type of a fast. And when you cut down on protein like you do on a vegan diet, the body cleans up excess junk and you sort of, you clean up bad stem cells and it can be actually good for your immune system to go on fast. Right, right.
And so there's something in the body called the Randall cycle and it's, what kind of fuel are you basically feeding your body and quite often it's competing and there's some controversy around this and it's a pretty complicated or at least complex process to try to discuss.
Sally, I'm looking at this person's report of how they're doing and how healing this has been.
Are you willing to say, hey, there are some people for whom this is the way to go?
Well, like I said, there is a healing period where it can be beneficial.
But I think like any diet, like the carnivore diet, if you continue too long, the side effects will start reaping into your health picture.
Let's do another question here.
This one is from Lisa.
I've had chronic inflammation for the last 10 years.
I found a functional medicine provider about three years ago that finally started getting it under control with natural products.
Earthing has helped me tremendously.
Well, I'm happy to hear about earthing.
we're actually gonna be talking about earthing quite a bit next week.
We'll save that for the next episode.
After visiting countless doctors, I mean, so many doctors, so I do different people putting scopes down my throat and up my butt and all the blood tests and stool tests and urine tests and all of these different tests.
I found that simplifying my diet was really one of three things that really helped me.
But for me, the number one thing was earthing.
And we're gonna talk about that.
In the meantime, if you want to read my essay, it just came out, it's called, I shouldn't have to deal with this because isn't that how we feel when we're, we develop sort of chronic pain or disease, Like I shouldn't have to deal with this, but I was eating healthy, I was doing my best. I, I've got all this pain.
I shouldn't have to deal with this.
You can find that over at theminimalists .com slash earthing.
It's my story of minimizing chronic disease, pain, and inflammation.
Our next question is from Susanna.
While nothing has eliminated my eczema completely, I've found some natural alternatives that have helped me keep it under control because I hated having to rely on steroid creams. For me, earthing, intermittent fasting, and probiotic supplementation helped reduce my eczema.
Maybe, Sal, you could talk about what role does food play in skin conditions, like acne or dendruff or flaky skin, and rashes, psoriasis, eczema.
And then we'll talk about the gut microbiome as well.
All of those things are signs of some sort of inflammatory reaction to something.
And so there is the puzzle of figuring out what are the triggers and you may just have this genetic tendency because as you said, your wife hasn't had antibiotics.
So she's in a position where she's way less likely to end up with these skin disorders, Because her immune system and her microbiome are how they were meant to be, potentially.
Ours, unfortunately, are different.
Once you've had a number of antibiotics or even vaccines, it's changed your body.
And so it may have set you up for these things.
So it may not just be that you can't tolerate those.
Whatever it is that's triggering us.
Now, we see in oxalate poisoning, we see a lot of skin conditions.
People have a history of Aksumaw rashes.
This is a huge subset of people who are now recovering with the low oxalate diet.
Those things will flare up on and off and sometimes flare up seriously for six months or so.
It's so bad they're itching and bleeding in the sheets.
The body really likes to use the largest organ it has.
The skin is the largest organ of detox that we have. And when it's really trying to get something dealt with, it can show up on the skin.
But not everybody has that but tendency is going to look different in different people.
Yeah. And so what you're talking about is an inflammatory process that presents itself differently in different people.
Some people might start getting acne in weird places.
That's what I get. Okay.
Yeah. Me, I get nodular acne on my scalp.
In fact, that's where it really started for me.
In my early 20s, I started going to dermatologists and they gave me Accutane.
And then we figured out, he gave me a daily antibiotic that I took for 13 years that totally I eviscerated my microbiome.
And by age 27 or so, I started getting some pretty significant issues there.
Now diet never came up into the equation at all.
In fact, it turns out that I just had a soy allergy.
And so whenever I eat soy, I would get these huge nodular acne on cysts and cysts on my head.
And I didn't need those antibiotics and I certainly didn't need them daily.
I'm not demeaning antibiotics are certainly a place for them.
But they've in fact, they're lifesaving when used appropriately.
But, used daily every single day for 13 years for acne is an inappropriate use of antibiotics.
And how many hundreds of thousands of people have been given that therapy?
Right. And in fact, they're even given that now a doxycycline is given as a preventative for STIs.
So, if you happen to have unprotected sex with someone, just go ahead and take a little bit of antibiotic before.
Even if you're not really sure, whatever, you could take an antibiotic beforehand.
And we don't know what that's doing to our gut microbiome.
We interviewed Lucy Mailing on Patreon during our quarantine conversations a few years ago.
She helped me out with a lot of gut stuff and she's one of the world's most intelligent experts around the gut microbiome.
And you know what she told me?
I know a lot about the gut, but I know about what, about 5 % of what we're going to know over the next 40 or 50 years.
And so the truth is, we know very little about the gut microbiome, and it is true, Susannah, that a lot of what we put in our body is causing a lot of different skin conditions.
That could be from oxalates, it could be from an allergy, it could be from something else.
I do wanna talk about what is the gut microbiome's overall role in our health, What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I have to agree with Lucy Mailing that we don't know enough.
We're so eager once we get a little factoid to think we know a lot more than we do and then we tend to focus on the benefits only, and not what if there's a bad side to this.
What doesn't have a dark side?
Even your best relationship is difficult work sometimes.
Your darling that inspires you everyday can still really upset you, and that's still something you have to work at.
So there's always a price to be paid, and we're not willing to look at the price.
We love this benefits -only mindset.
And that gets us into trouble with these powerful toys that we as little children are playing with like the antibiotics.
Right. And so there is a time for any of these interventions when they become the crutch for us.
This is when it becomes a problem.
I know one thing you talk about in the book is, and you and I might bifurcate a little bit here on this with respect to probiotics.
And I'm not a big fan of probiotic pills and other things like that, but probiotic foods, one thing that really helped me is there's a company called Coconut Cult.
I have no affiliation with them, but they make a really great high probiotic content coconut yogurt that I have a couple spoonfuls of each day.
And I think it's especially helpful if you just went through a round of antibiotics and you're looking to make sure you repopulate the gut microbiome, but especially as I was dealing with the fungal overgrowth in my gut, it was helpful for me to have probiotics that made my stools more regular.
There's an example of a daily therapy that's coming from a traditional technology.
Fermenting the food.
Fermenting a food. Right.
Yeah, and there's a lot more to learn because the gut itself is the gardener that shapes the microbiome when it's healthy.
And the problem when our health starts generating from these inflammatory reactions to the toxicity of foods like the spinach or the processed foods is that the energy production in the cells of the small and large intestine is compromised.
And so those cells function as compromised and they're not as good as gardeners and they lose control over what's growing in there.
It's really interesting that after a year or two, on the low -oxalate diet, people will shed their old fungal infections from anywhere in the body and they'll start to recover.
So the more we can get the cells energetically well, the more we can fix the microbiome naturally, the body doing it itself.
The big challenge is the sort of anaerobic environment of the colon and if we need to use probiotics, how do we put an anaerobic bacteria in there, and how do we do it at the right time when the body can take that and maintain it?
If you're still sick, you need that sort of daily probiotic to present some beneficial bacteria to help crowd out those funguses and help support gut health because it's a two -way relationship.
The gardener is gardening because it's benefiting from the right bacteria, just like the gardener is growing food so it can eat it.
That's what's happening in the gut.
So you need those good products of a healthy gut.
And if your gut's not healthy, you may have to support it with some probiotics.
We did a whole episode about gut health with Dr. Zack Bush.
Maybe we could put that in the show notes, Malabama.
How about you, listeners, what dietary changes have been healing for you?
Let us know in the comments real quick for right here, right now, a little segment we do, we talk about one thing is going on in the life of the minimalist. Actually, I've got two things for you today, TK.
Did you know that you can have a zoom call with the minimalists?
That's right, you can join us on the first Friday of every month during our Friday afternoon Minimalist Zoom on Patreon.
Our next fan's call is this Friday, October 4th at 3 p .m. Eastern.
What's your favorite thing about these?
Your last one, you were on fire, TK.
Oh, was I? I think it was the people, man.
It's the energy of the people.
You know, there's a magic that happens when you get human beings together in the same place.
And it's the sort of magic that none of us can produce on our own, no matter how creative or intelligent and open -minded we may be.
There's something that we co -create together that's unique.
and that's what I love about these sessions.
We'd love to have you on the call.
You can come on the screen with us.
You can have a conversation with us, or you can just turn your camera off.
Be a fly on the wall.
Patrion .com slash the minimalist. Our next one is October 4th at 3PM Eastern.
Also real quick, enrollment for the minimalist five week decluttering course.
It's called Simplify Everything.
It opens tomorrow, October 1st at simplify everything dot XYZ, not dot com, but dot XYZ, because Simplify Everything is the end of clutter.
Just like XYZ is the end of the alphabet.
That course is open for 72 hours only.
We only do this twice a year.
It's five weeks, 17 different videos.
You get a course workbook and you get to interact with everyone else who is simplifying their life at the same time.
We hope to see you over there.
All right, that is the first 33 % of episode 462.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full maximal edition with Sally Kay Norton.
You don't wanna miss this one.
We got a bunch more questions to answer.
Questions like, what causes my cravings for sweet foods, and how do I get rid of those cravings?
What role does our food intake play in arthritis, inflammation, depression, and anxiety?
What does gluten do that makes us feel awful?
What is chronic inflammation happen?
And what does it do to the brain?
What are the pros and cons of dairy consumption and how does a person's diet affect their libido and sex drive?
Also, Alabama did this 15 to 20 minute reading, this essay about the health care system, you don't wanna miss that either.
Plus we got a million more questions and simple living segments over on The Minimalist private podcast. Visit patreon .com, slash The Minimalist or click the link down in the description to subscribe and get your personal links so our weekly maximum episodes Play in your favorite podcast app.
You also gain access to all of our podcast archives all the way back to episode 001.
By the way, Patreon is now offering free trials.
So if you just wanna test drive our private podcast, you can do so for seven days for free.
Patreon .com slash TheMinimalist. Big thanks to Sally K.
Norton. Check out her latest book.
It is called Toxic Superfoods.
Visit her website, sallyk Norton .com.
We'll put a link to that as well as her YouTube channel in the show notes.
so you can dive deeper into oxalates and so much more about the foods that are making us sick.
And this is our minimal episode for today.
Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
On behalf of Ryan Nicodemus, T .K.
Coleman, Alabama post -production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave. A .B.
is over on the couch there.
Savvy D is over there by the board and the rest of our team.
I'm Joshua Morefield -Milburn.
If you leave here with just one message, let it be this.
Love people and use things because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace.
