low oxalate diet

tekwriter

Has anyone had to deal with a low oxalate diet? I have just been told to start one by my Urologist and it looks so hard. Any help would be appreciated.

RodaRose

Here is a link with a list that is easy to follow.
http://www.upmc.com/patients-visitors/education/nutrition/Pages/low-oxalate-diet.aspx
The big change will be removing certain veggies and carbs and adding others. Meat will stay the same. After you figure out three or four meals, you can start building more variety.
Meat and milk and cheese are safe.
Many fruits are safe.
These vegetables are safe: Cabbage, Cauliflower, Chives, Cucumber, Endive, Kohlrabi, Mushrooms, Peas, Radishes
These starches are safe: Barley, Cereals (corn or rice), Cheerios, Chicken noodle soup, Egg noodles, English muffins, Graham crackers, Macaroni, Pasta (plain), White rice, Wild rice.

lyknthrp

The biggest things for me to give up on a no oxalate diet were spinach and black tea. But which would you rather have? A happy few minutes or misery from stones? I do occasionally have both but very far and few between and flush out with a lot of water after ingesting. I have been stone free for 7 months now since giving up black tea. Good luck!

shaumom

This is the most useful websites I found, doing this, was http://www.lowoxalate.info/research.html and http://oxvox.com/start-here/

The latter website has a link to a low oxalates group which can be very helpful. They even have a project where foods are given to an accredited ab and tested for oxalate levels, and the chart of the results is available to everyone in the group. And as an aside, the testing results can vary from brand to brand, and vary from the 'standard' of what is safe and unsafe in many medical sites. I would highly recommend it.

It is also worth checking on the websites about something called oxalate dumping, which can be a potential for some (but not all) people who lower their oxalate load.

I am currently slowly my oxalate levels for medical reasons, too, and oh man, I would be in trouble if I hadn't found out about the oxalate dumping. I was really sick at first!

As for what to eat. All animal products are pretty low - eggs, meats, dairy. Go to town, there. :-)
Veggies - pretty much in agreement with RodaRose there. Some of those are low, some are medium level, but all not too bad.
the starches, though, are trickier, at least in my experience. Items made of wheat or oats tested high or very high in oxalates, at least in the low oxalate group's testing (15-40 mg ox per serving). Barley and corn tested around med. levels (5-14.9 mg ox per serving). White rice tested low. Many GF products tested low, too (like GF graham crackers).
A number of nuts and legumes are quite high, while some are medium level and workable in the diet, so it's worth looking carefully at those.

Truly, it's worth checking out the group. It was SO helpful.