How much oxalate is in sweet potatoes?

The following is designed to entertain and inform, not provide medical advice. Always consult your doctor before starting any treatment.

SPYR.

Welcome back to the Kidney Stone Diet podcast, the show about reducing your kidney stone risk and living your best life. I'm your host and fellow student, Jeff Sarris.

And I'm Jill Harris, your kidney stone prevention nurse.

You got your bright colors going on again.

That's me.

We were talking about that earlier, how you're wearing so many more bright colors than you used to.

I'm telling you, once I embrace something, it's all over. Now, I'm just like a bag of Skittles at any good time.

I really am. I don't know. I just am so happy about it.

I'm just one big, colorful thing.

But, yeah, I mean do you find happiness in the brightness then,?

Yeah, I am. I am. And I think, so now, you know, if I'm going out, it's always black.

I wear no lime green, okay? I am a minimalist in my outer, yeah, black jeans, black t-shirts. I just love it.

But in my everyday life, I'm like I'm just embracing it. I'm just embracing it. It's just happy and good.

And, again, it's so cloudy, but I'm going to continue this on in the summer. I sure am. I'm I'm I'm inverted.

Yeah, we'll have to see. I don't know if I'll get that far, but I'm planning on maybe getting, you know, some like white shirts to go with the black.

I was going to say you can get a white shirt. We'll start you off there.

Yeah, Amara actually got a white hoodie when we were in Miami last, and she was pushing back so much. I'm like, "It looks awesome. You should wear it." And now she wears it all the time, so who knows?

Maybe I'll be next. We'll see.

You should.

But, yeah, should we dive in this week? Because we are going to do one more FAQ.

Yeah, you know, I know, folks, we, you know, the caller in things, but sometimes I'm like, "Oh, we need this video, this video." This video because, you know, these are questions I get every day in the Facebook group. So now we will just have a video that we can say, "Watch this," right? Instead of answering the same question.

These are things that, you know, for 24 years people have asked on the daily, so we have to. And there's millions of them. I mean I can come up with 20 in 5 minutes what we should be doing, right?

There's so many, so, yeah, let's do it.

And it's funny, too, because now you say 24 years, and that just always reminds me that we've been doing this for years already. It feels like we just started the show, but, I mean, this will be we're at 1:30, so what would be 156 would be 3 years. So, we're coming up on 3 years in like half a year.

So, we're 2 and a half years in. Doing too much math for right now, but you know what I'm saying. When you say 24 years, I'm like, "Oh, wow!

Yeah, when we started, it was like 21 or 22." So, yeah, pretty wild.

It's amazing.

Yeah, anyway, today's topic, we're talking about sweet potatoes and kidney stones.

Sweet potatoes. Well, already I'm excited because I know Dave, our other partner, he's going to make probably I'm going to say he'll he'll automatically make something orange. And orange is really my favorite color.

Orange is my favorite color.

Nice.

So, yeah, I can already see the thumbnail's going to be orange. It makes me happy. Sweet potatoes.

"Jill, I'm so sick of not being able to have a sweet potato." "Well, Christopher, who said you couldn't have a sweet potato? That's the silliest thing I've ever heard." "But, Jill, they're high in oxalate." Okay. And people who, you know, "I'm a gym rat, and I'm I haven't done anything with it, but I'm a certified personal trainer, too, just because I love I love it all, so I just got certified.

But, and I don't have time to do anything with it, but you know, it's the regular bodybuilder kind of diet: sweet potato, chicken, broccoli. Sweet potato, chicken, broccoli." I get a lot of fitness people that get kidney stones because they're eating five sweet potatoes a day. So, Harvard, which is the oxalate list we use at Kidney Stone Diet, sweet potatoes for one cup are 28 mg of oxalate.

Harvard says they are very high. So, when people see the adjectives of very high, they just take sweet potatoes out of their diet. Because Harvard's original lists has those adjectives.

It will have the oxalate level. It'll have the oxalate value, and it will have the oxalate level: very high, little, none, high, moderate. And so people don't look at the numbers.

They just look at what it says. So when something's listed as very high, of course people are going to stop eating it. So people come to me, and they're like, "I've lost 30 lbs.

I have nothing to eat. Harvard says it's very high." I give them a different way to look at this. I'm giving you 100 mg of oxalate, and I'm putting it in a bank account.

With your bank account, I'm giving you a debit card. You're grown. You're all grown.

Use that debit card however you wish. Don't overdraft your oxalate bucks. So, you sweet potato for one cup is 28 mg.

You got lots left, okay? So, what we did, Jeff and I and Dave, what we did is we made an oxalate list. It is the original It is the Harvard list.

We just took away the adjectives, and we call it the Safe Oxalate List. And you just go by the numbers. Stop looking at high and very high.

It means nothing in the grand scheme of things. So, if you have 100 mg of oxalate, if you have 100 oxalate bucks in your bank account, you can withdraw 28. Shit, you could you could have two cups if you wanted.

I would pair it with some calcium-based beverage, so you can sop up that extra oxalate, because calcium and oxalate bind in your intestine, and the oxalate will leave through the stool. If you ate 50, you know, mg of oxalate, you know, some of that is going to be reabsorbed back into the body if it doesn't have some kind of calcium product to bind with, which is another reason people got kidney stones.

They weren't getting their calcium needs met, because no grownup does. So, there's a couple things before I go on. If you have malabsorption issues, maybe a gastric bypass patient, you will have maybe less oxalate in your bank account, as your doctor orders, because you already overabsorb oxalate because of your bariatric surgery, so check with your doctor on your own oxalate level.

If you're a healthy individual and don't have any malabsorption issues, you can safely have 100 mg of oxalate a day. So, you get rid of the adjectives, and you can see there's so many foods. I spend so much of my day bringing foods back on people's plate that they didn't think they could eat, and sweet potatoes are one of those things.

And remember, folks, nobody eats one of anything and gets a chronic disease. It's what we do over time in the amount that we do it. So, sweet potatoes, can you keep them on a lower oxalate diet?

100%, you can have your sweet potatoes. Eat them within reason. I eat sweet potatoes, and what I do, remember, I'm little.

I'm 5' 2" and 118 lbs, so, but I do like sweet potatoes. So, what I do when I, you know, typically, they're pretty big. So, I'll make one sweet potato, and I cut it up in 1/4s.

So, and I eat a 1/4 with my meal, and I'll have that a couple days a week. So, I just split it up. I'm not and because there's kidney stone formers in my family, so I everything I ask you guys to do, I do.

I haven't made a stone yet. So, whatever I ask you to do, I do, too. So, I know it's also hard, but the oxalate portion, everyone wants to focus on that all the time.

It's not hard, folks. Stick to your Don't overdraft your account. And, you know, even if you're a vegan, it's because you ate five cups of beans.

You got no calcium. It's all the things you're doing every day in big, large amounts. So, if you stick and don't overdraft every day, you can and get your calcium needs met, of course, you can have a sweet potato.

Split one with your wife. Split one with your partner. I mean, split one with your roommate.

You don't have to eat the whole thing, either. It's not a problem. But even if you did eat a whole sweet potato on one meal, listen, guys, just get right back on track.

That's all. I'll always say that. We don't get chronic illness when we get right back on track.

We get chronic illness when we have something we shouldn't have, I don't feel that way, but that's how people think about food, when we when we have something that is bad for us, we feel so bad about ourselves then, that we continue eating poorly until, you know, months turn into years, we gain weight, we get chronic illness.

But one ding dong don't make a disease, okay? So, we need a shirt that says that: "One ding dong don't make a disease." But it doesn't. It's what we do every day, year after year.

So, we're going to enjoy our sweet potatoes. We're not going to eat five of them a day like my bodybuilder friends do. And we're going to have them, you know, in a couple cups or less.

Split it with your partner and have it with calcium. All will be good. Promise.

And I say these, "What do you mean you promise? You can't How do you know?" Because I'm looking at all the follow-up urine collections. Patients come to me, their oxalate is high.

I give them a consult. They call me for their follow-up urine collection. Everything's within normal range, or we still have work to do with some salt and, you know, whatever.

But the oxalate is It always comes down. It always It can go I'll have an oxalate level Tammy comes to me when she first comes with her urine collection it was 125. We do the follow-up a couple months later, she sends me her new urine collection, it's 28.

People, it's so fixable, unless you have a medical condition that's making you overproduce oxalate or overabsorb it. Otherwise, folks, kidney stone disease is not an oxalate problem once you take away the highest oxalate foods and stop eating them in any amount you want, because it's a friggin' superfood. Eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

The only foods I take away are almond products, because people tend to overeat and do them, and spinach, because it's over 600 mg a cup, and nobody just has one cup of spinach, because it's so little. So, it's so it's thousands of milligrams of oxalate. It's that's what I take away.

Everything else within moderation, everybody can lower their oxalate along with getting their calcium needs meet. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom, baby, that's how we do it at kidneystonediet.com.

Yeah, it is! And if you want to find the Safe Oxalate List, you can just Google "Kidney Stone Diet Safe Oxalate List," or you can go to kidneystonediet.com and type that into the search bar, and you'll find the post. Actually, I could bring it up right now.

It's the Safe Oxalate List for Kidney Stones, and then you can scroll down and either do the searchable or download it by entering your email right there. But the searchable one, we still show the levels that they show on the oxalate list. It's essentially a tool to have easier access to the oxalate list that Harvard provides.

So, that is specifically you'll see some of the things on there, as well, are very specific in terms of a type of cereal or this or that. But we wanted to present it exactly as it was represented, but we have the Safe Oxalate List, just so you know then, okay, here's all the data, but now here's what matters. Here's what I need to focus on, or what I want–

And here's the other thing. Yes, here's the other thing. The original Harvard list with all the adverbs, high, very high, is 27 pages.

The Safe Oxalate List is also 27 pages. So, basically, we took, you know, I mean, that's what I'm saying. Once you take away spinach and almonds, you still have all those foods you can have.

You just can't eat as much as you want of one food. And that's not just for kidney stones. It's with anything.

Our body is really complex. It would like a wide variety of food, not the same damn oatmeal you have for breakfast every day. And I know there's always a comment, "Well, I like my oatmeal for breakfast every day." Okay!

But I'm just saying, even if you could just do something simpler, instead of the same oatmeal with blueberries, could you put strawberries on top? I mean, just something a little bit different, so your body gets a little bit different. I know that we don't like change, people, especially folks my age and up.

But I'm just saying, just think about it. Don't change nothing today. Just think about it.

A wide, varying amount of food is a nice thing, instead of broccoli every day or cauliflower. Can we try to get like 10 vegetables in our repertoire and move them around a little? Just try.

There's lots of different ones. Just try. That's all I ask.

Yeah. Yeah, it's all just a journey and how you choose to take this journey and, specifically, the journey through our diet and how we're approaching it. So, yeah.

Baby steps, that's all it is.

Baby steps. Always baby steps, yeah.

But, yeah, so, if you have a question, if you would like to get your voice on this on one of these future episodes, we'd love to have you. The number is 773-789-8763. You can leave a voicemail, your name, where you're from, and we'd love to hear from you.

We know we have we have a few in the backlog, in the queue, so we will get to everyone. But thank you all for tuning in, for subscribing, for liking, for commenting, everything you do that helps us reach more people. And we truly appreciate it.

It means a lot when–

We do appreciate it. Yes! And subscribe, please, because that helps people find us instead of, you know, the junky stuff on the internet.

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I welcome those comments, as well. Let's have a Let's have a chat about it.

Yeah, healthy discussion is very valuable.

Yes, absolutely. As long as there's kindness. I don't care what you say, but there's got to be kindness.

That I will delete unkind things. I'm kind of fanatic with that, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, with that, we will wrap, and we'll see you next week.

See you next week!