I like your right up “Four Effective Approaches to the Low Oxalate Diet” has helped me as this is a lot to take in when all of a sudden the foods you eat almost every day is not allowed now or at least for 3 months my Dr. said till things get lowered.

I may go ahead and start the resource page this week, so those of you from the UK can use it as a forum to ask questions and I can get an idea what type of resources and problems you are having. At least that could be helpful even if I don’t have a full resources page available for you. If nothing else, maybe it’s a way to keep a running list of food names common in the UK versus the ones we use in the US, so that you can more easily read the tables you have.

Thanks for pointing this problem out to me again.

Here’s a simple meal plan to get you started: Eat 2-3 eggs or a cup of plain yogurt for breakfast along with a piece of fruit (banana, apple, some melon or blueberries) and coffee, water or milk; For lunch each day, eat a salad with romaine lettuce, cucumbers, red peppers, plain grilled chicken or tuna, cheese and an olive oil/red wine vinegar dressing (add a corn tortilla if you feel you need whole grains); For dinner, have a piece of plain grilled meat (fish, beef, chicken, or pork all are fine) or roast meat with thyme, garlic or basil. Add some steamed cauliflower, broccoli or asparagus, white rice and another piece of fruit from your breakfast choices. Unless you totally pig out on the fruit/veggies/corn tortillas, you will be well under 50 mg. oxalate per day. From here, you can branch out as you learn more about the diet, substituting other menu ideas from the yahoo group or this website. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll right this up with a little more detail and some vegetarian options for a new post soon.

Hope this helps for now.

I hope to write a full post on dumping very soon, but here’s a quick version. Many years ago nephrologists recognized that people who have reduced kidney function due to kidney stone formation and damage, often can’t keep up with the toxic supply of oxalate circulating in their bloodstream and their bodies try to cope by storing the oxalate in other tissues in the body (any tissue is fair game). A serious form of this build-up is call oxalosis and can lead to death, but this build-up doesn’t only happen to people with severe primary hyperoxaluria (PH). We have since learned that all of us with oxalate -related symptoms, store excess oxalate in our tissues some of us in surprising high amounts – even those of us with healthy kidney function. It’s this build-up of oxalate in our tissues (or the purging of oxalate through our urine, sweat, vaginal secretions, tears, mouths and rectums) that cause our many oxalate-related symptoms.

When you go on a low oxalate diet, you reduce the amount of oxalate absorbed through your intestines. Unless you have severe PH, this should significantly reduce the amount of oxalate in your blood stream. Your body recognizes that it no longer has to store oxalate in the tissues and in fact has an opportunity to reverse some of the oxalate damage caused by storing oxalate, so it releases some (or a lot!) of the stored oxalate back into the blood stream with the hope that the kidneys will be able to handle it and help it pass through the urine. This release is called dumping and is your body’s attempt to detoxify itself.

The weird thing about dumping is that everyone experiences it differently and can present with very different symptoms. Some very common symptoms are fatigue, irritability, “brain fog”, loss of emotional control, wakefulness, a general achiness, stuffy nose, or a “flare-up” of their worse oxalate-related symptoms. So for women with oxalate-related vulvar pain or bladder pain, dumping symptoms usually include a sharp increase in pain or a “flare-up.” Also, your symptoms may differ depending on what part of your body is dumping oxalate. For example, if you are dumping oxalate out of your joints, you may experience a lot of joint achiness as part of your dumping at that time. Another time, your body may be dumping from your eye and you experience sharp eye pains.

Okay, that turned out to be not so quick . . . Hope this helps you! Dumping is frustrating and strange and sometimes really disheartening, but if you can keep reminding yourself that your body is trying to detoxify so it can heal, it seems easier to get through.
Heidi