How Toxins Affect Your Health

Each toxic molecule creates a cascade of reactions that expands like the radiating ripples around a single drop of water on the surface of a calm lake. You can follow the ripples as far as your eye can see. In the same way, you can follow the chemical footprint of each toxin long after the toxin itself initiated the chain of events. But a tropical storm on that same lake is a very different picture. Millions of individ­ual drops, each starting a ripple that collides with other ripples, make it impossible for an observer to distinguish one ripple from another. In fact, when the storm gets real intense, there are no more ripples. It just becomes a new kind of general surface pattern.

Toxins have many ways of interfering with the normal physiology of life. They can do it in a very unique and specific way, like arsenic, a deadly poison that causes asphyxia by blocking the usage of oxygen needed for the full metabolism of glucose. Toxins may block an enzyme needed for an important body function. Or they may stimulate a spe­cific body function in such persistent ways that it begins to cause dam­age. Caffeine, when consumed many times a day, stimulates the adrenal glands, resulting in a fight-or-flight response, in which the body pre­pares for intense action by increasing heart rate, blood pressure, alert­ness, and temperature. When caffeine is taken in persistently over a period of time, one can exhaust the adrenal system and not even realize caffeine was the cause. In fact, when started on the Detoxification program and asked to stop caffeine completely, many patients complain because they think they can only function if they have their coffee. Other toxins kill the good bacteria in the intestinal tract, block oxygen from binding to red blood cells, interfere with DNA synthesis by switching genes on and off, or block the absorption of different vitamins.

Molecules that carry an electric charge cause irritation and dam­age by facilitating oxidation, the much talked about “oxidants.” The process is similar to what happens to metals when they rust. These tox­ins are neutralized by anti-oxidants, abundant in raw vegetables and fruits. There are also toxins that interfere with the absorption of neces­sary nutrients, such as the prescription medications listed in appendix “Prescription Drugs and Nutritional Depletion.”

Mercury, a toxic metal, is known as the “great mimicker.” Mercury toxicity can present as almost any other disease. Toxic levels of this metal can trigger a chain of reactions that end up causing psychiatric imbalances, cancer, autoimmune diseases, or anemia, to name a few.

Each of the examples above describes how one type of toxic mol­ecule interferes with our ability to maintain the balance necessary for a healthy life. We can describe the individual mechanism for any of the many of the toxins mentioned so far in the book. It is even possible that scientists could one day understand how each of them alters our chemistry. But what is certainly impossible is to ever understand in detail how they interact when many of them are present together in the same organism.

In my practice, I needed to find a way to think about toxicity that allowed me to help my patients. Looking at every individual toxin and trying to isolate its chemical ripples from the others was too confusing. Once again, when I took a step back from the detailed level of individual molecules to the perspective of the whole person, a much clearer picture started to emerge. The storm of toxins on the lake of the human body started to cre­ate patterns similar to symptoms and diseases I knew too well.