Our Obsession with Toxins, Cleansing and Detox Scams

What you are going to read today may be a new thought to you. You may wonder by what authority I say these things when you've heard from so many other authorities something different. As usual, I ask you to keep an open mind and question what my motives may be, and also what motives the other "authorities" might have. I am not making any money from this article, you might want to ask the same from the other sources that you are getting your information from.

We have become obsessed with toxins. We either love to ingest them until we are in a coma of sorts, and then, knowing we have "sinned" feel the need to purge and pay penance through some sort of detox "cleanse". Some use vinegar, honey, and cayenne mixed together, some add psyllium husks, some do water only fasts and eat nothing at all, and then others  take herbs and other such gross-tasting "cleansing" potions, while still others do multiple colonics and enemas.

We need to have a voice of reason here. Right now as you are sitting and reading this blog, you are detoxing through no effort of your own. Whenever you breath in, you take in fresh oxygen which is distributed to your blood cells which take it to your body's cells, which exchange the gases for carbon dioxide wastes which are then breathed out by you into our environment, which are picked up by the plants which recycle and purify it back into oxygen for us to use.

It's actually quite simple and you have been doing it since birth, effortlessly most of the time and this will continue until you take your last breath and die. The only thing that you need to do to keep this process going smoothly is to avoid smoking cigars and cigarettes and other things like marijuana, avoid toxic out gassing in homes from formaldehyde and avoid polluted city areas and factories.

You do not need anything else to aid you in this detox process except to get outside in fresh air and bring plants indoors to grow clean air inside.

It is the same with our food. Our bodies have natural cleansers in our kidneys and livers and they are constantly purifying our blood 24 hours a day. When we eat fresh ripe whole fruits and vegetables, the water in these foods aids in the process of cleansing and we eliminate what we don't need or use and there is no further need to "cleanse."

What about all the junk food that pollutes up our bodies. Doesn't the body need help in cleansing out all that toxic matter? Doesn't it stick to our colons?

Not exactly. True, our body stores excess calories in our fat cells and also cholesterol is laid down in our arteries from eating animal foods and calcium deposits settle in our eyes as cataracts and joints and in our kidneys as kidney stones, but we don't need to do "cleanses" for these to be reversed.

What we DO need to do is STOP INGESTING the substances that are polluting up our bodies so that our bodies can catch up on the back-log of residue.

We have been sold a bill of goods telling us that many symptoms that are actually deficiency symptoms are "detox" symptoms.

True, when an alcoholic or drug addict or even smoker or coffee drinker stops ingesting their substances, 72 hours of detox headaches, nausea, diarrhea and other such uncomfortable symptoms are to be expected.

However, it is not usual to be having detox problems for years after eating a healthy diet.

It DOES, however, take years to BUILD HEALTH by replacing nutrient poor foods with nutrient rich foods to give the body the building blocks to repair itself.

This friends, is the real problem: we have been eating such depleted foods that the body does not have the necessary building materials from which to draw upon to repair itself. This process may take some time.

However: we MUST provide the body all the vitamins, minerals and other substances that it needs for this to occur.

If we get hung up on detoxing diets or fasting on water constantly, then we are missing an opportunity to provide the body with much-needed nutrition in order to do it's job.

I have looked at many detox or cleansing diets and many of them are missing in several nutrients, that if followed for a period of time, can cause chronic deficiencies that lead to sub-par health that can be cleared up fairly quickly with the addition of the needed nutrients via food.

This is a philosophical departing for sure from the much-loved detox paradigm that is so popular these days and is lining the pockets of a lot of people through the sales of detox supplements and cleanses and many fasting centers.

Dr. Norman Walker wrote a book on juicing and asked the question "What's missing in your body?"

He lived to be in his late 90's. Fresh vegetable juices provide super nutrition to the body in an easily assimilated manner and are delicious to drink and easy to make. If you feel that the soil is nutrient depleted and take a multi-vitamin each day because of that belief, then you will get everything you need by adding in vegetable juices daily.

Fresh vegetable and fruit juices were the foundation of Dr. Max Gerson's protocol for healing his patients from cancer and many other diseases. We need the fresh nutrition from these juices as heat often destroys many vitamins that are lost during cooking.

We do not need enemas, colonics, fasting, herbs, sauna's, tonics, and the many other things sold to us in order for us to detox. We need to stop the TOX-ing of our bodies with white flour, coffee, alcohol, animal foods, sugar, caffeine, hydrogenated oils, and anything else that is not a whole food. Our bodies will do the rest. It does not need extra "help" it just needs us to stop polluting it.

We need to BUILD the body with eating high-nutrient food and let the body do the cleansing of the leftovers that it doesn't use.  We can aid this process by getting enough rest so the body has enough energy to do it's job.

We should not be detoxing years into eating well. We should see a gradual improvement of health and deficiency symptoms should be gradually going away.

Trust your judgment and think twice when someone is trying to sell you a potion, retreat stay, herb or detox diet. Keep your money and spend it on good quality food and STOP INJURING YOURSELF with non-food items that have been sold to us as "food".