DETOXIFICATION - WHAT AND WHY?

Good day. Welcome to Medicine Health. This is Dr. Paul Anderson, and today we're talking about toxins and toxicants in four parts. So the first part here, we want to talk about what are toxins and toxicants, and why are they so bad for me? So the first thing to think about is that really any chemical in the world that can injure, harm, or even kill. You or an animal, etc., is essentially either a toxin or a toxicant. Now, in most cases, toxin refers to a specific naturally occurring molecule that is created either through the activity of animal biochemistry or plant biochemistry, or even within our own body due to microbial reactions. So it's a specific toxic substance. And a toxicant is usually something that is a byproduct of something we humans have made. So, for example, certain, you know, petroleum toxicants would be a byproduct of what, you know, what we have made. A toxin that's created by the death of a microbe in your GI tract would be more of a, you know, naturally created toxin. But the bottom line with these are that they are not really good for us under any situation. So the next thing is, where are the biggest sources of these toxins and toxicants? Well, if we subtract the ones that are made potentially in our digestive tract by, say, a microbial action, Then the majority of toxins and toxicants are going to be coming from either our food, the water, or other things that we drink, and our air. And then there are other ways to get them as well, which we'll get a little bit more specific about as we go along. So when we think about toxins and toxicants, etc., What we want to kind of think about here is how does the body normally try to get rid of these things, and then what can we do to help it out? So we're going to have some real specific, more deep dives in the other three parts about some of the things I'll bring up here. But I just want to do a top down really quickly. And so the first is there's two descriptive. words around getting things out of the human body. One is called depuration, and depuration you can think of as big picture. And what that means is that your whole body is being stimulated in a way to support your natural detoxification and elimination pathways, which is very, very critical. So depuration is taking care of everything in our body and supporting it in a way that the natural processes for getting things out of the body are enhanced, or at the very least supported, if not sped up. So there's gonna be different ways to do depuration. We'll get into those things. And then detoxification is literally a metabolic process. By which the toxin is processed in a way where it becomes less toxic or no— non-toxic, and then it's removed from the body. Now, there are times where our body does part of a detoxification process, but it cannot get the chemical all the way out of the body, and then that new chemical, which is an intermediate, is actually more toxic than the previous chemical. So that's another thing that we have to watch for. So in these cases, then, when we're trying to get this stuff that shouldn't be in our body out of our body, we want to think about doing both things, which is big picture depuration, help the body get rid of stuff, and then specifically, if it's possible, To either enhance or target in a way that speeds up, or some other way employ our detoxification strategies. Now, beyond what your body can do, there are antidotes or medical ways to get things out of your body as well. And most of the time. These sort of antidotes, these medicalized ways of getting toxins out of the body or toxicants out of the body, don't have a whole lot to do with your natural enzyme processes. That'd be more like what depuration is doing, etc. So we're going to kind of look at these things in those categories. Now, when we're thinking about toxins and toxicants, and you know why are these things so bad for me? One of the things to, you know, just keep in mind while we go through that is whether it's a toxicant or a toxin, after the, you know, semantic part of those words comes into play, the bottom line is these things are not supposed to, generally speaking, be in your body, and they're supposed to not really, you know, often be in our environment. Now, if it's a biological toxin that's made by a plant or a biochemical or microbial reaction with a microbe, something like that, then those are kind of quasi-natural. They're, you know, part of the world that we live in. But most toxins and toxicants that exist now are, as was mentioned earlier, made by us humans, and they didn't used to exist. So the whole time the human body was evolving, To deal with enzymatic breakdown and toxicants and all of that, it didn't have time to catch up to all of these new toxins and toxicants that we have out in the world that we have created as humans because most of them have been created in the last 75 years or so. So there's not been a tremendous amount of rapid evolution in the world of human detoxification pathways in that amount of time. So that is an important thing to. you know, consider there. So why would these guys be bad for us? Well, the first thing is, and this is something I would share with, you know, patients, is most of these things don't have a physiological or biological purpose inside of our body. So for example, if you get lead in your body, it can certainly do a lot of things. None of them are good, but your body really isn't set up to deal with lead. Our bodies deal with all sorts of metals, which we call minerals. So like magnesium and iron and calcium and stuff like that. But generally speaking, if they're in appropriate amounts for a human, those are not considered toxic. Now they can be if they're in excess, but generally they're not. But when we get to new metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, all these other things. Our body isn't set up for these things. It was never intended to have an eliminatory process for them. So the— a big reason why toxins and toxicants are bad for us is we have very slow and/or poor and/or incomplete removal of them from the body. Now, just a footnote on that removal thing. You will see, let's say someone gets exposed to lead today, and then you check, you know, their blood level will go up, and you check their urine, which there's a lot of data at the CDC about levels of different metals and toxicants in humans because they check urine and sometimes blood. So you can check the urine and the lead level in the urine will go up and up, and then it'll start to go down over time. Now, if it's a big exposure, the problem is that the natural elimination through the plasma and then the kidneys out through the urine is a portion of that metal, but it's not all of the metal you were exposed to. And that's something that people who get exposed often can be a little bit unclear about. Now, I want to make A distinction here. If you get a big exposure to something, you know, let's say someone tried to poison you with arsenic or something, you're going to be in a hospital. You're going to be seeing a medical specialist called a toxicologist, and they're going to probably give you an antidote for the poisoning. What we usually are dealing with in outpatient medicine is not acute toxicity like we'd see in a hospital. It is chronic, long-term, sometimes even low-level exposure. So when we have these exposures, if it doesn't put us in the hospital, yes, a lot goes out in the urine in the days following, but the rest the body has no place for. So then, and we'll, we'll use the example of metals, but it could be chemicals or mycotoxins or other things too. Then these things do other bad stuff. So the stuff that hangs around is going to circulate around the body. And it's going to bind to your enzymes and enzyme systems. Now enzymes, we think of, well, they help us digest our food, which is true, but we have a lot of enzymes that we use in our biochemical processes, such as the enzymes that help us make the neurotransmitters in our brain and the enzymes that help us metabolize our hormones and many, many other things. Also, the enzyme systems and other systems directly involved in our detoxification Many of those are affected by things like metals and chemicals and all of that. So enzymatic binding is not a good thing. And this is one reason why you can see neuropsychiatric side effects, pain side effects, hormonal side effects, and just about any other part of your body can be affected by this enzymatic inhibition or even enzymatic damage. damage that can go on. So that's something to keep in mind there. Next thing is that it can bind to the outside of the cell, which is your cell membrane, and/or the cell receptors. Binds to a receptor, it can either slow it down or stop it, and that means that the receptor can no longer communicate for the cell. And so this can create all manner of problems downstream. If it binds to the cell membrane, then it can create a pro-oxidant, in many cases, state. And a pro-oxidant state is an unhealthy state for the outside of the cell. It also depletes your antioxidants that your body naturally uses to deal with this. So what we tend to see in the literature is that people who have more toxicants and toxins in their body have often lower amounts of appropriately balanced antioxidants, and their oxidative reductive balance is off, and that's because you've got a constant challenge going there on it. So those are some general reasons why these things are so bad for you. So in this little section here, this is part number 1, we're going to do 3 more parts, and we're going to talk about how to support depuration, specific detoxification and depuration therapies, And then we're also going to do a section on, well, what happens if I can't find a practitioner to help me with this? Is there any ways I can just, you know, live sort of a low-tox lifestyle, etc.? So we're going to get into all that. But before we move on to those other sections, what I want to remind you is first, thank you everybody who has subscribed. 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