Outfoxin’ those toxins

Still feeling sluggish and a bit bloated after all those holiday indulgences? Are you lacking energy and having trouble getting back to your regular routine? Perhaps the biggest New Year’s resolution cliché is going on a diet. Almost as big a cliché is that most folks “fall off the wagon” in very short order.

This year, why not try something different? A “diet” that’s not specifically to lose weight (although that may be a welcome side effect), but that’s to help your body achieve optimum health and function. I’m talking about a detox program.

For many the word “detox” implies drug and/or alcohol rehabilitation, but the term is also used by natural health practitioners to describe regimes, diets and supplements that can help your body detoxify (a.k.a. cleanse) itself of things that assault our bodies — both things we ingest and substances in the environment, such as pollutants in the air and chemicals used in building materials.

Cleansing regimens aren’t new. From ancient Romans to wealthy Victorians, people took “cures” at spas, respites from their overly rich, overly abundant diets to eat lighter foods and drink quantities of mineral waters. Back in the ’60s, my health food pioneer family occasionally went on a weeklong cleansing diet that was as simple as it was effective. Breakfast was half a grapefruit, and a single cup of coffee (with cream!) was permissible. Lunch was a salad with olive oil and lemon and dinner was cooked vegetables that could be dressed with butter if desired.

There were a few proscribed vegetables, such as potatoes and corn, but most other nonstarchy veggies were fine. During and between meals we drank vast quantities of a broth made from carrots, celery and parsley, and ate as many raw vegetables from the accepted list as possible.

The first couple days weren’t very pleasant: our stomachs rumbled ominously and the bathroom replaced the kitchen as the center of the house. But towards the end of the week, we felt fantastic and chock-full of energy. My folks usually did it in the summer when the delicious produce we’d grown was fresh and abundant. I actually remember doing a cleansing diet as being kind of fun (except for those first couple of days) although, of course, I would have died before letting my “normal” friends know what my weirdo family was up to. Springfield naprapathic doctor and nutritionist Paul Mach says that our bodies are actually detoxing all the time through the “detox organs,” the kidney and liver. It’s only when those organs become overloaded that things begin to go haywire.

“It’s only” is actually a bit misleading. The problem today is that, according to Mach, “we’ve gotten to the point where we almost can’t eat healthy.” In an ideal world, says Mach, a special detox program wouldn’t be necessary. In the past someone would have had to try really hard to eat harmful foods that would overload the system, but today it’s just the opposite: it takes effort to eat optimally: unadulterated foods grown in or raised on healthy soil and pastures. And avoiding the external toxins and pollutants in our daily environment is even more difficult.

Those spa cures and regimens such as the one my family followed had varying degrees of efficacy, but most were at best guesswork based on limited knowledge. Some — such as extended water fasts — could even be