Dr. Paul Anderson outlines five ways to reduce toxin exposure and support your body's natural detoxification: cut incoming toxins with organic food and filtered water, use heat therapies like saunas to promote sweating, move your body to stimulate circulation, ensure regular bowel movements and urination, and eat low-glycemic foods rich in fiber and dark greens like broccoli.
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Good day. Welcome to Medicine Health with Dr. Paul Anderson. This is part 4 of our discussion around toxicity, detoxification, depuration, etc. And in this part, as a counterpoint to the last part, which was what would your healthcare provider maybe do— get asked this a lot— what if I live somewhere where nobody does this? There's no healthcare providers to help me with detox and depuration. On and on, which certainly is, is a big possibility. So what I want to do is give some general advice. I want to remember that nothing that we say on the channel is medical advice because it's not specific to you, and you really shouldn't get medical advice from TV or radio or YouTube or wherever. So these are just general ideas. You should always check everything out with your healthcare provider before you do anything. That being said, what are things that people can do to, let's say, have a lower toxin or bigger toxin elimination lifestyle? And even when we medically treat people for toxicity, etc., in the long-term follow-up, our goal is to have them doing things that have them in a detoxifying lifestyle, a way for the body to do the most that it can to get rid of All of this stuff. So when we're thinking about that, things that we might want to consider that we might be able to do on our own. The very first thing about lowering toxins and toxicants in our in our body is lowering the exposure that we have to them, and that is critically important. And so the main ways that they come into us are food. Water and other things that we drink, and then the air that we breathe. Now, there are other ways too. You can get them through your skin and other stuff like that. But when we're thinking about those, it makes no sense to go through all this work to try and work on my body to get rid of toxins if there's a flood of toxins coming in. Now, the first caveat there is that you never can eliminate all the toxins in your body. It's impossible. Listen, you can't eliminate all the toxins coming into your body, but you can decrease the load. That's the goal. So, uh, look at your foods, look at your food sources, eat as organic as you possibly can, although that's not 100%, it's pretty good. Uh, drink a lot of water. We've talked about hydration, but the water should be filtered or deionized. If you have, you know, a lot of people in your house, sometimes it's worth getting a good filtration system for your drinking and eating or cooking water. If it's just you alone, I've had a lot of friends where they just, you know, go and they, they buy a few gallons of purified or deionized water, and that's what they use for drinking and cooking because it's just one person. It's not worth a big You know, filtration system. So that's a big one— organic food as much as you can. As far as air goes, there's some things we can do about the air quality and some things we can't do. So one of the things that we can do is move air around, and there's even some reference in the literature that just the movement of air, like wind or a fan or something like that, is actually a fairly effective Uh, air movement and partial purification system. The other thing that you can do are— and now they're not as expensive as they used to be— you can get these, uh, ionic type of air filters. And if you only have one place to filter in your house, we usually have people make that their bedroom, or the bedrooms if you have a bunch of people living with you, because you spend the most static time usually in your bedroom breathing the same air over and over. So that can be helpful as well. The other thing would be personal protective equipment. So if you're, you know, someone like me who's maybe a little bit older and you remember the old days of no personal protective equipment when we, we worked with chemicals and stuff, you know, a lot of people still do that. Please, please, please, if you're working with chemicals, things that vaporize, all this stuff, and certainly other things like metals, Look at what you're supposed to do to keep those things out of your body, whether it's, you know, gloves and masks or whatever it is. The next thing, so after we stop the influx or lower it, would be heating your body up. Now, we're going to do a whole series on heat therapies and which ones do what and all this business. So Stay tuned for that. But just know that heating your body up does a number of things. One is it increases the speed of some of your enzymes, some of which help with detox and depuration. The next thing is it helps to move the toxins through the cells and move them out. So if you have enough hydration and then you've got heat, you're going to move more toxins out of your cells. And the next thing is that when you sweat, you actually do eliminate to your skin Not only chemical toxins, but also metal toxins, which we now have in the research as well. So it's a good way to, to get things moving. Now I'll defer to the other audio and video I'm going to do about heat therapies, but the bottom line is anything you can heat your body up with will help. So if that means you've got a sauna of one kind or another, go for it, do it. If you don't have a sauna, but you can get into a soaking tub or a hot tub, you actually will sweat in, in hot tubs, soaking tubs. We've had people do it just in their bath with as hot a tolerate bath as they can tolerate, or we've had people where none of that was possible, but they did. You know, they went on walks or run every day. I would have them put one more like sweatshirt on or something just to engender more of the sweating and heating the body up. Now, to go along with that, moving your body is a great help to your depuration and detoxification. Because it pumps your lymph around, it pumps your venous blood around, helps to kind of clean those systems out, stimulates the movement through the liver, a little bit through the spleen, some other stuff. And so it will actually stimulate your body to get rid of stuff as you move. And generally, if you sweat while you move, it's sort of 2 for 1 there, which I think is really, really critically important. The next thing is regular elimination. And so that means beyond sweating, are you urinating and defecating enough? And so we talked about this in another section, but urinating and defecating are 2 huge ways beyond sweating and breathing to get chemicals out of the body. Urination is going to be supported largely by enough water. So remember that most other fluids are not going to hydrate you. Water is the thing that you want to be drinking to hydrate. And because of the way the kidneys work, we want enough water in our plasma that we've drank or ate in food to be able to front-load the kidneys so that then if there's toxicants or toxins that need to go out through the kidneys, there's a good flow of fluid through there and that will help them be removed. And so when we talk to people about detoxifying or other things, we're always telling them don't get dehydrated. The worst thing you do is get dehydrated. And I've seen people who are detoxing And they became profoundly dehydrated. And we actually saw like skin color changes and other things because their body couldn't get rid of some of the junk fast enough. Then when you talk about eliminating through your bowels or your bowel movements, if you're not at least having one bowel movement a day, you're not going to be eliminating appropriately because it's not just the food that you've eaten that goes out through the bowel movement. But also toxins that are in the liver that may be more fat soluble or certain other toxins. The liver will put them in with the bile, which is something the liver makes to help us digest fats. That will go out, but it'll also be carrying toxins with it. Well, the bile tends under normal circumstances to recirculate back into the blood, certain parts of it anyway, and so that can carry the toxins back in. So number one, bile goes in the, you know, to the feces and you, you get rid of it every day. Okay, that's minimum. But the other thing then is something to help to bind on to the bile so it leaves. High-fiber vegetables are probably the best way to do this. All of the vegetables that you've heard of that you think of as good for you probably have some or a lot level of binding agent. People sometimes will also take extra things, you know, like guar gum or psyllium or whatever. Again, if you're going to take anything extra beyond your diet, talk to your healthcare provider about it before you do it. But that will help you eliminate too. And so people will say, well, what happens? Because we have this handout that says, you know, if you're doing especially something like chelation, so a medicalized treatment to support detoxification, it just says do not get dehydrated and And do not get constipated. People will say, what happens if I do? Well, if you do, then you need to talk to the healthcare provider working with you about getting things moving again. Now, if you're just doing it and you're, you know, you're eating extra fiber and stuff, usually that'll take care of itself. But constipation can be dehydration, so you might not be hydrating enough. It can also be that the bile is too full of stuff and you need one of those colagogues we talked about before. which can be like essential fatty acids or phospholipids, also like turmeric or curcumin. A number of other things can help the bile keep flowing better. So other things that you can do on your own, and this may sound a little strange, but the next one is having a lower insulin-stimulating diet. So online you can look at the glycemic index of You can also look at the insulin index of foods. Whichever one you're looking at, and ideally it'd be both, you want a diet that has a lot of low glycemic foods and has a low insulin index, meaning it's not going to shoot your insulin up. So what does that have to do with detoxing? Well, toxins and toxicants already increase your antioxidant burnout, okay, so your oxidation and reduction gets out of balance due to to toxins. When you're detoxifying through the body, you're going to use up more of your antioxidants, so you're already going to be somewhat in a potential antioxidant deficit. High insulin stimulating diets are very inflammatory, and they are so inflammatory that they will aggravate most of the other symptoms and signs of a toxic person or a toxic patient. So just keep that in mind as you're going along. And eating a diet that has sort of a low insulin index, low glycemic index is wonderful. Eating foods that have prebiotics and fiber helps with that elimination stuff we talked about, but also prebiotics help to feed the good bacteria in your digestive tract. And one of the places that can hold on to especially metal toxins are some of the bad bugs. or the, you know, the inappropriate microbiome agents. So prebiotics help to support the good guys and push the bad guys out. You can take a look online for prebiotics. So probiotic is a pill usually or a powder with actual bacteria in it. Prebiotics are just foods that kick up your natural probiotic production. So take a look while you're looking up low insulin diet, Take a look at prebiotic foods, and interestingly, they're also some of the ones that have the best binding fibers in them as well. Then there's other things that can be useful, such as dark greens, the sulforaphane family, things like broccoli and asparagus. Those have natural compounds in them that may help with glutathione, may help with detox, etc. So there's a number of things that you can do to help yourself. So heat, hydration, and movement, as we've talked about. Keep urinating a lot. Make sure that you're going to the bathroom every day at least. Make sure you got enough prebiotic and fiber in your diet, and then sweat when you can as well. All right, I'm Dr. Paul Anderson. We're out of time for today. Check us out on dranow.com. That's a hub website with all the links. If you're listening to us on audio. We're on all the pod burners. Please like, share, and subscribe. If you're on YouTube, that community is growing. dranow.com and/or Dr. A Now on YouTube. And if you can't find it, just go to Dr. A Now and you'll find us there on the hub website. So Dr. A Online is the YouTube one. Like, share, subscribe, and do notifications because sometimes the algorithm shoves us over to the side and you don't hear what we're doing. All right, thank you very much. I will see you all on the radio next week.
