Bankrupt Investor

Of all the things a plant has ever done to a person, oxalate takes the biscuit, and it lives almost exclusively in the foods you were told to eat more of. Not the chips. The spinach, the almonds, the sweet potato, the beetroot, the rhubarb, the buckwheat, the chia, the dark chocolate, the turmeric latte. Every one of them a health food. Every one of them the thing somebody switched to when they decided to sort themselves out. Oxalic acid is a plant defence and it binds minerals. That is the trick. It grabs calcium, magnesium and iron in your gut and walks out with them, which is why the iron in spinach never did anybody the favour the cartoon promised. What it does with the calcium is where it gets interesting. Calcium oxalate is a crystal. Sharp, needle-shaped, and your body has no enzyme for it, cannot break it down, cannot burn it. Around eight in ten kidney stones on earth are made of the stuff, which is the one bit everybody knows and treats as the end of the story. It is only the bit visible on a scan. The crystals do not stay in the kidney. They deposit in soft tissue, and a human being is largely soft tissue. Joints. Thyroid. Blood vessels. Muscle. Eyes. Bone. Which is why the symptom list is such a shambles: aching joints, gritty eyes, brain fog, burning when you go, unexplained fatigue, that pain in one hip three physios have failed to account for. Nothing that ever points back at a green smoothie. Then the bit where people fall off entirely. The body offloads it. Stop eating spinach and almonds daily and the deposits come back out, and coming out hurts. Rashes, aches, cloudy urine, a joint that lights up out of nowhere, weeks or months into eating properly. So somebody goes carnivore, feels magnificent, then gets a flare and a sore knee and decides the meat did it. Goes back on the smoothies. Feels better in days, because refilling the tank stops the emptying. The relief is real. The conclusion is completely backwards. That is the con. The one plant compound clever enough to frame the meat for its own crime, sat inside the exact foods a person reaches for when they are honestly trying to do the right thing. Popeye should have been drinking the milk.