Upgrade Your Health by Reducing Your Toxic Load - Part 3: Detoxification

Toxicity leads to cellular toxicity which leads to DNA damage which leads to cellular mutations which lead to cancer and other serious diseases. This is the main reason we want to reduce accumulated toxicity in our lives.

In part 1 of this series we looked at the toxins in your food supply. In part 2 we looked at the toxins in your environment. So now we’re going to tie it all together, look at how to prevent toxicity in the first place, and heal from the damage done in Upgrade Your Health by Reducing Your Toxic Load - Part 3: Detoxification.

Going organic with your fruit, vegetables and meats is one of the first things you can do to remove the huge amount of commercial toxins from your life. Certified organic food contains no rodenticides, insecticides, chemical fertilisers, fungicides pesticides and herbicides. Organic food is never GMO (genetically modified). Organic food is never irradiated. Animals raised organically have not been pumped full of antibiotics, growth hormones, medical drugs, vaccines and have been fed on certified organic produce. Some organic labels are better (Japan, UK, Europe, Australia) than others (USA).

Your microwave should be thrown in the bin. They alter the biochemical properties of food rendering them non-bioavailable and potential toxic.

Fried foods in vegetable seed oils, such as sunflower and canola, sugar and refined white flour increase your chance of obesity, cancer, heart disease, strokes and other serious conditions. Replace vegetable seed oils with molecularly stable saturated fats such as butter and ghee, coconut oils and monosaturated fats from avocados, lard and olives. Sugar should be given up completely or replaced with sweet fruits. And refined white flour upgraded to organic soaked/sprouted/fermented whole wheat flours.

Farmed fish can be replaced with wild fish. Smaller fish are always wild and less toxic than larger fish because they have had a shorter lifespan and less time to accumulate toxicity. Sardines, anchovies, mackerel all fall into this category and are always wild. Tuna is always wild and comes packed with selenium which helps bind to mercury and render it inert in the gut. Salmon should always be wild. Farmed salmon is one of the filthiest foods on the planet – total toxic garbage. 

Toxicity from plants is concentrated in “plant babies” such as grains, seeds, beans and nuts which all have protections to prevent digestion by animals. By soaking, sprouting or fermenting these first (as ALL of our ancestors did) you reduce the toxins (gluten, gliadin, phytates, oxalates, lectins et al) and increase the bioavailable of the nutrients. Sourdough breads from Europe, Idlis from India, Tempe from Indonesia and miso from Japan have all been soaked, sprouted and/or fermented.

We’ve written an extensive 3 part series on water before (part 1, part 2 and part 3 here) where we looked at toxicity it tap water and plastic bottled water. We also looked at the best ways to reduce the toxicity in part 3. In a nutshell don’t drink tap water and drink glass bottled mineral water or water from natural springs and aquifers. If you can’t do that then the next best option would be to filter your tap water and then remineralise with an excellent quality salt. The best filters are carbon blocks, the larger the better.

Toxic cookware (non-stick, copper, aluminium) should be replaced with glass, ceramic, stainless steel or cast iron.

Household cleaning products should be replaced with non-toxic alternatives. In Singapore there are many choices at NTUC Fair Price Finest, Cold Storage and other supermarket chains. They are a bit more expensive but you can just use less as we all tend to use far too much anyhow. Internationally you can check your own supermarkets and of course online you have www.iherb.com and www.amazon.com.

Beauty products are a little bit harder to source for. Natural deodorants will not stop you from sweating. Most natural make up will not last that long. Many natural shampoos will not replicate unnatural shampoos and conditioners because they won’t contain silicon or chemicals that strip your hair of oils. But with some experimentation you will find some great solutions:

• International: www.iherb.com, www.naturisimo.com, www.lovelula.com, www.budcosmetics.com
• Singapore: www.dvbioherbs.com.sg, https://supernature.com.sg, www.naturallybetterco.com.sg
• Australia: www.biome.com.au, www.nourishedlife.com.au

Golden rule of thumb? If you wouldn’t eat it don’t slap it on your body as it will definitely find its way into your blood stream anyhow. Not convinced? Then just slap on a nicotine patch on your arm and you will get high! How did the nicotine get into your blood supply and travel from there to your brain - through your skin.

Most medical drugs are highly toxic for your organs of detoxification such as the liver and the kidneys. Only take medical drugs when you need them. Don’t take paracetamol for a headache when drinking more water and sea salt might do the trick. Don’t take antibiotics for viral infections - they don't work that way. Don’t take statins if you haven’t worked on the root causes of high cholesterol first, and so on.

So the main way to improve air quality is to get your aircon’s serviced regularly, remove dampness and humidity (fans, aircons, dehumidifiers) from your home and have a mold inspector check for troublesome spots. If you have mold related problems (allergies, skin conditions, autoimmune disorders) and go on holiday for 2 weeks and your problems go away then you know you have a household mold issue. As with a water filter getting an air filter will really help, particularly in the bedrooms. Again carbon blocks are what you want to filter out the mold and dirt spores in the air, the bigger the better.

Maybe you think it’s “woo woo”. Maybe you don’t. Either way there’s no major downside to getting a qualified inspector round to check your home for dirty electricity, EMF overload from neighbouring devices and sources inside your own home. Turning the wi-fi router off at night, turning off all electronic devices and putting all your mobiles in flight mode costs you nothing to potentially give you a better night’s sleep.

Not getting enough sun is bad for you. Getting too much sun is bad for you. How do you know you’ve had too much sun? You get burnt. That is your inbuilt biological mechanism to tell you to get out of the sun. Slapping on sun creams to stay out longer than is necessary is pointless – you’re not preventing DNA damage only the burning. When you’ve had too much sun, put a hat and a t-shirt on.

And lastly avoid too much lactic acid build up by overtraining which is a really a big work out for your liver. Throwing up in a bucket at a cross fit gym because you pushed yourself too hard is nothing to be proud of. Body building type programmes that create a lot of lactic acid (the burn) will provide temporarily inflamed muscles that you’ll lose very quickly anyhow. It’s also counterproductive to creating any kind of functional human movement. Exercise should be sensible, practical and fun!

So when it comes to detoxification, we want to pull the toxins out of our cells and tissues. We want to move them into our lymphatic system, that’s our superhighway that runs all over our body and is designed to filter toxins from all over our body, into our organs of detoxification and out. And there are many ways to enhance this process.

There are several ways to push (or pull) toxins out of your cells:

• Heat, sweating and saunas, particularly full spectrum infrared saunas, penetrate your skin up to two inches, make the cell membranes more permeable to help toxins to escape at the intracellular level and into your organs of detoxification to be filtered, neutralised and removed.
• Chelating agents, used by both the medical and alternative industries, help pull specific toxins, such as heavy metals, out of the body. As this is an unnatural process one must be incredibly careful not to re-toxify with aggressive chelation strategies.
• Weight loss. Excess toxins that cannot be dealt with by the liver are shuttled into fat cells and rendered temporarily inert. So when we lose weight, and melt fat cells, the liver must process the toxins released from the fat cells. This is why people can get sick, and scar their liver, when they lose weight too quickly because the liver cannot handle the cellular detox dump.
• Cleaning the extra cellular matrix (ECM) that connects your cells together. This is really where the traditionally therapies come in such as herbal, fasting, diets, juicing, spirulina, high fibre etc.

The next stage is to move the toxins into your lymph system, to be shuttled to your lymph nodes, to be filtered and removed. The lymph system is like the circulatory system but there’s no pump, there’s no heart. The only way lymph fluid moves is if you move. You have a 2.4 million year old system to do this. It’s called walking. If you’re sitting around working all day your body is not moving, your lymph system is not moving, your toxins are building up. Not good.

• Walking, running, exercise, sport or any kind of movement is great. The more the better. Look for excuses to move whenever you can.
• Particularly good exercises are qi gong shaking, jogging and trampolining.
• Want to turn your lymph system into a turbocharged expressway? Then it’s back to heat and saunas again! Not only to they pull toxins out of your cells they also speed up your immune system and your lymph system to help accelerate detox. And this will work on cancer cells, heavy metals, chemical toxins, viruses, everything.
• Finally lymphatic drainage massage, dry brushing, acupuncture and acupressure can stimulate lymph flow

If you have overly stimulated your body to detox you want to be careful not to re-toxify yourself. This is where “binders” come in. Binders are ingested to absorb toxins in the gut to help take the burden of your detox organs. If you poison yourself, for example accidentally drinking bleach, and go to the hospital they will shove charcoal pills down your throat! The charcoal pills have a massive surface area and will soak up the poison in your gut. Examples of binders are:

• Charcoal - grandma’s traditional toxic binder
• Bentonite clay - absorbs toxins and can be mixed with water to coat the surface of your GI tract more effectively
• Zeolite – can be naturally occurring and synthetic
• Fiber from veggies - binds to toxins in the colon
• Chlorella – algae that helps bind toxins in the gut

You could think of this as a stage 4 but you can do this at all times. Polyphenols in green tea, sulphur found in cruciferous vegetables and allium vegetables, help support the body’s ability to produce glutathione. Glutathione is your master anti-oxidant. Having this in tip-top shape at all times is going to help enormously. Something that medical doctors, naturopaths and diet dictocrats of every type would agree on, “Don’t forget to eat your greens!”

Whilst too much sun can burn it is the best way to get Vitamin D which regulates your immune system. Sunlight also produces calcitonin gene-related peptides which protect against toxicity induced oxidative stress, adrenocorticotropic hormones and substance P which both regulate the immune system. Look for excuses to get your body in the sun.

So I hope you enjoyed our 3 part series on toxicity and detox (part 1 and part 2 here). In a nutshell what we want to do is to continually strive to make better choices, reduce the toxicity in our lives, look for simple ways to support our detox pathways and then every now, when we have the time, throw in a jolly good cleanse!

To your health, happiness and longevity

The Levitise Team

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