People are starting to bandy about the detox word more and more these days, yet when I ask them what detox actually means they generally have no idea.  They know it means doing some sort of special diet and maybe something else like taking special cleansing herbs.  But that seems to be about the extent of the awareness.  In an ideal world that should be enough.  But this is not an ideal world.  Detox has become a buzz word that sells products.  Consequently every marketer that wants to increase the sales of their product will figure out a way to convince people their product delivers the magical benefits of detoxification.  Most of the time these are bald faced lies.  Without a little more depth of knowledge, the average consumer has no way of ferreting out these deceptive or inferior products.

Detoxification is simply the removal of poisons from the body.  The most important detox your body undergoes happens with every breath you take.  Each breath you exhale expels poisonous carbon dioxide from your blood stream.  This is actually more important than the oxygen you take in with each breath.  If all you had was a bag full of air to breathe, you could actually last quite a while if it weren’t for the carbon dioxide you are breathing out when you exhale.  This is the principal used in re-breather scuba gear.  You keep re-breathing the same old air but the carbon dioxide is chemically scrubbed out and a tiny bit of oxygen is added back in.  In this way a single tank of air can last 8 to 10 hours instead of the usual 30 to 45 minutes.

The second most commonly used route for poison elimination is in your urine.  This is how your body eliminates water soluble poisons.  A little bit is also released when you sweat while at rest, but not while you are exercising.  This route of elimination is why hydration is important.  If you did not need to eliminate poisons this way, your body could hold onto the water it has and you would only need to drink a little bit a couple times a week.  Examples are koalas who never drink and sand gazelles that rarely drink.

The third type of poison is the type that is formed in our gut by the action of gut microbes on the food we eat, as well as poisons in the food itself and poisons formed by incomplete digestion.  The body has several defense mechanisms to try to keep these poisons from entering the body.  The idea is that these will pass out of the body in our stools.  Unfortunately these defense mechanisms are failing in many of us.  Herbicides like glyphosate, foods like gluten containing grains, and many chemicals in our food supply all punch holes in our gut lining.  Consequently these bad things can leak into our blood stream.  For many years people thought that cleaning out the gut in some way would detoxify us.  Many herbal products tout their great detox ability simply because they promote bowel movements.  Unfortunately simply cleaning out the gut contents does nothing to repair the damage to the gut lining.  The very next meal you eat starts the poisoning all over again until the holes are patched up.

One interesting detox technique is consuming substances that will bind with the poisons while they are still mixed with your food, thus preventing them from being absorbed.  Glucosamine is one example of this process in action.  Wheat contains a lectin poison which attacks our joints.  Glucosamine attaches to the wheat lectin while it is in the gut and carries it out of the system.   

The fourth type of poison that has to be dealt with are the fat soluble poisons.  These are the poisons that most people refer to these days when they start talking about detoxification.  These are nasty poisons since they attack cell membranes everywhere, as they are made of fat.  Your brain is almost all fat as well.  These poisons are detoxified by our liver.  The liver grabs these poisons from the blood stream and breaks them apart.  This is stage one detoxification using what is called the p450 pathway .  Unfortunately these broken pieces are often more toxic than the original poison.  Plus, this process produces a lot of dangerous free radicals (reactive oxygen), so if you don’t have a good supply of anti-oxidant nutrients in your liver, the liver cells will be damaged.  Stage two detoxification then combines these pieces with certain other chemicals that then inactivate the poison and make it water soluble.  Obviously you have to have these chemical pieces readily available.  Once this has been achieved the liver can then release the poison into the bile to be squirted into the small intestine where it can be expelled in the bowel movements.  Bile stimulates bowel movements.

As you can see this liver detoxification is a complex process involving a lot of necessary nutrients.  This is one of the key pieces to detoxification – you have to have all the necessary nutrients on board before you start a detox process or else you will only make a bigger mess of the poisons in your body.  What nutrients I hear you ask? Vitamins A, B3,6,12, C, D3, E, Folic acid, calcium, Bioflavonoids, Quercetin, N-acetyl cysteine, and the herb milk thistle support phase 1 liver detox.  For phase 2 we need  the amino acids glutamine, glycine, taurine, lysine, carnitine, cysteine plus methyl donors like TMG or choline.  Sulfur containing foods like cruciferous vegetables, eggs, onions and MSM are necessary to help make glutathione, the primary enzyme for drug detoxification.  Personally I cheat by taking acetyl-glutathione directly.  Unfortunately the good stuff is rather expensive.  

Bitter herbs like dandelion and beet tops thin out the bile so that it flows easily to carry the now water soluble poisons out into the small intestine and out the bowel.  In fact I often start any detox process with bitter herbs to give the liver a good flushing.  In the old days bitter herbs and milk thistle were all we knew about that would support the liver. 

The fifth type of detoxification involves the removal of heavy metals like lead, arsenic, mercury, cadmium, and aluminum.  This is a tricky area as these are potently neurotoxic.  These nasty substances are usually hiding in fat tissue and bone, but some is always floating around in the blood stream.  That means some is always being thrown out with the bile.  Unfortunately they tend to simply reabsorb into the body as they pass through the intestines.  Fancy chemicals called chelating agents are used medically for industrial exposures to heavy metals.  They pull the metals out of the blood and fats quickly and try to expel them through the kidneys.  The problem is the blood levels spike up to very high levels in this process which often pushes a lot of these into the brain causing serious brain inflammation.  It is much safer to go the slow way and bit by bit pull them out through the colon by eating metal binding foods that will stay in the intestine and not be reabsorbed.  Such things as chlorella, cilantro, activated charcoal, bentonite clay, and certain sulfur compounds work best for this purpose.       

As you can see, there is a lot more to the detoxification process than the pill pushers would like you to believe.  The biggest step in detoxification is to stop eating, drinking, and breathing the poisons in the first place.  That means eating organic only, using filtered clean water, using a HEPA filter to clean your air, and eliminating most household chemicals in favor of simple vinegar, baking soda, hydrogen peroxide, and Castile soap.  Our homes are literally toxic waste dumps because of all the chemicals in the products we buy in order to make our lives more convenient.  It is like all the toxic chemicals in most packaged foods.  Just don’t eat them.  Eat fresh, whole, single ingredient foods, not manufactured foods.  There is not much point in detoxing if we don’t clean up our acts first.

Is detoxification a good idea?  Yes, it is probably vital for survival in this polluted world.  Should we jump into the next trendy detoxification program that pops up on Facebook?  Probably not.  Start with the basics, clean the poisons out of your life.  Improve your digestion and support your gut microbiome.  Use bitter greens to support liver bile movement.  Eat lots of fibers and poison carrying nutrients to push the poisons out of your system.  Make your air and water clean.  Start small and work up.

Take care,

David    

 
Ellen update:    

This last week has been a rough one for Ellen.  I picked up some sniffles while traveling up to Portland to see my niece graduate from Chiropractic school.  Ellen either picked this up from me or we both picked up on this the week before somewhere.  Generally it takes 5 to 7 days from the time of exposure before symptoms appear.  Either way, she ended up down in bed with a fever for several days.  She is up now but not happy with life as a mucus machine.