Why Detoxing is Important

We live in a Sea of Toxins.  While there are a few success stories, by and large, the environment is more polluted than ever.  If you live in a city, the air is polluted.  Water sources are increasingly suspect.  Many individuals are exposed to chemicals at work, but are afraid to quit their jobs for fear they can't make as much money somewhere else.  Furniture, clothing, carpeting, new cars all "outgas" toxins into our indoor or Personal Environment.  Most of us apply chemicals directly to our bodies in the form of personal care products made from petroleum and other toxic substances.

 

The body might be able to handle all this if we all ate nothing but healthy food, drank pure water, got just enough of the right kind of exercise, were emotionally stable and well adjusted and took just the right amounts of supplements while avoiding second-hand smoke and rarely indulged in caffeine, alcohol or recreational drugs.  Though some of us know people like that, for most of us are a bit more relaxed. 

 

Your first level of insight must be to consider what that all means for your body.  It means that your body, especially your liver, must process out all the toxins, along with the rest of its activities.  Some of these activities include:

 

• metabolizing proteins, fats and sugars, providing the nutrients that sustain life;
• creating bile to break down fat.  High fat, or even just a high quantity of any kind of food, places an extra load on the liver;
• metabolizing the drugs and alcohol many of us use to "take the edge off";
• metabolizing the caffeine most of us use to get up in the morning;
• breaking down and eliminates excess hormones;
• cleaning up toxins including those resulting from the metabolism of that food from the environment, attached to the food we eat in the form of pesticides and herbicides, and dissolved in the water.
  
  

When the liver can't accomplish all these functions, you eventually begin to experience symptoms, such as fatigue, skin eruptions, headaches, allergies, and numerous other health complaints that can lead to disease-states, mental confusion, inability to concentrate, "failure to thrive," or the blues. You thought it was your boss, or your spouse, or your (fill in the blank _______).  No, it's your poor overworked liver!

 

This is a job that calls for DETOX.   Basically, you have to learn to take a load off your liver.  The good news is THIS IS DOABLE.  When you understand why you need to, a little bit about how the liver works to detoxify all those poisons, and a little more than you already do about some other systems of the body, you're going to understand SO much more about current health research in general.  That's because detoxification is a unifying principle behind many of the current findings in medical research.  Then you'll understand why people who eat a Mediterranean diet are less likely to get cancer, and why people who get enough Vitamin C are likely to have fewer colds, why people who eat enough fiber have fewer intestinal problems and why people who live simple peasant lives in countries where they eat yogurt can live to be very old.  They're all related to the unifying principle for body function that detoxification provides, the ideas that inform functional medicine.

 

With that, we invite you to find out How to Detox.