The Ultimate Detoxification Guide: How To Use Supplements, Saunas, Skin Brushing & More To Quickly & Safely Clean Up Your Body: An Official "Runga" Q&A
29 Jan 2026 · 45 min
Ben Greenfield, Dr. Leland Stillman, Dr. Chris Shade, and Jason Sonners discuss detox strategies from saunas and breathwork to binders and liver support. They cover testing for toxin load, why aggressive mobilization can backfire in pregnancy and breastfeeding, and how to safely use haritaki and milk thistle.
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My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life Podcast. And so that means like 57 times a year, I'm getting, you know, pretty good cleanup. And I've been doing that for about three years. And I just, I feel really good.
And some of them are interpersonal, and some of them are chemical, and some of them are immunological. And then there's the maximize as much as you can when it is fight or flight. Then you have the toxic reactions. You look at somebody and you're like, you're my source of toxicity. You're my source of pain.
Faith, family, fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. Hello. Ben Greenfield here. The episode you're about to hear was recorded live at a fantastic event called Runga R U N G A. It's a very intimate, comprehensive wellness event consisting of waking up in the morning and doing kundalini yoga and meditation, ice baths to fantastic organic breakfasts and kettlebell workouts, meditations, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, IVs, injections, electrical treatments, biohacks, you name it, it's all there. You just basically spend three days optimizing your body. And in the evening, there's like panels and special dinners. And what you're about to hear is a panel that was recorded at that event, a panel on detoxification that I was on along with Dr. Leland Stillman and Dr. Chris Shade to previous podcast guests, and Jason Sonners, also a previous podcast guest, and guy who runs a hyperbaric oxygen chamber company, HBOT usa. And we just had a fantastic chat, so stay tuned for that. And if you want to check out the Runga event, you can go to BenGreenfieldLife.com Runga and take a look at it, surf around, apply for this next Runga event, which is going to occur in October in Austin, Texas, if you want to be a part of it. But even if you don't, you're going to get a lot out of today's show, so enjoy. Oh, and one last thing. The the show notes for everything you're about to hear, you can find@BenGreenfieldLife.com Rungaqa that's BenGreenfieldLife.com R U N G A Q A.
I just wanted to say before we kick off because this is the last night I wanted to say thank you so much to all of you because this has been so beautiful and such an amazing time. I'm so grateful for every single one of you and every single one of you and just the exchanges that have been happening and the beautiful moments of connection that I've experienced and that I've witnessed and that I know is happening every single second that we've all been here together. So thank you all so much. I will start the panel by perhaps taking. Well, actually, you guys. Tell me, would you like to start with a question from the audience or would you like to start with like, maybe like a brief introduction to, like, how you view detoxification? Because I know Dr. Silliman, I would like him to go first.
So I'm going to make. My spiel is very, very simple and brief. Not that I couldn't talk about this for a really long time, but it just amazes me how I think people get very caught in the weeds with detox. You know, I get hundreds of panels back on patients every year that test a broad swath of detoxification markers. Not only toxins themselves, but then your ability to metabolize and excrete them. And that allows me then, in consultation with the patient, to also evaluate, you know, what symptoms they actually have from that. So I've been very amused when somebody comes in and they have, you know, tinnitus and a metallic taste in their mouth and, you know, vertigo and they're depressed and they feel confused, sometimes, have brain fog and insomnia. And I'm like, well, this probably has something to do with your mercury level of 13 and, you know, the fact that you live in Seattle, Washington, and you think seafood's good for you, which is true. But eating the high mercury fish is, for you right now, something you got to put a pause on. And it's funny because in my practice with one of my colleagues, it became kind of a running joke how if you had a 30 to 50 year old woman coming in with some swath of symptoms who likes to wear like a lot like yoga pants more than three days a week, there's a solid chance she's gonna have a high mercury level because she loves the spicy tuna roll with her girlfriends at least once a week. Yeah, so what I focus on first with people that has the most profound impact. And sometimes I don't have to get much deeper than this because I have so much to do with people, with how much I look at in their life and diet and so on and so forth is the simple stuff. Lots of people who are coming to me with abnormal tox panels have an exposure. I've had guys come through who were metallurgists and they had high zinc levels because they were working in galvanization, and they'd been really exposed to zinc. Then they get the advice they need to take zinc in order to stop their Covid. And they wind up with a level that's like 250, but you really only need 125. And then I'm like, well, do you have nausea and vomiting and diarrhea or headaches or any of the other malaise of zinc toxicity? And they're like, as a matter of fact, I do. And I'm like, okay, well, we can stop the supplement now. You've definitely got enough on board. And then simple things like, are you pooping every day? Maybe you need to be pooping more than once a day. You can get into the binders and stuff like that. And I'll let Dr. Shade opine on that because he'll geek out over the pharmacokinetics and dynamics, right? And then sauna and things like that. But one of the other things that's come through to me in my practice is, like, I'll have patients who are worried about being toxed, and they'll do a lot of sauna without understanding where their mineral balance is. And then they'll wind up with low mineral levels that are creating other symptoms that aren't fixed by sauna or they're temporarily fixed by sauna. So I really like to dial everything in as far as how much they're doing of different therapeutic modalities, detox, et cetera, et cetera. And then always the trend, overwhelmingly, is that if someone's got a real problem with toxins in their body, they've got issues with some combination of micronutrients, methylation, cofactors like B vitamins, certain amino acids. And then the minerals are where they're my favorite. I can't get over how cool minerals are and how powerful they can be therapeutically. So those are my thoughts on detox in five minutes or less.
Cool. I don't know very much about detoxification, honestly, I can tell you that. I think that, like Leland alluded to, sometimes it can be, in many cases, a little bit of a matter of simple lifestyle practices. And I like that approach because it seems like there's kind of this tendency to. In the same way that people go on their New Year's resolution to lose a bunch of weight after they've gained some fat all year long, they. They will, you know, build up toxins and build up toxins, build up toxins. And then some practitioner or some test or, you know, their own intuition will Tell them I ought to go do a detoxification protocol now. And they'll do some intense, you know, three, four, five week, three month, you know, type of, you know, spendy supplementation protocol. And those are, those have their time and their place, you know, if you're really overloaded and if you've dug yourself into a hole. But I think that just kind of like looking at your day to day habits, you know, how you live your day is how you live your, your life and engaging in simple detoxification strategies each day. And you know, I don't profess to have any clinical research behind this approach, but like, for me, every single morning I jump up and down on a trampoline. Four to five times a week I do a deep sweat in the infrared sauna. Once a week I'll have what I literally call like a detox morning where I'll take a binder and I'll do a coffee enema and then go into the sauna and get a little bit of a deeper sweat in the sauna. And, and so that means like 57 times a year I'm getting pretty good cleanup. And I've been doing that for about three years. And I just, I feel really good on that and that, you know, I have a lot of my clients do a kind of similar practice where you just have, you know, once a week you do a little bit of extra tlc. And every day, or at least most days of the week, you know, you try to do some rebounding or at least some tai chi shaking or something like that, you try to get a deep sweat in, you keep moving. And even something as simple as going on a walk and swinging your arms, pumps limp. So, you know, and I don't think I need to tell anybody in here to not live a sedentary lifestyle. And you're all very active and so you have that figured out. But those are a few little things that I do that seem to keep things in working order.
Yes, and yes. And to add to that, I'd say, you know, we look at it a few different ways. There are the toxin loads that we all have in our life. And so we talk about toxicity and sufficiency. Do you have too much of the things that are in your body that are hurting you and do you have enough of the things in your body that your body needs to actually heal and recover and regenerate? So we always want to look at both sides of that equation. And I think that the toxins that affect you are the same toxins that affect us and they're all in our environment. And so sometimes we want to look at that and say, why are two people, let's say you have a family of five and they're in a moldy house, but only two of them are expressing, you know, terrible symptoms and the other three are seem like they're doing okay. And you know, the reality to some of that is just, you know, how resilient are you, you know, as compared to somebody else? Or how well do you handle certain toxins versus somebody else? And so, you know, while we definitely focus on detox and detox pathways, we do, you know, ongoing detoxification strategies like what Ben was saying. We do more advanced detoxification strategies like what Leland was mentioning. And at the same time we should always be looking at what are the things we could be doing to make ourselves more resilient, period, so that we can actually tolerate, you know, it's unlikely that we're going to be able to eliminate all the toxins in our environment. So if we can't eliminate all the toxins in our environment, yes, we should have strategies for dealing with that. And what else can we do to become the strongest, healthiest, most resilient versions of ourselves so that we could become more tolerant of our environment and thereby hopefully have less issues as a result?
You see when we talk first guy, he's got all these people coming to him and a lot of people got all kinds of low hanging fruit like I'm deficient on this, I'm deficient on that, I'm deficient on that. And so you run a broad panel on them, see they're missing this, that and the other thing because they do all these crazy things or they're like hyper supplemented on on this and they're under supplemented on that. And so that's the sort of get the game back rolling and take the obvious things out of the way. Ben's then talking about the lifestyle stuff, the day to day to day to day that keeps you clean and you know, that's all that Ben's going to need. But in the beginning Ben did certain interventional protocols and then we get to talking about resilience. And resilience is part of the day to day determination, they think. So when we talk about detoxification, like you said, you know, in one house, two are bad, two are fine. Like why is that? And so we tend to cast that too much into this fixed game of like, well, that's my genetic predisposition to be able to detoxify or not but our ability to detoxify, and what everybody's suggesting is that you're not going to get rid of all the toxins from your life. They're going to come in, you're going to have to be able to deal with them. And so you've got this cellular machinery that's going to push away, it's going to kick the toxin out and out and out out of the cell. And when that cellular machinery is tired because of things it's not getting, I mean, it's maybe severely deficient in something, or there may be inflammation, because inflammation and detoxification are fundamental opposites. Detoxification relies on this internal antioxidant system. But when inflammation is happening, you actually turn down your internal antioxidant system because you want to keep this pro oxidant thing going. So you've got these things that are lowering you or elevating you. When you've got a strong inflammation, you're bringing down detoxification regardless of your genes. And then if you have genes that are working against you, then you've got a double negative and you can raise all of that. You can work against these things. And sometimes in the beginning, like Ben said, you get into a hole, you need a formal system. And we have to touch all these things, we have to bring down the inflammation, and then we've got to upregulate a cellular level, we've got to up regulate a liver level. And this is one of the simplest things that we miss all the time is that toxin transport out of the liver is coordinated and coupled to biotransport. The transporters that put bile into the bile tract to go down your gallbladder, go into your small intestine to help you digest are the same things that are moving toxins out of the system. So just upregulating that bile flow and getting that out at liver level is a really big thing. And sometimes people have just gone too far and you need to do a formal detoxification for a couple of weeks or months. And then you have to incorporate long range. You know, what are you going to do after that? And there's a number of things from the bile flow to, you know, he got out quite a bit, the whole ability to move lymph. And Ben actually came over and he had a. Today you had a lymph, lymphatic movement thing. And he came over, he said, I gotta get some binder. Right? Every time you have a massage, you're moving things into circulation. And then the fog you feel afterward you need to bind or you need to pee, you know, but you poop pee and bile and everything starts, starts moving out. So sometimes there's formal, there's ongoing and it's lifestyle and, and it's these things like poopy shit, sweat. All right, we're on to questions. Evan number one.
So the first question is what are some of the subtle symptoms of an over toxified person? Like not like, you know, you're in.
Dire need, whatever, and maybe give us.
The spectrum of what are the symptoms of over toxicity. I'll start move it down the line. But from a couple of systems. The toxicity mostly on a neurological level, switches you into glutamate excess and sympathetic overdrive despite being foggy because of the inflammation that's up there. So this sort of come down in lack of clarity. The fog is over, but you're hyper stimulated and you're not sure why. It's always like that and you're anxious. And then at a cellular level it's the energy generation machine generally, and that's mitochondria at a cellular level, it's thyroid and adrenal at a glandular level. And so it's turning down and it's a little foggy. When it goes from there worse, it gets a little bit more dysregulated.
What Chris is trying to say is brain fog, fatigue, trouble sleeping.
Electro hypersensitivity is another one that seems to pop up, was really interesting. A lot of times with metal toxicity, it's almost as though your body turns into a giant antenna and you get kind of, kind of sympathetically driven around WI fi routers and the like. So that's, that's, that's kind of a hidden symptom.
A lot of that is happening. You know, they're always trying to figure out like where that's happening, is it demyelination? And they never see that. But at an autonomic level, all that stuff's pushing through the extracellular matrix and that's all set up into this, this perfect gel structure, like a crystal gel. And then the toxins get in there and deregulate that. That's where I think the gel, when it's correctly formed, is the insulation on the autonomic nerves that are the wire. And when the toxins get in and damage the extracellular matrix, that's the insulation you lose. And that's where that autonomic antenna starts vibrating. You know, places where there's a lot of WI fi. You go into hotels if you really want to test yourself. Out. Just go down to Vegas. And not for all the other reasons that Vegas stresses you, but you go into the, into the casinos and they have a cell phone on every one of the slot machines and they all communicate that way. They figured out that was the best way to go. So you got super high levels there. And so that'll blow you out and stuff. Not that that's ever really good for you, but you'll be crumbled.
Fundamental detoxifying 201 game. Oh my gosh. That's easy for me, the sauna for sure. The infrared sauna too. Just because you get a little bit of a deeper sweat and you can hear, it's kind of funny, you might be able to hear the vibration platform going there in the background in the garage. And that or the trampoline would be a close second. I mean, I have a mini trampoline in the room right next to my office and I go in there kind of like pomodoro breaks and jump up and down. And then in the gym I got one of those vibration platforms and I stand on that thing almost every day. You know, when I walk by the gym, I'll just duck in there and stand on for a couple minutes. And so I would say vibrating in the heat.
Breath work.
Yeah.
If I was going to do physical versions, I'd say vibration, like lymphatic flow. Any movement is just pumping that lymphatic system. If I was going to say chemically, something benign. Because what happens is people jump into different binders and different things. Whatever they're trying to detoxify, they don't realize that sometimes they're bringing things up to the surface too, and they get lit up just as much as, you know, from the actual chemicals that they're trying to get out of their body. But I think, for me, I think charcoal is one of those things that in small amounts on a regular basis can be pretty gentle, can get some of the low hanging fruit and kind of move things through the system without, you know, setting somebody off with regards.
To the sauna work and, you know.
The depletion of minerals.
What's the easiest way to remineralize your body.
Quinton?
Yeah, you know, we use the ocean minerals. We really like those a lot. You know, there's. But they're, you know, you're gonna need a little bit more potassium. So you got all these different electrolyte ways. You know, all of us are Quinton junkies, you know, and I almost, I always have those guys in Spain ready to give Me vats of this shit. So I could just dose in a little bit more potassium. I'll get that done next year. But I mean, they're the best one hit wonder. But what do you do, Ben?
Quinton? I'd throw in some protect or some element here and there. Just if I want a little bit of flavor. Quinton doesn't taste that great and I don't know, I got a sweet tooth or something, but I kind of like some of the flavor.
And you get a little more potassium.
Yeah. And I sprinkle salt on. I mean, you guys probably see me on wheels here. I'm the guy with the giant box of salt. Literally, just like, you know, I have, I have a little bit of food with my salt, so I, you know. But I did a sweat sodium analysis, which is interest. You can get a sweat sodium analysis done in any exercise phys lab and you can actually find out the grams of sweat or the grams of sodium that you lose per hour during exercise. And I had that test done and I'm like four times higher than average for the amount of grams of sodium that I lose.
So you're a salty source.
I'm a very, very salty guy. Off the chart, salty sweater. Because I used to go to bed after, after a long day of training. You know, when I used to race Ironman, I could hear my blood pounding in my ears and, and it'd keep me awake at night and I just always thought I was training too much and I was sympathetically driven and just had to quiet my mind to get to sleep. And then I did that sweat sodium analysis. I saw how much sodium I was losing and I started to just use copious amounts of salt again, like I'm doing here. Just salt on everything and the electrolytes and almost every glass of water and a giant thing of the adrenal cocktail from Jigsaw Health. In the morning I do a couple scoops of that and some Quinton and so I'm salted up. My blood pressure's fantastic, so that's not a worry. But once I started doing that, all that pounding and everything kind of went away. You know, the orthostatic hypotension, the vasovagal reflex, and all the, like, the dizziness sitting down, standing up, all that just went away. Sleep, guys. Best recommendations for quality sleep and recovery during your sleep.
You know, my whole goal was how do I get the least amount of hours but get the highest percentages of, you know, REM and deep sleep with, you know, just enough light Sleep to just make it through the next day, but to have like a really good quality sleep again. The minerals play a huge role for me. So I do, you know, like the isotonic minerals at night. That has helped me tremendously. What else the. For me again, liver related. So like doing some deep like liver like a milk thistle or. I don't want this to be like a freaking quicksilver commercial. But you know, I use Liverpool, I use liver sauce at night with the binders and then I do some, you know, some of the minerals that really brings my. For me, if I'm not sleeping well, it's a sympathetic parasympathetic imbalance every time pretty much. So anything I can do to get better balance in my nervous system before I go to bed, you know, healthy sleep habits obviously, like you know, shutting screens and doing all the things you're supposed to do to wind down in the evening. But for me it's always autonomic nervous system balance going in.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, look, sleep hygiene is not difficult to decode. I mean you hear it all the time, right? Dark room, quiet room, don't do business and stressful activities in bed. And some kind of silence or some type of ambient noise that assists with sleep. Like those are kind of like the four biggies. And people hear that and you know, they turn off the lights before they go to bed and try to look at their phone, you know, for an hour before bed. But you can really get into the weeds and get super specific with stuff. Like for the light, you get blasted with light in the first hour upon waking. That's when your sleep cycle starts. And so that either means using the blue light boxes that they sell for seasonal affective disorder like the retimer glasses or the. In your human charge, you blast yourself with light. Make sure.
Oh, we don't just block blue light forever.
No, no, blue light's good for it. You want a bunch of. Don't, don't do that morning red at night. Yeah, I mean you can use anti glare glasses if you're working on the computer, but even those clear or yell lens and then just total absence of light whenever the sun sets in whatever area of the world you happen to be in. But I mean you really got to geek out on it. Like we got red incandescent lights installed in our bedroom and I got like a headlamp with like a red light headlamp for getting around at night and in the morning and, and you know, we got the, we got all the blue light blockers and, you know, everything just kind of dims down. So the home's like a cave with a fire in it at night. And. And so you start to think about this stuff in a little more advanced way. And it helps the temperature. Same thing, right? You can lower the temperature in your home, but a lot of people either don't get it cold enough or else they're warm from a heavy meal or an exercise session, like two to three hours before bedtime. So then it comes down to things like lukewarm shower, wearing wool socks because you have these anastomosis veins in your feet that'll basically cool the rest of your body when you warm the feet. And you can basically get the room temp very low, use breathable sheets. But you kind of start to think, okay, what are all the things I could do to stay cold? Because the stuff stacks. Same thing with business in bed. I used to be the guy checking at a hotel, and laptop goes in the bed, I plop on my belly, do some work. I don't let my computer near the bed anymore. Even the books by the bedside, they're not business books. They're fun books or fiction books or stuff. That kind of settles the mind. So the bed is not for business. And then the last part, the noise part, I mean, gosh, Brain FM makes a great little app that'll play ambient noise in the bedroom that lulls you to sleep, like dreamscape type of stuff. And New Calm has a great one. Braintap uses light sound stimulation. So it's like it can come down to more than just, like, calling up your neighbor and telling them to shut up their fricking dog, you know, you can actually play certain sounds that'llthat'll really help lull you to sleep or help get you back to sleep if you wake up in the wee hours, you know, Andand we could get more into, like, you know, the supplementation and GABA and, you know, inhibitory neurotransmitters and all things you take before bed, you know, from a supplementation standpoint. But I think thosethose four things, the light, the sound, the business, and the temperature are pretty important.
Yeah, I mean, the supplementation should only be when things are fucked up in your life. You know, if all of a sudden you can't sleep and you have this autonomic mouth, I mean, maybe there's something short term, but usually, like, there's, you know, some issue that you got to deal with, and you got to find out what the issue is you got to deal with.
It.
And then, you know, your supplement, you can use gaba, you can use cbd, you can use melatonin. Those are all going to help you get you there. But, you know, your checklist for when everything's, like, good and you're trying to maximize it should be what he's talking about. So recognize, you know, if something's going on. Because what that. That autonomic dysregulation. You know, autonomic dysregulation can come from a lot of things, and we think about, like, stressors and stuff. And, like, I didn't resolve this with this person. I keep waking up. But where this bleeds back into detoxification is both infections and toxins can have the same threat response to your autonomic system. And you can feel like you're under threat. And that's why, you know, detox stuff at night will help you. But if you are just constantly waking up, there's some combination of things that you've got to deal with in your life. And there are stressors, and some of them are interpersonal, and some of them are chemical, and some of them are immunological. And then there's the don't do stupid shit and maximize as much as you can, all the stuff that Ben's talking about.
Well, I actually, I had a question for all of you, but specifically, you know, Jason, you said that you like to take liver sauce before bed. And then you also said that detox can help you before bed. For me, that's so interesting because I wake up in the morning and that's when I'll do liver sauce. I would never think about doing that.
I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, I mean, generally we do. You know, we have people do early morning rounds because then you're fasted. And so your AMPK and your NRF2 come up easily. Those like fasting and carb restriction. You guys know all that for going to ketosis. That's all based on this trigger called AMPK. And it and NRF2 are like brothers. They sort of go brothers and sisters, and they go up and down pretty well together. And so fast. It is a good round for it. And then usually, like, around before. Before dinner. But we can do these things at night. And I tend to not do, like, something as, like, powerful as push catch. You know, it would be like he brought milk thistle. You know, maybe sometimes he'll take liver sauce. As long as there's not, like, tons of stuff to move and stuff. Then, yeah, generally we like the AM thing But your milk thistle is sort of one which doesn't bring you into having to then do binders. And it's not such a investment.
One quick addition to that, you know, if I have any struggle like in the mornings, it would be constipation. And so before bed I have found Triphala, you know, that three year blend. It's Ayurvedic blend. Somebody turned me onto it. I take triphala and magnesium and it works fantastically. I'm not super picky on them. I think I'm using the MEG breakthrough right now with bioptimizers and then about for these little Triphala capsules. And you know, it has a little bit of a detoxification effect too, because.
Moving stuff through Triphala is fantastic. Actually. It's got, you know, the three parts, Haritaki, bibelock and amalek. Amalek is a super high vitamin C and polyphenol 1. They're all polyphenols. But the haritaki is the one we use heavily in mercury detox. In fact, this is a fun thing. Why did I put haritaki in a mercury detox thing? In Ayurvedic alchemy, and this is really far out there, they use mercury as a healing thing and you have to purify it before you use it as a healing element by taking away all of its samskaras. All of its samskaras are its accumulated habits, usually accumulated bad habits. So mercury is a universal, a collector of bad habits. And so to use it as a medicine, you first have to purify it of all of its bad habits. And then when you take it, it sucks all of your bad habits in and you shit them out. Now what do they purify the mercury in before they do this, but a bath of haritaki. So it's like, you know, it's the triphala thing.
So hirataki, it's an herb or what is it?
It's kind of a nut, it's kind of a fruit that comes off of these trees, the Myra Balan tree. And if you see the medicine Buddha, so the medicines Buddha is sitting there with his glass of wine and his feet falling over and one hand on his left he's holding this beautiful flower that's going up and the right he's holding this bowl, the bowl of the Long Life elixir. I think it's phospholipids and Quinton. But the plant that's sprouting from his hands is the mirabellan.
That's haritaki and I had one last question and that's which of your products are we talking about? Which of your products has that ingredient in it?
Oh, Clearway cofactors is the only capsule that we make that has that. And I've been working on like a super purified liquid form of that. But a lot of these basic polyphenols don't absorb well and they work through GI receptors. And so Clearway has a bunch of stuff that's more GI driven. And the biggest thing in there is Haritaki.
Thank you so much. I have one more question personally, but I'm also happy to share you guys with the rest of the audience, so I'll ask this real fast. So I know all of you who worked with and probably currently work with pregnant and breastfeeding women. What are their options for detox? Realistically?
Yeah, very gentle.
Yeah, really, really gentle. I mean, you've got binders, everything's in moderation at this point. So liver flow is a problem that you run into during pregnancy. Estrogen excess blocks off liver flow and hurts detox a little bit. So really light bitters and phosphatidylcholine, especially phosphatidylcholine. That's a building type of thing. Light binders, all the exercise sweatings, all fine probably to a degree. And, you know, lots of good mineral balance and lots of water. It's all gentle. I've actually, I mean, I've had a lot of people get pregnant by accident and they got a mouthful of amalgams and they were planning to detox and they wanted to do all this stuff and then you, you give them a junior version of everything you would normally do. A lot more binding, no mobilizing, just support liver and binding and hydration.
Yeah. It's not like you're not detoxifying throughout every day, regardless of what phase you are in your life. So pregnant or not, detox pathways are detox pathways. Your liver, your intestines, your kidney, your skin, all of them need to work. All of them are hopefully working. So I would be very comfortable doing things to improve and support organ function that way. Improve sweating, improve kidney function, improve liver function, allow the body to just detoxify naturally that way. I just wouldn't push like the. Yeah, all the heavy. It's just not the right time.
Stay away from kale smoothies and lots of.
No adrenal smoothies.
A lot of the reports that popped up over the past couple of years about tainted ayurvedic herbal supplements, particularly related to you Know metal toxicity and things like that. And even, even, even a lot of liver issues and people use those protocols. So all the more caution should be taken by pregnant and breastfeeding women. You know, I, when I've got a pregnant breastfeeding woman, particularly pregnancy, who just wants to get a good movement protocol in. Number one thing I think is underrated for pregnancy is swimming. I mean just the babies love that hydrostatic pressure and the swaying back and forth. It's great, it's low impact. You know, as you get that relaxant built up in the joints, you have lower risk of injury, you get your cardiovascular performance still. And I think swimming is just a fan. For contastic, obviously related detoxification. You want a good mineral, you know, pool, not a chlorinated pool. But I think swimming is just amazing for pregnancy.
That lends itself to a really important follow up question, which is how, what's the perfect balance between like for us we have a community pool, of course it's chlorinated, but it's so much fun. It's so much fun to bring our toddler, like he loves it. He gets such good naps after. We all love it. I know that you occasionally swim in chlorinated pools. I'm very curious what your thoughts are on that.
It is interesting. I interviewed a guy, actually, I forget his name. I think it was, I wanna say it was David Getoff, maybe about chlorination and chlorination detoxification. We did a whole podcast on it. It'sit's on my website somewhere. And I won't remember all the different things that he recommended, but there' sthere's a company, I think they're actually called Swim Spray and they make like a vitamin C based spray that's literally designed to take chlorine. Like theythey eliminate a lot of the transdermal absorption of chlorine. So you get a good like vitamin C spray andand rub down afterwards. Cause a lot, a lot of the absorption is gonna be transdermal. You're gonna swallow a lot of that water. You know, I'm, I'm not a fan of chlorine, but like good rinsing and just cleaning up the body and using like a vitamin C spray afterwards can still allow you to get by. You know, we use a lot of minerals in our pool, a lot of hydrogen peroxide in our pool and then like we'll do a little bit of chlorine about once a week and not, not go in the pool on that day that we put it in.
Yeah, Cool. Thank you so much. And you know, do you have something to add, doctor?
We're talking amongst ourselves over here. Halogenation. And you know, what is, what's the chlorine? We're all like, oh, chlorine bad. But, you know, one level chlorine is a hormetic peroxidant. But where it becomes really bad, it starts kicking out iodine out of iodination sites and the chlorine goes in there and blows out those, the iodine stuff. And so, you know, if you. It's not like, okay, I went to the pool, now we're gonna take my iodine. You know, it's just like if you're a swimmer or shit, you know, you're gonna get long term buildup. And iodine's probably where it's gonna screw things up the most.
Oh, actually, and I would love you to touch on lead because I hear that everywhere in all my mom groups everyone's talking about lead and like caraway cookware and like all these all sorts of things. I'm so curious.
Yeah, I mean, the foods, you know, food's a big source. All the household chemicals, everybody wants to keep their house all clean and they spray 409 on the counter before the kid eats there and stuff. And so just be really mindful about all the different toxins that you're exposed to yet. Can you detoxify a kid? Have I had to do all kinds of detoxes on kids? Yeah, I mean, I don't think that we. Are you going to write this down like you're. Oh, you have to do a little, little, little amount. So what can you do, you know, sort of long term there, you know, so in the whole concept of things pushing toxins out of cells then getting them out. And binders in the gi. Well, a lot of the binders and fibers and things like that and a lot of the green things, you know, if you've had them tested real well, things like chlorella and spirulina, a little bit in the drinks and smoothies, those acts as binders. You could put little bits of charcoal in. I mean, that really goes a long way. If you're worried about their exposure, you're like, oh, wait, this has been a problem. And so you can put little bits of these things into the, into the drinks and have them take those down. You know, occasionally you'll get in there bringing glutathione into kids, but it's usually when you're running into some problem. So sort of the everyday is just Basic health, height, hygiene and. And just kind of keeping everything clean. I mean, kids kind of run themselves pretty easily. And whenever you do detox them, just little bits go a long way. And often homeopathics are all that you.
Really need, I think, keeping their diet really strong and varied. And that starts young again. That goes back to the resilience part. You know, like they're going to have toxins just like we, we all do. They're going to be exposed to things. So, you know, keeping them as strong as they can be, getting them used to and exposed to, you know, healthier foods that are harder to introduce later on, early as possible, I think that's critical. And yeah, we've definitely, you know, we've had to go through detoxing with kids, but you know, sometimes, if we can, especially if we can, if we can look ahead of time and actually, you know, check a mom and. Or a dad before the family even starts, you know, that's huge to just overall protecting of, you know, the family. And so, you know, anytime we have an opportunity to have those conversations really early, and I think, I think mom gets a lot of focus, credit focus for, you know, the source of, you know, toxicity and stuff. But for sure, I mean, it's equally, you know, it's equally contributing from male and female, especially on like, the whole epigenetic side.
And one thing I'd throw in there is that my sons and I, we enjoy doing the sauna. We breath work in the sauna and you know, a lot of times the cold pool afterwards. You know, those are like the four kind of things we do for physical resilience is we do some kettlebells or something like that, or calisthenics, and we do the sauna and we do breath work and we do cold. And the sauna, the breathwork in particular can really help with a lot of that lymphatic movement. Just a natural detoxification, even for children. And I mentioned the sauna a couple times, so I'd be remiss not to mention that, you know, you got, you know, three of the Greenfield, you know, stinky boys and their sauna sweating and, you know, there's toxins coming out your skin. So if you, if you do a lot of sweating in the sauna, you want to make sure that you regularly clean your sauna. I mean, we make sure we get ours a good rub down, you know, one to two times a week. So just, just remember that the wood and the sun, everything can absorb a lot of that stuff and a lot of people. Don't think about that. I don't know. That's my cleaner. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I. I would. It's actually so, you know, because. Because soap, the whole way soap works, it goes into water, right? And it creates these micelles that are fat on the middle and water soluble on the outside. And all this stuff partitions into the soap and you wash it out. That's how you take, you know, the dirt, which is very fatty from the soil, and that's how it comes off in the soap. And so you do. But I mean, all the castiles and stuff are all you need. You don't need the 409 there. I just grabbed the mic because I wanted to reiterate the importance of cleaning up before you have the kids. Klinghardt used to speak very eloquently and scarily about the. We need the mother to put out a lot of babies. And so the mother drops a lot of toxic liquids into the baby. It doesn't matter if you kill off the first one because there's a bunch of them coming along behind you. So if it's your first kid, you really gotta clean significantly and it's not that hard. And we can put you through all kinds of detox scenarios and then we don't have to worry about the kid.
Yeah.
Thank you for sharing. That I always wanted to do. I did a lot of water fasting before I got pregnant, but I really. I talked to you while I was pregnant, and you were like, oh, you should have talked to me before.
The only answer, really.
Well, thank you. Well, the one thing I really was hoping someone would touch on. If you guys know anything about this, like, why am I seeing so much about lead? And especially with kids, I think it's.
Like, you know, maybe the Gerber baby food.
Oh, interesting. Well, I know the baby food with lead.
Growing up with us in the lead paint base, our lead levels are ridiculous.
Well, I think it's like, maybe in a lot of my circles, like, people are, like, moving into houses and, like, buying old homes and renovating and buying antique furniture. Then it's like, oh, shoot. Like, at some point they realize, like, a lot of this stuff is toxic or it has lead. So I think it's just one of those things, like, even, like, caraway cookware. Now people are saying that's not safe. I don't know if maybe this is like a mom question.
This is the mom. Push it and let you know. You can. You can take kid, you can move mercury, cadmium, arsenic, no problem. Without too Much intervention, but lead's harder to move, and you're coming in with EDTA DMPs, you know, stuff you don't really want to use, but fortunately, you can dilute out a kid with time. He gets a lot bigger and just stop all the load going in.
Does anyone want to. Is there one more question to round this out, or do you guys have anything you'd like to say before we close and have some drinks and apps?
We're having sushi tonight, right?
No sushi. No. But it's going to be delicious. We have sourdough, organic sourdough on the menu, both from Jessa, I think, and from the best organic sourdough we found in Austin. And then I made the truffle porcini black garlic cheese that's on it. Actually, we made it. We made it in our cooking demos. So glad that I'm getting to share.
That this panel's over. It's over. It's over. Go, go, go, go, go.
No. There's one thing we didn't talk about at all, and it's probably the most fundamental thing. We talked briefly about parasympathetic sympathetic balance. But what is sympathetic? You know, we. Oh, it's fight or flight, right? What is parasympathetic? It's rest, digest, repair, regenerate, detoxify the calming down and opening up. And you have all the tools from the breathing to calming. But don't start getting all sympathetic about using the tools. Oh, my God. I'm gonna breathe, and I'm gonna. I'm gonna upreg it. I remember my friend Naomi. I was talking to her because she was toxic, and she was like. And she was talking about. I was like, well, you have to be in person, but you should. And she's the CEO. I upregulate my parasympathetic all the time. All right, can somebody point out the flaw here? And so actually going in and relaxing, it was like CBD was like a game changer for doing detoxification in autistic kids, because they're in a hypersympathetic thing all the time. That's neuroinflammation. And the toxins bring us in there. Mercury is a specific activator of glutamate receptors, which means it's gonna get you hyperglutamate active. It's gonna move you into that state that all that stuff in. So it's your job to move you into a calming state. And we just. We talked about hormones last night and estrogen. What? It moves you into an Anxious state because it works on glutamate receptors. And go. And progesterone moves you into a calm state because it works on GABA receptors. So if it's GABA or CBD or it's progesterone, it's slipping you into the calm. So if you're doing rounds of detox or just long term, you have to be able to slip into the calm. Because when you're in the other, when it is fight or fl, then you have the toxic reactions. You look at somebody and you're like, you're my source of toxicity. You're my source of pain. All of this is my source of pain. And you're holding on to all of it, and you're misaligning it. It's Ben's freaking fault that I feel like this. You know, all that is an error of the mind that propagates down the bile flow actually stops when you're glutamate dominant. It stops when you're sympathetic dominant because it's holding energy in because you're fighting or fleeing. And so if you can't handle the neurological response, you can throw all the chemicals at it and it's not going to work. Often all you need is a neurological response.
Hey, I've got a special announcement about an event that's taken place with me and my team at Ben Greenfield Life. See, we have our big Ben Greenfield Life team retreat this year in Sandpoint, Idaho, and we're going to do what's called the Walk for Water. During that event, we partnered up with the fantastic charitable organization World vision. And on June 14th, at about 10am, we're gonna be doing a 6k, 6k length event, which is the average distance people in the developing world have to walk to get water. Sometimes, sadly enough, not even clean or safe water. But anyways, what we're gonna do is we're gonna raise money for World Vision to be able to provide clean water for someone in a developing country for life. And World Vision does a fantastic job equipping farmers, equipping people who would normally not be able to get water with the ability to be able to produce water or get clean drinking water. So here's how you can help. There's a $50 donation option that will help to provide clean water. 50 bucks is all it takes to write clean water for one person for life. And there's also a $50 registration fee where you too can join in to do the 6K. So here's where you go. BenGreenfieldLife.com WalkForWater that's BenGreenfieldLife.com WalkforWater Check it out and get ready to join us on June 14th at 10am and of course you can just do this all virtually. You don't have to be in in Sandpoint, Idaho for the event. More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. If you liked it, or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.
It.
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