Low oxalate diet. @whee.

Okay, so I'm buckling down and making sure that I actually eat a diet relatively low in oxalates, so as to avoid the whole kidney stone thing happening yet again. I haven't had calcium oxalate confirmed as an issue by my doctor, but it's been pegged by several studies as being behind repeat kidney stone incidence. (Plain old calcium intake, on the other hand, doesn't affect the stones much and may in fact reduce the amount of stone formation.) To reduce stone formation I need to cut down on phosphate-containing soft drinks- not a problem, I'm not a big soda fan- on calcium oxalate-heavy foods, and on sodium. Again, not a problem on the latter. The problem is that high oxalate foods figure pretty heavily in my list of favorites...

( The following list is of foods with high oxalate levels. I'm bolding everything I like or go out of my way to eat. )

Animal foods? Much lower in oxalates. Slight problem: the same studies that show that calcium intake is okay generally indicate that excessively high levels of animal protein are associated with major major stone formation. So... yeah. And chick peas and spinach and beets were pretty much the backbone of my vegetable intake at the office, since I usually ordered salads containing those- with sunflower seeds- when I didn't like the rest of the lunch menu. And nuts, particularly peanuts and cashews, were my favorite office snack. Man, I really thought that of all the foods in my life that'd come back to haunt me, it'd be the cheeseburgers first....

Gonna be fun working on getting everything into line.