Is the Kidney Stone Diet a Low Oxalate Diet?

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

And we are back at it again. I am back from Miami in the sun. We were talking about how cold it is.

You still have your Christmas tree up because it's your winter tree, but

Yes, that is my winter tree.

My son, every time he walks in, he's like, "That's got to go."

I'm not ready yet.

I like it though.

All right, it's too dreary.

I like it too.. Don't judge my joy, that's the whole thing.

Don't judge my joy, people. Yes. So, it's a winter tree because honestly, I know I've said this before, but this really has been the grayest summer.

Did you enjoy Miami? I saw your Instagrams and stuff like that, so I know you did. Searching for the perfect coffee and that kind of thing.

Yeah. Yeah, we're doing little videos. I recorded more, just never edited them, cuz since we've been back, I've been just non-stop going.

It's been really good and, just like my motivation. But yeah, being there, I love it. Just

Just in general, it's Miami Beach. It's South Beach, but not the like clubbing and drinking and all this stuff that like people think South Beach is. Like just being there and, experiencing the great weather, but then also the great food and culture and all the things is just It's really nice.

And we always love it.

Look, I've been to South Beach many times and yes, it is definitely all that. It is d- It is that if you decide to participate in that. Otherwise, it is.

It's filled with culture, it's a joyful place, you have the beach, you have the It's colorful, it's vibrant. You know, it's a It's a cool place and it's a great place to go in the winter when you live in Chicago like we do, so, yeah.

Yeah, and affordable. Like everyone thinks it's it's expensive, but if you're getting an Airbnb around South Beach, it's not that much. Like obviously there's high-end hotels and resort kind of experiences, but if you just want to live there, it's very attainable.

Which I always love because then I can I have a refrigerator, I can bring my special foods in there, so I like, of course, you know, I'm going to say that because of what I do for a living, but it really suits my lifestyle. I am not going out to eat all the time, that doesn't work for me and all my medical conditions, and well, the diet in general.

But, you know, it's it's fun to be able to just have some kind of control over your food. So an Airbnb is a & cheaper.

An Airbnb is a wonderful, wonderful way to do it.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I really like it. What do you say we dive right in?

Should we dive in to, today

Okay, I'm ready.

Is a little different instead of doing a question we were thinking that we would, I mean instead of doing a call-in, which we will still do and we'll have another one, in the next episode, we were thinking we were going to go with more about the Kidney Stone Diet versus a low oxalate diet. So, is the Kidney Stone Diet a low oxalate diet and sort of start there?

I, you know, Jeff actually just brought this up. He's like, "I've been thinking we should do one on this," and I'm like, it's it's freaking excellent because I get annoyed. Nobody ever wants to see me annoyed.

People will say all the time, "I'm doing Jill's low oxalate diet." This is so much more than low oxalate and anybody who's been around with us for a while has heard me say this. Oxalate is the least important thing,

But, somehow, the kidney stone- Once you take away spinach and almond products and eating the same high, really high oxalate foods over and over again without any calcium in your diet, which most people until they have a kidney stone or bone disease,

They're not doing anything about calcium, which is interesting, too, and I won't go off too much on a tangent, but I will say this: until somebody has something, like heart disease, like osteoporosis,

Like kidney stones, until we get something, not a lot of medical professionals are saying, for example, like hypertension, if you don't have hypertension, you're not paying attention to salt. I can't tell you how many times people come to me and say, "Well, what the heck? I didn't have high blood pressure, so no one ever told me about paying attention to salt."

And, so, so much of kidney stone disease, we don't know what we don't know until we get something. And then, it's the holy bejesus moment where we're scrambling to get all our information.

The reason I started off on this tangent is with the calcium part of the Kidney Stone Diet. Nobody thinks about getting any calcium, nor has most doctors said anything to you about getting calcium until you get bone disease or kidney stones.

So, that's that's super important. Overall, people just don't talk too much about diets unless it's some stupid fad diet that we want to lose weight, but really, we don't pay attention to how to eat. It's not like, "This is how to maintain good health.

This is how," you know, it's just until you get something or if you want to lose weight, we go down the rabbit hole of all kinds of crazy information.

The Kidney Stone Diet is much more than a low oxalate diet. Much more. So, I love that Jeff posed this idea.

Kidney Stone Diet is about lowering added sugar and salt, eating moderate amounts of all meat protein, not just red meat, meat is meat, and seafood and fish, moderate amounts. That means we don't do, you know, doing keto, you're eating a lot of meat because you've taken away carbs, same thing with keto, typically. So, we want moderate amounts of meat.

If you're vegan, of course, you don't have to do that, but for meat eaters, slow your roll on how much you're eating, moderate amounts, and there's great articles on kidneystonediet.com on how to figure that out.

Getting enough calcium. For men, that's 1,000 mg a day. For women who don't get their periods anymore, up to 1,200.

For women that do get their periods, up to 1,000 a day through food and drink.

And then, drinking enough water, of course. That goes without being said. And I think that's it, right, Jeff?

And then the oxalate part. So, many people will just generically say, "I'm doing Jill's low oxalate diet." No, you're not.

You're doing the Kidney Stone Diet, okay? And that's all of it. Once people lower their oxalate, which happens like this, you just stop overeating almond products and super high oxalate foods, and then

You get your calcium, and then the real work is getting all those fluids in, lowering your salt, because you're going to be amazed. I can't tell you how many times a day people come to me, I look at their urine collection report, and I will say, "Listen, Bippy, you're eating too much salt." "Jill, I don't I don't eat no salt, none at all." Well,

The pee doesn't lie, and the body doesn't make salt, so it came from the outside. Whether you know you were eating it or not is a totally different thing, and often when I'm when I'm, when I'm educating patients, I will say, "All right, okay, listen. Okay, are you by your fridge?" "Yes, I am, Jill." "Okay, go get your whatever out of the fridge.

You had this for breakfast, go get it out of the fridge. Turn it around, BUSTER BROWN, look at all the sodium." And they look at the "Oh, Jill, I had no idea."

And I will say, cuz I'm annoying, "That's for one portion. You just said you had two servings of it, so you better times two that sodium, right?"

So, the problem is, we don't know where salt is. Same thing with added sugar. Look at all your condiments for salt and added sugar.

Tons of it, okay? So, the hard part of the Kidney Stone Diet is learning how to get calcium into it,

Lowering added sugar, lowering your sodium consumption each day, getting enough fluids, fluids, and then, you know, eat a little less meat if you're overeating it, and then the oxalate.

People do the urine collection, their oxalate's 70. The next time, after we talk, they do the follow-up, it's 22, like that, okay? So, Jeff, look, it was a great question because, yes, people refer to this or a kidney stone diet in general as just a low oxalate diet.

It's not necessarily a low oxalate diet, too, by the way. We're just making sure it's not, you know, it's not 200, 300, 500 mg of oxalate you're eating a day. You get 100, that's plenty.

Most people don't get anywhere near that.

And, so, The Kidney Stone Diet, it's all encompassing. Go ahead, Jeff.

Yeah, it's almost like Yeah, and it's almost like oxalate aware, an oxalate aware diet rather than low. Like we're now aware of how much we're consuming and how much we can consume to be as healthy as possible, as to reduce our kidney stone risk, specifically speaking.

Absolutely, and I think that's a great way to put it, too. You know, so, yes, we're lowering oxalate from, you know, hundreds and hundreds you were eating a day to 100 or less, so, but the diet itself is much more complicated than that. And, look, we're not going to make any money by me saying that all the time, but it's true.

I like to manage people's expectations,

Because what people will say, they'll get a urine collection and say they don't talk to me at that point yet. And their doctor will say, "Lower your oxalate," and that's all the doctor will say. And then, the patient gets another stone.

And then, I get the phone call. "Jill, I lowered my oxalate. Why I why am I still making-" "Let me see the urine collection.

Okay, well, your salt, you're eating 5,000 mg of salt a day, your urine calcium's high because of that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's always more than oxalate on a urine collection.

Always. I've never seen a urine collection where the only thing that was wrong with it was a high oxalate, never in 24 years. It's always all of it.

Now, I'm not I'm not saying that every patient has all of it, but there's always other elements.

Because, and that's why stone disease is complicated. Stone prevention is complicated. You need to talk to people that know exactly what they're doing, just know what they're doing, okay?

And, you know, sometimes we're not getting the full advice in the in the urologist's office because they're surgeons. They're doing the best they can. It is just the way it is, right?

So, but the Kidney Stone Diet is not a low oxalate diet. The Kidney Stone Diet has several components to it: the water, the calcium, the salt, the added sugar, the meat, and the oxalate, and

It's doable. You just got to learn it. That's why you're here on YouTube.

Yeah, it's more holistic. We're looking at the entire person instead of the one thing, but it makes sense why, you would look for a low oxalate diet, say, because

That is very binary. "I am lowering one thing and that solves-" It's sort of the magic pill approach, but at least much more health like true health focused. But still, we have that inclination.

Like we really want the binary, like, "I can do this and be better. Done. I don't have to think about anything else."

Yes. And, you know, believe me, there's plenty of stone formers that vegetables don't touch their lips! So, it's it's not it's just not always an oxalate problem.

It's also just being overweight can be a precursor for stone disease, but obviously, if you're overweight, there's going to be too much added sugar and sodium somewhere down the line, too. It all goes hand in hand, right? So, typically, people who are who are overweight aren't you know,

They're eat- they're overeating calories, so maybe People will say this, "Jill,

I got these tortillas. They're low salt." "Yeah, but you didn't eat three chips, you ate the bag! A lot more salt." You know, you got to count the sodium in each portion, but it's so interesting.

This is why I love my job so much, because

The smartest people, I deal with really smart people, but they just there's no education in nutrition that is just not,

You know, under fad diet kind of stuff, trying to lose weight. You've got to really just teach people the basics. And that's what we're doing here at Kidney Stone Diet.

We're teaching, we're putting some common sense on our plate. It's one thing to learn goals for any lifestyle. It's another thing to learn how to implement them specifically for you, not the masses,

For you, because you all come to me

With different obstacles, with different emotional issues and food. You're You're all different. That's why I can do this for so many decades.

Everybody comes to me, and you have your own set of, "Here's what's going on with me, Jill." And then, we get to figure it out, the best plan, and then we come up with why these are bad habits, how do we make them good habits, how it's going to be practice. You don't turn decades worth of doing something overnight. It takes practice.

So, it's all very interesting. It really is. And, so, is the Kidney Stone Diet a low oxalate diet?

No.

The Kidney Stone Diet has part of it is about teaching about lowering your oxalate, like Jeff said, but it's all those other things as well. So, I love it, Jeff. That was a great one.

Yeah, and if you want to learn more, sort of dive deep into the Kidney Stone Diet, you can go to kidneystonediet.com, where you can find the courses, all the free materials, the weekly newsletter, which is now Sundays, if I'm, not mistaken, right? Yeah, so we moved the, little inspiration, the free weekly newsletter, but it's, weekly inspiration to, stay on track with your diet.

And you can find all of it at kidneystonediet.com. Oh, and we mentioned last time,

Just because of, people asking how they can support, we do have a Patreon now. It's just patreon.com/kidneystonediet. It's something that's just out there.

There's no pressure. We just want people to know because we've been asked, how they can support the show in ways that don't involve, maybe, being a part of the accountability calls or the Kidney Stone Diet meal plans or the various things that we have going on at the site. So, that is just one more option, but, yeah,

Tons of resources there, so we'd love it if you head over to kidneystonediet.com and check it out. Like the protein calculator is the one thing, you mentioned it, I always pull it up. I'm just going to throw it right here real quick.

It's I think it's super helpful just to be able to throw in, like, 145 lbs, so that's 53-66 grams of meat protein per day. Little things like that, I think, are really helpful to

Not have to overthink the things that are, not up to us to think about, like not to worry about, like, "I need to calculate this again this week," or whatever it is, or for this meal, or where I'm going. So, yeah, lots of resources, and I hope to add more. Like if there's any

Listen, you give me You tell You use the word gram and kilogram and people will just pass out. I It is It is Now, there's always a mathematician that's, "Well, Jill, I know." I get I know you know, okay, but 99% of people start fading out when you bring up grams and kilograms per pound, and oh, most people do. So, that Jeff made that calculator, it's very helpful to people to understand how much meat, is acceptable for you and your size, blah, blah, blah.

But read the article, too, cuz it explains several things. It's a good article.

Yeah, so that's just, kidneystonediet.com/protein. But, yeah, if you're out there and you have a question, whether we've answered it before, you're just curious, the number again is 773-789-8763, and we would love to feature your voice on a future episode. But, I think, with that, we will wrap for this week.

So, I mean, this is a good one. I hope people, can really connect those dots

Well now and see that it's a little different than just a low oxalate diet. I think that will be very helpful. Yeah, we'll be back to a listener question next week.

So, thanks again for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.

Well, thanks, Jeff, cuz this was yours today. Bye, guys!