The head of the Trying Low Oxalate list has recommended that children with autism not eat high oxalate foods. However she did note some exceptions to her rule. There is a bacteria, oxalobacter formigenes, that eats oxalates and thus eliminates the problem of oxalates: She wrote the following on her list:
"Those who stay happy with SCD after adding nuts and/or high oxalate veggies after the early SCD probably still had some oxalobacter in their gut! People colonized with oxalobacter have a reason they can eat oxalates and have it not cause problems,"

What about the people who do not have oxalobacter formigenes in their gut? Owens wrote the following:
"Dr. Steve Daniel did include S. Boulaardii in his test of probiotics and found it was fairly good at degrading oxalate." Many people from the SC community use S. Boulaardii; there are SCD legal versions of S. Boulaardii in the probiotic section of the website.

Owens heard that a diet that eliminates sugar and complex carbohydrates may force the ordinary bacteria to consume oxalates. Owens also wrote the following very IMPORTANT TOPIC after listening to a conference talk by Dr. Steve Daniel:
"What changes when someone reduces sugar and starches on an anti-candida diet or possibly an SCD diet that reduces complex carbohydrates?"

"I learned that the probiotics "eat" soluble and not insoluble oxalate. That "neatens" things in that the oxalate that is not bound by calcium or magnesium can be handled later by flora in the gut, which in the best of all worlds, is oxalobacter formigenes which resides in the more distant parts of our colon and requires oxalate to survive. It cannot use any other part of our food as its food. It is an oxalate obligate, but it is killed back by many popularly used antibiotics."

"If your gut is not populated by oxalobacter formigenes, then the other flora that have been found to be able to utilize oxalate, will do that only when under stress...like running out of the ordinary sugars that they prefer as their diet!"

"This information puts a whole new slant on the "anti-candida" diet, for what avoiding sugar may be doing is inducing stress on flora that ordinarily would leave oxalate alone, but under a stress of no ordinary food around, this flora WILL begin to degrade oxalate".

Hmmm... This trait that may be seen in our more ordinary commensal flora may also explain a benefit of avoiding starches that get broken down into glucose.

For a feeling for how starches and sugars are related, please read this site: http://bioweb.wku.edu/courses/biol115/wyatt/biochem/carbos.htm

So by encouraging flora like acidophilus and bifidus to eat (degrade) oxalate, the anti-candida diet may function in reducing oxalate"

The research of Dr. Steve Daniel seems to show that eating a diet that reduces sugar and complex carbohydrates will reduce the food supply of the gut bacteria and force them to consume oxalates thus ending the oxalate problem. However, Owens does not believe that this will work too well for SCD:

You can see that this plan of action might not work too well if when you cut out sugars and starches, you kept eating high oxalate vegetables.

Owens does not provide any data to back that claim. Without data, people can easily make mistaken assumptions. The amazing success of SCD in the autism community speaks for itself. Owens believes that oxalates cause autism and digestive problems. This is not the belief of Elaine Gottschall. However, let us assume that Owens is correct and that oxalates do cause autism. If the bacteria inside the gut of SCD children did not do a sufficiently good job of degrading oxalates, then these children would become more autistic and develop digestive problems. This is the exact opposite of what is reported on the support lists for SCD. So something is wrong here. Either the theory of Susan Owens about oxalates inducing autism and GI problems is incorrect or the bacteria inside the gut of SCD people is doing a great job of degrading oxalates.