Thanks for your comment. The low oxalate diet doesn’t necessarily need to be a low sodium diet. Many doctors advise kidney stone patients to drink lots of water and lower their salt/sodium intake, along with following a low oxalate diet. If your doctor has told you to do this, by all means listen to your doctor! You may still be able to eat bacon if you buy a minimally processed uncured bacon that is lower sodium, especially if you’ve eliminated most other processed foods from your diet (since most of the salt in our diets comes from packaged processed foods, not what we add at the table.) But this will depend on how much you are limiting your sodium and what else you typically eat.

Many low oxalate dieters, however, are not kidney stone formers. It seems some of us are and some aren’t – no matter how much oxalate we have in our tissues. The excess oxalate in those of us who don’t form kidney stones causes other types of symptoms and health issues, including genital pain, bladder pain, rectal pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and autism. Most of us “non-kidney stone formers” also benefit from drinking plenty of fluids and controlling our salt intake, but we don’t necessarily need to follow a low salt/low sodium diet. I eat so few processed foods and add very little salt to my cooking, so for me, eating uncured low sodium bacon is a fabulous treat. Actually, since I eat so little salt normally, I don’t like the taste of regular bacon anymore – it tastes way too salty for me!

Anyway, not all low oxalate dieters need to watch their sodium intake, so the bacon recipes are for them. I hope to provide recipes that will work for a wide variety of low oxalate dieters, with workable variations that will address other dietary needs when possible. If you are watching your sodium intake, use olive oil in this recipe instead of bacon. It’s still very tasty!

Cheers,
Heidi