Kidney stone patients are cutting way too many foods out of their diet, and it’s making their world smaller and joyless. In this episode, Jill breaks down why “high oxalate” doesn’t mean “forbidden,” using real numbers from the Harvard Oxalate Food List to show that foods like sweet potatoes, kale, avocados, peanut butter, and blueberries can absolutely fit into a low-oxalate lifestyle in the right portions.
She walks through her own coaching calls, explains how to use the free oxalate calculator and food list tool at kidneystonediet.com, and shares why building a daily oxalate “budget” (rather than banning foods outright) is the key to long-term compliance, real joy, and better stone prevention.
Chapters
00:00 Understanding Kidney Stone Patients’ Struggles
02:23 The Importance of Food Choices for Kidney Stone Prevention
05:07 Navigating Oxalate Levels in Your Diet
08:27 Moderation and Balance in Eating
14:20 Bringing Joy Back to Eating for Kidney Stone Patients
Transcript
Jeff Sarris (00:00)
Kidney stone patients are doing this wrong. Let’s talk about that.
Jill Harris (00:04)
Here’s what I notice weekly, daily with most calls. Jill, I have nothing to eat. I’m so tired of this. I’ve given up all my favorite foods. And what I noticed with kidney stone formers, and I write about this a lot in my newsletter, they start their life just becomes smaller and smaller.
They stop going out to eat. We’ve discussed this. I I’ve discuss it all the time, but we’ve discussed it here, too. Their life becomes so much smaller. They stop going out to eat. They are afraid to travel because of the trauma that these kidney stones cause them. They come out of nowhere. The pain for most people is the worst pain. It’s always documented as the worst pain to man. That’s how it’s always been talked about, that sexist now.
It’s the worst pain for humans. And so because they never want to experience that, have surgeries, all the things because they don’t want to experience that. They’re afraid to go on a plane. They’re afraid to go on a boat. They’re afraid to go out to eat. They just their whole life is just becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. And you don’t have to be a kidney stone patient to feel your world getting smaller.
and the joy being sucked out of it. My cancer stuff and food with my bowel cancer, you know, I understand the whole my world is getting smaller. Believe me. And so I like talking about this, number one, because I really relate to it and I can talk about it well because I know what this is like. So for kidney stone patients, the mistake you’re making is you’re taking away too many foods.
and you have the tools you need right at kidneystonediet.com to check on yourself. What do I mean by that? Jeff has the only Oxalate calculator on the internet. He also, in the help center, if you go to kidneystonediet.com and go to the menu, the very last thing on our menu is the help center. And if you click that, you will be able to put the Oxalate
Harvard Oxley food list on your telephone where it looks like an app.
It’s not hard. Grandma here did it. You can do it too. Okay? So you can do it. The step-by-step instructions. It takes two minutes. The Harvard food list will look just like a little app. When you want to see how much oxalate is in a food, you click your phone and come right up and then you type it in. You have that tool. Here’s what my phone call sounds like. Hi Carla, how are you? I’m not good.
I’m not good. I want you to help me because I don’t understand. I have nothing to eat. Okay, so what foods do you think you can’t eat anymore? What’s missing in your diet, Carla, that you would like to eat that you took away? Well, I took away bread. I took away blueberries. I took away kale. I took away sweet potatoes. I’m not eating avocados anymore and I was getting fat from those. I’m really mad about that.
I took away all leafy green vegetables. I took away peanut butter, coffee, and tea. And I said, well, I’d be really annoyed too, Carla, if I took away all those foods from my diet. And you don’t have to.
So when patients tell me, she said, well, I haven’t eaten those foods in six months. Here’s what I tell them. Whenever you hear yourself saying, God, I miss this, let’s use sweet potatoes, for example. God, I miss sweet potatoes. I want you to go to that little app on your phone that you put on your phone. And I want you to type in to the Harvard Oxalate Food List, sweet potato. And if you did that, you would see that sweet potatoes for one cup
is 28 milligrams of oxalate. Carla, you get 100 milligrams of oxalate a day in your bank account and I replenish it every day for you because I’m cute that way and I do that. So I just ask that you don’t go over that budget. So you can clearly see you can eat a whole cup of sweet potatoes for 28 milligrams of oxalate. You are not going to be overjorn for your hundred. So of course you can eat them. I can.
But you see, when you start Googling all things about Oxalate, every place you even chat GBT, because AI is taking the Oxalate levels of sweet potato from the million different places, million different places, and it will just list it as high. I can’t tell you how many people say I use AI and it’s a don’t eat sweet potato. AI is wrong.
Well, how do you know, Jill, why do I trust you? I trust AI better because I’ve been doing this for 30 years. And I’m looking at follow-up urine collections and I’m working with the bodybuilder, by the way, that staple in his diet is going to be sweet potatoes. His oxlates slow because he’s not eating sweet potatoes, three of them every day, like a bodybuilder does. And he or she is getting his calcium needs met every day, where before they were not.
So you see, it’s not just the Harvard list, it’s all the advice I give surrounding the list and how to use it. You have to know how to use the list. It ain’t about just Googling OXLATE, and seeing that something’s high and you take it away. Kale. Kale, another thing doctors love to say. No kale for you, Irene. No kale for you.
Well, Irene knew she wasn’t allowed to eat spinach because even Irene knew that everyone knows that spinach is high. We can all agree on that. So Irene started eating kale and the doctor said, don’t. Now she has no green leafy vegetables because she’s petrified. Kale, look at me. I’m going in here. I’m taking away sweet potato and I’m typing in kale. Kale raw, one cup, 0.7 milligrams. It ain’t even a milligram of oxalate.
You can absolutely use kale. Peanut butter. Jill, I love peanut butter. What am I going to do about it? I want peanut butter. Peanut butter. I just search it. Peanut butter. One tablespoon is 19 milligrams of oxalate. It’s high. Is it 100 milligrams? No. Can you eat one or two tablespoons? If you want to spend $40 on oxalate for two tablespoons of peanut butter because you love it so much.
You’re not overdrawn, you can do that. Have it with a glass of calcium-based product. Whether it’s a plant milk or regular milk. Okay? Now, you may say this, and this is why when I do private consults, I ask, who am I talking to? Meaning, Irene, if I say, yeah, you could have a tablespoon or two of peanut butter. But if you tell me, well, if I have two tablespoons, I need 10, then I’m like, not for you. Step away from the spoon.
Step away from the jar, Irene. Not for you. Just like I can’t eat crackers. Because I’m not going to kid myself that I’m just going to have a cup of crackers. No, I’m having all the crackers in one sitting. Finn’s going to have crumbs. My son will have crumbs in his hair. My bird’s nest hair is going to have crumbs. It’s going to be a total shit show of crumbs. So no crackers for me. So you got to know yourself. I have plenty of patients that are like, yes, old lady, I can have a tablespoon of peanut butter and be on my way. I love it.
God bless. You’re not over your hundred. It’s well within. If that’s where you and you may say I want two tablespoons. I’m spending 40 bucks on two tablespoons of peanut butter because I like it once in a while. I get a craving for it, but I’m going to watch my budget for the rest of the day. This is why we give you goals, numbers. We don’t tell you yes, no. Fit into the goals. And if you want some chips once in a while, you’re not going to overburden your salt limit. You just have to make sure.
I had chips today, I’m going to watch my salt everywhere else. So when you have these budgets, you can make choices that sometimes you’re going to want something that you just want sometimes. You’re going to have a cupcake. You’re going to have something that you don’t normally have just because you want it. This is how we remain compliant long term in the diet world. We can’t constantly take things away from people. So the blueberries. Well, Jill, Harvard re-studied them. Now they say,
They’re higher. they just, you just hear higher and you don’t go to the oxalate food list and see half a cup of blueberries is 18.5 milligrams of oxalate. So you don’t want two cups no more. But listen to me, this is so very important. When you guys, when we human beings like a food and it works well with our diet, think of a diabetic.
when they were told to eat almonds. The dietician didn’t tell them to eat a bag of Costco almonds a day. Brian decided to do that on his own. That’s not what the dietician intended. But what we healthcare people tell patients and what they do with that information, two totally different things. All the diabetic knows is, almonds are a healthy snack for me, because there’s no carbs.
and they’re healthy and they’re crunchy and they satisfy me all day long on meat and almonds and they get a kidney stone. So even though you can have these foods, don’t always eat them in any portion you want. So half a cup of blueberries is 18 milligrams of oxalate. So it’s on the higher side. So what I do, cause berries are super great, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries, I eat a cup of frozen food.
berries a day. And there’s not enough of blueberries in there in the in the whole cup because now I’m crowding them out with other berries and it’s still it winds up being low oxalate. So I can have a cup of really healthy berries, good fiber, good good nutrients and the blueberries are just a tiny fraction of that. And I put them in my yogurt so there’s calcium. So you guys just look at things and decide on your own their high.
I want you to use the Harvard Oxlade food list because Oxlade originally listed things as high, very high, low, and Jeff and I changed that. I don’t want to go by those adjectives because people see high because blueberries are listed high. We don’t list them as high. We took away the adjectives. We just give you numbers because you’re all grown, mature people. And when you have facts, when you have a real number, then you can put it against your hundred dollar bank.
of oxalate. And you can use it. But when you just see something’s high, you just automatically take it away. Like all those other foods, avocados. Let’s look at it in the food list. Avocados. Everyone takes those away. Half of an avocado is only nine and a half milligrams of oxalate. You can certainly have that. Avocados are such a great, healthy fat and filled with fiber. It’s a wonderful fruit. Yes, it’s a fruit.
Keep in your diet. I do have probably about a fourth of an avocado every day I eat that when I take my vitamin D as in David pill every day because it’s a fat soluble vitamin and therefore I know I’ll absorb it better so Bread another one. I stopped eating bread jilkas a wheat. Well, there’s not a whole cup of wheat in the piece of bread So wheat if you look on the Harvard list One slice is only three milligrams of oxalate
But if you have a whole, you know, if you have a wheat flour, which is what people look at.
wheat flour, says one cup is 29 milligrams and people extrapolate that and say well 29 milligrams I ain’t eating bread no more but there’s not one cup of wheat and a piece of bread. So because the oxalate is such a scary thing for kidney stone formers because most people form a calcium oxalate stone they heard the word oxalate they googled it on the internet and now all bets are off they don’t know what to eat. I am not
Asking you to stick with our stuff and our stuff means our newsletters our YouTube shows all the things Because I think I’m the Queen Marie of the world of kidney stones. I don’t think that I’m talking With Almost 30 years of experience in what I see in follow-up urine collections from the advice I give With what people are coming to me
They lower their oxalate year after year after year with the same advice. I’m not changing my advice over time either. So what I’m doing works for kidney stone patients. I’m not confident about a lot of things in life. Jeff will say, yeah, that’s true. I work with her, I know. But I’m confident about this. I’m a good mother. I’m ⁓ good, ⁓ at love. I’m good with that kind of stuff. I’m good friend.
I’m good at kidney stone prevention. I’m a good dog owner. That’s it, folks. Those are my trick ponies. I put all my eggs in those baskets because I really don’t give a damn about anything else. These things that I just mentioned matter the most. And as a nurse and as a patient myself who’s been really sick, to see the changes that you can make and prevent kidney stones and in this video’s particular case, to know that you are
shrinking your life from all this joy from really good healthy foods, it makes my heart ache. And I see this every single day. This ain’t a video that’s like, well, this barely happens. This happens every day in my practice. So I really want to stress the importance of this. You all are giving way too many foods up that you can absolutely use as long as you’re getting your calcium needs met.
As long as you’re not overdoing them eating 10 cups of blueberries a day with no calcium, you’ve got to eat everything in moderation. That doesn’t sell courses. It doesn’t sell meal plans. It doesn’t sell anything. But that’s the fact. And also, this is why my meal plan is so successful, because people could say, I get emails, Jim, I can’t believe you used peanut butter. I actually have joy in my life. And since you figured out all the oxalate in each recipe, I can’t believe that it’s so
I thought I could eat peanut butter again. So we’re talking about expanding and bringing the joy back to kidney stone formers. It will be really eye-opening for you. So you can eat a lot more foods than you’re thinking folks. We just take a handful of foods away. Everything else is back on your plate. That’s it Jeff. That’s all I got to say.
Jeff Sarris (15:42)
Well yeah, and if you’re ready to dive in, you can head over to kidneystonediet.com where you can sign up for the free weekly email newsletter or join the all access pass where you can get access to the meal plans, to the group calls with Jill, a discount on private consultations, and everything that Kidney Stone Diet has to offer. That’s all at kidneystonediet.com. And if you have any question that you want featured on the show, go to call.show /kidneystonediet or click the link in the description and we will feature you in the future.
Thanks again for tuning in and we’ll see you next week.
Jill Harris (16:14)
Have a great week, guys. Thanks for joining us. Bye.
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