Oxalates in Spinach and Kidney Stones: Should We Be Concerned?
Kidney stones affect as many as 1 in 10 people in their lifetime
and can cause excruciating pain.
Makes me cross my legs just thinking about them.
Oxalate stones are the most common type,
forming when the oxalate concentration in your urine gets
so high it basically crystalizes out a solution, like rock candy.
Some foods, like spinach, have lots of oxalates in them.
Should we try to reduce our intake of oxalates to lower our risk?
It turns out that people who do get stones don't seem to eat
any more oxalates on average than people who don't get stones.
It may be less what you eat and more what you absorb.
People who are predisposed to kidney stones just appear to be born
with a higher intestinal oxalate absorption.
Their guts just really suck it up.
So-called "super absorbers" assimilate up to 50% more oxalate
than non-stone formers.
Overall, the impact of typical dietary oxalate on the amount of oxalates
that end up in the urine appears to be small.
Even a massive dose of dietary oxalates typically only results
in a relatively mild increase in the amount that makes it into your urine.
A 25-fold increase in oxalate consumption
doesn't even double the concentration of oxalates flowing through your kidneys,
so it's really more determined by genetics than diet.
But still, until you get your first stone,
how do you know if you're a super absorber or not?
Is it safer to just generally avoid higher oxalate fruits and veggies?
People who eat more fruits and vegetables
may actually tend to get fewer kidney stones.
When researchers put it to the test and removed produce
from people's diets, their kidney stone risk instead went up.
Removing fruits and veggies can make your dietary oxalate intake go down,
but your body produces its own oxalate internally as a waste product
that you may have a more difficult time getting rid of,
without the alkalizing effects of fruits and vegetables on your urine pH.
This may help explain why those eating plant-based get fewer kidney stones,
but it also may be due to their cutting animal protein intake,
which can have an acid-forming effect in the kidneys.
We've known this for 40 years.
Just a single can of daily tuna fish can increase your risk
of forming stones 250%, and even just cutting back on animal protein
may help cut kidney stone risk in half.
Surely there's some level of oxalate intake that could put people
at risk regardless.
There have been a few rare cases reported of people drinking green
juices and smoothies getting oxalate kidney stones,
though most had extenuating circumstances.
This case describes a woman whose kidneys shut down
after a 10-day juice cleanse, which included two cups of spinach a day.
Normally we might not expect a cup or two of spinach to cause
such a violent reaction, but she had two aggravating factors.
She had gastric bypass surgery, which can increase oxalate absorption,
and a history of prolonged antibiotic use.
There's actually a friendly bacteria you want in your colon called oxalobacter
that eats oxalate for breakfast, leaving even less for us to absorb,
but it can get wiped out by long-term broad spectrum antibiotic use.
She still probably wouldn't have run into a problem though,
if she had used something other than spinach,
or beet greens or swiss chard— the trifecta of high-oxalate greens.
Kale has hundreds of times less oxalates than spinach.
She would have had to have juiced in excess of 650 cups of kale a day
to get a comparable dose, so over those 10 days, more than 6,000 cups of kale.
But are the three high oxalate greens only a problem for people
with extenuating circumstances or who are otherwise at high risk?
And what if you cook the greens?
How much is too much?
I'll answer all those questions, next.