With the new year begun, many people have decided their goal is to improve their health. Hopefully they have stuck with it this far and will continue on that track. While many will increase their exercise or watch what they eat, some will try to detoxify, or cleanse, their bodies as a means of jumpstarting their weight loss. There are many ways to cleanse your body and many supplements to buy or protocols to follow. They each work in their own way, and in my opinion some are much safer than others. In this newsletter I want to explain the detoxification process so you can decide what sounds the safest and most effective to you.

When the body ingests a toxin two things can happen. The liver can detoxify it or it can get stored in our fat. When this fat is burned, these toxins are released into the body and need to be cleansed. This is one reason why some people feel terrible while they are cleansing. Some cleanses starve the body so it burns fat, but they do not support the liver to cleanse the toxins. The body is burning fat and releasing toxins as it should, but it is not getting the nutrition the liver needs to process and eliminate the toxins. So these toxins continue to flow through our body affecting everything from thought and memory to sleep and growth. If you are going to do a cleanse, make sure you support your liver with foods that will help the process. Some great foods that will support liver detoxification are kale, broccoli, red beets, Brussels sprouts, garlic, onions and artichokes.

After the liver processes the toxins, they are delivered to the gall bladder, which mixes them with bile and dumps everything into the small intestine to be eliminated with our stool. A healthy gall bladder is essential to a complete and safe cleanse. It holds and releases bile into the small intestine. Bile helps with the digestion of fat and cholesterol, carries toxins through the digestive system to elimination, and stimulates the intestines to move stool down and out. The gall bladder is not something that should be extracted on a whim, instead it should be supported nutritionally just like all of our other organs. To have the most efficient and successful cleanse, the GI tract (small intestine, large intestine, rectum) must be healthy to handle the toxins that the liver and gall bladder have passed along. If there is a problem in the GI tract, usually signified by symptoms of diarrhea, constipation, cramping, bloating, etc., then these toxins that were processed by the liver can be reabsorbed by the body and become a toxic burden once again. If you are going to do a cleanse, but you have symptoms of GI problems you must get those problems fixed first. If you do not fix them, the cleanse may make you feel worse, and many of the toxins will still be released from the fat, but still damaging the body. We use a stool and saliva test in our office to assess the health of the GI tract.

Doing a cleanse is a useful tool to promote and maintain health. But like many things, when used incorrectly or at the wrong time it can cause more harm than good. Along with the test to assess the health of the GI tract, we have tests to assess the detoxification pathways and toxic loads. These give us the information to support the pathways that need help and identify where the toxins are coming from.

Before doing a cleanse remember, you need to support your liver, gall bladder and GI tract. If you would like to know if your body is ready to do a cleanse call our office. We’re here to walk you toward the path of health.