Liver Detoxification

Mercury contamination is so severe in our waterways nowadays that many are thought to be contaminated forever. Sadly, most of the unwitting public will also be contaminated permanently. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every individual in this country probably has detectable levels of mercury in their system.

There are ways to check mercury levels in your body, but none are foolproof—and there’s a considerable amount of controversy over which methods work the best. The most well-known test for mercury toxicity is hair analysis.

Many doctors are of the opinion that hair analysis isn’t reliable, but that’s not the case. It can be a great tool if you know how to use it. Individuals who are mercury toxic will, in most cases, have normal readings for mercury not only in hair tests but also in blood and urine tests. To determine if mercury toxicity exists, one has to look for the biochemical aberrations that mercury causes—not just for the mercury itself.

This is far too complicated to explain here, but there’s one book all doctors should have in their offices that explains in detail how to interpret these tests. The best reference guide available is the book Hair Test Interpretation: Finding Hidden Toxicities by Andrew Cutler. Cutler also recommends specific lab tests like the “Hair Elements” test from Doctor’s Data in Chicago or Direct Lab Services.

For more information on how to detoxify the body, eliminating body toxins, or liver detoxification, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site.

When a fluorescent bulb breaks in your home, enough mercury vapor is released that the place should be considered a hazardous waste site to be decontaminated by experts. Obviously, that never happens. In fact, most people aren’t even aware that breathing the released vapors or coming into contact with the broken bulb are dangerous. The EPA is.

Not only did the EPA provide a special exemption to even sell mercury-containing fluorescent lamps to the public, they also have very specific guidelines for cleaning up a broken bulb. Until I researched the subject, I had no idea of just how dangerous a broken bulb could be. I doubt many people do.

According to the EPA, there are very specific guidelines you should follow to clean up a broken fluorescent light bulb:

• Open a window if there is one, and leave the room for at least 15 minutes (and restrict access to others).
• Remove all you can without using a vacuum:
  
  • Wearing disposable rubber gloves, scoop up everything you can, including the powder, using stiff paper or cardboard.
  • Use sticky tape such as duct tape to pick up the remaining small pieces and powder.
  • Wipe the area clean with a damp paper towel or disposable wet wipe.
  • Place all cleanup materials into a plastic bag and seal it. If your area allows it, dispose of the bag in an outdoor trash receptacle. (They don’t give any suggestions for final disposal if your local government doesn’t allow you to put CFLs in the trash.)
• Vacuum the area where the bulb was broken, then remove the collector bag or wipe out the canister. Put the debris in a plastic bag, seal it, then put it in a second bag. Dispose as above.

Given the EPA’s inconsistent track record, at this point it’s hard to tell whether they’re being alarmist or conservative. Regardless, a broken bulb is something you need to take seriously.

For more information on how to detoxify the body, eliminating body toxins, or liver detoxification, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site.

The state of California, as well as the country of Australia, are considering banning the use of incandescent lighting and encouraging people to start using fluorescent lighting. While this move, no doubt, would save an enormous amount of energy and could substantially reduce toxic emissions, there is one concern involving fluorescent lighting that seems to have been overlooked—the issue of mercury.

Fluorescent lights are filled with argon gas and mercury vapor. It’s the photons given off when the mercury vapor is energized that produces the light. The average fluorescent light contains 20 mg of mercury. (Some of the newer CFLs contain only about 4 mg of mercury, an amount that would just cover the tip of a ball-point pen.) This may not sound like much mercury, but consider the fact that it takes only a single gram to contaminate a 2-acre pond of water. Currently, about 800 million fluorescent lamps are being produced yearly to replace those that burn out. That’s enough mercury to contaminate nearly 20 million acres of water.

And mercury contamination isn’t something new; it’s just the awareness that’s recent. I can remember that, as a child, my brother and I played with the mercury (often referred to as “quicksilver”) from broken thermometers. Those old thermometers contained 500 mg of mercury! I have no idea where that mercury eventually ended up.

The dangers of mercury contamination are well-known and documented. Mercury is the second most toxic naturally occurring substance on earth. (Plutonium is said to be the most toxic.) Mercury is recognized as one of the most hazardous substances in our food and water, and has been linked to everything from mental impairment in our children to heart disease in adults, and is a possible contributor to the growing epidemic of Alzheimer’s. (Neuroreport 1;12(4):733–737)

While a few states (California, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, and Michigan) have passed laws making it illegal to throw fluorescent bulbs in the trash, I’m not convinced that it can be enforced. I doubt that most people in these states even know about the law.

There are also companies that specialize in recycling these bulbs, for a charge of anywhere from $2 to $4 per bulb. Through recycling, over 99 percent of the mercury can be reclaimed and kept out of the environment.

All of these recycling efforts are highly commendable, but I still think we’re going to see a very significant increase in mercury pollution for several years to come. And along with that we’re going to see increases in childhood mental deficiencies and cases of Alzheimer’s and other “unexplained” neurological diseases.

Don’t get me wrong—I think widespread use of fluorescent bulbs has a place in solving many of our current problems. Full-spectrum bulbs are a good choice, and even better are LED bulbs—which don’t contain toxic material, but haven’t become inexpensive enough yet for widespread use. I have no problem with the use of fluorescent bulbs. I do, however, have a problem with their potential for contamination.

For more information on how to detoxify the body, eliminating body toxins, or liver detoxification, visit Dr. Williams’ Web site.

If you are overrun with body toxins, one of the first places it will show up in your skin. In addition to following my previous recommendations, you can support the liver nutritionally by taking supplements that help your body detoxify waste material.

To help your liver and body detoxify, I generally recommend using milk thistle, which both protects and helps increase liver function. The active ingredient in milk thistle is a bioflavonoid complex called silymarin. Studies have shown that silymarin can prevent damage to liver cells. It also has the unique ability to stimulate regeneration of damaged liver cells.

The best products for this purpose are concentrated extracts standardized to 70 to 80 percent silymarin content. I recommend that you take 500 mg 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.

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.