Toxins

TOXINS – AVOIDING TOXINS:
More often than not it’s the MAN ALTERED FOODS that you want to avoid because they contain toxins. And MAN MADE MEDICINES that you want to avoid/because they contain toxins. Do you see a pattern forming? Why do we want to avoid anything MAN MADE or ALTERED? One simple answer TOXINS.

It is toxins that drive disease in the body. The less toxins that your body is in contact with the healthier your body will be.

What is a toxin?
A toxin is a harmful agent found in our environment that is capable of causing disease when introduced into the tissues of the body.
A little story about Toxins
It is toxins have the ability to drive disease in the body. The less toxins that your body is in contact with the healthier your body is.
Take a typical day for the average Joe Soap.
You wake up on your flame retardant furniture, with your wrinkle free chemically treated and synthetically coloured bedding. You reach across to turn your phone alarm off. Your phone has been plugged in charging by your head all night, throwing some electromagnetic waves at you all night. Then you manage to drag yourself out of your bed, your feet hit your synthetic floor covering. You head to the kitchen turn on the tap and have a glass of the finest quality tap water with added chlorine, fluoride, synthetic hormones and possibly some prescription medication, if you are lucky. You grab your fabric-softened towel and head to the shower. Then you stand under the running chlorinated and fluoridated water and you reach for your wonderfully smelly bubbly toxin-loaded – shower gel, shampoo, conditioner, shaving foam, dry yourself off with the aforementioned towel, moisturise and follow up with some deodorant and then top it all off with some cosmetic chemicals for your skin to absorb all day long. Don’t forget to brush your teeth with the ever so important toxic fluoride in your toothpaste. Have you ever read the back warning on your tooth paste tube re: ingestion…? (Please do). Make sure to wear your fabric-softened synthetic clothes next to your skin all day long.

Then it is time for breakfast you open the usual breakfast cereal of choice, then you pour some milk into a bowl and then you microwave it for some microwaves to heat up the milk, then you throw in some MAN-ALTERED foods with fortified vitamins and minerals into the bowl – if it was worth eating it wouldn’t need to be fortified with anything?!? Depending on your circumstances you may be lucky enough to chug back some synthetic chemicals aka prescription medication or its time to think you are being healthy and take some supplements (not against supplements but the problem is some can do more harm than good) Now let’s get to work. Sitting in traffic or taking public transport the chances are your lungs are going to consume some good quality toxins on the way to work be it petrol fumes, cigarette smoke or someone else’s perfume on the overcrowded public transport system.

Then you stop at the coffee shop, you get your coffee in a plastic lined cup, mixed with a hot liquid, some of the plastic should leach into your drink and then into you. The pastry you ordered with your coffee is made from refined-heavily-sprayed-conventionally-grown wheat flour, GMO refined oils or hydrogenated fats and possibly sweetened with MAN-MADE Glucose-Fructose syrup or HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup)- there is a new name for this now… `fructose’ and apparently it is laden with toxic mercury…one of the most dangerous substances known to man.
Then you head to work… who knows what you are going to be exposed to at work…
At lunch time you tell yourself you are going to be healthy and head out to the local food court to get yourself a chicken salad. Which is served to you in a plastic bowl and eaten with plastic cutlery and the salad dressing is pre-packaged (heat treated plastic wrapper). You then consume your chicken salad. It was edible but nothing to write home about. Your chicken was produced in a chicken farm where chickens never see daylight, grass or open space. If an infection breaks out the chickens will all be treated with antibiotics because what chicken farmer doesn’t want to lose a whole overcrowded batch of chickens because of five sick birds?!? There is no money in that.
The vegetables in your salad have been grown in soil which has been synthetically fortified with chemicals because the soil has been over-farmed and there are no nutrients left in the soil to grow healthy plants from which to produce fruits and vegetables. If the soil has been over-farmed scientists have figured out that NPK (NPK – a synthetic fertiliser that contains Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium these nutrients that are needed by plants to produce healthy “looking” fruits and vegetables) but plants need up to 52 minerals in the soil to produce nutritionally dense fruits and vegetables if it’s not in the soil it can’t possibly be in the fruits and vegetables (more in the organic chapter). Not to mention the array of chemical pesticides, herbicides, which have been sprayed on the conventionally grown fruits and vegetables?
A salad bar is out to make a profit, they buy the cheapest produce that they can get (the cheaper it is generally the poorer the quality) they aren’t running a charity, it’s a business.
Then you head back to work. It has been a stressful day and you feel a headache coming on, you reach for your trusted pain killer, which is just a MAN-MADE neurological toxin. 30 minutes later your headaches seem to have vanished… awesome! Did you question why you got the headache? Dehydration, poor lighting, too much time in front of a computer, poor posture, and stress etc. pain is your body’s way of communicating with you that something isn’t right. Listen to it don’t just shut it up with painkillers.
Its home time and dinner time, you stop by the supermarket and pick up some conventionally grown vegetables and industry raised beef. Do I need to explain how this food was produced?!? The same as your lunch, the supermarket is looking to make a profit!! You may have even picked yourself up a heavy processed-artificially-coloured and sweetened dessert because you had a healthy lunch…to reward yourself.
After your dinner and your artificially-coloured and sweetened dessert it’s time for a drink to help you relax… let’s light some artificially scented candles (with dangerous wicks) both the alcohol and the scented candles should throw a little bit more work at your OVER worked liver… lets just hope you don’t smoke!
The moral of the story is we are bombarded with MAN-MADE chemicals aka toxins all day long.
It is toxins and how your body deals with environmental toxins that are one of the determining factors to what disease your body will suffer from.
In an ideal world, we could live on a deserted land, in a wood hut, living off the land and in the buff (nude), but for 99.9% that is not going to happen and 99.9% of us don’t want that. We need to be more aware of the chemicals that we expose our bodies to on a daily basis.

Where are toxins found?
In processed foods, non-organic foods (pesticides, herbicides etc.), diet foods, cleaning products, home fragrance plug ins, cosmetics, shampoos, perfumes, Teflon cooking equipment, plastics, pesticides, …the list is endless. Generally, if it is a synthetic product, the chances are that the body will recognize some of the ingredients as toxins.

How do toxins enter the body?
They can enter the body a number of different ways:
– Our mouth (digestive system) foods that we eat, drinks that we drink.
– Our skin – lotions and potions that we apply to our skin daily, sun creams, moisturizing cream, fake tan products, shaving foam, this list is endless.
– Our nose – any smell that you inhale is absorbed by the body be it real or artificial.

When we absorb a toxin (via our mouth, skin or nose) where does it go?
It generally ends up in our blood. The liver is our filtration system. It`s job is to filter out items that should not be circulating around our body. The liver either removes these toxins from the body by tucking them away in our waste products or in our sweat and then the body expels them in the usual manner. If these are not options (because the liver is overworked) for removal of the toxins the body will hide the toxins away in our fat cells, to keep them from circulating over and over again. This prevents damage and prevents them from coming back to the liver where they would be removed from the blood all over again. This re circulation of toxins puts extra work on the liver, which wears out the life of this vital organ.

Where are toxins stored?
Our bodies store toxins in our fat cells. Most toxins are fat-soluble and this is why toxins are easily stored in our fat cells. When we lose body fat, the toxins stored in the fat are re-released back into the body. It is the re-release of these toxins that can make you feel unwell, feel tired and head-achy when you are “detoxing” or trying to be good. This is the reason why most people feel rotten when they are giving up junk food.

Your body then decides that it does not like this “rotten” feeling so it tries its best to hold on to the fat so the toxins will not be re-released back into the body and so that you won’t get that “rotten” feeling. It is much safer for your body to keep these toxins in your fat then to have them floating around your body. If your body is toxic you will always find it hard to lose weight and it can be the fat-storing toxins stopping you from achieving your ideal body!

How do you reduce the amount of toxins in your body?
Ideally, what you are trying to do is to reduce your toxic load (the amount of toxins that your body, liver and kidneys have to deal with). This way you will find it easier to lose body fat and your body will not have as much work to do.
How you reduce the amount of toxins in your body:
Making better food choices: remove processed foods, artificial sweeteners, hydrogenated vegetable oil, sugar, MSG and refined foods from your diet.
Eat whole organic foods where possible.
Eat clean meals 80% of the time. Clean means not processed, includes vegetables, a form of protein and low GI carbohydrate. 80% of the time means if you eat 3 main meals a day, that’s 21 in a week. so you can cheat with 20% of your 21 meals. That gives you 2 and a half meals to eat whatever you like.
Use less chemical cleaning products and more elbow grease. Change your cleaning products over to natural environmentally friendly cleaning products.
Use natural cosmetics, shampoos, shower gels, deodorants etc.
If you use perfume, make sure to spray it on your clothes and not on your skin this way you will still smell nice (artificial) and you will not absorb the chemicals via your skin but just through your nose. Or, look for healthier alternatives online or in your local health store.
Use natural tampons or sanitary towels as the conventional products contain a lot of toxins but the part that gets me is that they have been bleached to make them whiter! We don’t need them to be whiter, no one ever advertise that they are buying, carrying or using tampons/sanitary towels. This bleach can come in contact with your skin all day long, as in the case of tampons they are actually resting beside your mucus membrane (toxins can be absorbed via your mucus membrane) all day/night long, this is best avoided.

Changing over: from Conventional to Natural products – cleaning/cosmetics products
When changing over from conventional to natural products. The best advice is that you use up whatever you have in stock and when they run out replace them with better more liver and environmentally friendly products. As changing all your products over night can be expensive, it is best to do it as they run out, to make up for this add extra elbow grease and use a little less of the product.
Bleach – Only bleaches its surroundings white and damages your lungs in the process. Just because you change the colour of the dirt (bleach it white) does not mean it is much cleaner, the dirt is still there! When cleaning your toilet it is more about removing the dirt than bleaching it white.
Dish soap (aka washing up liquid) – needs to be natural, why? The food you eat on a daily basis (that is if you cook and eat at home) is cooked in pots that may still have some soap residue from the cleaning product used to clean it on it. When your food comes into contact with the surface of the pot or plate is can mix with your food. The more natural it is the less toxins that can your digestive system can be exposed to.

Any product you can smell goes to your liver to be broken down, just because you cannot see the smelly tiny molecule that you are inhaling doesn’t mean that they do not exist. The more natural the ingredients of the product the better it is for your liver.

Benefits of reducing your toxic load:
Your liver will function will improve, as you have reduced the amount of work it has to do.
Your immune system will function better as your body will not be focusing on storing or removing toxins from the body.
You will find it easier to lose body fat.
Have more energy as your body will not be burdened with extra detoxifying work.

A little bit on Organic foods:
Organic foods contain fewer toxins (pesticides etc.) and other additives found in non-organic foods (sweeteners – aspartame, tartrazine, MSG and hydrogenated fats and non-organic foods can use genetically modified ingredients).
Non-organic foods are generally heavily sprayed with synthetic chemicals and the soil tends to be of lesser quality. Non-organic animals are fed foods of poorer quality or foods that they should not be eating. For example, cattle should not be eating corn, some studies suggest that corn is foreign to the cattle’s digestive system and can cause e. coli. Which can be passed along into the human food chain.

A lot of people think Organic V’s Non-Organic is just a scam but organic foods have been proven to contain more health boosting vitamins and minerals. There was a study done at the University of Washington where 42 children aged between two five, were tested to see the different toxin levels in eating organic foods versus non-organic food. They were divided up into two groups.
Group 1 ate normal non-organic foods (75% of the foods were to be non-organic). Group 2 ate organic foods up to 75% of the foods they consumed were to be organic.
Their urine was tested for traces of organo-chlorine pesticides before and after the study. The pesticides found in the “Organic children” was a sixth of the pesticides found in the “Non Organic children”. Clearly organic food made a big difference in the toxins levels.
What problems do toxins cause?
Let’s talk about your backyard, a grass space or a park. If there are weeds, fungus, insects, rodents etc living in the grass of your backyard that you do not want living there, you have ways to remove them.
The ways generally involve…

Pests – pest-i-cides
Herbs – herb-i-cides
Insects – insect-i-cides
Fungi – fung-i-cides
Rodents – rodent-i-cides

Think of the words genocide or suicide, depressing as those words may be the term “cides” in Latin means the “act of killing” or “killer”. Why is it ok to make up chemical concoctions to kill off pests or weeds?
Do not be fooled into thinking that it is ok to kill off that brightly coloured yellow-headed dandelion in your backyard without some consequences. Do you think that somehow it will not affect you, your neighbour or possibly your grandchildren in the future? These chemicals are designed to KILL. We are too big to be killed off from one single dose of these common “cides”, but think about the effects that they have on a cellular level within our bodies. Inevitably, we will be in contact with these “cides”; We absorb them when lying on grass, we digest them when we drink tap water and even most bottled water, we also eat it in almost all foods especially non organic and processed foods, and by inhalation. The air we breathe is riddled with these harmful toxins. We cannot be ignorant enough to believe that it only kills off this one tiny weed and that it has no bearing on any other aspect of our health or the health of our planet.
Human beings believe that we are somehow removed from nature, from plant life, from insects, and from animals because we are civilised and live in houses with running water, air conditioning, the internet, and bug spray under our kitchen sinks, but we live in a world-wide eco system that is integral to our lives and one that we play a giant role in, unfortunately we are doing more harm to it and to ourselves than you may think.
Doctors will dismiss that detoxing does not work and it is just a sales tool.

Our liver is designed to take toxins out of our body but our livers were not designed to deal with the amount of toxins and stress that we place upon it.
How can you check how your body is dealing with toxins, how can you check the levels of toxins in your body?
Talk with your Health Care Practitioner
The test options include – Blood, hair and urine tests. Your health care professional will guide you on what tests are right for you.
A Hair mineral test is used to test for the levels of heavy metals in your body. A piece of your hair is sent to a laboratory to be tested. This test gives you a snap shot of what metals your body has been dumping into your hair (because these metals were in excess in your body and cause case harm). This is a cheap test to do and the company will send a copy of a supplement programme to remove these excess metals from your body.
Liver Enzyme test, is a blood test will test to see if the liver is functioning optimally.
In order to reduce your toxic load i.e. the amount of toxins that your body, liver and kidneys have to deal with, try the following:

According to Dr. Alejandro Junger, author of The Clean and Clean Gut, to successfully detox the body, the digestive system needs to rest. This will enable more energy be used for (a) detoxification purposes (mostly done by your liver – the liver plays the biggest role in detoxification in the body), (b) repairing the body and (c) strengthening your immune system. To do this, Dr. Junger recommends not eating for a 12 hour period. However, you can have liquid meals during those 12 hours and you can also sleep within the 12 hours. For example, if you are a person you who needs just six hours sleep per night, time your last meal to be a liquid meal anytime within three hours before going to bed. Have a liquid meal for breakfast and a healthy snack (nuts, seeds, and/ or fruit) later on, if necessary. This is an easy way to aid the detoxification process. Liquid meals are beneficial because juices and smoothies have already been broken down into their smallest components, which make it really easy for the body to absorb the nutrients from the liquid. The body therefore does not need to physically break the food down; it just gets to take all the ‘good stuff’ out of the liquid.

Juicing Rules
1. Try and use as much organic produce as possible.
2. Try and use more vegetables than fruit as the sugar in fruits can cause a spike in blood sugar levels.
3. Use a masticating juicer over a centrifugal juicer. Masticating juicers crush the foodstuff where a centrifugal juicer tears and heats the foods, which may in turn destroy some of the vital enzymes and nutrients within the food that your body needs. Crushing is best.
4. Consume your juice as quickly as possible.
5. If you are making it for later, keep the juice sealed in an airtight container (limit oxygen exposure) in the fridge. This helps to maintain the nutrients and enzymes.

Click to access toxic_chemicals.pdf

The Biological Weapons Convention – An overview 30-06-1997 Article, International Review of the Red Cross, No. 318, by Jozef Goldblat.

TOXINS – TOXICITY IN THE BODY

Environmental Toxins that can lead to weight gain, inflammation in the body and in the long run, disease:

Examples of food/products that contain toxins:
1. Sugar – refined sugar (junk food, fizzy drinks)
2. Alcohol
3. Processed foods (white flour, anything with an extended shelf life)
4. Processed diet foods (artificial sweeteners)
5. Artificial preservatives, flavours, colours etc
6. Pesticides sprayed on foods
7. Herbicides sprayed on foods
8. Cleaning products
9. Cosmetics
10. Artificial smells, perfume, febreze, scented candles, room deodorants

TOXINS – ADDITIVES avoid anything that you don’t know what it is
● MSG – monosodium glutamate
● HFCS – high fructose corn syrup
● Artificial sweeteners – aspartame, Splenda, saccharin etc
● Sulphite
● Bisphenol A
● Nitrates

Pick up a refined food product found in your kitchen or in the supermarket. Turn it over and read the label. Can you identify all of the ingredients on the label? If not why are you eating this “food”?

Don’t worry about knowing what every possible ingredients is and if it a toxin. If you don’t recognise it on the label as a real food then when you’ve the time google it and learn as it you go. Best advise is avoid anything you can’t read or don’t recognise as a food.

I was in a kitchen recently and there were two bottles on the counter. Both claimed to be vanilla extract. Except one was real and one was artificial, when I read the ingredients the artificial bottle didn’t even contain any vanilla. Artificial vanilla extract can be synthesized from wood pulp, a by-product of the paper industry, clove oil and the sap of a pine tree. Why is this acceptable? Eating fake foods?!? We need to be accountable for what “foods” we are buying, cooking with and eating. These foods provide the buildings blocks for our body. Do we want our bodies to be made from “artificial” foods? Will that in turn mean that our body’s building blocks are somewhat artificial?!? That we are artificial?

TOXINS – DETOXING – Cleaning up your system

Detoxing involves many different areas of the body:
● Liver
● Digestive System
● Sweat Glands
● Skin
● Urinary System
● Bowel movements
● Lymph system

How does our body get rid of waste?
There are many passes for the body to rid itself of waste. The most obvious is the digestive system using bowel movements and the urinary system. The body can also use sweat glands for you to expel toxins through your skin.

The liver is the main detoxifying organ of the body its purpose is to remove toxins from the body and send them out of the body via urine, sweat or pooh.

There are a couple of important things you need to do when you are detoxifying the body:
1. Reduce the amount of toxins that you are taking into the body, via food, alcohol, cigarettes, medications, cleaning products (both personal and for cleaning your home) food additives, artificial sweeteners, cosmetics etc. just as the skin can expel toxins it can also absorb toxins so it is important to make sure you are not loading up on toxins from the outside of your skin with moisturising creams, deodorant, sun creams, make up etc.
2. Make sure you encourage all of the detoxifying pathways of the body:
● Make sure your urine is a pale yellow to clear colour, this will make sure you are consuming enough water to take some toxins out with your urine.
● Make sure you are regular, what is meant by regular? is that you are having at least one but ideally two bowel movements a day, (REGULAR IS NOT ONCE EVERY TWO TO THREE DAYS) if you are all those excess toxins are sitting in your intestines dying to leave the body but if your system is not that regular. The toxins will get reabsorbed back into the body and the body will have to put all that energy back into getting them out of your system again.
● Make sure you sweat, what I mean is move, get up and move your body, as this clears out your sweat glands and lymph system (another toxin drainage system).
3. Provide your body with the key nutrients it needs to detoxify. This should include green foods and supplements eg chlorella, spirulina, wheat grass as they all contain high amount of vitamins and minerals which the liver uses to aid in the removal of toxins. Fresh green juices will provide vitamins, minerals and enzymes (key for detoxifying). Another key nutrient are amino acids (building blocks of protein) these guys really stimulate the liver to aid in the removal of toxins. During a detox it is best to consume an easily absorbable form of protein, eggs are perfect for this. It takes a lot of energy for the digestive to break meat down into it absorbable components (amino acids) this is why eggs work so well.
4. Provide the body with the time and energy to detoxify itself. To get your body to focus on detoxing you need to rest your digestive system so that the energy that would have been put into digestion goes into detoxing. During digestion – breaking food down into an absorbable size uses a lot of energy and time the best thing that you can do to aid detoxification is to give the body the chance to detoxify itself.
Don’t eat for 12 hours. It takes 8 hours for the digestive system to breakdown a meal. If we are constantly eating and breaking down food, then how will the body ever get a chance to detox? Now you can cheat somewhat by using the hours that you are asleep. If you have a liquid meal (juice, smoothie, protein shake) first thing in the morning for breakfast and your last meal of the day is a liquid meal to. Then you are sleeping for 6-8 hours, having an easy liquid meal for breakfast should tide you over for an hour or two before you get hungry. If your last meal is liquid, this is extending your detoxification period. Liquid meal is at 8pm. (that’s if you live in the real world and go to bed after 11pm ish) Then off to bed for 6-8 hours’ sleep, get up at 7am, liquid meal at 7.30am. Eat at 9.30/10am. That is 15 hours of taking it easy on your digestive system which gives your body for extra time and energy for other functions other the body needs to perform.

Strict Detoxification should not be carried out for longer than a couple of days. You can always do one liquid meal a day either at the start or the end to give your body time away from digesting food.
If you detox for one meal a day that’s 7/21 meals a week. A third of your diet.