Spinach

[Guest guest]

Tammy,

I believe that spinach would never had been touted as a " health food " if people

had really known the science that had already been done before Popeye came on

the scene.

Just so you can read the science yourself, look at these studies. (Some are

long, but look at the introductions and conclusions, and the pictures of altered

bones and teeth and charts of altered growth.)

See these studies:

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/17/6/557.full.pdf

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/122/1/137.full.pdf

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/18/3/233.full.pdf

From the last study:

" If to a diet of meat, peas, carrots and sweet potatoes, rela

tively low in calcium but permitting good though not maximum

growth and bone formation, spinach is added to the extent of

about 8% to supply 60% of the calcium, a high percentage

of deaths occurs among rats fed between the age of 21 and

90 days. Reproduction is impossible. The bones are ex

tremely low in calcium, tooth structure is disorganized and

dentine poorly calcified. Spinach not only supplies no avail

able calcium but renders unavailable considerable of that of

the other foods. Considerable of the oxalate appears in the

urine, much more in the feces. "

Immediately below I've put a link to an article explaining how spinach got to be

touted as a health food after a paper was printed with a big mistake:

http://www.cracked.com/article_18517_the-7-most-disastrous-typos-all-time.html

Tammy, not only is spinach one of the highest foods in oxalate, but it is also

one of about five or six foods known to be extremely high in cyanide. Remember

cyanide poisoning?

These are symptoms:

At lower doses, loss of consciousness may be preceded by general weakness,

giddiness, headaches, vertigo, confusion, and perceived difficulty in breathing.

(from Wikipedia)

Isn't " giddiness " more often called around autism lists, a " yeasty symptom " ?

Dr. Rosemary Waring found about a fifty fold difference in autism in the

thiosulfate to thiocyanate ratio compared to normal controls, which suggests a

loss of function of the enzyme rhodanese.

Rhodanese detoxifies cyanide that is produced by the metabolism, forming

thiocyanate. Thiocyanate then crosses the membrane via a transporter that may

be inhibited indirectly by oxalate, but then it is converted outside intestinal

cells into an antimicrobial called hypothiocyanate that protects us from

microbial overgrowth from UNDERNEATH the biofilm. Odds are, in autism,

especially in those eating high oxalate diets, that this protection may be lost.

Cyanide is also high in many nuts, especially almonds (and likely almond milk).

The lists of which foods are high and how high in cyanide is extremely limited,

even at the FDA. I've checked, but spinach is clearly one of the worst.

When rhodanese can't work, then the cyanide gets detoxified by methylcobalamin

or hydroxycobalamin, leading to elevated blood and tissue levels of

cyanocobalamin (produced in the reactions) and low levels of the important B12

cofactors, critical for methylation and other duties. This could also hurt the

folate chemistry.

So if this is happening, blood levels of B12 look high, but what you are seeing

is tracks of cyanide detoxification when useable B12 is probably quite low so

you have signs of cobalamin deficiency even though blood levels look high.

Does it makes sense to be feeding children with autism one of the highest foods

in oxalate and also cyanide, and a food that may rob us of useable B12?

This connection to cyanide may be a bigger reason than boosting methionine

synthase activity for explaining why methylcobalamin shots help kids with

autism. If the issue had been methionine synthase, then homocysteine levels

should have been high, but more often they are low!

The question a parent needs to ask iis this: WHY do you believe spinach is

healthy? Who told you that, and WHAT was their proof that it is healthier than

other low oxalate green leafy vegetables like kale and cabbages?

What may tie the oxalate and cyanide issues together (besides spinach) is a

study that found that people with uremia (where oxalate builds up in blood) also

have impaired rhodanese function which may mean that oxalate itself impairs this

enzyme. That direct work has not been done, but I have a scientist ready to

test that in neurons in the spring.

This association with rhodanese may be yet another confirmation of how CENTRAL

oxalate could be to the metabolic disorders in autism and how spinach should be

the last thing on earth you would want to feed your child that has autism,

especially in his growing years, and more so if you know he has a leaky gut and

got better when you cut out gluten. (Note in the studies that the rats fed

spinach didn't grow properly.)

Autism Oxalate Project at ARI