Understanding Detoxification
Detoxification starts in your liver. While it’s a complicated process, your liver essentially does this in two phases.
First, it converts toxic substances to highly reactive metabolites and then excretes these toxins. Your kidneys, lungs, and even gut also play a role in detoxification.
Toxins can impact these organs both acutely and cumulatively. More dangerous are the persistent, low-grade toxins such as residue you consume regularly on conventionally grown fruits and vegetables.
Reactions aren’t immediate, and so you might not see the connection between chronic low-grade toxicity and struggle with weight loss.
What Is a Detox?
Detox diets are generally short-term interventions designed to eliminate toxins from your body.
A typical detox diet involves a period of fasting, followed by a strict diet of fruit, vegetables, fruit juices, and water. Sometimes a detox also includes herbs, teas, supplements, and colon cleanse or enemas.
This is to:
Rest your organs by fasting
Stimulate your liver to get rid of toxins
Promote toxin elimination through faeces, urine, and sweat
Provide your body with healthy nutrients
Detox therapies are most recommended because of potential exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment or your diet. These include pathogens such as bacteria, fungus and viruses, pollutants, synthetic chemicals, heavy metals, and other harmful compounds. These cleansing are also claimed to help with various health problems, including obesity, digestive issues, autoimmune diseases, inflammation, allergies, bloating, and chronic fatigue.
Are they necessary?
While some people believe that full-body detoxes provide health benefits, they are not necessary for most people, it is better to get an opinion from a medically trained person and do a full-body medical check-up including your heavy metal levels before detoxing. The body already has its own highly efficient detoxification system to eliminate toxins from the body.
Sometimes, people have medical conditions that require help with detoxification. For example, people with heavy metal toxicity may undergo chelation therapy. This is a procedure that removes heavy metals from the body.
Potential benefits
While detoxes are not medically necessary for most people, under certain circumstances, they may offer some health benefits, such as:
Weight loss: detoxification diets can result in weight loss by eliminating extra waste and aids with metabolism.
Fruits and vegetables: Many detox therapies may involve consuming fruits and vegetables which will help with the elimination of toxins from the body.
Hydration: A full body detox also promote water consumption. Water is vital for health and helps the body remove waste through sweating, urination, and bowel movements.
Antioxidants: Some studies have found that certain detox therapies can aid liver function and that certain foods can increase the antioxidant glutathione. Glutathione may help remove toxins, such as heavy metals, from the body.
How to try a full body detox safely
If a person wishes to try a full body detox to feel healthier making simple changes to diet or lifestyle can improve general health.
Here are some ideas for how to support the body’s detoxification system.
Stop smoking or drinking
Tobacco smoke and alcohol both place strain on the body in various ways. Alcohol in particular affects the liver, which is the body’s main detoxification organ.
If a person smokes or drinks regularly, they can begin detox by reducing these habits or stopping entirely.
Stay hydrated
Drinking enough water is important for general health and for detoxification. How much water a person needs depends on their level of physical activity and age, among other factors.
Begin eating a nutrient-dense diet or plant based proteins
Adequate nutrition allows the body’s detoxification system to work effectively. People should avoid refined carbohydrates, added sugars, and processed foods and try to include more:
Foods high in antioxidants, such as berries and nuts
complex carbohydrates, such as sweet potatoes or quinoa
Oily fish are another source of beneficial nutrients. However, it is important to note that some oily fish, such as tuna, can contain mercury.
The FDA advise eating 2–3 servings of low-mercury fish or seafood per week.
Get enough sleep
Sleep allows the brain to remove toxic waste products that accumulate throughout the day. This makes adequate sleep an essential part of detoxification.
Improve indoor air quality
While it is not always possible for individuals to control pollution exposure outdoors, there are things people can do to reduce exposure indoors, such as:
Asking household members to smoke outdoors
Avoiding products that contain high amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as aerosols and air fresheners
Keeping rooms well ventilated when someone is using solvents, household paints, and other DIY products
Choosing carpets, couches, and mattresses that do not emit VOCs
Addressing issues such as damp and fungus.
Dusting regularly
Using an air purifier with a HEPA filter
In conclusion, Detoxification is known to help the body eliminate excess toxins from the body thus helping our body’s natural detoxification process.
In functional nutrition, which views the body as a whole and seeks to uncover root cause solutions, we use a detoxification system to restore digestive and whole-body health that goes by the simple acronym of the ‘5Rs’: remove, replace, repair, re-inoculate, and rebalance.
It is the deep association between GI function and ill health that the 5R’s is intended to address. When applied to various chronic problems, the 5R program can cause a dramatic improvement in symptoms and general health.