The Detoxification Program – What is and how it works

Whenever I see a new patient, at our first meeting we spend an hour or more talking about the person’s present state of health. Frequently patients tell me they have been diagnosed with a disease and have been given prescription medications, mostly to alleviate their symptoms. Before I agree with any diagnosis, I tell my patients that their symptoms are the way their bodies and minds are telling them that things are not really working. Whatever they are doing, eating, and thinking has created an imbalance and their body is screaming at them that something needs to change. We are designed by nature to survive and procreate, and we have evolved to do so incredibly suc­cessfully over millennia. So the symptoms they are feeling are part of evolution’s most powerful and sophisticated driving force, survival. To kill the symptoms without changing the conditions that caused them is insulting to the body’s intelligence.

Some symptoms do point to immediate life-and-death situations, in which case emergency measures are needed to preserve life. For acute situations, modern medicine has developed life-saving technol­ogies that are nothing short of miraculous. As a cardiologist I know that chest pain moving into the left arm classically happens when a clot stops blood from flowing through the arteries that feed the heart muscle. In this emergency scenario, catheters can be guided inside the arteries, from the groin up into the heart, to confirm this diagnosis and to allow doctors to break the clot by blowing up balloons that will stretch the arteries open. Science fiction has nothing more impressive than a modern cardiac catheterization lab, where saving lives is the daily routine.

But most patients’ complaints are not indications that something is really “broken” and endangering their lives. The great majority of physical symptoms point to problems that would take much longer to cause death. These are symptoms of the chronic diseases that, accord­ing to statistics, most Americans will present with, sooner or later and to varying degrees, in their lifetime. These are the diseases that cost so many so much suffering and money. For these chronic ailments and their related symptoms, modern medicine has little to offer. The won­der chemicals and surgeries that are so effective in emergencies are the cause of worse suffering or even death when used to silence symptoms long-term.

I believe that whatever health problem is affecting my patients, their incredibly intelligent body will attempt to survive. The mecha­nisms it puts to work in order to do that get confused with the disease. Symptoms are the alarm system that makes us aware and demands we try something different from whatever we’re currently doing—since that was what got us into trouble to begin with. To expect different results from doing the same thing is the definition of madness.

Instead of blocking the symptoms with medication, I try to answer the question, “What is it that my patient is trying to survive?” Something doesn’t add up. We have split the atom and broken the genetic code, yet our society is sicker that it has ever been. What are we missing?

The human body has an amazing natural ability to defend, repair, heal, and even rejuvenate itself. It is the magic you would see if you were to look at a magnified, high-speed movie of a cut on your skin. You would see that the bleeding stops when corklike bundles of cells, blood plate­lets, stop the bleeding by clumping up and filling up the blood vessels where they are cut, but nowhere else. And then, as if guided by an invis­ible hand, the skin cells on each border of the cut would start dividing and bridging the gap, until the whole surface was covered by skin, and the cut completely vanished, leaving just a reminder—a scar.

I tell my patients that even though they can’t see it, the healing process is the same under the skin, deep inside the body. When dam­age occurs inside a healthy body, a number of mechanisms are triggered that are perfectly designed to stop the insult and then repair the damage, provided the conditions they need to complete the work are available. If they are not, the healing process fails and symptoms persist or worsen.

Two basic problems are responsible for the loss of this ability, result­ing in chronic disease:

Obstacles that block cell functioning and chemical reactionsLack of the ingredients needed for this process to occur

When I look at what is happening with a patient’s health, I ask myself these questions:

What was the original insult that caused irritation or injury? What obstacles are preventing the body from healing?

What is lacking that is needed to repair things?

The answer to the first two questions is often the same: the toxic over­load we are exposed to in our daily lives. The air we breathe, the water we drink and shower with, the buildings we live and work in, the cos­metics we use, and the foods we eat are loaded with chemicals that alone or in combination damage our bodies and every other living creature on this planet. The chemicals we prescribe actually worsen the toxic burden we intend to correct.

Toxicity irritates tissues, damages our own cells, and kills other cells that we host in harmony and need for our health. When our body attempts to defend itself and repair the damage, toxins are often the obstacles that prevent it. The toxins bind to useful chemicals and pre­vent them from doing their work. They irritate cells persistently, forc­ing the inflammatory, allergic, and defense mechanisms to act longer and more intensely.

Minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients in our foods is the answer to the third question. All the chemicals needed for our body chemis­try and architecture would be provided by nature if we respected its ways. Comfort and greed drove us to change nature’s design for grow­ing plants and animals, resulting in a severe depletion of the nutrients that our body needs to function. Mass agriculture in exhausted soils produces plants that are depleted. Then we irradiate them, wax them, and turn them into all kinds of products that are loaded with toxins such as preservatives and additives. Growing cattle, chicken, and fish on an industrial scale has resulted in massive toxicity as well.

For all these reasons food lacks essential nutrients and turns out to be the biggest source of toxic chemicals. When you add the thousands of other chemicals of modern life, as well as the toxic influences invis­ible to the naked eye (thoughts, emotions, radiation), you have the per­fect recipe for chronic diseases.

Whether toxicity is the primary or secondary cause of illness, it seems to be an integral part of the disease equation, since nobody is able to escape it completely. Everything is connected in such an intri­cate way, often with so many points between first cause and ultimate effect, that it is impossible to map every reaction. The time has come when we are waking up to an alarming truth. We are killing ourselves with the same chemicals we invented to make life easier. This concept has never been more relevant than in our modern life, yet so under the radar of our collective awareness. Until now.

Cleansing is turning up the intensity and effectiveness of the detoxifi­cation system. Supporting the process with the right nutrients is safe cleansing. Going beyond this to also promote the repair of the gut sys­tem is the essence of Detox.

Cleansing and detoxification programs may be returning to popu­larity today, but they are certainly not new to humans. Every ancient system of health care had ways of regularly attending to the body’s detoxification systems and making sure the lines of defense in the body were working properly—and this was centuries before industrial chem­icals filled the air. Humans have always instinctually known that a reg­ular period of resting and recharging the body will let it shed the accu­mulated toxins and waste materials that tend to build up in all of us simply from living. It is also a way to boost healing when systems are taxed and are beginning to show signs of stress.

Every creature in nature does this periodically, alternating cycles of growth and activity with cycles of rest, such as hibernation. This keeps things in balance. Animals stop consuming food when they get sick. They rest the digestive system, so that energy can be diverted toward defense and healing.

As I learned during my own time in India, the Sanskrit word “Ayurveda” can be translated as the science of longevity. Its core phi­losophy is that health is a state in which the body is clear of toxins, the mind is settled, emotions are happy, wastes are constantly eliminated, and organs are working efficiently. To achieve this goal, Ayurvedic doc­tors give their patients balancing diets and herbs as part of a treatment plan. But they also prescribe regular periods of deeper detoxification known as panchakarma, during which the patients follow a cleansing program for several weeks and have hands-on treatments to pull toxins out of tissues and quiet the busy mind. This was developed millennia before smokestacks and diesel trucks arrived on the scene. Ayurveda understands that a part of ordinary human experience is the tendency to build up waste and accumulate stress, and if we don’t spend some time alleviating this at a deeper level, our systems and organs get fatigued, making us sick.

Chinese health care is similarly wise. Frequently Chinese doctors put their patients on a program of teas, tonics, and treatments to help them throw off the toxins and mental fatigue they accumulate just by eating, breathing, and meeting everyday demands. Native Americans and members of other indigenous cultures around the world have used fasting and sweat lodges to purify body, mind, and spirit. Done periodi­cally, the sweat-lodge experience returns participants to a path of clar­ity on every level, or is used strategically to heal disease.

All these traditions know that the simple experience of being human brings with it the need to periodically focus on cleansing and detoxifying. When we consider the weight of our modern toxic load and its taxing effects on our inner environments, a period of detoxify­ing practically becomes obligatory.

It’s important to distinguish between a detox program (a cleanse) and the more generalized practice of slowly “cleaning up our act” by making gradual diet or lifestyle changes over several months. A cleanse is a distinct program, done for a concentrated period of time, that puts the body in a more intense detox mode. It has a start and an end date and a specific purpose.

These kinds of detoxification programs have also long been valued as a chance for the mind to come back to a peaceful center. In ancient times, cleansing through fasting was used as a tool to gain spiritual clar­ity. Cleaning out the amma wasn’t just about diet; it was a process of cleansing the spirit of the toxic feelings and thoughts that cause suffer­ing in the heart and soul. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights; Muhammad, Gandhi, and Buddha all fasted. Fasting for ultimate clar­ity about the nature of life is a part of many spiritual traditions and has been ingrained in humans for thousands of years.

For most people living busy lives today, the primary motivation to cleanse and detoxify is to remove the heaviness, fog, or lack of energy that is a consequence of contemporary lifestyles and stress. But dig a little deeper and there’s often an underlying eagerness to simplify and strip away excess for a period of time, make some space, and get a new start by taking leave of some old, stuck patterns. There is an inevitable awakening in the mind and emotions, even if the stated goal of the cleanse is more physical, such as to enhance beauty, encourage weight loss, or look younger.

Health care in the twenty-first century is in the process of being radically reinvented. Ancient methods of protecting and preserving body and mind are being integrated with new discoveries in biochem­istry and quantum physics. A new era of detox programs is being born. Detox sets the standard, for its design intentionally addresses both ingredients of good cleansing practices: the elimination of toxins and the repair of the gut.

Everywhere I look today, there is growing curiosity about cleansing. As information is exchanged between individuals and as articles and tips are posted online about the many methods for detoxifying, there’s more confusion than ever. It can be overwhelming. Descriptions of extreme programs can deter people from starting. Also people often get disillu­sioned a few days in, when the program they’ve selected turns out to be incompatible with their needs or simply uncomfortable. Sometimes the program they’ve picked can even be dangerous.

When we understand that a cleanse is a way of harnessing the body’s natural intelligence, we learn that we can drive it in specific ways. Picking one type of cleanse-detox program over another is really about adjusting the intensity and speed of detoxification to best suit our bodies and lifestyles while we do it. Detoxification is a comprehensive pro­gram designed for the daily requirements of the busy lives we lead. There are benefits that happen quickly and I urge you to do the best you can. If for any reason one week of the program is the limit you can accomplish on the first try, you will still see and feel a difference. Perhaps next time one week can turn into two weeks or even the com­plete program.

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 Detoxification 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.

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.

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 disease– or 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.

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.

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 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.

Food and the processes connected with it consume a big portion of our daily energy reserves. Digestion, absorption, the transportation of nutri – ents 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 pro – duction of enzymes consumes large amounts of energy. (During the Detoxification 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 sub- stances—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.

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.

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.

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.

There are other factors influencing when, if, and how efficiently we enter detox mode. If we ingest a food that triggers an allergic response, a host of processes are put in motion that consume even more energy and time. When the GALT, the immune cells that live close to the intestinal wall, get irritated, they start manufacturing substances— histamines and immunoglobulins—to mediate allergy, which in turn activate a series of responses, including the activation of the inflam­matory system. Thus, foods that cause allergies end up activating three bodywide systems: the digestive, immune, and allergic systems, all high energy consumers. When they’re switched on, a snowball effect starts: one reaction triggers the next in a chain of reactions that recruit other cells and cause specific effects such as sneezing, itching, vomit­ing, vasodilatation, and more. By using up so much of the energy bud­get, they cause detoxification to get delayed even longer. And simul­taneously, they cause disruption all over the body—draining resources further. The chaos and confusion caused by irritating foods can drain the body, the patient, and the doctors, who typically don’t connect the problem to irritating foods or the eroded state of the intestines to the presenting symptoms. Pulling this picture into focus makes very clear how every one of us, over time, can end up with a backlog of toxins in our tissues.

The news is not all bad, though. Some foods delay the signal to start dumping toxins, but other foods accelerate it by supporting and enhancing the many steps in digestion and absorption. Magnesium-rich foods promote intestinal motility and accelerate intestinal transit. Olive oil facilitates transit by lubricating the walls as well as triggering the release of bile from the gallbladder. Bile is crucial for effective diges­tion. Enzyme-rich foods speed up the process by supplying the body with many of the enzymes needed. Nature actually provides much of what we need to get toxins out of our bodies, if we just follow its rules.

This understanding is the basis of an “Elimination Diet.” Avoiding the foods that are difficult to digest and that are known to cause food allergies and sensitivities will allow the body to enter detox mode reliably and consistently. When you combine meals that follow the Elimination Diet guidelines with liquid meals, as you will do during the Detoxification program, you reduce the workload of digestion even further. Naturally, this helps the detox mode to start sooner, last longer, and consequently clean deeper.

The toxins and mucus that are released into circulation once detox mode has been switched on must get neutralized and eliminated. Why? Because these toxins contain free radicals, electrically charged mole­cules that corrode tissues and damage cells on contact. In addition, dif­ferent toxins interfere with different functions such as cell division and reproduction, hormone assembling and release, and receptor sensitiv­ity. And as described earlier, they even affect gene expression, altering the way our genes govern the inner workings of the body and literally changing the course of our life expression at the origin of command. Furthermore, since toxins, particularly the human-made ones, are by and large fat lovers (lipophillic), if they circulate long enough without being neutralized, they will find fatty tissue to lodge within. The brain, with its high percentage of fat, is a prime target. Neurological distur­bances are, not surprisingly, a consequence of accumulated toxicity.

Because fat is hard to offload (as everyone knows), the newly freed toxins must get transformed from fat-soluble molecules into water-soluble molecules, which can be more easily excreted. The central player in this part of the story is the liver. Its cells contain a group of enzymes called the cytochrome P450 system, which are designed to cause the chemical reactions for this crucial process of neutralization. The reac­tions are performed in two steps, phase 1 and phase 2 liver detoxifica­tion. During phase 1, the structure of the toxin being neutralized is actually altered and it is turned into an “intermediate metabolite.” In some cases, this intermediate product is more toxic than the toxin it came from. The rush is now on to push it through to the second phase of liver detoxification, which will neutralize the toxic property and transform it into a water-soluble product that can then be thrown back into blood circulation and passed through to the blood vessels inside the kidneys. The kidney cells will recognize it, capture it out of the blood, and finally release it into the urethra as urine. You pee it out and with this act of elimination, the detoxification journey is completed.

This essential liver work has some important requirements. It requires energy, a steady supply of antioxidants (to neutralize the free radicals), and an array of other minerals, vitamins, and nutrients (to feed the chemical reactions of phases 1 and 2). If all these things are available, detoxification occurs safely. The transition between phase 1 and phase 2 happens so quickly that the intermediate compounds don’t spill out. If the liver doesn’t get this support, however, phase 2 is compromised. The partly transformed toxins spill out of the liver, return to circulation in the blood and lymph, and travel back to the tissues and cells, where they cause damage. The other organs of detoxi­fication might try to compensate, but none can do what the liver can do. A cascade of stresses on different systems can set in, which strains the body more. Knowing this, you can begin to see why fasting on its own, even though it helps accelerate the release of toxins from tissues, might be harmful to health. There are no nutrients coming in to help with the processing and neutralizing stage that must occur next.