As 2019 comes to a close and a new year begins, it’s time to start thinking about detoxing. Each year the average person is exposed to 14 pounds of pesticides, herbicides, food additives, and preservatives. Other common toxins include cosmetics, skin care products, nicotine, alcohol, caffeine, and prescription drugs.
The average woman is exposed to 126 unique chemical ingredients daily through skin care products. While everyone should work to reduce their daily exposure, it is virtually impossible to eliminate all toxin exposure. Therefore, it is important to periodically restore the body’s ability to cleanse itself and eliminate toxins.
Detoxing is the process of decreasing the body’s toxic load by reducing exposure to harmful chemicals, and simultaneously implementing nutritional and lifestyle strategies to promote efficient elimination of toxins from the body with regenerative medicine in Springfield Missouri.
Toxins have many harmful effects on the body. Toxins are fat soluble and attracted to the fatty portion of cells throughout our body. In studies, 100% of Americans contained toxins that are stored in fat. These same toxins were proven to be a human carcinogen. No wonder cancer rates are continually rising in America!
In addition to reducing your risk of cancer, other reasons to detox include improved energy, weight loss, eliminating food cravings, clearing skin, improving digestion, eradicating sinus and allergy problems, improving brain fog, stabilizing blood sugars, reducing migraine headaches, improving food sensitivities, improving joint pain and just overall feeling better. If you have any of these symptoms, we recommend doing a structured detox program.
Whenever a new year rolls around, we are all inundated with ads and articles suggesting lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, and “cleanses” may be what our bodies need for a quick detox. However, the truth is that our body is detoxifying itself all day every day. In doing this, the nutrients required for supporting those organs involved in detox are often depleted.
For example, our liver is the primary organ of detoxification in the body and eliminates toxins through 2 phases. Nutrients involved in phase 1 detox include B vitamins, folate, glutathione, polyphenols, quercetin, and lycopene. Nutrients involved in phase 2 detox include Vitamin B5, B12, Vitamin C, folate, glutathione, magnesium and essential amino acids. Toxins deplete these necessary detox nutrients. Therefore it is best to bolster the body with specific nutrients that provide regenerative medicine to help improve the pathways of detoxification.
A second important part of detoxing is an elimination diet to reduce our toxic load and allow our immune system time to calm down any reactivity to specific foods. During this elimination diet it is important to eat organic, grass fed meat only and focus on eating whole foods. Avoid alcoholic drinks, caffeine, soda/sugary drinks, refined sugars and simple carbohydrates.
It is also important to eat foods that naturally aid the body in detoxing with regenerative medicine such as ginger, garlic, apples, green tea, lemon, grapefruit, coffee, cranberry and cruciferous vegetables.
Other ways of improving detox include sweating, exercising, dry brushing, fasting and infrared saunas. It is not recommended to exercise during a structured detox program when often the calories are limited.
We encourage our patients to participate in a medically supervised, structured detox program at least once per year. Every January we conduct our “Detox With Your Doc” program in which our owner Keri Sutton completes the detox alongside our patients. This is a comprehensive 7 day diet, lifestyle and nutrient program designed to reduce toxic burden and support phase 1 and phase 2 liver detoxification function.
We will kick things off with our group visit January 16th at 4 pm. For more information check out the event on our Facebook page or call our office at 417-881-4994.
