Taking the Detoxification Initiative: The Basics of Detoxing Your Body: Recognizing how crucial your diet is, Using exercise to help reach your detox goals, Exploring your options for supplements, Making sure your intestinal flora has the right balance and Picking a good, open-minded doctor.

Taking the Detoxification Initiative: The Basics of Detoxing Your Body

In This Chapter

▶ Recognizing how crucial your diet is

▶ Using exercise to help reach your detox goals

▶ Exploring your options for supplements

▶ Making sure your intestinal flora has the right balance

▶ Picking a good, open-minded doctor

Your body is well equipped to maintain health and to detoxify an enormous number of chemicals and toxins. It really is a marvelous natural machine. But your body does have its limits, and the world around you now is pushing those limits and in many cases exceeding them.

If you want to keep your health moving in the right direction despite the ever- present threat of toxins, you have to make an effort to augment your body’s natural detoxification mechanisms. That’s what this chapter is all about. I take you through the basics of several types of active detoxification methods, from diet (which is perhaps the most important battle in your war against toxins) to exercise, supplements, and maintenance of your bowel flora. I even offer some advice on how you can find the right kind of doctor to support and enhance your detoxification.

You won’t find lots of specifics in this chapter — the details are in other chapters of this book. But if you’re looking for an overview of what you should do if you’re serious about detoxification, you’ve come to the right place.

Detoxing through Diet

Imagine a toolbox that contains all the detoxification techniques and methods you have at your disposal. The toolbox has a place for saunas, one for chelation (the process of using a chemical that can attach to and then remove a toxic substance), and on down the list. (I cover these and other detox options in Chapter 18 and in other spots throughout the book.) In this toolbox, you’d need a whole separate compartment for diet. Maybe even a whole drawer. You know what? You may even need another toolbox just to fit all the impor- tant dietary components of a healthy, detoxified lifestyle. The right kind of diet is critical for effective detoxification.

Because diet is so critical, I certainly don’t skimp on the detox diet details in this book. But before you can grasp the finer points of adjusting your diet to accomplish detox goals, you need to feel comfortable with the basics,

and that’s what this section is about. (If you’d rather dive right into the nitty gritty details about detox dieting, I recommend Chapters 6, 7, and 9.)

In order for your body to function and maintain health over the course of your life, you must ensure that you continually provide it with a number of nutrients. You don’t need these nutrients in any spectacular amounts, and you can even go without some of them for a period of time. I see this all the time in my practice. To be honest, after hearing about the diets of some people I’m surprised they’re still alive. (Nowhere is this more evident than in children with autism. I’ve treated some children who have eaten only chicken nuggets, cheese pizza, and sugary cereal for years.)

Denying your body the essential nutrients it must have to operate is a way of inflicting malnutrition on yourself. Think about that: If you’re not giving your body the right amounts of the right nutrients, you’re basically creating a problem for yourself that we spend billions of dollars to fight in developing countries every year. There’s really no excuse for it!

Over the next few pages, I tell you all about the most important nutrients for your body. I let you know a little about the roles these nutrients play in your system, and I provide a good look at some of the food sources you can include in your diet to make sure you’re getting what you need in the right amounts. Filling up your diet with key nutrients is just as important as rid- ding it of toxins. (If you’re craving more information on how to keep toxins out of your food, flip back to Chapter 3 or ahead to Chapter 7.)

Eating the essentials

Your body needs certain substances that it can’t make on its own. You have to get these substances in the food you eat (or sometimes in the water you

drink) if you want to enjoy long-term health. Here’s a basic look at these substances:

✓ Essential amino acids: Amino acids are the building blocks that make protein. There are ten amino acids that we must have, and we can’t make them on our own. You can’t store amino acids in your body, so you have to get them in your diet every day.

✓ Essential fatty acids: These include omega-3 fatty acids and omega-6 fatty acids.

✓ Minerals: Your body needs 16 minerals to operate at an optimal level.

You can get all the minerals you need from vegetables and water, but only if you eat 100 percent organic. (Check out Chapter 7 for my thorough explanation of organic foods.)

✓ Vitamins: We can’t make them, and we can’t live without them. There are 14 essential vitamins, and each one is unique. As with minerals, you can’t get all the vitamins you need from vegetables unless the vegetables you eat are all 100 percent organic.

To read about all of these substances and find out how you can make sure you’re getting them in your diet, flip ahead to Chapter 17.

Eating colors for antioxidants

The next time you’re in the produce section of a grocery store, take a second to stand back and look at all the colors. Fruits and vegetables seem to be painted from a lush, comprehensive palette that ranges from deep, rich greens to eye-popping bright yellows.

You can use the colors of fruits and vegetables to help guide your dietary levels of antioxidants, which is another extremely important component for your diet.

Antioxidants are substances that help to cut down on oxidation — a process that occurs normally in the body but can run rampant and damage your body’s cells (especially in the presence of toxins). Antioxidants help keep oxidation under control, and an overwhelming amount of research shows that including plenty of antioxidants in your diet will make you healthier across the board.

Join me for the following look at the rainbow of fruit and vegetable options and the antioxidants that you can find in each color.

Red

Plenty of red fruits and vegetables are available, and many can provide you with wonderfully healthy antioxidants. Take red kidney beans, for example. They’re loaded with antioxidants! Red kidney beans have antioxidant levels that are as high as or higher than many berries that are commonly regarded as antioxidant powerhouses. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should skip red berries and other red fruits; raspberries, cherries, red apples, and strawberries are excellent sources of antioxidants, too.

Red tomatoes have a specific kind of antioxidant that is particularly important for men. You can find abundant amounts of lycopene in tomatoes, and lycopene has been shown to contribute to the health of the prostate gland. That doesn’t mean that women should discount the health benefits of eating tomatoes, of course — just that men should keep it in mind when deciding whether or not to put a slice of tomato on their sandwiches or add another spoonful of sauce to their pasta.

Here’s one other specific antioxidant that you can find in red fruits: resveratrol. Resveratrol has been shown to decrease the growth of cancer cells, help nerve cells stay healthy in diabetics, and also decrease heart disease by helping to maintain blood vessels. You can find resveratrol in red grape skins and also in red wine.

Blue and purple

Fresh vegetables and fruits that are blue or purple may not be as common as those in shades of green or red, but a few blue and purple foods can provide you with some terrific antioxidant benefits.

Start with plums and their dried counterparts, prunes. Both make great snacks, and they’re packed with antioxidants. You can also go for blackberries; they’re a little tough to find out of season, but when they’re available try to mix them into your diet for an antioxidant boost.

The king of the antioxidant-rich blue foods is the blueberry. You often hear blueberries referred to as one of the “superfoods,” and that’s not just clever marketing. Blueberries are chock-full of beneficial antioxidants, and they also contain many of the vitamins you need to stay healthy. Load up on blueberries when you can, and keep in mind that the darker the blueberry, the more healthy materials you can find inside.

On the vegetable side of things, try eggplant for a blue or purple food that can provide you with an antioxidant kick.

Orange

Orange (and yellow) members of the fruit and vegetable groups are famous for containing beta-carotene, an antioxidant that is thought to help protect against eye disease and some forms of cancer. If you’re looking to give your beta-carotene levels a boost, try orange foods like carrots, pumpkin, and winter squash. Orange and yellow fruits that contain ample antioxidants include nectarines, oranges, lemons, peaches, and grapefruit.

Green

Green vegetables make up a big part of the produce section, and they should also make up a substantial part of your diet. From peas to turnip greens to Brussels sprouts and even sea vegetables like kelp, green vegetables help you give your body all sorts of healthy substances, antioxidants included.

I want to give special treatment to broccoli, which packs an extremely healthy punch. Broccoli contains lots of sulforaphane, an antioxidant that has been receiving a lot of attention from researchers lately because it helps the body get rid of toxins, supports the immune system, and can even slow down tumors.

Eating raw

The preparation of your food — from processing to cooking — has an impact on its nutrition. Processing foods with chemicals has the most negative impact because those methods often add toxins and rarely (if ever) conserve important nutrients. Applying heat to food is less damaging, but it can still break down some of the really beneficial substances. For these reasons, it’s useful to get plenty of raw foods in your diet, particularly plant foods like vegetables, fruits, and nuts. It’s really hard to beat fresh produce for nutritional value; there’s no better way to get essential nutrients than to load up on all the tasty things that don’t get fooled with much (if at all) on their route from the tree (or bush or vine or root) to your plate.

Some people go so far as to eat only raw foods, but that’s a practice that can be difficult for most of us to sustain. Chances are you currently cook your food and plan to continue doing so. With that in mind, I provide some simple analyses of a few cooking methods:

✓ Frying: Nothing good happens when you fry food (except the taste!).

As you’d probably guess, pan frying is better than deep frying, which is really one of the worst things you can do to your food. Skip deep frying whenever possible.

✓ Pressure cooking: Antioxidant levels in most foods are reduced more through pressure cooking than through any other cooking method. If you’re eating specific foods for antioxidant value, be sure you’re not pressure cooking them or you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

✓ Boiling: Boiling food can be fine for short amounts of time, but boiling for extended periods can really decrease the nutrient value of many foods.

✓ Baking: Generally speaking, baking is a good way to cook food without compromising the nutritional value too much. It’s a problem only if you’re baking foods to the point where they’re mushy; if that happens, you know you’ve lost at least some of the nutrients.

✓ Steaming: I’m a big proponent of steaming, particularly for vegetables.

It’s easy, quick, delicious, and helps to maintain most of the nutritive value of vegetables.

Some fans of raw food diets insist that all vegetables and fruits are better raw than any other way, but that isn’t completely true. The nutrients in some foods are actually enhanced through cooking. One example is the lycopene (an anti- oxidant) found in tomatoes. A recent study showed that one type of lycopene in tomatoes actually increases 35 percent when the tomatoes are cooked for 30 minutes at 190 degrees Fahrenheit. Another study showed that the antioxidant beta-carotene increases when carrots are cooked. Other examples include spinach, mushrooms, asparagus, cabbage, peppers, and many other vegetables, which also provide more antioxidants when cooked.

There’s always a trade-off, of course, and in this case it’s vitamin C. Most types of cooking break down vitamin C, so while you’re cooking some of these vegetables to increase their antioxidant levels, chances are you’re decreasing the amount of vitamin C you’ll get from them. However, it’s pretty easy to get vitamin C in your diet by eating fresh fruits, so in this case you’re probably just fine doing a little cooking to up the antioxidant ante.

Avoiding ingredients you can’t pronounce

If you want a nearly foolproof way to make sure you’re getting what you need and avoiding what can harm you in food, stick to this simple rule: If you can’t pronounce an ingredient in the food, don’t eat it. I know that sounds remark- ably simplistic, but for the most part it really does work. Foods that contain bizarre ingredients with huge names and pronunciations that only a chemist could love don’t have any place on our plates.

This rule is a no-brainer when it comes to fresh foods like fruits and vegetables. Produce doesn’t have ingredient lists, but if it did you wouldn’t have any problem pronouncing all the words. Lettuce. Carrots. Apples. Spinach. Easy enough, right? But go a few aisles over in your grocery store and take a look at the ingredient lists on the food that comes in boxes, pouches, and cans. You’ll see ingredients like butylated hydroxyanisole, potassium metabisulfite, and erythorbic acid. Huh? Can you pronounce those ingredients? Do you have any idea what they are? If you answer no to both questions, it’s safe to say that those chemicals don’t belong in your body. The fact is that you don’t need them to survive. So why would you eat them, when it’s just as easy to fill up your shopping cart with foods that contain things like rice, cabbage, broccoli, and cherries? Stick with the basics.

Spicing up your life

One of the biggest knocks on eating a healthy diet is a lack of flavor. Some people think about eating healthy and immediately assume that if they fill their diets with nutrient-rich foods, they’ll look down at their dinner plates and see nothing more than a few kale leaves and chunks of celery.

In fact, the opposite is true. Healthy, nourishing diets — including detox diets — can and should include a wide variety of flavorful components, particularly spices and herbs. You can get a world of flavor and an excellent array of nutrients just by adding spices and herbs to your diet.

Spices are made from flowers, berries, bark, seeds, and roots, and herbs are usually plant leaves. Both are readily available, and both can be an integral part of a detoxification-focused diet.

Pound for pound, spices have more antioxidants than fruits or vegetables. The antioxidants you can find in spices are varied, and their contributions to your health can be substantial. To give you an idea of how impactful spices can be, a recent study showed that adding lemon balm and marjoram to a diet could increase antioxidant levels by 150 percent and 200 percent respectively.

You probably include some herbs and spices in your diet, but there’s always room for more. There’s no better way to improve the quality of your recipes and your health all at the same time! To help encourage you in that direction, I offer the following list of spices and herbs and some of their health benefits:

✓ Cayenne pepper: Contains capsaicin (a potent antioxidant), beta-carotene, and vitamins A and C.

✓ Cilantro: Contains potent antioxidants and can be useful in the removal of mercury from the body. Coriander is the seed of cilantro.

✓ Cinnamon: Acts as an antimicrobial, decreasing the growth of fungi and yeast. It also helps to prevent blood clots, and a recent study has shown it to help decrease blood sugar in diabetics.

✓ Cloves: Helps to reduce nausea, vomiting, indigestion, and stomach ulcers.

✓ Coriander: Offers strong antioxidant effects and contains vitamins A and C.

✓ Garlic: Includes potent antioxidants, decreases blood pressure and cholesterol, and has historically been used to prevent the common cold.

✓ Ginger: Provides antioxidants and can help decrease nausea, vomiting, and morning sickness. A truly dynamic spice, ginger is twice as effective as many common motion sickness drugs and can lessen the side effects of chemotherapy.

✓ Oregano: Provides four times the antioxidant activity of blueberries, which are a powerful source of antioxidants.

✓ Parsley: Contains strong antioxidants (including beta-carotene), folic acid, and vitamins A and C.

✓ Red chili powder: Includes capsaicin and has been used to help reduce inflammation, clear mucus, boost immunity, and decrease cholesterol.

✓ Saffron: Loaded with antioxidants and has been used to treat dysentery and improve eye health.

✓ Sage: Contains antioxidants and can generate anti-inflammatory effects.

This list is really just the beginning. Most herbs and spices offer some sort of health benefit, and hundreds of different varieties are available. You can use them to boost your health, detoxify, and spice up your meals all at the same time. Your imagination is your only limitation!

Embracing Exercise

For most of human history, exercise consumed a big part of our daily lives. We were physically active for much of the day just doing the work of staying alive. Only in the last 100 years or so have most people stopped doing daily vigorous exercise. And exercise isn’t the only thing we’ve stopped doing since the advent of twentieth-century technology. Until the 1950s and the development of air conditioning, most of the world’s population was used to spending all summer in a natural sauna, day and night.

Our bodies are built for physical activity; we simply can’t be healthy without exercise and sweating. Virtually every part of our body is dependent upon exercise to work at maximum efficiency, and any effort you make to detoxify your body is greatly enhanced if you make regular exercise part of your plan.

If you’re not exercising regularly, you need to start now. If you can get 30 minutes of exercise each day, you’ll do wonders for your body. And don’t think that you need to be jogging steep mountain trails or pumping iron in an expensive gym to get a workout. For many people there’s no better exercise than walking at a fast pace. Even if you’re not currently exercising, you should be able to walk briskly for a half hour, but it’s always a good idea to check with your doctor before starting an exercise regimen. Don’t be afraid to start out slowly and increase your speed gradually until you’re walking about 2 miles in 30 minutes. The important thing is to exercise regularly — daily is by far the best — so that it becomes a ritual instead of a chore.

If you want to sleep better at night, exercise in the early morning. Multiple studies have shown that early morning exercise helps keep our day–night cycle stable. Exercising in the morning gives you far more energy during the day and better sleep at night. Exercising in the evening tends to wake up your body when it’s trying to prepare itself for sleep. If you think that your schedule, climate, or some other factor prevents you from exercising in the morning, take another look. You may just have to get up 30 minutes earlier, which is something that most of us can do in the interest of promoting long-term health.

If you dread the idea of getting started on even a simple exercise plan, try getting someone else involved to make things more enjoyable. Why not get your spouse or a good friend to walk with you? It’s a great way to spend time together, and you may be surprised what some sidewalk and a pair of comfortable shoes can do for a relationship or friendship.

Maximizing detox with your muscles

An obvious benefit of exercise is strengthening skeletal muscles, and going through a regular workout will inevitably improve your muscle strength and endurance. When you use your muscles regularly, they become more toned and utilize energy more efficiently. This means you can get more work done with less energy expended. Exercise also extends the length of time that a muscle can work without getting tired.

In addition, the following are other, less obvious benefits to working out that can help you use your muscles to maximize your detoxification efforts.

Revving your lymph system

One of the most important functions of exercise relates to stimulating your lymph system, which is a key body system for detoxification. You may not have ever heard about the lymph system. I bet you’ve heard about the circulatory system, right? That one involves your heart, arteries, and veins, and it circulates blood throughout your body in a closed system (meaning the blood stays in your blood vessels). The lymph system is another body system for moving around liquid substances. It’s twice as large as the circulatory system and consists of tubes called lymph vessels. The lymph vessels are connected like limbs on a tree, and the small ends are open.

After your body’s tissues use the nutrients that are delivered by the blood in your circulatory system, the waste products — including many toxins that your body has to get rid of — are released and travel into the lymph system. Waste products move through larger and larger lymph vessels until they’re eventually dumped back into the circulatory system, which carries them to the liver and kidneys to be processed and later expelled from your body.

Your heart works as the pump for your circulatory system, but what’s the pump for the lymph system? There isn’t just one. The lymph system depends on contracting muscles and the movement of your lungs to move wastes through your system and eventually out of your body. The stronger and more active your muscles and lungs, the more activity your lymph system will enjoy and the more waste products you’ll clear out of your body. Taking time for regular exercise helps keep your lymph system in tip-top shape, and it goes a long way in helping you clear your body of toxins.

Muscling out blood sugar problems

Too much sugar in your body can have a variety of toxic effects. I know it can be a little hard to think of sugar as a toxin, but if you have doubts just ask someone who suffers from diabetes.

The control of blood sugar is another vital benefit of exercise. When you exercise, your muscles have an increased demand for energy, and they’re more than happy to take sugar directly out of your bloodstream to get the energy they need to keep moving. That process is a huge help in keeping your blood sugar under control, and it also helps to prevent diabetes. The problems caused by diabetes affect millions of people each year, and the cost to treat all those conditions is in the billions of dollars. Think about all the suffering we could prevent and the resources we could save if we all just made it a point to take a brisk walk for 30 minutes every day!

Working your heart, lungs, and brain

Exercising is an awfully important part of total body health, and some of the most crucial advantages of regular exercise affect your heart, lungs, and brain. (I think we can agree that these are three pretty useful body parts.)

Making your heart happy

The heart is a muscle, but it’s one that performs feats of stamina and longev- ity that put most of your other muscles to shame. Like all muscles, it functions much better if it’s exercised regularly — preferably on a daily basis. You can exercise your heart muscle simply by engaging in a physical activity that makes it beat more actively than when you’re not doing anything physically active. The amount and intensity of that physical activity depends on your age. You can use your age to figure out your maximum heart rate (MHR), which you can therefore use to figure out how hard you need to work your heart muscle. Subtract your age from 220, and the result is your MHR in number of beats per minute.

You don’t want to exercise to the point where you’re raising your heart rate to your MHR and leaving it there, because doing so would be dangerous. You really want to shoot for various percentages of your MHR, ranging from 50 to 60 percent (when you’re just getting started on an exercise regimen) up to 80 percent of your MHR (when you’ve been exercising regularly for a few weeks and you’re trying to build endurance). If you can’t maintain 80 percent, try maintaining 60 percent and adding in a few short bursts that take your heart rate up to 80 percent. (Keep in mind that these are just general figures, and your ideal heart rate may be quite different if you have medical problems.)

Don’t wait until you have heart trouble to begin an exercise program. Use exercise as a preventative measure, and you’ll keep your heart healthier and happier than you ever could with prescription drugs and surgeries — common treatments for patients with established heart conditions.

Letting your lungs breathe easier

Getting a regular dose of exercise keeps your heart pumping along happily, but it also helps you to build stronger lungs. During a session of physical activity, your lungs have to work harder to keep enough oxygen in your blood to fill the needs of all your moving muscles. That increases your lung capacity and contributes to making your breathing easier and more effective. It also has a positive effect on the muscles that you use to expand and con- tract your lungs, which in turn increases endurance.

Boosting your brain function

And let’s not forget about how exercise can benefit your mind. Here’s what working out regularly can do for your brain:

✓ Grow new nerve cells.

✓ Improve mood and even help reverse depression.

✓ Release natural chemicals (called endorphins) that create a sense of euphoria and reduce pain.

✓ Improve cognitive function (especially in older people).

✓ Possibly prevent and treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. (Some studies suggest this benefit, but at this point the evidence is inconclusive.)

Supporting Your Health with Supplements

Most of our diets are downright deplorable. Our food choices are often lousy, and even when people make good choices, the actual food items are of a poor quality. In the days before commercial food processing, a person’s usual intake of food was rich in vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. The result was generally good health. But all the various methods for processing — from homogenization to radiation — have reduced a lot of our foods to nutrient- depleted masses of empty calories and harmful fats.

I truly believe that you can’t be healthy in the Western world today without using supplements to increase your intake of vitamins, minerals, and essential fatty acids. Even if you eat only organic foods, you’re not likely to get the extra amounts of antioxidants that are necessary to fight off all the environmental toxins that assault us on a daily basis.

Not everyone in the medical community shares my love and support of supplements. You’ll hear some doctors say that taking supplements just makes expensive urine because your body doesn’t absorb enough of the key ingredients to have an effect. I simply don’t agree.

The recommended daily allowance (RDA) for most vitamins is established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and in most cases the recommendations are absurdly low. The FDA tends to set RDAs at a level that helps you avoid certain diseases but doesn’t help you to improve your health much beyond that. For example, the FDA says that you need 90 milligrams of vitamin C per day, but that measly amount won’t do much for you beyond fighting off scurvy. Vitamin C can have wonderful effects on your health, but not in such paltry amounts. (I list my recommended dosages for all the necessary vitamins in Chapter 17, if you’re interested. You can also flip to Chapter 22 to read about ten supplements that I recommend everyone take on a daily basis.)

In this section, I use a two-pronged approach to provide you with basic supplement information: I let you know some general rules for selecting supplements, and I clue you in on the ways in which you can avoid a few common supplement mistakes.

Selecting supplements smartly

If you’ve decided that you’re going to begin taking supplements regularly, it’s time to go to the store to pick out a supplement product. That sounds easy enough, but in most stores you find an intimidating wall of choices. It can be difficult to choose the right bottle of supplements among all those options. How can you know which supplements are good quality? What do you need to look for before buying? How can you tell, when you’re standing there in a store aisle, how a supplement is going to perform when it’s in your system? Let me help you sort through some of those questions.

The most expensive supplement you buy is the one that doesn’t contain any active ingredients. If all you’re buying is a glorified sugar pill, you can save a lot of money by just buying a bag of sugar! Be prepared to consider and analyze several options before making a supplement purchase.

Many supplement companies will tell you that their supplements are more effective because they’re administered as dissolvable tablets that you place under your tongue, as patches that you put on your skin, or even as rectal suppositories. The truth is that a good oral supplement (with some legitimate studies that back its effectiveness) is the best option.

Looking for supplement certification

Vitamins and other supplements aren’t required to have any testing done before they’re sent out into the marketplace. No government entity sets industry-wide requirements that supplement makers have to meet. If a product does not contain as much of the substance as its label says, nothing prevents the manufacturer from selling it anyway. To be honest, in terms of initial obstacles, not much stops someone from bottling sugar pills and selling them as vitamin C. The whole operation can be backed up with a marketing plan, Web site, and multilevel sales scheme.

That said, some supplement manufacturers do conduct their own in-house tests to make sure their products are legit. The extent and frequency of the testing varies from company to company.

Make it a practice to check any potential supplement for confirmation that it was made in a GMP approved plant. The Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) regulations are specified by the FDA, and they cover the quality of the actual manufacturing processes by which supplements are made. To achieve the designation, a supplement maker pays a third-party testing firm to come into the plant where it makes supplements. That firm conducts a series of tests to make sure that the plant is operating in a clean, safe, and accurate way. If the testing firm’s results are within the guidelines set by the FDA, the supplement maker’s plant becomes GMP approved. A supplement made in a GMP approved plant may not be perfect, but at least you know the product was made in a good environment.

Before I recommend any supplement, I confirm it was made in a GMP-certified facility. But I also go a step further. I make certain that the supplement company sends a portion of every lot of its product to an outside independent lab for assay (molecular analysis). The supplement company must allow me to contact the lab directly to confirm the test results on any particular lot of product. This testing will include making sure that the supplement dissolves in the stomach or intestines. Exceedingly few companies do these tests.

At the very least, take the following two steps before buying a supplement:

✓ Look for a seal from USP (United States Pharmacopeia) on the label.

This designation indicates that the company has made some effort to be credible, but its testing is only random.

✓ Read the label carefully to make sure that the manufacturer, packer, and distributor have addresses in the United States. Some supplements are made in other countries — where manufacturing processes are even more of a crapshoot than they are in the United States. The supplements are then repackaged in the United States, and those products can be dangerous. Even if the supplement brand is familiar, take the time to confirm the addresses of its operations. Some of the best known and advertised names are the worst in quality.

Checking out supplement ingredient lists

Another key to supplement selection is making sure the ingredients that are combined in one product have a valid reason for being put into the same product. Some companies do their own research to validate the effectiveness of a particular combination of ingredients. An enormous amount of data is available on the effectiveness of vitamins, herbs, supplements, and minerals. If you’re going to spend your money on a product, make sure you know the scientific rationale for the combination of ingredients you’re getting.

When you find a company that does third-party testing before shipping and allows access to the outside lab directly, you can be assured that its products are well formulated and high quality. This type of quality company will also be more than glad to give you the research material to support its use of product combinations. Keep in mind that some of the best products are sold only through physician’s offices.

Avoiding potential supplement snags

Supplements are big business. Annual supplement sales are $23 billion, and about 40,000 supplement products are on the market. In an industry so large, it’s tough to avoid the occasional subpar or even harmful product. And, as I mention in the previous section, the supplement industry is loosely regulated at best. So you can imagine how many questionable products are floating around.

The biggest problem with supplements is that many of them don’t actually contain what the label claims. Depending on the estimate you choose to believe, as many as 70 percent of the supplements on the market either don’t have ingredients that match their labels or contain contaminants of some kind. The results can be disastrous: Recently, more than 200 people were sickened when a selenium supplement had 200 times the amount of selenium indicated on the label, for example.

Cases of spiked supplements have also occurred. Not long ago the FDA had to get involved in a situation in which a questionable supplement manufacturer had been adding a drug similar to the powerful male erectile dysfunction medicine to its supposedly all-natural dietary supplement.

With all the potential pitfalls, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? You need to do some legwork. Here are some pointers:

✓ If a product claims to guarantee results and help to alleviate all sorts of ailments from headaches to hemorrhoids, save your money.

Reputable sources that produce high quality supplements know better than to advertise that way.

✓ Look for supplements that are derived from food sources whenever possible. Synthetic production often eliminates the natural mix of substances present in the natural food source, making them less beneficial and sometimes of no benefit at all.

✓ Request analyses from the companies that make the supplements you’re considering. The best manufacturers have a litany of evidence to support their claims and verify the integrity of their products, and some of them will provide that information upon request. Don’t hesitate to call or e-mail a supplement maker to ask for detailed information about its products. (You can usually find all the contact information on a company’s Web site.) Above all, do not accept lab analyses that companies perform in their own labs.

While these suggestions apply to any supplements, you should also be aware of problems specific to certain types of supplements, which I cover next.

Minerals

The big problem with some mineral supplements is that they’re not easily absorbed. To confirm that the minerals you’re buying will actually end up in your body and not in your toilet, look for chelated minerals. Chelating is a somewhat complicated chemical process, and I won’t bog you down with the details. The take-home point is that chelated minerals are much more likely to be absorbed by your body than minerals that haven’t been put through the process. The process is patented, and you can spot it easily by looking for the company name Albion on the supplement’s label.

You should also be aware of one other mineral-specific concern. In addition to the active mineral ingredient, some mineral supplements include other substances, including — believe it or not — toxins. What’s even harder to fathom is that mineral products that contain these types of materials often list them as ingredients on their labels. Many mineral products are simply ground-up clay. So keep your eyes out for minerals that list lead, silver, antimony, or tin as ingredients! (Yes, I’m serious.)

Probiotics

Probiotics are supplements containing live bacteria that are taken to boost the amount of beneficial bacteria living in your body (the good bacteria living in your intestines). Here are two common problems with probiotics:

✓ Live bacteria levels: Some probiotics don’t have as much live bacteria in them as the label states. A study of 50 products taken from health food store shelves showed that the most any product contained was 5 percent of the live bacteria the label stated.

✓ Stray bacteria: The same study found that 8 out of 50 probiotic supplements tested contained harmful bacteria in addition to the good bacteria advertised on the label.

To dodge these problems, do what you’d do for any supplement: Request some third-party analysis from the supplement company.

Herbs

Because herb supplements are derived from plants, sometimes they contain nasty things like mold, bacteria, heavy metals, and pesticides. This disturbing trend will probably continue as some herb supplement manufacturers aim to cut costs and look overseas for raw materials. Reliable supplement makers test all incoming herbs and reject contaminated shipments, and the purity that results is obvious in the reports that they will send you upon request.

Vitamins

Vitamins are perhaps the most commonly used supplements, and I wish I could report that their widespread use means you won’t find problems with the many different vitamins on the market. But that’s simply not the case. Like the other supplements I discuss in this chapter, vitamins can sometimes fail to meet label claims. All too often a vitamin maker cuts the amount of vitamin material that’s included in each pill without changing the label; recent independent lab analysis confirms that this has been and is currently a significant problem.

I apologize if I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but if you want to make sure your vitamins contain what their labels swear they contain, be sure to contact the manufacturer for some documentation to support those claims.

Omega-3 fatty acids

Here’s one more supplement problem to be aware of before I wrap up this discussion: Supplements that contain omega-3 fatty acids usually come in fish oil products like liquids or softgel capsules, and because these things are fish-based they’re prone to mercury contamination. I can’t imagine that you would want to take a dose of mercury — a deadly toxin — with your fish oil supplement, so be sure to buy fish oil products that have been distilled. Distillation does an excellent job of removing all the mercury.

If you’re considering taking a fish oil supplement to up the amount of omega-3 fatty acids in your system, be sure to contact the supplement company first to ask it for analysis that confirms its fish oil doesn’t contain anisidine, DDT, dieldrin, or PCBs. These are all toxins, and all have been found in fish oil supple- ments in recent years.

Changing Intestinal Flora: Gut Check Time

How often do you think about your bowels? Chances are you really consider what your bowels are doing only when something is wrong with them — when you have constipation, diarrhea, or some kind of pain. That’s not enough! You need to put some thought into what’s going on in your intestines, because the condition of those parts of your body — and what’s living inside them — can have a tremendous impact on your total health, from ensuring good nutrition to avoiding disease.

Less than a century ago, most people in the developed world did a much better job of keeping up with their bowels than we do today. Getting a colon cleanse used to be an annual ritual for much of the population, but the practice fell out of favor by the mid-twentieth century. The timing couldn’t have been worse, as the advent of processed food was on the horizon and world travel was starting to become a possibility for more people. (Both trends have caused major problems for millions of intestines.) Colon cleanses went the way of the dodo just when we really needed to keep up with them.

In this section, I first explore what lives inside your gut — both the good and the bad. Then I explain how to get tests done that reveal what’s going on inside your intestines. Finally, I walk you through the process of cleaning out the bad elements and boosting the good.

Checking out what’s living inside you

The bacteria living in your intestines outnumber the cells in your body. Billions of organisms are living in your intestines, many of which play a key role in boosting your health, from nutrition to your immune system. Some of them can also play a role in damaging your health in nasty and painful ways. You should definitely understand the various things that live in your gut, so read on to explore the details. I can’t fill you in on all the varieties, so I’ve lumped them into two very broad groups: the good and the bad.

The good

The good types of organisms that live in your intestines are beneficial bac- teria that break down your food so the nutrients are more easily absorbed. Good bacteria also make vitamins for you, including B12 and K. As if that weren’t enough, they stimulate your immune system (in a good way) and help protect you from disease. When good bacteria are present in the right amounts in your intestines, it’s very difficult for harmful bacteria and yeast (which can damage your body) to survive. The most common types of good bacteria in the human intestine are Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus.

To help boost the amounts of good bacteria that you have living in your gut, you can eat plain yogurt with active bacterial cultures. You can also take bacteria in supplement form (called probiotics — read more earlier in this chapter), but you really have to do your homework on the supplement quality to make sure you’re getting good value for your money.

Good bacteria are very sensitive to the antibiotics administered when people get sick. Approximately 80 percent of good bacteria are killed when you take a single round of antibiotics! After the good bacteria are gone, it’s easier for harmful bacteria and yeast to multiply. That’s why diarrhea and vaginal yeast infections are common after someone takes a round of antibiotics — yet another reason to use antibiotics only when absolutely necessary.

The bad

The organisms that you can regard as bad when they’re in your intestines include harmful bacteria, yeast, and parasites. Bad bacteria commonly create byproduct gases, and they can cause inflammation and excessive, foul bowel gas. They also cause stress on your immune system, and they can give you chronic intestinal problems.

Antibiotics kill the good bacteria in your intestines and allow the bad bacteria to multiply rapidly. After the bad bacteria multiply, they can easily cause trouble in your intestines. The symptoms of these ailments can persist for years after just a single round of antibiotics. The effects aren’t always localized, either — some types of bad bacteria release toxins that can be absorbed in your bloodstream and damage distant organs, including the brain.

You also usually have a small amount of yeast in your intestines. Just like the harmful bacteria, the yeast is kept in check when the good bacteria are present in the right amounts. Good bacteria also help to thwart parasites, many of which love the intestines and can wreak all sorts of havoc on your body. For more details on the problems that yeast and parasites can cause, flip back to Chapter 2.

With its extremely high acid levels, your stomach also helps to control the amount of harmful bacteria, yeast, and parasites that end up in your bowels. If you overuse acid reducers, the stomach loses its acidity, making it easier for these damaging organisms to pass through to the intestines.

Considering useful tests

You can have two types of tests done to help determine what types of critters are living in your intestines: stool tests and urine tests. Both tests need to be administered by professionals, so if you’re interested you need to consult your doctor to get the process started. Both tests can be pretty expensive, so be prepared.

Stool tests involve providing a stool sample, which is sent to a lab that examines parts of the sample under a microscope and also runs some chemical tests to find out what is present in your stool. The test is relatively easy, although you may have to stop taking some medications a couple weeks beforehand. (Your doctor will fill you in on those details.)

The process for urine tests is similar: You simply provide a urine sample, which is sent off to a lab for analysis. It’s not possible to actually see what’s in your intestines by looking at your urine, of course. But labs can run chemical tests on the sample that reveal the presence of byproducts of certain types of bacteria, yeasts, and parasites that commonly set up shop in your intestines and release chemicals that enter your bloodstream and eventually end up in your urine.

Cleansing your bowels

I’m a big proponent of colon cleanses, and I suggest that doing a cleanse once a year is an excellent practice to help you rid your body of abnormal flora and put you on the path to better health.

If you’re starting a detox diet or any other detox program, you need to see to it that your intestines are healthy and have the right amounts of the right bacteria living inside them. Doing so involves removing the bad bacteria, yeast, and parasites; eating food and supplements that help your intestines to heal; and replacing the good bacteria. You usually need to take some prescription medications, but they’re very easy on the body. It often takes a month to get the intestines back in optimal condition.

To do your bowel cleanse, first find some good intestinal detox supplements. A supplement maker you rely on for quality products should have some in its product line. (See my discussion on choosing supplements earlier in this chapter.) Look for a product that includes wormwood, black walnut hulls, garlic, and pumpkin seeds. I also recommend adding in some clove supplements and a Vermox prescription because both are good for killing off parasite eggs. You should usually take such a supplement for a month in order to kill off the majority of the organisms that live in your bowels.

At the same time, you need to take a product that kills yeast cells. That supplement usually contains barberry, grapefruit seed extract, lavender, and other herbs. I usually add a prescription drug — either Diflucan or Nystatin — to aug- ment the yeast-killing process. It generally takes about three weeks to rid your intestines of harmful yeast cells.

After you’ve taken a round of supplements and perhaps prescription medica- tions to kill off the harmful bacteria, yeast, and parasites in your intestines, it’s time to start building up your intestinal health and adding back in the good bacteria. Do that by eating a diet that’s rich in the foods I describe in Chapter 7, and be sure to include lots of bacteria-containing yogurt and probiotic supplements.

If you and your doctor conclude that you’re suffering from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), you should strongly consider doing a colon cleanse. In my practice, I’ve found that a significant number of patients with IBS have complete relief of symptoms after doing the complete bowel detoxification that I describe here.

Getting a Professional Check-up

For many of the ailments caused by toxins, you need a doctor or other health- care professional to help you diagnose and in some cases treat the problem. If you want to make a concerted effort to detoxify your body and treat that effort as a top health priority, you need a doctor who understands and is sensitive to more than just the standard practices and beliefs of traditional medicine.

Deciding on a doctor is an intensely personal and important choice, so if you’re looking for a doctor or considering whether to stick with the one you currently use, be sure you’re as honest with yourself as possible. If you want to consider solutions that fall outside the range of traditional medicine, you need to feel confident that your doctor will hear you out and be willing to work with you. Few things in life are more important than your health, and it’s critical that you find someone who will work toward bettering your health without dismissing your input or forcing an agenda on you.

Finding an open-minded doctor

If you want to pursue natural healing, supplementation, or any other form of integrative or alternative self care, you may very well end up butting heads with your doctor. Many doctors aren’t as receptive to these ideas as they should be, but you can rest assured that it’s not totally their fault. Physicians today are overwhelmed by the influence of pharmaceutical companies. Every medical journal I receive is paid for by drug companies. Every speaker at every traditional medical seminar at the local, state, and national level is paid for by drug companies. Every representative who comes in my office is paid for by a drug company. It isn’t in a drug company’s best interest for physicians to recommend solutions for their patients that don’t involve prescription drugs, and they bombard doctors with information and propaganda accordingly. That situation can make it extremely hard for you to find a doctor who is open to alternative options.

But there’s good news, as well, in the form of an ever-growing group of physicians who consider a wide range of disease treatments and health enhancements that go beyond taking a prescription medication.

Two good resources exist for finding open-minded physicians who are keen on considering nontraditional solutions to medical problems: the American College for Advancement in Medicine (www.acam.org) and the International College of Integrative Medicine (www.icimed.com). I strongly recommend visiting their Web sites for a wide range of information on integrative medicine

and for physician lists that will help you find an integrative doctor in your area.

Integrative medicine is a concept of medicine using natural treatments when possible but using medication and traditional therapies when necessary. This approach is also called complementary medicine. Alternative practitioners (discussed in the next section) are usually not licensed to use traditional medical therapies and therefore use only alternative therapies.

Seeking out an alternative practitioner

Alternative practitioners are healthcare professionals who specialize in medicine that doesn’t necessarily fall within the range of what is currently regarded as “conventional.” They can be of great help in detoxing and seeking out good health. These types of professionals include chiropractors, naturopaths, and acupuncturists, and they also include some medical doctors (MDs) and doc- tors of osteopathic medicine (DOs).

MDs and DOs have the benefit of access to traditional medical treatments and prescriptions, which may be required at times. (Keep in mind that not all traditional medicine is bad!) For the best medical care, find an MD or DO who combines traditional medicine with an integrative approach. A doctor who uses natural therapies when possible but also calls upon traditional medicine when necessary is an excellent option.

MDs and DOs have equal medical privileges and very similar training. DOs receive training in manual medicine that MDs don’t receive. Manual medicine involves working directly with muscles to improve function or reduce pain.

Another difference is that about 80 percent of DOs are primary care doctors and 20 percent are specialists. MDs typically have the opposite split.

A naturopath is a professional who uses natural and physical tools to treat various conditions. Naturopaths are alternative practitioners, and they’re a varied group that includes acupuncturists and chiropractors as well as a host of practitioners who don’t have standardized training. Some alternative practitioners may have limited formal training but are still very talented in their particular field. Be careful, though, because some of these folks can practice bogus medicine (see the next section for details).

Your selection process for your alternative practitioner should be rigorous. Be sure to check credentials, years of experience, and word of mouth references, and also set up an initial interview to make sure you’re comfortable with your choice before beginning any medical evaluation or treatment.

Keeping an eye out for bogus medicine

It’s sad but true that a number of people claim to be practitioners of alter- native medicine who don’t offer much useful treatment or analysis at all. Put simply, there’s some bogus medicine out there, and you need to keep that fact in mind to avoid getting burned and putting your health (and your money) at risk.

Here are a few key questions to ask yourself when considering an alternative practitioner:

✓ Do any state laws govern this profession?

✓ Are standardized training and tests required to gain credentials?

✓ Do any local, state, or national organizations exist for this practitioner’s type of medicine? If so, is the practitioner in good stead with the organizations?

✓ Does the practitioner have reliable word of mouth support?

✓ Has the practitioner moved around frequently? If so, does he or she have a good reason for those moves?