Understanding How Your Body Detoxifies Itself: Discovering how your mouth and stomach contribute to detoxification, Investigating the incredible detox abilities of your intestines, Seeing the important role your skin plays in detoxification and Looking at the toxin-fighting functions of your liver and kidneys.

Understanding How Your Body Detoxifies Itself

In This Chapter

▶ Discovering how your mouth and stomach contribute to detoxification

▶ Investigating the incredible detox abilities of your intestines

▶ Seeing the important role your skin plays in detoxification

▶ Looking at the toxin-fighting functions of your liver and kidneys

The wonders of the human body never cease to amaze me. When you really think about what your body is capable of doing, I bet you’re

amazed too. One of the most impressive things your body does is deal with the influx of toxins.

From your mouth to your skin to your kidneys — and many places and parts in between — your body is set up to help you avoid and cleanse yourself of toxins. I think it’s critical to grasp all the ways in which your body deals with toxins so that you can play an active role in helping it out and augmenting its detoxification processes. That’s what I focus on throughout this chapter. Take a spin through the next several pages to find out what’s going on inside your body to help maintain your health against an environment that contin- ues to get more toxic with each passing year.

Your Mouth: Chewin’ It Up

All digestion starts in the mouth. Food and liquids enter your body through your mouth, and some extremely important things occur there. Successful and healthy digestion requires that the mouth is doing its job, and your body’s ability to detoxify itself can be greatly aided if you make an effort to allow your mouth to do its important work.

Remember when your mom told you to slow down and chew your food? That was excellent advice. When your teeth tear and grind your food into smaller bits, your food is better prepared to go through the various steps in digestion. Chewing your food well allows your stomach and intestines to break down the food and extract its nutrients with a higher degree of effectiveness. The result is a healthier you all across the board, and it’s a heck of a lot easier for your body to fight off toxic threats if it’s healthy. But that’s not the only detoxification value that chewing your food offers.

When you chew thoroughly instead of swallowing larger bits of food, you make it easier for the acid in your stomach to break down the food. Stomach acid is a terrific toxin fighter, and you want to see that your body is taking full advantage of its powers, so be sure to chew your food thoroughly before swallowing it.

In addition to chewing, the mouth adds an ingredient that’s critical for digestion: saliva. This super fluid does all sorts of great things:

✓ Binds and lubricates: The mucus in saliva makes the food you eat very slippery, and it binds the food together in a soupy mixture that slides down your esophagus without damaging the lining of that important tube, which runs from your mouth to your stomach.

✓ Allows you to taste dry food: Without saliva, it would be virtually impossible to taste dry food. If you were eating something with toxins that can be tasted — food spoiled by harmful, toxic bacteria, for example — you probably wouldn’t even know it.

✓ Decreases acidity: When you eat highly acidic food, there’s always a chance that the acid could damage your mouth (including your teeth) and esophagus. Saliva contains sodium bicarbonate, which is a chemical that reduces acidity. Sure, your stomach is highly acidic, and after your food gets there it gets fully soaked in acid. But your stomach lining is equipped to handle acids in a way that your mouth and esophagus just can’t.

✓ Starts the digestion of starches: Saliva releases a chemical that begins to break down starches into basic sugars. That’s a good thing because your body can’t do much at all with starches, while it absolutely has to have sugars (for energy) to survive.

✓ Kills bacteria: This is a big one. Saliva contains a substance called lysozyme that can kill off bacteria in your food and even the bacteria that try to grow in your mouth and on your teeth. If you read Chapter 2, you know that some types of bacteria can be just as toxic as the worst chemical toxins, so it’s of the utmost importance that you’re not bringing high levels of bacteria into your body when you put food in your mouth. (A side note: Bacteria cause bad breath. Healthy amounts of saliva kill more bacteria, thereby helping you to avoid bad breath.)

✓ Improves oral hygiene: Saliva constantly flushes away food debris, which is a major cause of poor oral hygiene.

This advice really surprises some people, but you shouldn’t drink fluids with your meals. Doing so simply isn’t good for digestion. If you need to wash down your food with liquids, you’re not chewing your food enough, and you’re not allowing the food to be penetrated by and covered in saliva. You’re also diluting the acid in your stomach, which is an important component in the process of killing toxic bacteria before it enters your intestines. Many pharmaceutical drugs reduce saliva and can cause a really dry mouth; if you have this problem, talk to your doctor. My advice is to wait a couple hours after a meal before drinking fluids. After that, you can drink all the water you want.

Your Stomach: Breakin’ It Down

If your body had a trash can, it would be your stomach. When your sinuses use mucus to trap particles of dust, viruses, mold, and bacteria, where does that mucus end up? In your stomach. When your mouth takes in food and liquids that could contain dangerous, toxic bacteria, where does that material end up? In your stomach. When the tubes leading down to your lungs trap foreign materials in the air you breathe before they get down to your sensi- tive lung tissue, where do they send those materials? That’s right — up your windpipe, into your esophagus, and then down into your stomach.

Your stomach is rough, tough, and ready to take on just about anything you put into it. Can you blame it for growling every once in a while?

Death to the microbes!

The key to the stomach’s wonderful ability to handle almost everything your body throws at it is stomach acid. This isn’t some weak acid like the kind in your orange juice. If your stomach acid were sitting on your kitchen table instead of in your stomach, you’d soon be in the market for a new kitchen table. It’s even strong enough to eat away metal, so you can imagine the number it does on many toxic materials that end up in your stomach when you inadvertently eat, drink, or breathe them in. Your stomach acid breaks down many types of dangerous toxins, and the health of your stomach is an important factor in keeping your body as toxin-free as possible.

Stomach acid can kill almost anything that’s living when it reaches the stomach. As you can imagine, this ability has major benefits for your immune system. It’s a whole lot easier for your body to simply kill off things like harm- ful bacteria, mold, and parasites in your stomach than to deal with the effects of those critters compromising your immune system.

Interfering with your stomach’s work

When stomach acid is potent and present in healthy amounts, it can be very difficult for potentially harmful living things to pass through the stomach and enter your intestines. However, many people today take medication — both prescription and over the counter — for stomach pain or indigestion, thereby lowering the amount and strength of acid in the stomach. These medicines can help to relieve stomach pain, but they also make it a lot easier for living threats to survive in your body and eventually give your immune system fits.

If you’re experiencing frequent stomach pain or indigestion, make sure you and your doctor consider several possible causes before you start taking medication that weakens the acid in your stomach. The pain can be caused by a number of different things, and you don’t want to compromise the important acid in your stomach if you don’t need to.

When one of my patients experiences a burning feeling in her stomach or symptoms of acid reflux, I always test the levels of acid in her stomach. I don’t expect to find extremely high levels of acid; in fact, in most cases (and especially with older patients) the problem is a lack of stomach acid. Hard to believe? Here’s how it works.

When it’s working correctly, your stomach won’t let food enter your intestines until the food is at least partially digested. If you don’t have enough acid in your stomach, the food isn’t digested well enough and your stomach hangs onto it instead of sending it on down the line. Soon your stomach begins to contract on the stalled food in an effort to try to mix it with the small amounts of acid present. If it’s five hours after you’ve eaten a meal and you’re lying down with a stomach full of food, and your stomach begins contracting, you’re bound to have pain or acid reflux.

This sequence of events is most common in older patients. A higher percentage of older people are taking potent acid-reducing medication than ever before. If that were the right solution, the cause would have to be that older people are producing higher amounts of more powerful stomach acid as they age. That would mean that the cells in the stomach are working better in their effort to produce more acid. But let’s be honest: Hardly anything works better as we get older — stomach cells included. In these situations it could very well be that acid-reducing medicines are a counterproductive treatment. If you think you may be making your stomach problems worse by taking medicines that cut down on your stomach acid, be sure to bring up the question with your doctor before taking any action. The bottom line is that most acid reflux is cause by low acid — not high acid.

The good news if you’re acid deficient is that the problem is relatively easy to correct. You can take an old medicine called sucralfate that doesn’t lower acid levels but does help to cover any raw spots in your stomach lining that could be causing you pain. (The most common brand name for sucralfate is Carafate.) You can use this drug in combination with betaine HCL, which helps acidify your stomach to the right levels when you’re eating a meal. That com- bination will correct stomach pain problems in many people. But again, please don’t take these steps until consulting your doctor.

Breaking down good and bad proteins

In addition to killing off harmful organisms, the acid in your stomach works to break proteins down into amino acids, which your body has to have in order to survive and thrive. (You can read a bit about amino acids and their important nutritional value in Chapter 5.)

Without the stomach’s processing of protein into amino acids, you wouldn’t be able to digest and absorb those materials into your bloodstream, and you’d have a hard time staying healthy for very long. Keeping up healthy levels of acid in your stomach is key here. If you use acid-reducing medications unnecessarily, you could be putting your nutrition at risk.

Your Intestines: Thirty Feet of Detox Action

It’s hard for some people to believe, but your large and small intestines are a combined 30 feet in length. That’s the length of a football field’s end zone! And the sheer size of your intestines pales in comparison to what they do when it comes to sorting out toxins and absorbing the right nutrients into your body. They really are fantastic body parts, and much of the detoxification effort put forth by your body takes places all along that 30-foot length.

Your intestines have thousands of little folds called villi. They add a huge amount of surface area to the intestines — so much, in fact, that they make the total area of your intestines that’s available for absorption roughly the same size as a tennis court! Villi are responsible for absorbing different mate- rials out of the partially digested food that passes by them. Whatever they absorb is passed into your bloodstream and therefore made available for your body to use. They’re not supposed to absorb toxins, of course — anything your body doesn’t need should pass by and out with your stool — but some toxins have a chemical structure that allows them to get past the villi and into your bloodstream.

As a rule, your intestines do a masterful job of absorbing the nutrients you need and shunning the toxins that can harm you. But if you don’t get enough of the former and you’re bringing in far too much of the latter, you can cause some major problems for your intestines. I shouldn’t have to tell you how important it is to maintain the health of a 30-foot organ that is responsible for the absorption of almost all your body’s nutrients.

Bringing up the barrier

When you think about it, the wall of your intestines is really the only thing between your body’s tissues and your stool. It’s an amazing and very protec- tive barrier, and it’s almost magical in its ability to let the good stuff pass into your body while keeping the bad stuff moving through with your waste.

In addition to providing a wonderfully dynamic physical barrier, the intestines also include a lot of important elements of your body’s biological barrier against disease: your immune system. It’s a little-known fact that about 80 percent of your body’s immune system is located in your intestines. The GALT (gut- associated lymphoid tissue), located mostly toward the end of your small intestine, is the final barrier that separates the inside of your body from your stool, which at that point usually contains harmful things like toxins, bacteria, yeast, mold, and parasites.

Taking in too many toxins through your diet can compromise the health of your intestines, including the GALT. That situation makes it difficult to maintain the integrity of both the physical barrier and the immune barrier, and disease is often the result. If you want to keep your intestinal barriers working like they should, do what you can to eliminate toxins from your diet.

Considering normal flora

Your intestines perform some critical functions, but they also act as a board- ing house for most of the beneficial bacteria living in your body. The normal, healthy bacterial flora in your intestines play an important role in digestion, breaking down several different kinds of food that your body isn’t able to break down on its own.

The normal flora in your intestines also provide you with another service. When present in healthy amounts, the beneficial bacteria take up space and nutrient resources that could otherwise be used by harmful, toxic organisms like bacteria, yeast, and parasites. I provide some details on normal bacterial flora in Chapter 5, so flip ahead if you’d like to read more.

Eliminating the mess

The chemical processes and reactions that take place in your intestines when nutrients are absorbed and toxins are shut out are as complex and elegant as anything you’d find in even the most technologically advanced chemical company. On top of that, your intestines also have a very complicated way of moving your partially digested food and stool through at a proper rate, so that all the processes can take place in the right amount of time. This function helps to keep toxins moving through and eventually out of your body. If your intestines move things too fast, diarrhea (which can have a disastrous effect on your nutrition and hydration levels) is often the result. If your intestines move things too slowly, constipation can occur. When your stool spends more time in your intestines than it should, you’re just giving the toxins in your stool more time to hang around and get inadvertently absorbed into your system.

There are many intestinal diseases that conventional physicians typically treat with medication that helps to control the symptoms but doesn’t do anything to address the cause of the problem. Many of these ailments, like Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and irritable bowel syndrome, can be greatly exacerbated by the presence of too many toxins in your diet, and detoxification diets often go a long way toward providing relief.

Your Skin: Touchable and Functional

Your skin is the largest organ you have. In terms of avoiding toxins, the role your skin plays is indispensable. Your skin is the first line of defense against any toxins that you don’t eat, drink, or breathe.

The skin has three layers:

✓ The epidermis: This is the outer layer that you can see. It gets a lot of wear and tear, and it regenerates very rapidly if you’re healthy.

✓ The dermis: Your dermis is the next layer down from your epidermis, and it contains all sorts of useful things like blood vessels, hair follicles, oil glands, and sweat glands. (I clue you in on the importance of sweat- ing a little later in this section.)

✓ Subcutaneous fat: This layer gives you some insulation and padding, but fat cells are often locations for toxin storage.

Now that you have a basic understanding of the structure of your skin, let me explain what it does for your body in terms of aiding in detoxification and helping you to avoid taking in toxins in the first place.

Putting up a barrier

Like the intestines, which I describe in the previous section, the skin creates a barrier between your body’s tissues on one side and potentially toxic influ- ences and conditions on the other. But the skin isn’t as receptive to allowing

some substances to cross the barrier into your body. Skin works to keep most of what’s outside on the outside. If you take care of your skin and don’t expose it to an overwhelming amount of toxic threats, it does an excellent job.

Some toxic chemicals are very rapidly absorbed, and you should never allow those materials to touch your skin. If you’re handling any potentially toxic substances, make sure you wear the proper safety clothing, gloves, and eye protection.

As a mechanical barrier, your skin makes your body waterproof. Because many toxins are water soluble, this means that your skin keeps out some of the toxins that may be dissolved in the water that you bathe in or swim in. One of the other terrific aspects of skin is that it takes care of itself. If you injure your skin and compromise its barrier, making it more likely to allow various toxins to cross over into your body, your skin will heal itself. It has to be tough but flexible, and it includes oil glands that help it to flex and bend as you move. If it needs to get tougher, then over time calluses develop to keep the barrier intact in places where you really put it to the test.

Skin is a versatile barrier that keeps many toxins from gaining access to the inside of your body. But like many other body parts, it can only do so much. If you don’t make an effort to keep your skin healthy and free from excessive toxic threats, it can be compromised, and increased toxicity is the result. Making an effort can be as simple as avoiding swimming in water that could have elevated toxin levels or wearing gloves when handling potentially toxic materials. It’s also important to give your skin all the nutrients that it needs, especially vitamin C, sulfur, and omega-3 fatty acids (fish oil).

Giving a nod to natural bacteria

If you read about your intestines earlier in this chapter, you know how useful it can be to have natural, beneficial bacteria around. The same holds true for your skin. Having enough good bacteria present can prevent bad bacteria from growing and building up.

Hundreds of types of bacteria are present on your skin, and several of them are considered good bacteria. One of the most prominent is Staphylococcus epidermatis, which plays a key role in keeping toxic, harmful bacteria in check on your skin.

You can help the good bacteria on your skin to keep its upper hand on the bad bacteria simply by washing your body. Don’t go overboard, though, because excessive washing with harsh soaps can wipe out the good bacteria and also break down the skin’s natural oils, which can serve as an additional layer of protection against bad bacteria.

Sweating (out) the small stuff

I can’t say enough about the importance of sweating in detoxification. It truly is one of the most effective ways our body can get rid of toxins.

As a natural detoxification process, sweating is one of the best ways to rid your body of toxins that can be present for many years. Under normal conditions, we sweat about a quart of liquid a day, and it’s estimated that sweating can remove about a third of the toxins that your kidneys can. Not bad! I know it’s a little creepy to think that some toxins can hang around your body for several years, but that is indeed the case. When toxins end up in your bloodstream or in your tissues, your body tries to protect your organs by stuffing fat-soluble toxins into fat cells to isolate them. If your body doesn’t know how to process or get rid of a toxin, it just stores it away in a place where it’s not as likely to damage your organs as it would be if the toxin were floating around in your bloodstream. After a toxin is stashed away in a fat cell, it can remain there for many years. This process can result in the buildup of fat and weight gain, because fat cells have a natural mechanism that makes them grow in an effort to try to dilute the toxins within them. Bigger fat cells mean more fat and an increased likelihood that you’ll gain weight. You can read much more about this topic in Chapter 9.

Sweating aggressively — that is, more than what you typically sweat on an average day — mobilizes the toxins from your subcutaneous fat cells to your sweat glands, where they can be moved outside your body as you sweat. When that happens, the concentration of toxins in your fat cells is much lower. The cells aren’t as likely to try to grow to dilute the toxins, so you may be able to lose weight and clear out excess fat.

Less than a hundred years ago, most people were sweating aggressively every day, and in the summer they were in somewhat of a sauna for a good part of the day. The advent of air conditioning changed all that (at least in many parts of the developed world), and we sweat quite a bit less as a result. That’s nice for keeping shirts clean, but it undercuts your body’s efforts to detoxify itself through sweating. To make sure that you’re getting the full detoxification benefit of sweating, exercise regularly and consider using a sauna to enhance the frequency and intensity of your sweating. (You can read more about saunas in Chapter 18.)

Your Liver: A Detoxification Powerhouse

Your liver is a very complicated organ, and it performs many essential functions. (Some researchers estimate that the liver performs as many as 500 different functions for your body!) Much of what the liver does is complicated, and you don’t really need to understand all the ins and outs to grasp its importance and its role in detoxification. Here, I’d like to give you a basic understanding of some of its crucial processes:

✓ Toxin processing: All the materials absorbed by or inadvertently leaked into the intestines go into a special vein that leads directly to your liver. The liver processes the blood by removing and breaking down many of the toxins. I dive a little deeper into the details of this process later in this section. Your liver processes about two quarts of blood per minute.

✓ Bacteria destruction: Your liver is loaded with immune cells, which kill many of the bacteria that manage to work their way through the intestinal wall.

✓ Cholesterol creation: Cholesterol is made in the liver. You may not think of cholesterol as a good thing, but cholesterol is very important for your body; cholesterol is the basic molecule used to generate several of your most critical hormones.

✓ Blood protein production: Ninety percent of your blood proteins are made in the liver. That’s extremely important for you, and also for all those vampires out there.

✓ Blood clotting: The clotting of blood doesn’t actually take place in the liver if everything is working as it should, but several of the materials your body uses for blood clotting are made in the liver.

✓ Antioxidant production: An antioxidant called glutathione is one of the most important for your body’s healthy function, and it’s made and stored in your liver.

✓ Blood sugar control: Your liver helps control your blood sugar by converting glucose to glycogen (a form of glucose that your body can store) and vice versa.

✓ Vitamin storage: Vitamins A, D, and B12 are stored in the liver. So is iron.

✓ Bile production: Bile breaks down fats in your intestines, and it removes toxic waste from your liver. Your liver makes bile (as if it weren’t doing enough already!).

So the liver really is a jack of all trades. You can thank your liver for break- ing down many, many toxins in your body (although you might avoid doing that in public — people tend to think it’s strange when you talk to your liver outside of the privacy of your own home). There are two main ways that your liver breaks down toxins, and I present the broad strokes of both next.

Phase I detoxification

Two major types of detoxification occur in the liver: Phase I detoxification and Phase II detoxification. Phase I either breaks down a toxin (rendering it pretty much harmless) or changes it somehow to prepare it for Phase II. (More on Phase II in a moment.)

During Phase I detoxification, your liver first tries to use enzymes to break off pieces of a toxic chemical’s structure. This process often works and results in a substance that is far less toxic and more water soluble, so it’s less dangerous to your health and easier to move out of the body with one of your waste products. If that doesn’t do the trick, the next step is the addition of antioxidants. Sometimes that process works where the first step failed. If step two doesn’t work, it’s time for Phase II detoxification.

Before moving on to Phase II, I want to take a moment to tell you about several substances that can help to enhance Phase I detoxification:

✓ Nutrients: These include niacin, vitamin B1, vitamin C, and glutathione.

✓ Herbs: Caraway and dill seeds are two of the best.

✓ Foods: Cabbage, broccoli, oranges, grapefruit, tangerines, and Brussels sprouts are especially helpful.

For the sake of full disclosure, I’ll also admit that some drugs — narcotics, alcohol, nicotine, steroids, and phenobarbital — also increase the activity of Phase I detoxification. But as you can imagine, that’s only because the liver has to step up its game to deal with the influx of toxic materials that correspond with drug use.

A number of things also slow down Phase I detoxification:

✓ Some herbs: Curcumin and capsaicin are examples.

✓ Certain foods: Clove oil, hot peppers, and grapefruit juice are among the top offenders.

✓ Drugs: Antihistamines, medicines that block acid secretion in the stomach, and certain antianxiety medications are culprits.

✓ Aging: Getting up in years slows down your liver’s Phase I detoxification.

This is another good reason to try to limit your use of prescription drugs:

They often have to be broken down by your liver, which puts a strain on it as you get older.

✓ Diet: As you’d expect, your diet can have a major impact on your liver’s health and ability to detox your body. Eating too many processed foods chock full of additives (and coated in pesticides) puts stress on your liver.

Studies have shown that the Phase I detoxification your liver is able to carry out is based heavily on genetic factors. Because of their genes, some people are fortunate to have livers that can process many more toxins than others. In some cases a person can conduct Phase I detoxification at more than five times the capacity of a similar person (in terms of age, sex, and so on) with different genetic makeup. This difference is one of the main reasons that certain people’s bodies are able to detoxify themselves in a much more efficient way than others.

Phase II detoxification

Phase II detoxification is often a continuation of Phase I, but it can happen on its own as well. Phase II detoxification works when the liver attaches toxins together or attaches other substances to toxins to make the harmful materials less harmful and more water soluble (easier to flush out with urine and bile).

Phase II detoxification is a very nutrient-intensive process, so consider including the following foods and supplements in your diet if you want to bolster your liver’s efforts:

✓ Food: Spinach, black beans, animal protein, legumes, pumpkin seeds, lentils, asparagus, broccoli, cabbage, and other leafy greens.

✓ Supplements: Fish oils, milk thistle, and alpha-lipoic acid. (Ask for details at your health food or supplement store.)

If you work on including these types of foods and supplements in your diet, you’ll make it a lot easier for your liver to carry out effective Phase II detoxification, and your health will get a nice boost. It’s more important now than ever because the amount of toxins you’re faced with on a daily basis continues to go up, so your liver’s ability to cope is extremely important.

Make sure you’re getting plenty of fiber in your diet. In addition to all the other useful things fiber can do for you, it helps your intestines clear out the toxins that your liver has processed. Without ample amounts of fiber, some of those toxins can be reabsorbed, and your liver’s hard work will have been for naught.

The liver cleanse

No section on the liver would be complete without mentioning the liver cleanse. It’s a process that involves taking a mixture of food ingredients that are purported to help clear out excess toxins from your liver. The mixture usually includes olive oil, Epsom salt, and grapefruit, among other ingredients. Some people report very dramatic results like passing multiple gall- stones, and others claim to see a marked improvement in general health after the liver cleanse is complete. Many proponents recommend doing a liver cleanse twice a year to combat the elevated levels of toxins that we’re faced with today. I think liver cleanses are a good idea for most people, although you need to be aware of a couple potential side effects:

✓ Doing a liver cleanse will activate your colon, so if you choose to do one

be ready to make multiple trips to the toilet.

✓ If you’re like many people and you pass a gallstone during a cleanse,

there’s an outside chance that it could get stuck on its way out.

(However, I can report that hundreds of my patients have done liver cleanses, and this problem has never occurred.)

If you begin to feel abdominal pain while doing a cleanse, make sure you stop the cleanse immediately and get in touch with your doctor.

Your Kidneys: Major Detox Players

Most people give their kidneys a whole lot of abuse and not much credit. All of the water-soluble materials that end up in your blood eventually find their way to the kidneys, where they’re removed and sent out with your urine. The truth is your kidneys are very sophisticated organs that never stop filtering your blood to remove toxins, keep salts and protein levels in check, and adjust your blood pressure. When it comes to detoxification, your kidneys are a major player.

If you want to keep your kidneys running at tip-top shape, try to limit your exposure to toxins (a no-brainer, I know) and make sure you drink lots of clean water without chlorine or fluoride in it. Your kidneys don’t stand a chance if you’re not drinking plenty of water, because in this case the solution to pollution is dilution!

To keep your kidneys — and the rest of your body, for that matter — healthy, try to drink enough water to keep your urine clear. Clear urine is a sign of a hydrated body. The only times your urine should have a darker yellow color is first thing in the morning and after you’ve taken vitamins, which can alter your urine’s tint.