Paul Saladino· MD
there's at least seven Rolls of for oxalate that plants can make use of it um there's they're all really interesting like one of them is in the leaf of the plant the plant can use oxalate to create hydrogen peroxide which it will use to defend itself from funguses so you're from Virginia you know that we have these dogwood trees that are very prone to something called powdery mildew yeah Milos are in the air here it's very humid and it's getting worse so we get rain all the time so plants are constantly bombarded with Milos and molds and and they would just get all yucky because the molds would take over but they can use oxyc acid to create paroide and beat back the mold so I think that's kind of cool that's kind of cool another major use is to Pantry calcium because calcium is just a sucker for oxalate so if the plant makes oxal oxalic acid the calcium is there because the soil is full of calcium and plant can easily get a hold of calcium and needs to put it in the seed you got to have some calcium in your seeds so that when you germinate you've got calcium to run the the you know the biochemistry of creating creating amino acids so as the cell is germinating it needs that calcium so when the cell germinates it can split off the oxalate and have the calcium but a nice quiescent form of calcium is to make calcium oxalate um and there's many others including these Crystal shapes there's a nice little study a couple of them that demonstrated that the raphide which is really I mean I described as a toothpick and you had another word for it but they're really arrows and they're a quiverful of arrows the way the plant produces them is in bundles of like 200 or 500 of them all bundled together like a whole quiver and shoots these out deliberately to to penetrate the cells of whoever's eating them so it can penetrate through at least one probably two layers of cells and brings with it proteases and soluble oxalate and once you punctured a cell and you got proteases inside somebody's mouth and people think enzymes are so cool you should eat your enzymes oh no you don't put plant enzymes inside your bloodstream that is not good no so you get some pretty um Vicious Kind of mucosal membrane effects when you're a PL and you can shoot into the mouth and throat of the eater and you see this in dumc which is a tropical plant that is used as a house plant and just a simple one simple drop of that stuff can create a huge um crisis where someone can't speak for four days and his whole mouth is torn up with ulcers that are sort of the immune systems reaction it strips the tongue and you can't breathe because the whole tongue swells up I mean your body is going nuts over some of these rapi crystals and the proteases and the other toxins the soluble oxalate that are delivered through this Weaponry the plants make these crystals as self-defense Weaponry to get you to not eat them because you know what else are they gonna do they don't want to be eaten