Low Oxalate Meals

This week, Jill answers a listener question about low oxalate meals and recipes.

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.

Jeff Sarris: We’re back.

Jill Harris: We’re back at it. I took Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, so we’re during Thanksgiving. This is Thanksgiving weekend break. So, I’ve had some–which, of course just means, you know, I’ve been on the Facebook group, I’m doing stuff behind-the-scenes, obviously, but you know, I’m not taking client calls and stuff. I’m not doing active phone calls. So it’s been a nice little break, but I feel kind of lost in the world not screaming about kidney stone stuff. I mean, I need the break, people, don’t get me wrong, but I always miss everybody, too, when I take a break. I have to be honest, even after all these years. I’m addicted to kidney stone patients. Addicted!

Jeff Sarris: Well, it’s the connection with people. You know, that’s the big thing in the end.

Jill Harris: It really is! It’s the connection with people. It’s also interesting, too, because, you know, I live in a very busy part of the city and so many people left the city to go back home for Thanksgiving. So, you know, there’s no people walking the dogs or anything. So yeah, I’m like a connection creature. So, for me, it’s been kind of like, although I’ve enjoyed my time, you know, it’s been it’s been interesting for me. So there’s that. Did you have a nice holiday, Jeff?

Jeff Sarris: Oh, yeah, it was good! It goes by quick, you know, but yeah, a little time off. It’s funny because it’s the same thing. I’m always building and doing and working on the things that we’re doing. So, it’s weird to have a little break because then my mind is just like, “Ah, but I want to get back to this, or I want to finish this, or I want to push forward on this.” So, it’s hard to get away and really disconnect because it’s so interwoven into who I am, who you are, and everything.

Jill Harris: Yeah, people are always like, “Oh, you’re so lucky. You work by yourself, for yourself, or whatever.” It’s like, “Yeah, we do, but when you do, you’re working, typically, seven days a week.” I mean, you can take a Monday off, if you’d like, but you’ll be working on Sunday. You know what I mean?

Jeff Sarris: Well, it’s Sunday right now!

Jill Harris: Exactly! We’re working! So, you know, it’s just interesting. I feel the same way, too. We’re just so grateful we love what we do because, honestly, when you love what you do, you never feel like you’re working. So, it’s pretty amazing to have this life that we have, Jeff.

Jeff Sarris: Definitely! So, with that, should we dive right into this week’s question?

Jill Harris: Yeah, let’s go, baby.

Listener Voicemail: My name is Joyce McNeil, and I’m just trying to find out some information about low oxalate meals that I can eat to prevent kidney stones. Oh, and I live in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Jill Harris: Fayetteville.

Jeff Sarris: All righty.

Jill Harris: Is that it?

Jeff Sarris: That’s the whole one. There was a little more silence at the end, but I will just pause it right there.

Use our meal plans! They’re quick, easy, and affordable

Jill Harris: Okay, Joyce, from Fayetteville, North Carolina. That was the most adorable voice I’ve ever heard, quite frankly. Wasn’t it? So, low oxalate meals. Well, good question, right? So we definitely have an answer to that. We have a low oxalate meal plan and you can find that at kidneystonediet.com under “Meal Plan.” It’s a subscription service, $19 a month. It’s very cheap and cancel it at any time. You’ll get, every Sunday, you get seven days worth of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack recipes sent to your email. And so it will give you recipes that you can make for the week. Maybe you just want to make one thing. It doesn’t matter however you choose to do it, but you have all those options each week and every Sunday you will get a new meal plan sent to you.

All the food has been figured out, the salt, the added sugar, the calcium, the oxalate. So, listen, we have that meal plan service because people have been asking me forever to do that and there we go. There it is, so you’re going to love it. The meals are delicious. You’re going to see how much you can really eat because everybody thinks they have to give up everything. Not true. There’s beans on there. There’s chocolate in some snacks. Again, it’s always going to be portion, not perfection. We take away almond products and spinach, and everything else is back on your table as long as you’re able to eat it within portion size.

Now, if you’re like me and, like, for me, I can’t have Cheez-It’s in my house because I’ll eat the whole box in one sitting. I will. It doesn’t come in my house. So, you may say, “She just said, Henry, I could have chocolate. What the hell is she talking about it’s high oxalate.” It is, but if you have a square or two after dinner, nobody’s making a stone with that. You get your calcium had every day, you’re fine. It’s when we let things in our house, like chocolate, that you’re like, you know, “If I have a couple squares, Jill, I’m having the whole bar.” Not for you, then. Chocolate has to leave the house. But the meal plan–so that’s there at kidneystonediet.com/meal plan. You’ll find it. Jeff will put the link up or do something.

But, Joyce, in general, make what you want to make. You have the Harvard list, that’s the Harvard oxalate list. Again, if you go to kidneystonediet.com, the Start Page, you’re going to see the most important resources that I want you to look at when you first start. So you have everything in a row, so you know the most important stuff. But a low oxalate meal plan is just looking at the Harvard list and making foods that you want. You want pasta? Have some! Is it higher in oxalate? A little bit, so don’t have five cups of it like most people do. Have a normal portion size. “Tomato sauce is high oxalate, Jill.” Don’t drench it in tomato sauce and that’s a perfect place to put a non-dairy or dairy source of calcium.

So when you pair oxalate and calcium together, that’s how oxalate, you can rid yourself of it. So, the meal plan is on the website. So you can start your journey doing that. Maybe you just get a month or two, so you get a feel for things. Get your favorite recipe, have them on rotation, you’ll be set. That meal plan service that we offer is going to teach you, “Hey, I can eat a lot of stuff. She has all kinds of things in here.” So, again, when you notice the serving sizes I’m giving you, you’re going to be like, “Wow, it’s pretty amazing.” Once you get a feel for the meal plan, cancel it, and then start making your own. “Yeah, she’s a shitty business person. She just said cancel it!” But cancel it!

It’s a great teaching tool, so you can get your feet wet on what we’re talking about. “What is a low oxalate meal plan? How do I do this? Oh my gosh, I can have so much more than I thought of!” When you buy the meal plan, too, it comes with education with each recipe. Ain’t nobody doing that in the world. So, it will teach you why I use the things I did, substitutions if you’re a vegan or vegetarian, lactose-free, all kinds of stuff. So, there’s a lot of work put in that meal plan. But, Joyce, when you’re just starting, I would suggest joining that for $19. Get a feel for things, then you can go on your own.

So you can eat higher oxalate foods, but you have to also get your calcium every day and you can’t eat as much as you want to have those foods. Most people got kidney stones because they overate spinach and almond products without getting any calcium into their diet and that left them with too much oxalate. Also, not enough fluid. Also, too much sugar and salt. So all of those things are a great way to make kidney stones. So, what else, Jeff? You could tell I’ve been on vacation. I’m even floundering myself and I know this stuff like the back of my hand.

Jeff Sarris: No, it’s perfect! I was just gonna throw the meal plan up on the website on the screen right now just so you can see what we’re looking at here. So yeah, with the meal plan–

Remember, you get 100 milligrams of oxalate a day

Jill Harris: And, look, many people do use it as a tool. They’re like, “I’m gonna get a couple months, a few months, so I get a feel for what she’s saying. I’m gonna print the recipes that she gave me, so I have them,” and then you just expand from there. But a low oxalate meal plan when you’re first taught that you have to lower your oxalate, it’s very overwhelming. You don’t understand really what it means. You’re thrown a brochure or a piece of paper that has all these things that are high oxalate, when they’re really not if you just ate them with the normal portion size. Remember, most of you get 100 milligrams of oxalate a day. That’s a lot of oxalate.

Peanut butter, you get two tablespoons a day if you want it. It’s under 30 milligrams of oxalate, so you can see you get a bank account of 100 milligrams of oxalate. Also, a debit card, you’re getting that today! You take away the oxalate you use in the foods you’re choosing. And you’ll see you’ll even have extra leftover, even if you’re a vegan, even if you’re a vegetarian. Once you take away spinach, which is like over almost 700 milligrams a cup and people are eating a few cups. So, it’s very doable. I suggest getting that meal plan at first to get your mind around all the foods you’re going to actually eat.

You’re going to be shocked at how many delicious recipes are in there. And, by the way, people, they’re simple because these are foods I eat, and I don’t have time, and I know you don’t have time. And there’s only a couple recipes that are 30 minutes. Most are 20 minutes or less. So, super simple things, tasty, delicious. All Kidney Stone Diet-safe. It’ll teach you how to do it.

Jeff Sarris: Yeah, the inspiration to get on track, to stay on track, and keep going. And not to just be plugging products, but I just wanted to mention the eBook because I don’t think it was out yet with the last episode.

We have a Kidney Stone Diet-safe snacks and desserts eBook!

Jill Harris: I forgot about it! People love it! So, for the last several months, I’ve been making Kidney Stone Diet-safe snacks and desserts. All the sugar, salt, oxalate, everything’s figured out. There’s 30 recipes. If you get the meal plan, we throw in the snack book for free. If you just want the snack book, it’s only $9.95. People were saying this should have been $30, but we don’t roll that way here because I’m a patient myself and I know what it’s like to get a bunch of medical bills in your mailbox. So, we do things very high-quality here and very inexpensive. That’s how we do here.

We understand that our demographic is old, like me. We’re on Medicare. We have illness, so we have, like I said, medical bills. We’re on Social Security, there’s all kinds of things. So, we’re very respectful of our prices, my privates tend to be pricey because that’s a lot of time for me. But our products, like the Kidney Stone Prevention Course, right now is forty dollars off, it’s $149, people! Look on the web, over $300, these are and you get you get calls with me! So, the snack book, the meal plan, ridiculously cheap. If you understood the amount of work that goes behind the scenes between the IT and all of that that Jeff does, and then making these recipes that I do, and then our third partner, Dave, who does all the beautiful design work, it’s ridiculous how we price this.

But we believe in this model because we want people to have access. And, again, this is why we do the YouTube channel, why we have the Facebook group. The more people that understand that kidney stones can be prevented, the less people that are sick in the world. And, by the way, I get to talk to you about diet! The Kidney Stone Diet is just a healthy diet, people. Low sugar, low salt, get calcium, drink enough fluids, don’t overeat anything–portion, not perfection–and your A1C will go down. Your cholesterol can be lowered. You’ll get off your blood pressure medications. Am I making this up? Ask the patients that have worked with me because they work that hard.

And that’s why I can do this for so many years because I have seen the success in my patients. They lose weight. They’re so motivated by the kidney stones, that they will do whatever they can and they take this–the Kidney Stone Diet– and they work it and they’re on the road. So, you know, it’s very important that we get the word out. By the way, please like and subscribe to our channel because we get lost in the shuffle when people search for kidney stone stuff. So, if you can just click that subscribe button, it would mean so much to us. Also, if you enjoyed the video, please comment or click the “like.” If you didn’t like it, that’s okay, too, but subscribe. Well, I don’t know, Jeff, if they subscribe if they didn’t like it, but I’m just gonna throw it out there. People are always like, “Jill, what can we do for you?” Subscribe to the channel, people! That’s what you could do! That would be very helpful to Jeff and I!

Jeff Sarris: It efinitely helps and there’s a lot of free content, as well. It’s not just the meal plans and the prevention course and everything. There’s all the recipes on the site. There’s the weekly email newsletter that you can find at kidneystonediet.com and the prevention group on Facebook and everything. There’s so many areas to help and then we have the premium stuff as well. So just the little help with giving a thumbs up to the video, it means a lot. If you’re out there and you have a question we haven’t touched on, or even if we have, but you would like the perspective on your specific scenario. The phone number is 773-789-8763 and we would love to feature you on a future episode. I think with that we could wrap for this week. Again, everything is found at kidneystonediet.com, where you’ll find meal plans, the prevention course, and whatnot. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in and we will see you next time.

Jill Harris: Thanks, Joyce!