What is and Where are Toxins Located?

A toxin is something that interferes with normal physiology and nega­tively impacts bodily function. Toxins are of many different kinds, with totally different qualities, from an infinite number of different sources; just as varied are the complex mechanisms by which they cause irrita­tion and damage.

Some toxins, known as endotoxins, are waste products from the nor­mal activity of cells. Uric acid, ammonia, lactic acid, and homocysteine fall in this category. When these toxins build up, they cause diseases. Some are very specific; for example, when uric acid lingers, it causes gout.

Exotoxins, or xenobiotics, are human-made toxins that we are exposed to intentionally or inadvertently. Thousands of chemicals are being invented every year. These chemicals, alone or in combination, may cause disruption of the normal cell function. Throughout the fol­lowing posts, Detoxification will continually point out the toxins you need to be aware of (including specific names), where they are, and how to measure them. It will also describe how these toxins affect your health and what you can do to prevent disease or repair the damage that has been already done

Studies now show that every person living today carries measurable levels of several hundred synthetic chemicals in his or her body. These contaminants did not exist prior to the twentieth century and have no role in our body chemistry. It is safe to assume that all of us are bur­dened with a toxic load from exposure to synthetic substances: pesti­cides, phthalates, mercury, trans-fatty acids, benzene, trihalomethanes. Exotoxins have names scary enough to make any smart person want to avoid them. The evidence is now undeniable that what we don’t know can hurt us. It’s estimated that the average American comes into con­tact with thousands of potentially harmful chemicals every day.

To understand the way we are exposed to toxins, it is useful to imagine four layers separating our inner chemistry from the rest of the universe, as if we had four skins.

The first skin is what separates our blood, tissues, and organs from the outside world; it is the outermost edge of our physical bodies, just one layer of cells thick. To the naked eye, it may seem like a barrier, decep­tively leading to a sense of separation, even protection. But under the microscope, things become less clear, since the first skin is in constant motion, selecting from the environment what to reject and what to actively capture and absorb. It also discards to the outside what we don’t want or need inside anymore. The first skin uses two types of cells to form our body surfaces, depending on the location.

Epithelial cells. We see epithelial cells (dry, tough) at a simple glance. They form what we commonly call skin. When this part of our first skin gets sick, we visit a dermatologist. The major source of toxins enter­ing through this skin are the cosmetics and toiletries we use. Think of everything you rub or spray onto your skin on purpose. Do you read the labels? You should think of cosmetics as food. Ideally, you should only use cosmetics that you feel safe eating, because, just like food, they will end up circulating in your blood. Your choice of products should be guided more by the ingredients list than the promised effect. This information is no secret. Doctors use creams, gels, and ointments to deliver many prescription drugs into the blood through the skin.

Dyes, fragrances, foaming agents, heavy metals as stabilizers and tex­turizers, tanners, inks, alcohols, and hundreds of other potential poisons are frequently included in cosmetic formulas. Nail products, hair prod­ucts, deodorants—all the ordinary products in your bathroom cabinet and makeup kit as well as the ones in your neighborhood beauty salon and nail spa have chemical compounds that don’t exist in nature. They can cause irritation, allergies, and sensitivities, just like food. Endocrine-system disruptions are problems linked to a group of chemicals found in skin and hair products called parabens. Many deodorants contain alumi­num to stop you from sweating. They give you a double whammy, intro­ducing one more chemical into the circulation while shutting down your pores, which were originally designed to eliminate toxins.

The water we shower with is absorbed through the skin and ends up in our circulatory systems, just like the water we drink. Most city-supplied water has some amount of chlorine, which was used upstream to prevent bacteria from growing. It makes for a bacteria-free shower, but contributes to bacterial genocide in the intestines. Recent reports reveal that your shower and tap water may contain increasingly detect­able levels of most of the popular prescription medications such as antidepressants, antibiotics, hormones, and immunosuppressants.

This skin is also in contact with the air around us. And many toxins carried in the air affect the other type of cell used for the first skin.

Mucosal cells. Mucosal cells (wet, soft) form the walls of the first skin in areas that are hidden from sight without using instruments. Many of my patients think of these areas as inside their bodies, but technically this type of first skin separates in and out as much as the epidermis. When we breathe in, air gushes down the trachea and bronchi, finally hitting the wall of alveoli, where mucosal cells are quick to absorb oxy­gen, since it is such a precious commodity. You are probably aware of airborne toxins like car, factory, and cigarette smoke, but has it ever occurred to you that breathing your hair spray could be worse than second-hand smoke?

The urethra, vagina, and uterus are also lined with mucosa. There are toxins in products used on these areas.

Of all the “first skins,” the one coating the inside of the digestive tract is the largest and busiest; it is the most important site of exposure to the toxins of modern life. The chemicals of modern life enter our cir­culatory system starting with our mouths. In the past, silver amalgam fillings were frequently prepared with mercury. It takes many years for them to leak into your blood. Toothpaste, mouth rinses, breath sprays, and other dental products introduce toxic chemicals as well.

The intestines, a twenty-five-foot-long tube that connects the stom­ach to the anus, has two distinct sections. The small intestine is about twenty feet long and an inch and a half in diameter. The large intestine is wider, but shorter (about five feet). When food enters the digestive tube, it is broken down in small pieces and absorbed into our circulatory system by the cells that form the intestinal wall. The wall of this tube is not smooth like the surface of the pages from this website. In order to increase the surface area for the purpose of maximizing absorption of nutrients, the walls have folds (villi), which in turn, have folds of their own (microvilli). If we opened and completely stretched out an average intestinal tube, its surface area would cover a tennis court.

It is said that a person who lives eighty years digests twenty-five tons of food in his or her lifetime. Understanding food as a source of toxicity through our first skin is vital, and we will cover it in detail in the coming pages. Besides food, everything else that enters the tube is absorbed, such as prescription and over-the-counter medications. Drugs in America today may be causing more damage than the problems they are supposed to solve. Not only are many toxic chemicals themselves, but they also contribute to nutrient depletion as a side effect.

I see common drugs affecting patients every day. Beta blockers, used to manage cardiac arrhythmia and high blood pressure, deplete the body of coenzyme Q10 (needed to maintain heart functioning, normal blood pressure, and energy levels). Statin drugs, used to lower cholesterol, deplete coenzyme Q10, calcium (needed to regulate bone strength, blood clotting, and cell rigidity), and beta-carotene (a vision and immunity booster). Oral contraceptives, used to prevent preg­nancy, deplete vitamin B2 (needed for eye, nerve, skin health), vitamin B6 (helps avoid depression, cardiovascular disease, sleep disorders), vitamin B12 (needed to prevent anemia, weakness), and zinc (immune system booster, sense of taste and smell).

Imagine what happens to your nutritional status when, like the aver­age senior citizen today, you’re taking up to ten prescription drugs daily. Even if, to manage an ongoing condition, you are simply taking two or three, they all get in line to be processed out by the liver, while they continue to prevent absorption of essential nutrients.

Prescription drugs have important uses, and there is a time and a place for them. I prefer to prescribe them as a “bridge”—something to help the patient transition while we work together on boosting the body’s own ability to heal.

What I call the “second skin” is the layer that we put right on top of our epidermis. It includes clothing and everything used to clean, process, color, and perfume it. Today most of the material we press against our bodies is more heavily sprayed with pesticide than our foods. Growing cotton uses 25 percent of the world’s pesticides and 10 percent of its insecticides, which get into the ground, water, and air, not to mention vast amounts of chemical fertilizers. (The bulk of chemicals from cotton get into us through food, via the cottonseed fed to dairy cows and used in junk food.) Add to that the petroleum-based synthetic clothes we have become accustomed to wearing—acrylic, nylon, polyester, and so forth—which harm the environment and can leach toxins into us too.

Wearing synthetic clothes typically also inhibits the evaporation of fluids that your skin releases, and they get reabsorbed. (In addition, habits that kept humans healthy in the past—like sweat rooms and sau­nas—are missing from modern life. You will be encouraged to include these as part of the Detoxification program.) Many textiles are finished with a formaldehyde resin to make them crease-resistant, waterproof, and shrink-proof—especially sheets and bedding made of a polyester-cotton mix. Sleep in a cloud of formaldehyde, and insomnia, not to mention headaches, asthma, and skin rashes, can likely result. Children’s sleep-wear, meanwhile, is legally required to contain toxic fire retardants.

Now consider the new trend of wearing plastic clogs constantly, not to mention spending all summer in flip-flops. (If plastics leach out of sun-warmed bottles into water, what are plastic shoes doing to your sweaty feet?) Then there are the detergents, highly toxic dryer sheets, and, worse, dry-cleaning fluids used to care for all these second-skin products. You only have to look at a bottle of supersized, bleach-enhanced detergent or take a whiff of the suit inside your cleaner’s plastic wrapping to get a sense of this invisible source of exposure. The dry-cleaning chemical perchloroethylene is known to cause liver, kidney, and neurological damage as a result of both short- and long­term exposure.

The next skin, slightly farther out, is our living-space environment— our homes and workplaces. It is calculated that one-third of the planet’s pollution comes from the chemicals we use to manufacture the materi­als for building and the carbon gases generated in doing so. Included in that is everything we use for furnishing, decorating, cleaning, and maintaining our homes. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, indoor air is more polluted than outdoor air, due largely to all the emissions from furnishings, paints, foam, insulators, fire retardants, veneers, and flooring as well as dust, dander, and sometimes cigarette smoke. Synthetic wall-to-wall carpeting is loaded with chemicals.

Asbestos and lead may make the headlines as household toxins that must be identified and removed, but seemingly less dangerous things like shower curtains emit their own poisonous compounds. That new­shower-curtain smell, just like the “new car smell” that many people love, is a chemical off-gassing from the PVC (polyvinyl chloride) plas­tic, commonly referred to as vinyl. It is one of the most hazardous con­sumer products ever created. One recent study showed that elevated levels of dangerous airborne toxins from shower curtains can persist for more than a month—a good reason to buy some organic cotton ones.

Think of everything we use to clean our living, working, and even driving environments. Plenty has been written about the downside of chemical-filled household cleaning products and how the toxins in them are linked to cancer, immune system disorders, liver dam­age, and many other very common health issues. But you don’t even need to study the scientific findings telling you that bleach has been linked to reproductive problems in men and learning and behavioral problems in children, that the fumes given off by carpet cleaners can cause cancer and liver damage, or that air “fresheners” spew poisons into the living room. Just use your common sense. Anything with a smell that can trigger a headache is causing a disturbance in the cells and should be avoided. And a combination of these products used at the same time? They’re going to react together as you inhale them and cause even greater damage. ( Just because something is inhaled instead of eaten doesn’t make it harmless. Molecules breathed into the lungs enter the bloodstream and circulate around the body too. That’s why spending hours in a recently painted room or a photo lab or working with glues and dyes all add to the toxic load your body must process and dispose of.)

It’s easy to get started replacing toxic cleaning products, because trendy new eco-companies provide green cleaning products at a friendly price. But one thing we don’t often consider: the traditional cleaning products that boast of their power to kill “99.9 percent of germs” or that advertise themselves as “antibacterial” are slaughtering the good bacteria your intestines are working hard to nurture in order to protect you—which you will read about later. Meanwhile you lose your resis­tance to the bad bacteria from lack of contact. More than anything, reducing exposure to toxins in the third skin is what green architecture is all about. Make informed consumer choices.

The fourth skin is a gigantic layer that ends at the edges of our planetary atmosphere. It contains an innumerable number of different toxins, many of them by-products of agriculture, industry, and transportation. Emissions from cars, trucks, and planes pour out into the air. Where you live can make it worse, of course. Those who live by highways or near factories are subject to more intense exposure. Recent research indicates that a few hours of exposure to heavy air pollution increases the rate of heart attacks.

Heavy metals such as cadmium, mercury, arsenic, chromium, and lead compounds, which are emitted into our environment and con­sumer products, can accumulate in fatty tissues when they exist in high enough concentrations and over prolonged periods of time. They affect and disrupt many brain functions, since they have a high affinity for fat, which makes up 90 percent of our brain. Some, like mercury, can be deposited in soils or surface waters, where they are taken up by plants, which are then ingested by animals. Mercury accumulates in greater concentrations as you go up the food chain. When people and animals at the top of the food chain eat fish or meat contaminated with mer­cury, they get exposed to concentrations that are much higher than those in the water, air, or soil.

Here in the fourth skin we find toxins in the form of electromag­netic frequencies (EMFs). The radiation from power lines, cell phones and headsets, computers, and all the electrical objects that surround us daily is considered by some in the scientific and healing worlds to cause the same sensitivity and symptoms that chemical toxins do. Research links the modern bombardment with even low-level frequencies to brain cancer and miscarriages. Today there is a lot of discussion of the dangers of cell phones. Since there is as yet no consensus regarding the dangers, it makes sense to be cautious and limit their use to situations in which a land line is not available.