Toxic Superfoods: How Oxalate Overload Is Making You Sick--and How to Get Better

This book has changed my life! I have struggled over the past four years with GI issues, food sensitivities, brain fog, and joint pain, that popped up out of the blue. Thought it was all long COVID related. I have had every GI test available through doctors, I’ve paid enormous amount of money to integrative doctors for every test available and have wasted an enormous amount of time and money on probiotics, prebiotics, digestive enzymes, gut diets, and the list goes on and on. I was at the end of my rope when I ran across this book. I am so very grateful I took a chance and bought this book. Oxalates was my problem! I have only been eating low oxalates for two weeks and I’m blown away! All my joint issues are gone. Brain fog is gone. I had the first normal bowel movement in 4 years this morning! I cried! I was going to cook sweet potatoes for dinner tonight and decided I will pass. It’s just not worth going back to the horrible way I felt. To sum up this book in one word is ‘Truth’. I bought into the lie that all these foods I was eating are healthy. They were killing me! The last chapter of this book is called ‘unbroken’ and I cried as I read it. I’ve felt like I was broken over the past 4 years. I am not broken! God gave me a body that is a canary in the coal mine! I am blessed that my body would not give up on letting me know something is terribly wrong! I am so grateful to Sally Norton for taking the time and having the courage to sound the alarm bell!

Sally’s book has been a life changer for me. I’ve been passionate about health & fitness for the past 30 years, continuously striving to eat healthier, be healthier. Doctors continuously encouraged my mainly vegan diet and my ambitious work out routines, and friends and family would look to me for advice and inspiration. But slowly over time medical issues began, to which I made excuses because Doctor’s said “nothing to worry about”, “you’re super healthy”, yet: early onset arthritis (had to stop running and switch to walking, hard to kayak and bike – back pain), increasing fatigue/brain fog (I should sleep more), increasing itchy skin patches (always had sensitive skin, may be my 2 new rescue dogs who aren’t hypoallergenic this time), wounds (frozen shoulder injury, minor cuts/bruises) that just wouldn’t heal. Then this past year and a half the eye issues began – floaters, eye pain, cloudiness, along with a very strange “stress/anxiety” (my career has always been stressful but rewarding – I’m no stranger to stress, but this was very different – anxiety over everything), and the final straw – an abnormal mammogram (“calcifications”). I couldn’t understand how all of this could be happening – I’m only in my 50s and supposedly living a very healthy lifestyle. My eye doctor, who shares my passion for health & fitness, recommended Sally’s book to me. He discovered it after he started having eye and other issues and realized his oxalate consumption from his “super healthy diet” was the cause of his issues (he did not have kidney stones either). While reading Sally’s book I was in shock - page after page – the best way to describe it is a “golden aura moment” when everything became clear/puzzle pieces fit. I was eating about ~2500-3000 mg of oxlates per day – and thinking it was super healthy. I couldn’t believe it. I know that if I had read it any sooner, I wouldn’t have been able to accept the fact that everything I knew to be true was, in fact, not true. I would have made excuses about the fact that I never got a kidney stone, so my body must be able to tolerate the oxalates. Yes, it was hard to accept, but I knew I had to try it – worse case, I could go back. I followed the plan in the book and within 2 weeks the fatigue, brain fog and extreme stress/anxiety was completely gone – I was back to my old self. Things have continued to improve over the past 5 months – shoulder pain from a 3-year-old injury is now gone, joint pain/”early onset arthritis” is significantly improved (back to running, and no more joint pain in my hands, no more back pain), no more itchy skin patches (thankfully because my dogs weren’t going anywhere!), eye pain & cloudiness is now sporadic/not 24/7. As Sally said, I know I’m still in the “honeymoon” phase and the hefty oxalate dumping is yet to come (so far, it’s been tolerable). But because I now know firsthand that high oxalate consumption was my problem, I am committed to riding out the oxalate dumping storm to brighter, truly healthy days ahead. I hope this book will be as informative and game-changing for everyone struggling to reform from a high oxalate “super healthy” diet like me. As George Bernard Shaw said, “progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything”. Best of luck to all on your journey to better health. Thank you, Sally, for all of your work and dedication to sharing this life saving information. I’m forever grateful.

Toxic Superfoods is a jaw dropper and a must read! I have gallstones and read a study where a nut free diet had shown patients' gallstones dissolve. This is consistent with Ms. Norton's explanation of nuts being a no-no high oxylate food which can contribute to kidney and other calcification stones. Out of the blue, my libido has dramatically improved. I think that is a sign of healing. This book is not just for kidney impaired individuals. SN demonstrates how high oxylate foods undermine everybody's health, from fibromialgia, to MS, and the list goes on. The oxylate free lifestyle is definitely the new health paradigm shift. She advises, try living oxylate free, then just to see how bad they are, try an experiment of eating a higher oxylate food.I did this incidentally and was sick as a dog after unknowingly drinking a product with rhubarb in it. I'm a devotee to this program.