Cleansing the Liver

While much well-deserved attention is paid to soluble fiber foods, it is insoluble fiber that provides roughage and improves bowel regularity. This natural bulk also gives feelings of fullness and satisfaction, resulting in less food intake.

In the 1980s, there was a huge push promoting the benefits of fiber in the diet, particularly its ability to prevent colon cancer. Since that time, there have been conflicting studies, and, for some reason, fiber has fallen out of favor. I predict (something I do very rarely) that you will soon begin to see a dramatic increase in the ill effects of decreasing the amount of fiber in our diets. We’re already seeing an increase in many of these problems, such as widespread obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and numerous bowel problems.

Fiber has decreased dramatically as our food supply has become more and more processed. To make matters worse, low-carb diets like Atkins and South Beach often shun the complex carbohydrates that contain insoluble fiber or roughage. The most commonly consumed “vegetable” in this country is now French fries. Food manufacturers have increasingly removed insoluble fiber from processed foods, to both lessen the gritty texture and make ingredients easier to combine.

Insoluble fiber, the portion of the plant that can’t be broken down by your digestive system, provides a valuable service. The fiber absorbs water and swells, making the stool bulky, soft, and easy to pass. (This is why you always need to increase your water intake when you increase the fiber in your diet.) Without adequate fiber, bowel movements slow and toxic material remains in contact with the intestinal walls longer. The foreign material causes inflammation, and additional toxins are reabsorbed into your bloodstream. These additional toxins increase the workload of both your liver and kidneys. The slow-moving stools also lead to a condition called diverticulitis.

Diverticulum: Latin for “You Don’t Want to Know”

In the early stages of the disease, as your intestines struggle to remove toxins and waste material, small, pea-sized, irreversible pockets called diverticula develop. Waste material becomes trapped in these pockets, which often expand and become inflamed, resulting in diverticulitis. If the pockets rupture, the resulting infection and inflammation in the abdominal cavity can prove fatal.

Not surprisingly, the treatment for diverticulosis (the condition before inflammation sets in) is to increase fiber and promote bowel regularity. At the same time, I would also highly recommend the use of probiotics and fermented foods like sauerkraut and others to help re-establish good bacterial flora in the lower bowel at the same time. I don’t recommend the long-term use of over-the-counter fiber products like those mentioned earlier. It is my experience that long-term use of these products seems to deplete various minerals, which can lead to all kinds of seemingly unrelated problems. This just doesn’t happen when the fiber comes from a wide variety of foods such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, seeds, dried beans, popcorn, brown rice, and bran.

For more information on common digestive problems, bowel irregularity, or a list of the highest fiber foods, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site.

When it comes to skin problems, most people don’t think of detoxification, but they should. In fact, one of the best ways to clear up a variety of skin conditions involves easing the load on your liver in every way possible.

To help you do a liver cleanse naturally, follow these three easy steps.

Liver Detoxification: Step 1
You must make sure your bowels are moving regularly, at least once daily. Food wastes that remain in the body over 24 hours become toxic. Your intestines continue to absorb this waste and it places an enormous burden on the liver to detoxify it.

Liver Detoxification: Step 2
You must drink at least eight, 8-ounce glasses of water per day. This helps both the bowels and the kidneys and lightens the load on the liver. If you drink other liquids, make sure they are sugar-free, but don’t count them as part of the eight glasses of water.

Liver Detoxification: Step 3
Foods high in sugar (natural or otherwise) and high starch foods must be eliminated initially. Some products where sugar has been added are obvious, like soft drinks, candy, ice cream, cakes, pies, etc. The list below contains foods which have a high natural sugar content or an abundance of starch that can be quickly converted to sugars by the body. Eliminate or at least reduce these foods until the psoriasis patches have disappeared.

• Potatoes
• Rice
• Grapes
• Raisins
• Plums
• Figs
• Dates
• Bananas
• Spaghetti
• Macaroni
• Noodles
• Pizza
• Jams
• Jellies
• Corn
• Beans
• Rice
• Peas
• Artichokes
• Breakfast cereal

After reading this list, you may be wondering just what you can eat. Remember, the foods may later be reintroduced into the diet, but in the beginning you will get faster and better results if you stick rigidly to the program. You can eat any vegetable not listed above. You can have any meat except pork. Eggs and dairy products are allowed. But only a few kinds of fruit are allowed such as: strawberries, cantaloupe, watermelon, honeydew melon, peaches and all citrus fruit, which may be eaten if fresh or packed in water. Coffee and tea should be limited to a couple of times a day.

For more information on how to detoxify the body, eliminating body toxins, or liver detoxification, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site. While there, you can also sign up for Dr. Williams’ FREE eLetter or monthly newsletter.

The skin is the largest organ of your body. For the average adult, the surface area is about 3,000 sq. inches (or over 20 sq. ft.). It ranges from one-tenth to one-one hundredth of an inch in thickness. And, one square centimeter, you have an average of 1,000 oil glands (called sebaceous glands) and hundreds of sweat glands.

Your skin is an extremely complex organ. Besides protecting the underlying tissues from dehydration and bacteria invasion, it performs many other vital functions. It also helps control body temperature, store chemicals, synthesize several compounds such as vitamin D, receive environmental messages, and act as an elimination organ. This last function is of particular importance in dealing with skin diseases.

Waste products and body toxins that are filtered and broken down by your liver and kidneys are removed from the body by several organs. These include the bowels, the urinary tract organs, the lungs, and the skin. You use water to carry these waste products away and detoxify the body. By tracing this water loss, you can tell just how important the skin is in this cleansing process. The average water intake is about 10½ glasses a day. This includes the eight glasses of water you should be drinking and about 2½ glasses from food.

Although the skin’s primary purpose is generally said to be that of temperature regulation, the sweat it uses to cool the body is made up largely of waste material. In fact, the chemical composition of sweat is remarkably similar to urine. Sweat is a mixture of water, various salts, urea, uric acid, amino acids, ammonia, sugar, lactic acid and ascorbic acid.

As you can see, the skin is not just something to cover your organs. It is a complex organ itself, and its overall health depends on how well your body detoxifies and eliminates waste.

For more information on how to detoxify the body, eliminating body toxins, or liver detoxification, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site. While there, you can also sign up for Dr. Williams’ FREE eLetter or monthly newsletter.

To realize the full benefits of a liver detoxification routine, you need to begin with the gallbladder, which is often overlooked.

Your gallbladder can become clogged with small stones or thick gelatinous bile. This bile contains body toxins that have come out of the liver, and a flush is an important tool for helping restore normal gallbladder function so the toxins can keep flowing out properly. While the flush is easy to do, I would never recommend doing so without the approval and guidance of your doctor. I have supervised hundreds of flushes and never had any problems, but each patient should be screened to rule out the possibility of large gallstones that might not be able to pass through the bile duct during the flush.

To flush the gallbladder, follow these directions precisely:

1. Monday through Saturday noon, in addition to your normal diet and supplement regimen, drink as much apple juice or cider as you can. The apple juice or cider should not be from concentrate or contain sugar or additives.
2. At noon on Saturday, eat a normal lunch.
3. Three hours later, take 2 teaspoons of disodium phosphate, dissolved in about one ounce of hot water. (Disodium phosphate is available from The Vitamin Shoppe at 800-223-1216, or from Mountain Home Nutritionals at 800-888-1415.) The taste may be objectionable—it’s okay to follow it with a little fresh-squeezed lemon or grapefruit juice.
4. Two hours later, repeat step 3.
5. For the evening meal, you may have grapefruit or other citrus fruits or juices.
6. At bedtime, drink a half cup of unrefined virgin olive oil either followed by a small glass of grapefruit juice or blended with a half cup of lemon juice.
7. Go to bed immediately and lie on your right side with your right knee pulled up close to your chest for 30 minutes.
8. The next morning, one hour before breakfast, take two teaspoons of disodium phosphate dissolved in two ounces of hot water.
9. Continue your normal diet and any nutritional program that may have been prescribed.

The olive oil/citrus juice may cause slight to moderate nausea, which will slowly disappear by the time you go to sleep. In the rare instance where the olive oil causes vomiting, the procedure should not be repeated at this time.

Once you have finished this process you'll be ready to start on your liver cleanse & detox program. All the environmental toxins that are moving out of your liver will now have an escape route. You won’t notice the toxins as they’re being flushed out, but be assured they are leaving.

As a bonus, you should see an improvement in bowel regularity, because the gallbladder will become more efficient at releasing bile into your small intestine.
 

The benefits of a good cleansing and detoxification regimen just keep coming. One you might not suspect is that getting rid of body toxins can improve your bone health.

Your bones are a storehouse for minerals, which your body uses to keep pH within a very narrow range (for most people 7.35 to 7.45, which is slightly alkaline). As I've written in my Alternatives newsletter, eating a diet high in acid-forming foods can pull minerals out of your bones. I recommend cutting out foods such as sodas and "white" foods--white flour, white rice, and white sugar--partially because they increase your body's acid levels.

But food isn't the only source of body acidity. Many metabolic wastes are acidic, as well. The most common example is carbon dioxide; the simple act of breathing helps regulate your blood pH by getting rid of acidic CO2. Sweat is acidic as well, as low-pH body toxins leave through your skin.

Many promoters of body detox regimens tout the value of removing environmental toxins. Certainly this is beneficial, but you need to keep all your body systems in top condition so they can efficiently remove metabolic waste as well. Begin with a thorough liver detoxification program, follow it with a colon detox and cleansing, and you're on your way to stronger bones.

Not all that long ago, "detoxification" was something that only alcoholics and drug addicts went through. While most of us don't need to remove toxins the way those folks do, it's still important to perform a regular cleansing & detoxification regimen regularly, at least once a year.

Even for those individuals living the "green" life, environmental toxins accumulate with every breath. We can't completely escape everything that surrounds us:

• pesticides and herbicides
• PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls)
• VOCs (volatile organic chemicals)
• heavy metals (lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and others)

Many of those toxins end up in the liver. Continued accumulation can eventually impair function of that organ, which is why liver detoxification is so important for continued health. Even for those folks who aren't intentionally putting toxins into their bodies, it's essential to detoxify the body.

Many natural detox programs you see out there address liver detoxification. In this post I'll let you know why a natural liver cleanse is so important.

Your liver uses two process to detoxify and remove toxins from the body. In Phase 1, biological and environmental toxins are broken down into molecular fragments, a process called glucuronidation. This is where a group of enzymes known as P450 do their work, and the stage at which many drug interactions occur.

In Phase 2, the toxins are bound to other molecules, a process called conjugation. The toxins are then dumped out through the bile into the bowel for elimination. This is why cleansing the liver isn't enough on its own. The longer material sits in your gut, the more opportunity bacteria and enzymes in your gut have to break the bonds, known as deconjugation. This allows those toxins to be reabsorbed into your body, doubling (or more) the workload on your poor liver.

A thorough liver cleaning helps repair any damaged areas in your liver, as well as clearing out the toxins that have built up over time.

Considering the world we live in, it's almost a given that you need to perform some kind of a body cleansing & detoxification regimen once a year or more. Readers have asked me how to know when it's time to begin. The answer almost certainly is, "Now." Environmental toxins accumulate daily, and every elimination route is constantly under pressure. Here are some of the signs that it's time to remove toxins from your body:

• Sluggish thinking, and/or depression
• Dull hair and skin
• Feelings of fatigue
• Joint aches and pains
• Constant bad breath
• Chronic indigestion

All these symptoms relate to either the routes your body uses to remove toxins, or the places that toxins tend to accumulate.

It's possible to detoxify the body naturally, to get rid of some or all of these symptoms. A thorough liver cleaning is a good early step in body cleansing. Detoxification involves more than that, certainly, but it is a necessary component. A liver cleanse is another necessary component of any detox program. I've provided full guidance and resources for a natural detox program on my Web site, detox.drdavidwilliams.com.

One of the most basic steps you can take in a full body cleansing and detoxification program is a colon cleansing. You'll notice that nearly every natural detox program focuses on bowel regularity. There's a reason for this: Your gut receives all manner of body toxins as they're cleaned from the blood in the liver, then dumped into the gut through the bile. Any measures you can take to help remove toxins from your intestines lessens the risk that they'll be reabsorbed before they've had a chance to be eliminated.

A thorough digestive cleansing also requires a little maintenance afterward so you can keep up the benefits. Even so, an effective program is remarkably simple.

• Add more fiber (of course). No matter how healthy your gut is, if it doesn't have something to push against, you're headed for bowel irregularity. Don't bother counting fiber grams; just add more fruits and vegetables to your diet, and replace any "white" foods (bread, pasta, etc.) with whole-grain versions.
• Try a natural laxative. If you find that adding fiber isn't enough to produce the bowel changes you want, then add a laxative to your regimen for up to two weeks. Avoid the chemical-based products (which tend to be hard on your digestive tract) and look for ones that contain herbs such as senna or cascara sagrada.
• Heal your gut with glutamine. The amino acid glutamine is a basic food for the cells that line your gut wall. Glutamine is found in most high-protein foods such as meat and beans, but for focused gut healing take an additional 5 grams a day.
• Take a daily probiotic. Benefits of probiotic supplementation come from normalizing the bacterial balance in your gut. Healthy gut flora promote a healthy gut wall, which means that you're not reabsorbing all the environmental toxins that have just been cleaned by the liver.

That's the basics. You should begin to see the benefits of a colon cleanse almost immediately, as you just feel lighter and more refreshed. The benefits will continue long after, as other organs have their loads lightened (because they're not trying to get rid of everything that wasn't leaving through your colon.)

• Your skin will be clearer.
• You'll breathe more easily.
• You'll think more clearly.

All in all, a regular colon cleansing is well worth the effort.

An FDA panel has just recommended limiting the dosage of over-the-counter acetaminophen (Tylenol and other brands). The panel also considered limiting other medications containing acetaminophen such as prescription pain relievers (Tylenol with codeine, Percocet, etc.) and over-the-counter cold medicines (Tylenol Cough and Cold, Nyquil Multi-Symptom, and many others).

Finally, the FDA is doing something about a high-profile toxin. Acetaminophen overdose is one of the most common poisonings in this country. (It's also high on the list of suicide methods.)

The problem with acetaminophen is that it's hard on your liver, limiting that organ's ability to clear the body of all the environmental toxins it has to deal with. Essentially, it overwhelms liver detoxification mechanisms, leading to a near-complete organ shutdown and accumulation of body toxins.

I have two suggestions. First, instead of acetaminophen, try the digestive enzyme bromelain for pain relief. Taken on an empty stomach, it's highly effective at reducing the inflammation that's behind most pain. Bromelain is available at any health food store.

Second, support healthy liver detoxification with the supplement called NAC (N-acetylcysteine). Your liver relies on the amino acid glutathione to directly break down all manner of environmental toxins, including hormones, pesticides, and the compounds known as VOCs (volatile organic chemicals, found in everything from new carpets to the plastic wrap on a deli sandwich). Glutathione supplementation would be a useful support for liver detoxification; unfortunately, it's very unstable in supplement form. NAC is used as a raw material for producing glutathione in your liver, so it makes a suitable substitute. Take 600 mg daily to support your cleansing and detoxification efforts.

A reader recently asked me about her psoriasis. She was surprised to hear that her digestive health could be a source of her skin problems.

Her problem likely began with all the environmental toxins she’s taken in over the years. As they’ve built up in her system, her liver detoxification system has been overwhelmed, and her body has tried to remove toxins through her skin. Her liver has become overburdened because the most effective body detox system, the digestive system, isn't working at peak efficiency.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, I would suggest trying a good digestive enzyme supplement with each meal. Make sure it contains betaine hydrochloride, protease, and ox bile or bile salts, all of which are necessary for the proper breakdown of protein and fats. A shortage of these digestive compounds is frequently a problem in cases of psoriasis. The condition can also worsen when taking certain drugs like beta-blockers, steroids, and the anti-inflammatory indomethacin.

I would also suggest taking a good bacterial digestive supplement. Probiotic benefits include a strengthening of the mucosal barriers in the large intestine, which can be a point of entry for undigested protein fragments. These fragments can cause inflammation and make it easier for toxins to enter the bloodstream and be excreted later by the skin, causing even more problems.