I was like a rat in a maze searching for any clue I could find to get out of the RLS trap.

I didn’t know it at the time, but all the ideas I gathered would eventually mesh together: face relaxing, hypoxia, dopamine and iron deficiency, DNA, the circadian rhythm, and then there was diet…

One guy I met through an RLS forum claimed he could turn his RLS on and off through diet. It was a fascinating story. He maticulously recorded all his food intake for years and came to the conclusion that what worked for him matched exactly a low-oxalate diet. I had never heard of oxalates, but I soon found out everything I could, and became engrossed, overly so.

Oxalates are what plants produce naturally to boost their defence against animals trying to eat them. They are micro-sized sharp blades. Take a spring onion. The white part has very few oxalates, and the green part is full of them, which has a hash, gritty type texture. The premise is, if you have a leaky gut, these micro sharp pieces pass through the lining of your gut and into your blood stream where they travel around your body and gather in critical places such as joints and also form crystals in your bones. Kidney stones are made up of oxalates combined with either calcium or magnesium, and sometimes ammonium or sodium. The most common type by far is calcium oxalate, which forms when oxalate binds to calcium in the urine.

I even went back to university and studied nutrition. I went religiously low-oxalate: no spinach or dark leafy veges, no almonds, certain fruits were out such as figs, beets, roubarb, no soybeans.. and the list went on. I had previously been a pescatarian for 20 years, and was used to the discipline of controlling what I ate, but this was a whole new level. I was soon running out of food that I could eat, especially when it’s combined with a low sugar and low refined food diet, which was my usual fare.

When you get deeper into the study of oxalates, you find that ‘experts’ blame them for many of our ailments, from arthritis to chronic fatigue syndrome, as they damage the mitochondria inside the cells. It is fascinating, but there is very little scientific evidence to back up the claims.

After about 18 months on a low oxalate diet I didn’t feel any different. My RLS was still raging night after night. I did, however, learn a lot about nutrition and, importantly, how the body worked.

Having realized the limitations of finding a solution through diet alone, the next clue came while travelling through Greece.