Toxicity is, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the degree to which a chemical substance or a particular mixture of substances can damage an organism. Toxicity can refer to the effect on a whole organism, such as an animal, bacterium, or plant, as well as the effect on a substructure of the organism, such as a cell (cytotoxicity) or an organ such as the liver (hepatotoxicity).
Every living thing deals with toxicity, and the mechanisms by which organisms on Earth are able to DE-tox their bodies are crucial to their survival.
You’re probably familiar with the standard detox mechanisms. The intestines are able to filter through the food you eat, what is nutritious and what needs to be sent out of the body. Your liver acts as a sort of processing plant that takes things that make it into your bloodstream (i.e., drugs, alcohol) and cleans out the blood. Your kidneys do the same, but on a somewhat less sophisticated level. Your lymph system drains pathogens into your excretory system.
A quick note on organic toxins and mold
The lymph system is designed to detox us from organic toxins. These types of toxins are alive, things like bacteria, viruses, fungi, lyme disease, parasites (tapeworms, ringworms, etc), simply anything that is alive that invades our bodies and does us harm.
Realize this is very distinct from GOOD bacteria, such as the microbiome in the gut, on the skin, in the mouth, etc.
Nevertheless, most people are familiar with things like bacteria, viruses, parasites, and how we detox them: our immue system neutralizes them, our lymph system sends them to the excretory system, which sends them to the toilet—hopefully!
The only organic toxin that I feel is REALLY misunderstood—both in terms of its toxicity AND in terms of how common it is—would be mold.
Some mold exposure symptoms include (keep in mind they don’t stay the same from day to day.):
- Muscle and joint pain
- Headache, anxiety, depression, memory loss, and visual disturbances
- Immune system disturbances and fatigue
- GI problems
- Weight gain
- Morning stiffness
- Shortness of breath
Some mold you can see—in the windowsill or around the lining of your bathtub maybe. But a lot of it hides behind walls or in faucets or in out-of-the-way places. Sometimes people come to me having felt sick for YEARS. They’ve had every test known to man on their blood, urine, stool, whatever, and everything looks fine—until we test their HOME for mold. If you are worried about this, find a licensed remediator to mold test your home. It might totally change your life.
Inorganic toxins
But let’s get a fix the less-understood set of toxins: inorganic toxins. While medicine has spent most of its history trying to figure out how to beat organic toxins, they haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of how to deal with inorganic toxins.
Some examples:
First we have heavy metals. If you eat a lot of fish, you probably have a lot of mercury in your system. Lead passes from mother to child for seven generations, and not just three generations ago, we were making toys, water pipes and paint–all with lead. A lot of people deal with lead toxicity from their moms these days. Aluminum is in a lot of people from vaccines, deodorant and city water systems. There are several more, but these are the big ones. Heavy metals cause all sorts of cognitive problems, immune issues, heart disease and cancer, to name a few.
Pollution and corporate negligence can cause heavy metal toxicity as well. For example, Duke Energy’s years-long coal slurry leak into Lake Norman, which feeds the Charlotte drinking water supply.
That’s right, Duke Energy has decided that rather than fix leaks of toxic sludge into Lake Norman (and so many other places around North Carolina), they would prefer just to pay more than $1.6 billion in fines.
The latest scandal came when the EPA ordered them to drill into sites around their coal power plants to test the toxicity. They found a lot of toxicity, namely the heavy metals thallium and radium, and tried to bury the results in paperwork. It’s an ongoing investigation and battle to ensure North Carolinians have safe drinking water.
Still, moving on.
Another common toxin is PCBs, which stands for polychlorinated biphenyls. It’s generally used in coolant, that black copy/receipt paper and various other industrial processes that the average person doesn’t need to worry about, but the real problem is that once this stuff gets into the environment (the Great Lakes are full of it), it lasts for decades and you can pick it up. Fish pick it up and then we eat the fish and it gets into our system. It causes cancer, liver enlargement, menstrual and reproductive issues…
Perhaps the most pervasive source of toxicity are pesticides and herbicides. The most common and dangerous is glyphosate, also known as RoundUp. It’s all over our food. It’s seriously all over the food you eat, in restaurants, grocery stores, your pantry and fridge is probably full of glyphosate right now. It’s a carcinogen and causes mitochondrial damage.
BPA is another big one. It’s a part of plastic. When you drink from a plastic bottle, you get BPA. When you drink hot coffee through a plastic lid, you REALLY get BPA because the heat releases it. This stuff really screws up your hormones, disrupts thyroid function, leads to estrogen dominance in men and women, has been linked to testicular cancer, breast cancer and neuroblastoma.
Phthalates are very pervasive. They’re in makeup, perfume, hair spray, mousse, hair gel, deodorant, nail polish, lotion and skin cleanser. It’s in vinyl flooring and backpacks and lunch boxes. It’s also an endocrine disrupter, contributes to obesity, metabolic disorder and insulin resistance, which turns into diabetes.
Detoxification
Always the first step in detoxification is to get rid of the source. If you’re toxic load is heavy metals, stop eating large ocean fish, get rid of your fillings, change out the pipes in your home, etc. Start eating organic to avoid pesticides and herbicides. Eat grass fed beef to avoid hormones and antibiotic toxicity. Free range poultry and wild caught fish for the same reasons.
Beyond that, realize that most toxins are stored in fat tissue. Pesticides, BPA, PCBs, Pthalates, they all build up in fat. So honestly, one of the best ways to detox is to lose weight. The problem here, though, is that your brain is mostly composed of fat tissue, so it is at risk of accumulating toxins.
In many cases, determining what is causing the toxicity and removing it, along with losing weight, will bring your toxic load way down.
Heavy metals can be particularly problematic as they can accumulate in brain tissue and deep in your bones. We can take chelators like activated charcoal, which attracts heavy metals at a molecular level and binds with them. However, the problem remains that you then have charcoal bound to a heavy metal and it’s circulating through your system. That’s why you often need a binding agent that your body will quickly get rid of through urine or feces.
There are a couple of products designed to do this. BIND is one. Another is cytodetox (practitioner number is 60110). They are chelators that don’t hang around in your body. Rather they bind with heavy metals and other toxins, then exit relatively quickly with the toxins still attached.
Cilantro also binds with heavy metals and can help extract them from bone and brain tissue, as can a silicone crystalline formula called zeolites (which are contained in zeolites).
For PCBs, beyond weight loss, Vitamin B12 has been shown to help remove them.
If you are worried about pesticide toxicity, once you’re sure you aren’t consuming any more (by eating organic), things like cilantro, milk thistle and cruciferous vegetables are helpful in flushing these chemicals out.
But the best way to defend yourself against toxins is to be healthy overall. Your body knows how to flush toxins and has various systems in place to do just that.
If you get enough sleep, manage your stress, eat clean, get exercise, get into nature and just generally care about yourself and your well-being, you can generally keep your body in a state where toxins are manageable. Health is the side effect of healthy choices.
For a full toxicity workup and customized detox protocols, get in touch and we’ll talk about your options.
