Nutrients, Toxins, and Detox Series: Blog One
If there is one common thread from my days as a high-risk specialty nurse to the last decade as an oral-systemic consultant, it would be the number of people who are following their provider’s guidance to the letter but say they are not getting much more than temporary symptoms relief, whether that is from a conventional/pharmaceutical approach or a natural healing/nutraceutical approach.
Without going into all the details here, I will just share that I was one of those people. After a disabling neurological symptom cluster set in with incorrect diagnoses to follow, I transitioned from pharmaceutical measures to herbals. Then, to very strict nutritional programs with what I believed was toxin avoidance that was so insane that it literally broke my family apart and took all enjoyment out of life!
I took all the courses and learned all the things and set about coaching others because I did regain my function when I started hitting the nutrients hard. But, I also knew that if I had a major stress, toxin exposure, at the wrong food, went to the wrong place with the wrong chemical smells, I would have symptoms. I see a lot of whack-a-mole behavior whether using pharma or supplements. One product may fix one thing but then something else crops up and another product is needed for that. Whenever we take in supplements that are made in a processing facility, we do not know exactly what we are getting and what is being used to produce said nutrition. Most people do not have a nutritional deficiency, they have a nutrient utilization issue and that means that there is something other than nutrients the body is having an issue with.
We are biological beings and we have an inherent blueprint in which the body is designed to thrive on clean water, clean air, and local fresh nutrients from whole foods. However, modern theories and mass distribution came with the age of industrialization and now we have labs where all manner of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) chemicals are used in everything we put on, in and around the body. We can now easily get foods, or food substitutes, with tastes from all around the world. Just take a common desert ingredient, Vanilla, for instance. The demand for the taste of vanilla greatly exceeds the ability to produce real vanilla. It comes from the Vanilla planfolia orchid and is considered rare and exotic, even in South America where native growth has been severely impacted by deforestation. So, industry has to figure out how to synthetically produce the taste of vanilla flavoring used in so many processed foods. Even if there were enough Vanilla planfolia orchids, the price of our vanilla flaovered packaged treats would be excessive and not available to every budget. I will not go into the differences here but just google search vanilla vs vanillin and look for research on vanillin. You will find that most of your vanilla flavored items have a synthetized chemical acid that is considered GRAS by the FDA but when you look keeper, you will see the concerns about both environmental and bioaccumulation of this synthesized flavoring that is used in food, medications and cosmetics. In food, most vanillin is manufactured from a substance called guaiacol. Most of the world's guaiacol supply comes from petroleum. But in cosmetics…well look up vanilla scent and beavers, lol!
Because my homeschooled son had an odd form of ADHD and hated it, we spent much or our science and biology classes researching what is really in our food and at 11yo, he chose Feingold diet to see if it helped and it completely changed his behaviors that were a mystery to him, and to everyone else, lol. I was very sick back then and that is when I began realizing what I now share with all of my clients.
So, the first thing to understand in any attempt to regain health is the gravity of the current environmental and biological dance we are doing with toxins, often without realizing it. If you are using prescriptions and/or supplements but are still finding your health is riding an edge, then this series may interest you. The root cause of all illness is cellular dysfunction and if nutrients or chemical compounds could truly correct that, then there would not be full practitioner schedules and SM would not be full of advertisements for people searching for a panacea in a bottle to cure this or that symptom. I cringe when I see some of this ads. Vitamin C immune function, YAY….wait, what if you are not Vitamin C deficient? Hmmm, maybe there is more to consider?!
The biological body is designed to take in food, filter out and eliminate the bad stuff, and process the good stuff to be sent into circulation to be utilized by the cell. If the cell is functioning properly, then it creates the biochemistry needed to keep each organ system balanced and able to meet its demands. This process is incredibly impaired in most people now. Not because we are not getting nutrition but because of what is coming in, much of it with our nutrition, daily in the form of heavy metals, chemicals and mycotoxins from certain types of raw material storage practices. In this series we will look at the sheer number of these toxins we are exposed to on a daily basis and the symptoms that low level chronic toxicity cause.
We will also look at how these toxins behave in the gut vs in the circulation and how the body is so brilliant that it will store more of these toxins than we can imagine, accumulating them over a lifetime and causing higher and higher levels of oxidative stress and inflammation that is now well accepted as being related to almost every symptom and disease.
However, do you know what else is related to almost any disease? Do your own experiment, type any disease into a google search bar followed by the words, heavy metals. Then do the same experiment with the word chemicals instead of heavy metals. You will soon see that science is very aware of what I am sharing with you. So, the next question is, “why don’t they do something about regulating these toxins?”. Because it would bring down most industries, including agriculture and medical. That is just not going to happen. So, if we want a chance of avoiding becoming one of the statistics below, we are going to have to learn this for ourselves!
So where does that leave us? Are we doomed to be chasing health at younger and younger ages and/or living out our latter years suffering the consequences of our younger years’ choices? Let’s just look at a few stats pulled from various organizations who keep statistics on disease prevalence:
Autism is 1 in 36. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that over 5.4 million adults in the United States have autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or 2.2% of the population.
2023 Cardiovascular death stats include deaths from coronary heart disease (40.3%), stroke (17.5%), other minor CVD causes combined (17.1%), high blood pressure (13.4%), heart failure (9.1%) and diseases of the arteries (2.6%), now affecting adults in their 40’s!
The number of people with diabetes rose from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014.
There are over 55 million people worldwide living with dementia in 2020. This number predicted to double every 20 years, reaching 78 million in 2030 and 139 million in 2050.
20 million Americans suffer chronic digestive disease and 40% of Americans' daily lives are disrupted by digestive issues.
About 100 million people (about 25%) in the United States are estimated to have Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (now called MASLD). NAFLD is the most ordinary form of liver disease in children and has more than doubled over the past 20 years
The rate of new cases of cancer (cancer incidence) is 440.5 per 100,000 men and women per year (based on 2017–2021 cases). An estimated 611,720 people in the United States will die from cancer in 2024, corresponding to approximately 1680 deaths per day. 1 in 2 people will have some form of cancer in their life time. (my addition: Cancer is just bad cells. It is the endpoint of cellular dysfunction because the genetic potential has been turned on. We can also turn that the expression of that potential off)
According to the CDC , 836,000 to 2.5 million Americans have ME/CFS
About 30% of adults have symptoms of insomnia. About 10% of adults have insomnia severe enough to cause daytime consequences
Almost 21% of the U.S. population—51.6 million adults—lives with chronic pain, defined as pain lasting more than three months
I could keep going but I think you can see the gravity of the overall cellular dysfunction that can impact every organ system, so the question is why are we experiencing such biological decline? Well, there are so many reasons for that but a novel would not really explain it all.
Below is a link to a PDF that will provide you with a really good start. This book was released over a decade ago, shortly after a landmark study of infant cord blood showed over 200 toxic chemical compounds present at birth. This book was co-authored by a Biochemist Jen and I will believe has an answer who we will be introducing you to soon.
The book is $250 on Amazon now but you can read the PDF here for free.
And of course, all of this sounds so dreadful that one might just throw their hands up in denial and just decide to live and let live. However, unfortunately, this toxicity issue is not one that is akin to my youngest adrenaline junkie child who says, “If I die, I die but at least I am enjoying living”. There is no amount of immediate gratitude of what we consider the joy of living that is worth years of chronic suffering that takes all the joy out of life! So, once we understand the root cause of why we have symptoms and develop disease and what is causing the cellular dysfunction, then we can begin to tackle the toxins but, of course, we will also need a blog to discuss binders and how/where they do and do not work.
Detox has become such a common word that is very misunderstood. Detox is not just about mobilizing toxins. It is not a detox if the toxins are not significantly eliminated via both the gut and the kidney! In fact, many of the “detox” nutrients are just mobilizing and redistributing the toxins in the body. Most people have heard about “binders” but just because someone bottles something that is a binder in the environment does not mean it will work the same way in the body. Here is a hint of what most people, even providers do not consider/discuss, the gut is external to the body and the last barrier to environmental toxins. Putting good binders in the gut will absolutely prevent many toxins from moving into circulation but if there is nothing in circulation to absorb what has already made it there or is in storage, then all the binders on the market are not going to fix the cellular dysfunction that is already occurring. Also, what makes a binder “good”? Well, if it’s a good binder, it is dirty when sourced and the first thing that has to happen is a cleaning that does not reduce the particle structure, size, and charge that will attract the toxins inside the body!
More to come on all of this but for now, know there is hope and your Provider is not doing anything wrong. Nutrients are key but that key cannot fit into all the locks and blocks to our health if there are toxins preventing them from working at the cellular receptor sites!
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