Paul Saladino· MD
you said that spinach could cause oxidative stress no question about it it does and you know we have all kind of drugs and and kind of like fix it molecules mostly create a sort of toxic experience for the body intended to turn on the body's own natural defenses and where your body kind of creates a brief inflammatory but then a stronger anti-inflammatory secondary response and so you might get this feeling of well-being from this drug this oxalate drug that's in a spinach smoothie but it's only because your body is appropriately responding at least in the short run it doesn't last long and and then there's whole other reasons why you might get confusing signals from your body about what diet is working for you or not which i hope we'll get into yeah so this is the nrf2 system i've talked about it recently i did a controversial thoughts uh last week about uh keep one and nrf2 in response to turmeric and specifically curcumin and turmeric which activates nrf2 it's the same mechanism this is the same thing i've talked about in the past guys sulforaphane curcumin oxalates they if they're going to create oxidative stress they might turn on nrf2 by dissociating from keep one and that is a pro-oxidant so i just think it's ironic that you walk into the grocery store and everybody looks at the spinach and says oh that's a great antioxidant or they look at turmeric and say that's a great antioxidant when in fact it's kind of a pro-oxidant and there is a bodily response to that which is a hormesis but as i've talked about in separate videos and i won't go down the rabbit hole here there are always side effects to these plant molecules and the side effects to oxalic acid are many as we're enumerating but it is important to understand that that spinach in in many ways is a pro oxidant and it can deplete glutathione in in that respect as well as can curcumin in the same way and curcumin is yet another food that is very high in oxalates people don't often eat large quantities of curcumin but if you are taking tablespoons of turmeric and putting them in your smoothie with spinach you are having a lot of oxalates and i i talked about that in the curcumin video as well i also love to throw almonds in there but exactly right the difference between whole root tumeric which is terribly high in oxalate and curcumin extracts which many of them have very little oxalate because the oxalate can get separated in the separation processes that we do and sometimes very processed things are much lower in oxalate like you know potato starch has like no oxalate but potatoes are quite high and oxalate kind of equivalent to beets yes beets are another food so i had this thought as i was refreshing my memory on oxalates for this podcast when i go into a whole foods in the united states there's like this sense of calm right it's this nice store and and i think that as humans who are very far removed from our wilderness ancestors from the hadza for instance or any hunger gatherer tribe you know it's been for most of us it's been tens of thousands of years since we were since our ancestors were in a forest uh picking up plants and choosing whether to eat this leaf or that fruit or go hunt this animal or that mushroom or this mushroom and so i think that if we think back to that level of human existence or that time in human existence it's not crazy to imagine that there are many plants that are toxic that are frankly toxic and will kill you if you eat them things like sorrel if you eat too much sorrel you will die because of oxalate toxicity so hunter-gatherer tribes people that live in the wilderness know this and they don't overeat these foods but when we walk into whole foods we sort of imagine that like everything in there is good for us right it's all packaged and it says it's an antioxidant and they have the orac rating for for kale and i mean kale is hailed as a panacea and chard is just like it's it's really it's wonderful cousin and you know the more greens you eat the better so you're walking into whole foods and what what strikes me