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(rough draft)
This is a matter of degree: how far do you want to go. Where we have most control of our toxic intake is in what we ingest. Explore your options with water. You certainly do not want to be drinking chlorinated tap water (a goldfish will go belly up in about five minutes in chlorinated tap water!). Bottled water or filtration (another question of degree with options of little or of great expense) are the common solutions. You can filter the mains water too at no great cost and spare your skin the chlorine (ask Jode MacDonald at Pure Water [address coming]). With food again its a matter of degree: how far do you want to take purity? Avoid processed foods and in so far as you don’t, get into the habit of reading labels. If you don’t know exactly what a particular ingredient is, suspect it! Vegetables, and to a lesser extent fruits and grains, are the healthiest foods, but commercial crops carry a large toxic load. What are you to go? You can wash food: wash with hydrogen peroxide for instance. Of course it is best to eat "organically grown" foods wherever possible (and if you get into "juicing" carrots and other root vegetable must be organic. Dr. Shou Lan says they use carrots to clean the fields in China. They pull the toxin in out of the field.) Meat and other animal products (dairy and eggs) accumulate "fat soluble toxins" (which are the toxins we are most concerned with. Water soluble toxin are excreted easily.) If you wish to detoxify, you must avoid commercial meat and animal products! (In his "Diet for a New America" John Robbins quotes a study that found the breast milk of mothers eating a Standard American Diet (SAD) contained one hundred times more pesticides than that found in the milk of vegetarians, and indeed this milk is not really fit to ingest.) Fat soluble toxins accumulate up the food chain. Fish: if you wouldn’t drink the water, don’t eat he fish. If it’s fresh water you have to know the water it came from. With sea fish deep open water is usually cleaner than coastal. I’d avoid bottom feeder and that’s going to include "sea food".
a/ diet/fasting a/ Diet and Fasting: when the body is taking in toxins it tends to store them. When we aren’t taking in toxins we tend to eliminate those we’ve previously stored. Therefore fasting can be an effective means of detoxing. (I will put up a page on fasting shortly. If you need it sooner, ask.) Dr. Max Gerson had a wonderfully simple, and basically true, description of the origin of disease, according to his daughter, Charlotte: disease comes from the absence of nutrients and the presence of toxins. Further, the toxins tend to sit where the nutrients should be. Therefore, said Max, if you flood the body with nutrients you will push out the toxins. The Gerson Therapy involves eating 20 pounds (10 kilos) of fresh, raw, organic vegetable a day. To eat that quantity you have to juice. In the Gerson Therapy you drink vegetable juice every hour. Also, because the treatment causes the rapid elimination of toxins, which accumulate briefly in the liver and make you feel ghastly, "coffee enemas" are used to flush the liver. (I would advise trying flushing with "liver tonic herbs" rather than coffee: e.g. Burdock.) You might take a look at the Gerson Therapy as an example of an extremely rigorous diet.
Dandelion root is a mild liver tonic. Dandelion leaf is a kidney tonic. Dandelion root and leaf is a useful part of a detox regime. Burdock root is a mild liver tonic and lymphatic. Yellow Dock is a mild to moderate liver tonic. Cleavers is a useful lymphatic. A possible herbal detox regime might involve 15 drops Dandelion root and leaf tincture Three times a day before meals.
e/ supplementation: of course the antioxidants specifically help in detoxification. Vitamin C and vitamin E will be useful along with other antioxidants such as grape seed extract.
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