Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (16 page)

Assessing the different methods of cleansing is a complex challenge. It becomes easier when you consider three pivotal factors:

How intensely does the detox program switch the body into detox mode?

How much nutritional support does it offer while the detox process is taking place?

Does the program create the conditions for repair of the gut?

Though you don’t need an advanced degree in medicine to proceed, it’s helpful to understand what happens during the Clean program. For this, it’s important to look at the mechanics of detoxification and how we harness this natural mechanism and boost it during a detox program.

The detoxification function is a joint venture of many organs and systems that work in harmony to neutralize and eliminate toxins, both “inner,” the by-products of normal metabolism, and “outer,” toxins we eat, breathe, or absorb through our skin and intestines. The function involves the liver, the intestines, the kidneys, the lungs, the skin, and the blood and lymphatic circulatory systems. It’s an extraordinary system of great complexity and brilliant design.

Detoxification: An All-Day Activity

Though you probably never give it much thought, at every moment of every day your cells are breathing, working, and generating waste. It is part of the basic formula of life: your body is constantly performing an unimaginable number of functions every single instant of your living existence.

Each of the trillions of cells that make up your body is like a miniature factory that manufactures a product, from hormones to cartilage, hair, enzymes, protein, serotonin, and many more. Sugar from food and oxygen from air are what each cell factory uses for power. Sugar is burned to release energy. It also generates waste that must get thrown out. The waste is released into the circulatory system and then captured downstream by other cells whose function is to neutralize it. This process of neutralization makes these waste molecules nontoxic; now they can be safely filtered out of the body by the skin (as sweat), the lungs (as carbon dioxide), the kidneys (as urine), the liver (which mixes them with bile and releases them into the intestines), and the intestines directly (as fecal matter). Getting rid of waste is as critical to life as producing energy. Without it, waste products would accumulate and become so toxic that life would be terminated. Detoxification, therefore, is an ongoing activity that the body is brilliantly designed to accomplish.

THE WEB OF WASTE

Inner waste is constantly being eliminated to ensure your survival. You probably know that:

If you don’t get rid of carbon dioxide, you asphyxiate.

If you don’t get rid of uric acid, you can develop gout and heart disease.

If you don’t get rid of homocysteine, from the breakdown of certain amino acids, you can develop Alzheimer’s and heart disease.

If toxins in general are not handled in a timely manner, your inflammatory system goes into overdrive.

If you don’t get rid of food debris, you can develop bowel diseaseor at the very least, constipation.

On a subtler but still powerful level, if you don’t get rid of anger or anxiety, it can manifest as heart disease, cancer, and many other kinds of bodily injury.

Detoxification in a healthy human is an intricate web of activities, guided by natural intelligence.

The Body’s Economy of Energy

To understand detoxification, you have to become familiar with the body’s energy economy. Energy is as precious a resource for your body as it is for the planet. The sum total of the energy expense of every cell is called metabolism. Each cell consumes fuel to make energy and then uses up that energy fulfilling its function. Thus, metabolism is the energy cost of maintaining life.

Some cells have functions that are more “expensive” than others—they cost more energy to run. Like a city with a financial budget to distribute on many city services, the body has an energy budget to spend. Energy reserves are limited, so the body must prioritize second to second how the energy capital gets distributed. If it spends too much energy in one area, it simultaneously has to cut back somewhere else to compensate. The body can’t take out energy loans; when the energy reserves start running low, it has to stop activity. It might make you tired and sleepy, because when you rest and stop moving your muscles, you stop one of the costliest activities as far as energy goes.

Reallocating the Energy Cash Flow

Sometimes there are so many energy demands at once that split-second adjustments have to be made in what is basically an intricate balancing of the budget. The body’s intelligence will shut down certain functions temporarily, slow down others, and allow the most crucial ones to continue spending their full energy “cash flow,” since their function is deemed to be most vital. Neurons in the brain get top priority. As systems get shut down one by one, from least important to most, the brain is always the last. Without the brain, survival is over.

The body’s detoxification processes lie somewhere in the middle of this list of priorities. It’s very common for the body to put detox on hold, then catch up with cleaning later. For example, during hard exercise detox is put on hold. When muscles contract, they burn sugar in combustion with oxygen, and the waste product is carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide dissolves in the blood as carbonic acid, circulates in the bloodstream, and when it enters the lungs, it is turned into a gas and exhaled. If the carbonic acid were not eliminated as carbon dioxide gas, it would accumulate in the blood, becoming so toxic that it would kill you faster than you can imagine.

But when you push into the harder exercise realm of anaerobic exercise—meaning you’re burning sugar faster than oxygen can be taken in—you make a different waste product, lactic acid. Anaerobic exercise has an abnormally high energy expense, because the muscle is working so hard, and the body has to shift its energy distribution quickly to fund it. So it puts detoxification on hold, which is why lactic acid accumulates in the muscles. Knowing that the exercise won’t go on for too long, the body lets it sit for a while and saves the expense of detoxifying it. (The side benefit is that, should that muscle go crazy for some reason and want to continue working at that level without stopping, the same lactic acid will irritate it so much that pain will eventually make the muscle stop. Muscle pain, in this case, is another survival mechanism.) Once the exercise stops, detoxification is immediately resumed, and the lactic acid is processed and transformed for elimination.

This pausing of detoxification to deal with other needs happens quite naturally in healthy bodies. Now add in the impact of the toxic overload of modern life, with its exotoxins, and it becomes clear why we all have a detox debt to varying degrees.

The Inner Economic Crisis

The energy expense of eliminating the toxins of daily life plus the added expense imposed by modern toxins causes a recalibration of the energy economy. If nothing else were going on, then cutting back on a little muscle movement and a couple of other not so vital expenses would probably compensate. But the demands are too big. We are drawing on our energy reserves to fund crazy work schedules, mental and emotional stress, and many more “extra” expenses that modern life imposes. The largest one of all is the digestion of food. Contrary to the assumption that food is where we get our energy from, modern life has turned the processing of foods by the body into a business that exacts the biggest energy drain. We are constantly eating and munching. Anything that we throw in must be processed when it arrives in the stomach—we can’t put that off. But most of what we throw in today has minimal nutritional value, so all the energy we invest in its chewing, swallowing, digesting, and absorbing gives minimal return on investment. We are making less than we spend.

THE REAL ENERGY COST OF FOOD

Food and the processes connected with it consume a big portion of our daily energy reserves. Digestion, absorption, the transportation of nutrients through the blood, and assimilation into the cells are highly expensive processes for the body. Not to mention growing, picking, and preparing the food—or working at a job to make money to buy it. In fact, some of the most energy-intensive functions of the body involve turning food into fuel and into the building blocks of the body’s architecture. Sometimes we spend more energy processing food than we actually get from the food itself.

The whole process of digestion from start to finish has one of the highest energy costs in the body. Producing saliva costs energy. The production of enzymes consumes large amounts of energy. (During the Clean program you will increase the intake of enzymes by eating plenty of raw foods, thus conserving that energy and supporting digestion.) Muscles need energy to contract and push food to the stomach, which must then secrete digestive juices and push the mix through to the intestines. The pancreas and gallbladder meanwhile produce their signature substances—insulin and glucagon in the former case and bile in the latter.

Once the food has been broken down into small enough pieces, the molecules must be absorbed through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. Now there’s the work of transporting these building blocks to different sites in the body, where they can be assimilated by the cells and used to build your architecture, fund chemical reactions, and so on. This explains why the simple act of eating carries such a high energy cost.

Since modern habit is to eat frequently throughout the day, the constant energy requirement never stops. Often there is no energy left for anything else. Think of Thanksgiving dinners: the only activity possible after consuming all that food is to take a nap. Though everyone has a different theory explaining this dramatic drop in energy—from the tryptophan in turkey meat causing drowsiness to the alkaline blood currents that are generated as a result of producing excess acids in the stomach—the fact is that any big feast will put you to sleep, because digesting food takes a lot of energy. Every species of animal has this experience. Lions sleep for a few days after a big kill.

Triggering the Signal: How We Enter Detox Mode

Confronted with this huge load of demands, the body has to prioritize, redistribute, and reorganize. As long as digestion is using up so much of the energy budget, detoxification is partly on hold. All the extra modern toxins we’re exposed to, having made their way into circulation and into the different tissues, will be retained where they are, just as lactic acid is retained in the muscles while the intense muscle work is going on. Since these extra toxins are irritants, the cells coat them with mucus to tone the irritation down while they anxiously wait for the signal from the body’s central bank that energy is available for detoxification and it is okay to release these toxins back into the circulatory system.

In the case of lactic acid that has accumulated during intense anaerobic activity, the signal to start detox is sent when the muscle stops working. In the case of toxins that accumulate in the tissues, the detox signal is sent when digestion, absorption, and assimilation are completed. It is the green light for the body to enter detox mode.

A detoxification program is designed to trigger this signal more intensely than normal, principally by reducing the workload of the digestive tract. If digestion is stopped long enough and frequently enough, the signal to detox gets switched on more often and turned to “high.” This initiates the release of accumulated toxins and the mucus that coats them. But it’s only the beginning. Once the toxins are set free from the tissues they’ve lodged in, they are free to circulate in the blood. The “buffering” mucus coat falls off and circulates too. Both the toxins and the mucus must be rapidly neutralized and expelled, or they will cause damage to the body at large. Though toxins are harmful sitting in your tissues, coated with mucus, they can cause even more harm if released en masse and not treated. It’s like liberating hundreds of prisoners into the city streets with no program of rehabilitation for them.

Detox Equalization

Cleansing and detox programs accelerate and enhance the removal of toxins. But the acceleration of the first action (toxin release) does not mean that the second action (neutralization) speeds up automatically to match it. The two processes occur through different mechanisms. That’s why a successful and safe detox program requires that the two processes take place in a balanced way. Knowledge and experience are needed to equalize them, to avoid discomfort and even damage. This balancing of release and neutralization is what distinguishes the different styles of detox programs from each other as well as the speed at which intestinal-system damage is repaired.

Detox Programs: The Basic Mechanics

You finish the work of processing your food about eight hours after your last meal. Only then can the body turn its attention to “cleaning up” not only the day’s mess, but also all the accumulated garbage that you have not had the energy or detox time to get to for weeks, months, or years (if not decades). Once digestion is done, the signal to release accumulated toxins from tissues into circulation (bloodstream and lymphatic system) can get triggered. Not every meal is created equal: quantity and quality of food may cause the signal to go on sooner, six hours after eating, or later, up to ten hours after the meal. As a general rule, the more you eat, the longer it takes to process your meal and for the signal to start intense detoxification. Solid foods must first be liquefied for digestion; this takes energy and time. Liquid meals are practically ready for absorption, bypassing the need and energy expense of being broken down.

Cooked foods delay the detox signal further, because heating any food above 118° Fahrenheit destroys the enzymes contained in it. Enzymes are of paramount importance for digestion. Manufacturing them take so much energy that nature provides them already made. Raw vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds contain the enzymes necessary for their own digestion. When those foods get cooked, we lose that important resource. We have to manufacture all our own enzymes from scratch, which adds to the energy cost of eating and delays the funding for detoxification.