"Now you've got cells that have too much calcium in them and too little calcium that's actually functional. So, the cell keeps bringing in even more calcium because the oxalate is lowering the functional intracellular calcium by chelating calcium ions in the cell.
But in the meantime, the mitochondria are picking up calcium because they're trying to save the cell from the excess calcium. So, this mitochondrial rescue problem kills the mitochondria and ultimately kills the cell as well. So, you've got multiple steps where the oxalate effects are kind of expanding into cell collapse ...
The oxalate penetrates the cell cytosol area and the mitochondria and sits on ... the active site of four metabolic enzymes, including the last step in glycolysis. So, the last step in glycolysis is blocked.
It also affects your ability to produce glucose and can contribute to low blood sugar, probably insulin resistance, and lots of metabolic problems because you've created an energy crisis in the cell ... and you've got enzyme interference. Now, if your mitochondria ain't happy, you can't produce enough of the materials to even replace the cell. So, cell reproduction can be hampered.
They're dying, their lives are shortened, they're dying quicker, and they don't have enough energy to produce enough proteins and other materials they need to duplicate themselves. So, you get fibrosis instead.
Instead of getting healthy maintenance of tissues, the fibroblasts start producing more and more of this scar tissue material and you get fibrotic gunk holding you together.
If you don't have enough cells to hold the tissue together, you need this temporary stage of producing scar tissue to keep you from falling apart and suddenly bleeding out or having problems. This is a great thing the body's doing, but in the long run, you could turn into a fibrotic mess and not know why."
"This is the intersection of all these toxicities where the oxalate toxicity creates increased vulnerability to the EMF toxicity. We see this in my client base where they're frail and sensitive to everything.
When we get lower oxalates in the body, they're tougher again and these other stressors aren't quite as bad anymore. As you say, take control of your health. This is one place where you have more control over how much oxalate is in your diet than you have over EMF exposure in many situations."
"The main symptom pattern is that no one can figure out what's wrong with you and you seem OK according to tests," Norton says. "That's a classic oxalate situation." I personally have struggled with a challenging itchy rash for 15 years that defied any diagnosis by multiple dermatologists. I finally realized that it was due to oxalates and it has dramatically improved by lowering my oxalate consumption. I also used to struggle with dental plaque and that seems to have also improved with oxalate reduction and using a dental scaler.
"The major source of internal oxalate is ascorbic acid or vitamin C ... There are lots of case studies of train wrecks from supplements, and lots of case studies about problems with intravenous vitamin C. Let me tell you my personal story. I had vitamin C chelation ... I didn't know I had an oxalate problem ...
By the third time, I became harder and harder to stab for the IV needle because now my veins were ropier and rollier and would run away from the needle. That's fibrosis ... I only had IV vitamin C maybe 10 times. But the doctor and the nurse took no notice of this side effect of the treatment -- that I was becoming more fibrotic and harder to puncture ...
It's hubris to say, 'Oh, well, it's fine. All my patients are doing great on my vitamin C IVs when you're not open to seeing the side effects. One of the studies demonstrated that just with oral supplementation, for not all that long, once they stopped the vitamin C, the level of oxalate in the urine went way up.
So, while the body's being assaulted by too much vitamin C, it's busy sequestering the oxalate that's forming and holding onto it and protecting the kidneys from devastation, from excessive oxalate load. Once you stop producing or eating too much oxalate, this holding pattern can let go, and now you see much higher oxalate levels in the blood and the urine." For these reasons, if you take vitamin C on a regular basis, Norton recommends limiting it to 250 mg a day. This is enough to meet your nutritional requirements and is unlikely to cause oxalic acid-related trouble. The exception would be if you are septic, in which case large doses of IV ascorbic acid can save your life.
"You definitely need calcium and magnesium with high oxalate meals," Norton says. "But the bigger issue is this long-term toxicity, because we all grow up on high-oxalate foods. Peanut butter is high, wheat bran is high, potatoes are high. Oat bran is variable. Rice bran is high, wheat bran's high.
The citrates in the minerals are especially important for this long tail of getting over the chronic illness of having an oxalate overload in your body. So, if you're past the age of 10 and grew up on standard foods, you've got some degree of deposits in your bone marrow, your joints and glands ...
The biggest biohack is calcium [citrate] because calcium promotes the clearing [of oxalate]. Some people can't even tolerate the calcium because their body is so eager to upchuck this mess from its tissues that calcium gives it too much permission. Some people are so deficient in minerals.
The long term high-oxalate diet really sucks you dry of electrolytes and minerals, and you're really fragile without the minerals. That's slowing down the excretion from the tissues. The expulsion from the tissues requires a certain amount of metabolic heft and some access to electrolytes so the tissues can do what they need to do.
[I've seen] people who were heavy keto for three years and then went full carnivore, which is a zero oxalate diet -- so, they went from super toxic high-oxalate diet to zero oxalate -- which is a precipitous dive.