Plant toxins like oxalates have killed people at dietary doses
The case reports are real, but they involve extreme amounts, raw kidney beans, rhubarb leaves, or people with existing kidney disease. Normal intake of spinach, beans and other plants is nowhere near those doses. Cooking, variety and a normal diet handle this, and omnivores eat the same foods.
Plants make defensive chemicals such as oxalates, lectins and other anti-nutrients, and these compounds have put people in hospital and occasionally killed them. A diet built entirely on plants means eating more of them, and people on heavily raw or juice-based vegan diets have suffered kidney damage. Plants are not automatically safe, and anyone cutting out animal foods needs to understand the doses involved and how to prepare their food.
Deaths at typical dietary doses are not what the case literature shows. The reports of serious oxalate harm involve unusual intakes: rhubarb leaves, star fruit eaten by people with kidney failure, or weeks of heavy juicing of high-oxalate greens. Those cases matter and they are worth knowing about. They are not ordinary eating.
The numbers make this clear. Typical oxalate intake is in the low hundreds of milligrams a day. Reaching 5,000 mg from spinach would take something like half a kilo or more in one sitting. Only a small share of dietary oxalate is absorbed, and calcium eaten at the same meal binds much of it in the gut. Boiling greens and draining the water removes a large part of it. The real concern for most people is kidney stones in those already prone to them. That risk is managed by variety, enough fluid and enough calcium. It does not mean avoiding plants.
The kidney bean incidents work the same way. Lectins in raw or undercooked beans cause acute illness, and proper boiling destroys them. That is a reason to cook beans properly, not a reason to avoid them. Tinned beans are already cooked.
The principle offered here is that you need to know what you are doing and cannot eat plants indiscriminately. That is true, and it is true of every diet. Omnivores eat spinach, rhubarb and beans too. Meat has its own preparation risks: undercooked poultry, pork and minced beef are leading sources of Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli infections. Nobody treats that as evidence that eating meat is dangerous in itself. A vegan diet does not require large amounts of any high-oxalate food. Basic food knowledge covers the risk for everyone.
Treating a personal story or an isolated case as though it outweighed systematic evidence. Individual cases are real, but they do not establish general patterns.
How it applies here: It cites case reports of poisoning from extreme intakes, raw beans or existing kidney disease, then presents them as harm at 'typical dietary doses'. The cases do not show that, and they say nothing about the risk of an ordinary plant-based diet.