Totally open-minded.

It’s the right way to be, but understandably a rarity. Primarily because it leaves you so exposed.

Somewhat like the tight end who outstretches to catch passes as he cuts across the middle. Do that repeatedly, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll really get thumped sometimes.

And when sometimes happens a few too many times, whether it be in pro, college, high school, or even pee wee league football, it’s easy to develop what players call alligator arms. You let protecting your body from another bell-ringing blow take precedence over catching the football.

I wax philosophic about open-mindedness and tight ends because one night after I put down “Toxic Superfoods” (Rodale, 2022) by Sally K. Norton, MPH, I watched a bit of TV and saw Rob Gronkowski.

He’s as tough a tight end as ever played football. But he’s no longer in the NFL.

He’s in commercials.

Choosing to never alligator-arm an offline throw exposed him to so many hard blows that Gronkowski has retired twice and both times arguably prematurely. And after a few chapters of “Toxic Superfoods,” I was feeling like Gronk on the gridiron - and that Norton was both the quarterback who threw me the pass and the linebacker who put the hurting on me when, alligator arms be damned, I left my feet and fully exposed myself to make a crucial third-down catch.

The premise of Norton’s book, you see, is that oxalate overload can - with the emphasis clearly on can - create fatigue, inflammation, anxiety, recurrent injuries, chronic pain, and in rare cases lead to death. So how does oxalate overload occur?

Primarily by eating already-established-as-healthy foods. Ones so healthy, in fact, they’re called superfoods.

Like spinach.

Norton explains “high-oxalate eating - with great potential to get healthy people into trouble over time - is typically defined as 250 mg or more per day. Diets over 600 mg per day are considered extremely high [in oxalates].”

FYI No. 1: Just 45 grams of spinach contains 450 milligrams of oxalate.

FYI No. 2: I eat, and have eaten for about a decade, five 8-ounce bags of raw spinach a week. That comes out to 11,350 mg of oxalates a week or an average of 1621 mg per day.

That’s more than 250 percent higher than what Norton calls “extremely high.”

Other superfoods I consume daily that make Norton’s “worst offenders” list are mixed salad greens, green tea, cocoa powder, turmeric, and black pepper. As well as the nearly two pounds of potatoes, another worst offender, I eat as baked wedges every weekend.

And while Norton warns “even moderate, relatively common levels of oxalate in a habitual diet can fuel the customary aches and pains of life, such as digestive distress, inflamed joints, chronic skin conditions, brain fog or mood problems, not to mention ”those painful kidney stones,” I can honestly report that as far as I can tell I’ve never had any sort of adverse reaction to at least three decades of totally over-the-top oxalate overload.

But that declaration does not mean I dismiss Norton’s premise that the problem exists.

She shares that a movie star you probably know, Liam Hemsworth, suffered from low energy, depression, and developed kidney stones severe enough to land him on an operating room table after a few years following of a vegan diet that featured breakfast spinach smoothies.

But a far more significant share by Norton comes when she comes clean about her prior long-term health woes.

Despite being a healthy eater (what you’d expect from someone with a Bachelor’s degree in nutrition from Cornell University and a Master’s degree in public health leadership from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Norton reached a point where she was “beyond exhausted,” unable to work, and even “unable to read with comprehension” while also suffering from joint pain and genital burning.

By following a low-oxalate diet, however, she soon remedied all this. Norton can be sure the changes came from the new diet because of what she calls “her ignorance.”

She “drifted back” to two high-oxalate foods she loved, sweet potatoes and celery. Then after eating a kiwi fruit or two (also high in oxalates) a day for three months as a way to combat chronic constipation, the joint stiffness and arthritis she experienced as part of her past oxalate overload became “severe” again.

While Norton floats the idea that oxalate overload could be common in the United States, she acknowledges there’s no way to know for sure because nutritional science is presently “ill-equipped to identify oxalate toxicity.”

What you’ll be able to identify by reading this book, however, may be enough to keep you from doing any future eye rolling while reading my seemingly incessant advice to experiment, experiment, experiment, and never stop experimenting with your diet. Dietary experiences such as the ones Norton shares in her book - especially her own - is just more proof that advice is certainly sound.