06/10/2025
Why does our body dump oxalates when we stop eating them?
The bigger question is why the medical field was not convinced this was happening in more people. TLO just got more people reducing oxalate, and as anticipated, the process of oxalate release happened precisely as it had been described as happening in a genetic disease called primary hyperoxaluria. In that disease, a liver with a genetic fault secretes oxalate to the blood that then goes all over the body for your whole life until you either get a liver transplant or die from the damage the oxalate causes in your body. After the liver transplant, often the symptoms are worse than before the transplant at this toxic substance very slowly clears the body.
We definitely do not throroughly understand the recognition system beyond knowing that substances leave an area of higher concentration to lower concentration. To leave cells, oxalate travels on transporters that move a limited variety of substances that trade for each other,. That would include sulfate, oxalate, formate, thiosulfate, bicarbonate, and chloride. It is best to think of these transporters as “evener outers” because they work at getting the concentration balanced on either side of a cell membrane.
What we do not understand is why this phenomenon that we have labeled dumping (to incorporate the concept of its sudden start and stop) has an “on-off” nature.
The closest we can come to other people noticing this is this graph of a child with primary hyperoxaluria who had her blood levels of oxalate measured for seven years after a liver transplant. You can notice the see saw pattern to the blood levels of oxalate. It was by no means a steady even line moving from higher to lower concentration. That just implies some sort of regulation.
We also think it might represent release from different tissues, and with this graph, you can see that the last release took years..
Testing blood levels of oxalate is a very rare skill, and Mayo Clinic seems the only competent lab, so until they are interested in studying this phenomenon, we are a bit stuck with no data on the rest of us, especially if no one is willing to pay for getting the expensive test over and over for years during that slow clearance.
At least we learned that on the symptom side, many people seemed to experience this same phenomenon, but because of shared substrates, the process may involve the movement of more things and might be more complicated than we know about right now.
I hope that answer brought a little clarity.
