In this episode, Jill discusses the topic of eating spinach on a low oxalate diet. Jill dives into the issue of spinach and its high oxalate content, which can increase the risk of kidney stones. She explains that spinach is often overeaten and recommends taking it off the table to reduce oxalate intake. She suggests substituting spinach with other greens like kale. And, finally, she also touches on the importance of getting enough calcium and the flexibility of dietary choices.
Takeaways
- Spinach is high in oxalate and can increase the risk of kidney stones if overeaten.
- It is recommended to limit spinach intake and substitute it with other greens like kale.
- Getting enough calcium is important for reducing oxalate absorption.
- Dietary choices should be flexible and tailored to individual needs and preferences.
Jeff Sarris
This week on the podcast, can I eat spinach on a low oxalate diet?
Jeff Sarris
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.
Jill Harris
And I’m Jill Harris, your Kidney Stone Prevention Nurse, nurse, nurse, nurse. Hi Jeff.
Jeff Sarris
I like that. That’s what we need to put as your little tagline below your name. Just nurse, nurse, nurse. I like it.
Jill Harris
Nurse, nurse, nurse, nurse, nurse, nurse. You know, it’s a Saturday. It’s a Saturday sometime in April and it’s beautiful outside. And so here we are taping. But you know what? I love working on the weekend. I think, you know, we own our own businesses. We can work whenever we want. So it’s kind of fun to work on the weekend when most people aren’t. I always feel kind of special. I don’t know why. I mean, it’s kind of silly, but I…
Jill Harris
Well, and I think that plays to the exact mirror image of it too, because going out and doing things during the week versus the weekend is always so much more satisfying. I don’t know why.
Because you feel like you’re playing hooky and also, you know, living in a city, it’s less busy. So you could do errands, you know, it’s just easier. It’s just easier moving around in a highly populated place, right? So yeah, it’s amazing. Last night, I went to an art opening and it was, you know, I love my art, right? So I just love looking at what creatives are doing in the world. All over the country, all over the international people were flown in. It was a lot of fun. Really wonderful. Yeah. Well, and I heard you’re going to Italy. Go ahead.
Jeff Sarris
That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah. You can kind of see. Yeah, we’re going on Monday. I was just saying, you can kind of see some of your art behind you, but yeah, like your, your place is just like filled with like awesome, beautiful pieces that you’ve found. And it’s not that it’s famous pieces. It’s like, these are things that you’ve found just in your, in your travels and you’re just going around and spotting it, which I really like it’s, it’s curated by you, which makes it so much more special.
Jill Harris
Yes, I get, so after I was sick, I was never somebody that cared about art. Not that I didn’t care, it just wasn’t on my radar, you know? Also, I owned homes and I hated putting nails in my walls. I mean, honestly, that’s why I’m like, I don’t wanna, you know, I’m always buying and then selling, buying, now I live in an apartment and my landlord’s not gonna be happy there are nails all over my wall. But, you know, after I got sick, I was like, I want to wake up and see things on my walls that bring me happiness. So a lot of patients, because they’ve seen in pictures, they’re like, you have a lot of weird art up. It’s all different. There’s different themes in my bedroom, in my bathroom. It’s all different kind of crazy art. And a lot of animation. There’s a lot of different things. And so people are like, why do you choose the pieces you do? And if I can envision myself looking at it every morning and feeling joy, it’s going on my wall. That’s how I do it. And so it just, you know, I don’t know what to tell you. It just brings me so much joy. So it’s not like this stuff is expensive, but you know, local artists, I’m always really interested in that, local pieces. And so it has brought me so much joy. And I know people are like, we don’t care about your art and joy. We want to talk about spinach. Okay. Okay.
Jeff Sarris
But yeah, like I can totally relate to that too, because like completely at the edge of the frame on the wall back here, you can’t see it because it’s just like, it’s out of focus. But there’s a piece from a photographer that I just love his, uh, his name is Jeremy Cowart. He does, he’s done like, like famous people and things, but he did this entire series where he took pieces of like famous people, like photos he’s taken in the past. And he calls these block. So he takes eyes, he takes a face, he takes a background, takes all these different things and makes a completely new, really artistic representation of like a person that doesn’t and couldn’t exist. Just like different eyes, different mouths. But it’s so cool. And he did a digital version, and then I ended up printing it, but his digital version will expand. So you can do this and see the layers separately. It’s brilliant. It’s just something that I don’t know, I just, I see it every day and I just love it on the wall. It just, I don’t know, it makes me happy.
Jill Harris
That’s how you pick art. And you know, a lot of people will say, well, I feel like I don’t know about it. You just pick it because it makes your heart feel happy, right? And again, envision yourself waking up. So there’s sometimes I’m like, I look at something and I’m like, eh, do I want to see this every day? No, then I’m not buying it, right? But if it just, if it just grabs me and you know, I’m actually pretty quick. I know what I like, you know? So it’s, it’s just a wonderful thing. It’s kind of like theater to me because even if the play wasn’t that great, the fact that somebody was on stage live and performed for me, for an audience, I feel so privileged. And when somebody makes art, it’s coming just from this creativity from their brain, and now I get to have it. I just feel so privileged that I get that. You know what I mean? So yeah, it makes me so very happy. So at this art show last night, there were just so many really interesting pieces and just talking to the artists and it was amazing. Just doesn’t even cost 20 bucks. There’s a whole night of really just joy and enjoyment, you know, so loved it, loved it.
Jeff Sarris
Yeah, there’s so many awesome things, so many awesome things like that that are outside of the norm. Like not just going out to drink or going to a movie. Like those things are fun, but it’s like when you get that, that novel experience, it means so much more sometimes.
Jill Harris
And it’s so inspiring and I don’t know, it just fills me up. I just love it. And you know, now that Nate’s going to NYU, I mean, you know, all the art and all the crazy stuff there. I mean, oh, that’s gonna be so amazing. And one of the artists that I bought a couple of pieces from last night, he’s based in New York. So I’m like, oh, I will be visiting you there. Don’t you worry about it, you know? So yeah, really exciting. That’s my life right now.
Can I eat spinach on the Kidney Stone Diet?
Jeff Sarris
So should we dive right in to spinach? We realized, like we talked about spinach a lot. We talked about oxalate, but we don’t really have something specifically dedicated to spinach itself. So before we started, we were just sort of like, oh, yeah, why don’t we start there today?
Jill Harris
I mean the number one thing is always spinach. Jill, I can’t have spinach anymore. So there are two things that I take away. And then everything else is back on your table, folks, is spinach and almonds. Those are the two things I take away. Spinach, because it’s, if, you know, on the Harvard list, cooked spinach, which winds up being about a half a cup, a half a cup cooked, is 755 milligrams of spinach.
And so the deal is nobody’s having half a cup. Who the hell’s having, nobody’s getting spinach. You could put a whole saute, a whole pan of spinach. And when you’re done with it, you have about as much as your eyeball. I mean, it’s so little, right? So the reason we can’t just blame spinach folks too on, you know, you made a stone because of just spinach. If you had a spinach salad once a week, would you have gotten a kidney stone?
If you had gotten calcium, if you were getting your calcium needs met every week or every day, would you have gotten a kidney stone by eating that one spinach salad once a week? Probably not. What I hear all day long, what I hear all day long in the kidney stone prevention course, in the private calls, in my group calls, Jill, I was eating spinach every single day.
I got diabetes, I was told to eat some almonds, spinach is great, I was drinking spinach smoothies, spinach, spinach, spinach. It is because people overate spinach, that’s the problem, along with getting absolutely no calcium. So because spinach is so high in oxalate, for such a small amount, I take it off the table. Because the oxalate…
We give the goal of 100 milligrams of oxalate a day. We want you to stay under 100 milligrams. That’s the goal in the Kidney Stone Diet goals. So, I mean, you know, half a cup of spinach is almost 800 milligrams of oxalate. That’s off, right? So that’s the issue.
I’m always careful about saying this publicly. If you ate a spinach salad once a month, are you all going to get kidney stones? Most likely not. But I don’t know of one kidney stone former that’s going to do that because they’re so petrified of ever getting another kidney stone again. So I just take it off. I just take it off people’s menu. I take almonds off their menu. And that’s how we roll. Remember, 100 milligrams of oxalate or less a day.
Get your calcium needs met every single day. For men and women, 1 ,000 milligrams of calcium a day. If you’re a woman who no longer gets her period, up to 1 ,200 milligrams of calcium a day. This helps lower urine oxalate too. So that’s the story. I take spinach away. It’s just too high in oxalate. Why chance anything? End of story. Substitute kale. And people are like, ah, kale’s terrible.
I know it’s not the same as spinach, folks. It doesn’t have that little sweetness spinach does. Also, kale is rough, so you have to massage it. Massage it if you’re having a kale salad. But you’ll get used to it. You can use other greens. But spinach, off the table. Go ahead, Jeff.
Jeff Sarris
Yeah, isn’t it funny? Like spinach was always the cliche, like that no one wanted to eat spinach. It’s like, oh, it’s disgusting. And it’s like boiled or whatever, but we’ve sort of culturally, I think, like we just collectively, maybe not culturally, we collectively decided like spinach is healthy because there’s a lot of things about it that are good. So then we’ve decided and sort of reformatted our brain to be like, I like spinach now, but then this major part.
This major issue that it sort of presents with the enormous amount of oxalate now throws a little monkey wrench into our like collective shift over there. It’s kind of funny.
Jill Harris
It’s very interesting and it’s a very good point, Jeff. You’re absolutely right. I remember back in the day watching Popeye cartoons. And every time he was eating spinach, all the kids were like, oh, that’s disgusting. But yes, I mean, it has become such a cultural, I do think it’s a cultural thing. It’s very common. If you Google green smoothies, spinach is gonna be the star in each one of those smoothies, absolutely.
And so whenever I’m seeing, not only seeing, but hearing, my patients will say the number one and two foods that they were overeating were almonds and spinach because I got diabetes, my dieticians said, and nothing against dieticians, of course. But what we healthcare professionals, telepatient, you gotta be really specific, because maybe somebody says, you don’t have spinach, have almonds. Well, human beings take that to a whole new level and they overeat it because if something’s healthy, if I eat more of it, that’s gonna be even more health. Well, not in the kidney stone world. So I’m always talking about eating a wide variety of foods. Don’t eat the same foods over and over every day. People hate that advice. People don’t like when I say that. I get it. People wanna eat their oatmeal with blueberries for 20 years straight because they don’t wanna think about food.
But I push back and I’m like, you tell me. I don’t know what else you want to think about. I think food is really important and how you nourish your body is a very important thing to think about. So I’m not saying you have to have 15 different breakfast choices. I’m just saying, can you have an egg sometimes? Can you have avocado toast, something a little bit different for breakfast? That’s all I’m saying. What do you do for breakfast, Jeff?
Jeff Sarris
So I don’t tend to eat breakfast too much. I’ll have coffee sometimes. Sometimes I’ll add a little oat milk to the coffee, but a lot of times, yeah, I don’t eat until like a lunch or a dinner. And that is the challenge. Like my, my goal, like what I’ve, what I generally feel best with is a 16 eight fast. So 16 hours of fasting, not eating, and then eight hour window of when I can eat.
But we’re so busy now traveling and doing all these things that’s really up in the air and nothing is, uh, they’re not a hardened. It’s not a hard and fast rule for me. It’s more just, I know if I do that, I feel a little better. Um, just for me, it works for me and that’s what we have to figure out for all of us. And like, that’s really the thing that having the same thing all the time. It’s one more decision that we can pull away. It’s like on this show, I have been wearing this shirt for a year, not this exact one. I have like five of them but I’ve been wearing this simple black tee on almost every single episode. That’s an area where I decided I don’t want decisions. I want to take it away from there. And then I have a little more energy, say, to make decisions on the things that matter to me most. And health, I think, is that thing for me that really does matter. So I want to put my mental energy there along with the other things.
Jill Harris
I think that completely makes sense. And people say, oh, Jill don’t want us to do intermittent fasting. That’s a bunch of bulldo. I don’t care if you guys do IF. That’s absolutely fine. I do worry you may have a hard time getting all your calcium needs met in that little window. But look, there’s nothing special. And Jeff, I love that you do IF. Everybody, and that’s why the KSD, the Kidney Stone Diet, is just a set of goals. Because everyone’s going to do what works for them. You all have different medical conditions.
Flexibility in Dietary Choices
Jill Harris
You all have things that you enjoy. Some people don’t like breakfast, so I don’t care. I didn’t eat breakfast, actually, till I was in my 50s. I never liked breakfast. I just wasn’t hungry in the morning. So, and then one day, and also I want people to understand that they can be flexible. Like one day you may wake up and I did, I’m like, damn, I want some breakfast, and I’ve been eating it for the last, I don’t know, seven years. Seven years I think, and now it’s one of my favorite meals and I also like to have typically a little larger breakfast, little larger lunch, and now a lighter dinner and that I just started maybe a few weeks ago. So I’m always tweaking what works for me because of all my bowel issues, my schedule, everything and that’s perfectly okay. Nobody’s married. I like to say I’m just a flexitarian. No one’s married to one diet. If you are, that’s awesome but it’s good to get outside of the box sometimes because as we age we may have different needs as we get more medical conditions we may have different needs so that’s what I love about lifestyle that’s what I love about nutrition number one there’s always a million different things to learn that are new because nutrition is such a newer thing to study and also I mean it’s just fun to tweak things and think outside of the box and try new foods and trying new ways of fitting it in, you know, I don’t know. I’m a nerd that way and it’s what I do for a living. So I enjoy thinking about how am I going to nourish my body? How am I going to move my body differently this week? Like I like that. And when people push back and say, I don’t want to think about these things, I’m like, listen, man, you don’t want to get sick. And I’m not saying everyone who has a poor diet or doesn’t move their body gets sick.
But you don’t feel your best, that I know for sure 100%. So where else do you want to put your time? Because illness is going to take it somewhere along the line. So why not be proactive? Those are my thoughts after being very, very sick in my life. I like to be proactive. It’s really important to me. So just my thoughts.
Jeff Sarris
Well, I think that’s a perfect note to wrap on for this week. If you’re out there with a question, the number is 773 -789 -8763, because we’d love to feature your voice on a future episode. So you can just leave a voicemail there, or you can always record a voice memo on your phone. Email that to podcast at kidneystonediet .com because we know we have some international listeners and that’s just a better way to reach us there.
And, if you want to support the show, people have asked, we have a Patreon and it’s just for the people who want to contribute. And that’s just patreon.com/kidneystonediet. You can find that in the link in the description below this video or podcast or however you’re consuming this. And I just wanted to say thank you to Steven who joined a Patreon this month for the support. We really appreciate it. It means a lot because we want to reach as many people as we can in an absolutely free way because this is meant to help as many people as possible. So that support really means a lot.
But if you want to dive deep and you want to have some of the premium content, the kidney stone prevention course, which is completely been re just updated recently, all new videos. And yeah, it’s just we leveled up the production quality because I have fun with that. So it was his time, you know, and yeah, so that’s all new. You can find the Kidney Stone Diet Meal Plans and everything at kidneystonediet.com.
Jill Harris
Yes, Steven, thank you so much for joining the Patreon. Everybody, please subscribe. We’re almost at 10 ,000. We’re trying so hard. We’re at like 9 ,500 and something. So we’re working really hard to get 10 ,000 subscribers. And the meal plan is, we have so many new recipes in there and I just came up with one that’s not in there yet, but it’s gonna be in there soon. A gluten-free, vegetarian, high protein, low-net carb pizza coming your way, folks, at the Meal Plan. So, yeah, thanks Steven. That’s so kind. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that. That’s so nice.
Jeff Sarris
And that is the pizza recipe too. We were talking about it before, but that has me very excited. I’m excited to get that out there and also to make it for ourselves because yeah, we’re gluten free and that’ll be nice. I think with that we’ll wrap. Thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next time.
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