Living A Full Life

Detox Truth Bomb

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 3 • Episode 19

Share episode

Detoxification has become a wellness buzzword, but what does it really mean to "detox" your body? Dr. Enrico Dolcecore strips away the marketing hype to reveal what actually works and what's just snake oil in the detox industry.

Your body already has sophisticated detoxification systems—the liver performs over 500 vital functions, while kidneys, lungs, skin, and digestive system work tirelessly to process the 700,000 chemicals we're exposed to daily. Understanding these natural pathways is crucial before considering any supplemental detox protocol.

Those popular juice cleanses, colon cleanses, detox teas, and extreme fad diets? Dr. Dolcecori explains why most offer minimal benefits and can sometimes cause more harm than good. Real detoxification isn't about feeling terrible for days while drinking lemon water with cayenne pepper. Proper protocols should be structured and supervised, focusing on supporting rather than shocking your body's systems. The doctor outlines a comprehensive approach involving toxin assessment, opening drainage pathways, safe mobilization techniques, using appropriate binders, and recovery support—elements rarely found in over-the-counter detox kits.

For those seeking realistic ways to support their natural detox processes, simple daily habits make the biggest difference: proper hydration, cruciferous vegetables, avoiding processed foods, regular exercise, and reducing environmental toxin exposure. Combined with targeted supplements like milk thistle and NAC when appropriate, these strategies provide genuine support without the extreme measures or false promises that dominate the detox marketplace. Want to know if you truly need detoxification support? Consult with a qualified functional medicine practitioner who can assess your individual needs rather than following a one-size-fits-all approach.

Send us a text

Speaker 1:

Welcome everyone. I'm Dr Enrico Dolcecori and this week we are going to be reviewing toxins and detoxifying your body on Living a Full Life podcast. Thanks for joining us this week. Last week we went through toxins and then it led into this. A couple questions came in about. I love the podcast about toxins. What about detoxing? So we know we're exposed to toxins all the time. What about detoxing and getting them out of the body? What a great topic.

Speaker 1:

We've done a couple episodes on toxins in season one and season two. We're now in season three of this podcast. By the way, I can't believe it's been such a hit. We keep doing it each and every week, but this week toxins. So just type in toxins in the Living a Full Life search menu, whether you're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or whatever, and you'll see the two or three other episodes we've done on this. If you want to dive a little bit deeper, this one we're going to go into detoxifying the myths, methods and proper protocols that we should be going through to truly do a detox, and you'll see at GNC and health food stores and Whole Foods detox kits. Well, I'm going to burst those bubbles for you a little bit here and what truly happens when we are trying to detox. So the key points on this episode are going to be detoxing methods, breaking some myths, and how to detox the right way under doctor supervision. The only real way to do it is under doctor supervision.

Speaker 1:

So the definition of detoxing is the process of eliminating toxins from the body to improve overall health. That is, plain and simple, what we're trying to do. When we go into a detox phase, the body has natural detox pathways that maybe understanding them may help us a little bit more. Like the liver, which filters all of the blood in the body and metabolizes the toxins that process through it, the kidneys end up flushing these toxins out of the body by combining it with urine and water, and then the lungs expel carbon dioxide. That's the main job is to get all the carbon dioxide, all the waste products in our body that will turn on off gas into carbon and oxygen, and these get binded by the lungs and moved out through carbon dioxide. The skin is the major detoxer in the body. It helps remove toxins from blood and lymphatic system through sweat, so through our pores, and then, finally, the digestive system eliminates all solid wastes. We understand that one pretty simple through the foods that we eat and everything through the digestive system can be eliminated that way, including bacteria and viruses as well. So here's some cool stats. The liver processes over 500 vital functions related to detoxification in general, and that's from the Journal of Hepatology, hepatology. The average person is exposed to 700,000 chemicals daily, every single day. And that's from the environmental working group. That's pretty hard to believe.

Speaker 1:

We're surrounded by this and we went through this in the last podcast about how we're exposed to toxins all the time and we have to pick and choose the things that we can control to help make our you. Often these, these programs whether you do a one-day juice fast, a three-day juice fast, a seven-day juice fast, whatever it is are low in protein and they definitely spike blood sugar and they limit the long-term benefits of the detoxification process anyways, because we're creating an insulin spike in the body. So juice cleanses, although have some merit behind them, I love them for giving the digestive tract a vacation, giving your mastication, your digestive meats, fibrous vegetables, fibrous foods, giving it all just a little bit of a break so that the liquids can easily be absorbed into the body, and gives your whole digestive tract a little bit of a one, two, three day vacation Depends how long you want to do it for. So that's one. The second one is colon cleanses. I don't know if you've tried this and if you have, well, you may have experienced it but the claim is that it cleanses the gut and improves digestion and unfortunately most colon cleanses can't get deep enough to really cleanse most of the digestive tract. The colon is the smallest portion of the entire digestive tract, so we're not really getting an intestinal cleanse. The reality it can really disrupt the natural gut bacteria if it's done excessively Once or twice to do this. I think it's healthy for the colon to go through a little bit of a cleanse every now and then, once a year. That's okay. If you want to do it through enema water cleanse, whatever it is, make sure it's done safely. But that's a popular one that's used the coffee enemas. Remember that little phase that was going through.

Speaker 1:

There's some merit behind these things. I'm not breaking them down as myths to never be tried, but to do them repetitively aren't, isn't going to help or make a major dent in overall health. There's things like detox teas that we drink that can help improve things. A lot of claims on fat burning, reduces bloating Teas and herbs themselves have great health benefits behind them Chamomile dandelion. They have detoxing properties and are great to ingest. But mainly relying on laxatives can be harmful if we're using it for that reason alone. But drinking teas are great, but not as a detox type system. You can add them to your regular regimen, your regular intake of fluids for any reason that you may have to help calm your mood, to help you sleep, to help digestion, to help the liver detox. These are great things to do, but the major claims that they're saying that they're actually detoxing your liver. You're probably not getting much benefit from that long-term, or even by doing it once and then.

Speaker 1:

Fad detoxes you've heard of this. The master cleanse, the lemonade diet, where you just eat one food or one juice. Um, the real thing behind that is that it can create rapid weight loss and toxin elimination, but it's often extreme and may result in nutrition deficiencies If you do it for too long. The master cleanse is a 10 day thing of just drinking lemon juice. I forget what was in it. I did it once. Cayenne pepper lemon juice. Um, it was a couple of things salt and maybe something else. There's only four and it was easy to make and you had to drink like 100 ounces of this a day or something like that. And, yeah, if that's all you do for 10 days, you're going to lose a little bit of weight. It may even be a little bit anti-inflammatory, because there's nothing in there that's really inflammatory, but to promote cleansing not really cleansing anything. So these methods may offer, you know, short term results but rarely address deeper toxic buildup or support organ function properly. So let's skip all that.

Speaker 1:

There's the myths. Okay, so myth? Here's a couple of myths to about detoxing. Myth Number one you need extreme detoxes to cleanse your body. This is further from the truth. Your liver, kidneys and gut are already detoxing every single day. Extreme methods may cause more harm than they cause good.

Speaker 1:

Myth number two detoxes are a fast way to lose weight. Well, you may get some results quickly, but rapid weight loss from detoxing is often water loss or muscle depletion, not really fat. Because of the hyper low caloric intake from juices, you may go eating from a 2000 calorie diet per day to a 400 calorie diet per day. Your body will not go into fat burn because of that. After day two it's going to go into starvation mode and hold onto fat even more and start breaking down protein from muscle to try and figure out what the heck you're doing to it, to your body, as long as you're going to try and do this detox. So, and then what ends up happening is, once you're done and you start eating a normal diet, your body's not going to lose fat, it's going to try and retain even more for the next crazy thing you put it through. So that's what's happening there. It's a, it's a survival mechanism of our metabolism that does that.

Speaker 1:

Myth number three detoxing means feeling sick or exhausted. No, it should not make you feel sick or exhausted. These are extreme detoxes that people go through and that's why they have those side effects, While some fatigue can happen if we're going through carbohydrate detoxification, but extreme sickness during a detox may indicate that toxins are being mobilized faster than your body really can handle them. So they're not getting them out of the body, they're going back into the bloodstream and creating more of a inflammatory process as the liver tries to re-clean these up and the kidneys try to clean it up once again. Because guess where all toxins are held in the body after they're processed through our systems Our fat cells? That's where they all are stored. So when we go into a detox or a rapid weight loss, these fat cells start to shrink and they squeeze out everything that's in it from water. Waste products and toxins go back into the bloodstream and the lymphatic system and that's how our body goes back into trying to push them back out of the body.

Speaker 1:

And the fourth myth that I came up with was all detox supplements are effective. They're not, and I'm pretty sure all the listeners right here are not going to be duped by that. Many over-the-counter products lack scientific support or proper dosing for effective detox pathways. How can you sell one box of a colon cleanse to the entire population from the age of 21 years old to 79 years old, male, female, different weights, different heights? It doesn't make much sense.

Speaker 1:

This is why we need to get into doctor supervision when it comes to detoxes and unfortunately the medical field doesn't really do this. There is no real detoxification process under medical guidelines that you can go to a medical doctor, an MD or a DO that will put you through this. So you typically are looking at functional medical doctors who may be DOs, nurse practitioners, MDs, doctors of chiropractic in that realm who are licensed internists or in some type of functional medicine program. These testings will go through a few steps. There's three big steps they go through. Number one assess the toxin load.

Speaker 1:

In functional medicine we use testing for heavy metals, mold, pesticides, herbicides, anything that could be building up in the body, and that's through specific blood, hair analysis, saliva testing or even stool testing. Step two is we open the drainage pathways. That's what every functional medicine doctor is trying to do. We want to support the liver, kidney and gut function first with herbs, minerals and IV therapies. Step three is to mobilize these toxins. So open up the drainage pathways first, then mobilize toxins safely, in an effective way, not some crazy fad diet and we can mix some techniques in here, like IV therapy, infrared saunas, red light therapy and to stimulate sweating toxins out, stimulate cellular repair and using key antioxidants in the detox pathways, Something like glutathione, which can be taken orally or by intravenous to help these key antioxidants in the detox pathway directly into the bloodstream.

Speaker 1:

Then we got to use binders. Once we start to open up toxic pathways, we need to get binders into the system to hold on to these toxins, to not allow them to all go back into the bloodstream and recreate the inflammatory process of the liver, kidneys and lymph system to try and filter these things out again. So things like activated charcoal, bentonite clay and other binders help trap and remove toxins safely. And there's other stuff that we can use too. And number five, a doctor will always support your recovery through this, Rebuild nutrient stores with minerals, vitamins and probiotics. So every detox process should come with proper mineral support, some key vitamins and maybe even some probiotics, depending on what detox we're aiming for. Maybe we want to support the gut through that as well.

Speaker 1:

So my recommendation from a podcast which again is not medical advice please don't take any of this. Always work with a practitioner if you're going to do any of this stuff. There are no over-the-counter things that you can do, but you're more than welcome to try a juice fast, a two-day juice fast or the master cleanse for a few days. Whatever you want to try, you can try these things, but as long as you don't have an outcome that you're trying to get with this, because you're not going to get much from it. But if you're going to support any type of detox system, you want to look into milk thistle and acetylcysteine, which is sometimes called NAC or NAC. It boosts the glutathione naturally in the body. Dandelion roots and chlorella. Milk thistle is just wonderful liver support it's great for no matter what detox approach you want to take.

Speaker 1:

Maybe this is just like a one week health challenge you're going to put yourself through, You're going to eat clean, drink a lot of water and you want to support a detox pathways. This is stuff you can do safely. Add some milk thistle to your diet just a oral pill, some NAC that boosts the glutathione naturally in your body, Some dandelion root, which supports digestion and liver health, and then some chlorella, which is a natural, safe binder that binds to heavy metals. And follow the recommended dosage on the packages and you've got yourself your little mini detox challenge that you can do for seven days, 14 days, 30 days, whatever you like. Those are safe, short or long-term, with a proper diet and good hydration. So those are easy ways and some things you can take away and see how you feel. Most people feel better with these things. Very few feel worse and some just feel the same because they're overall healthy to come. You know most for most people.

Speaker 1:

Some practical detox strategies that you can follow are just from daily habits, so we can use detox support things like drinking enough filtered water, drinking enough per day. Most people need at least 100 ounces depending on your body weight of clean, filtered water every single day just to support natural detox. Just from sweating, urination and going to the bathroom All these things require hydration to get these wastes out through the body. We talked about the kidneys with water and urine, sweating and bowel movements they all require hydration and healthy doses of water to get healthy bowel movements and healthy amounts of urination. Coniferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower and these coniferous type vegetables are fantastic for natural liver support. So adding these to your diet to make your diet more healthy are great. Avoid processed foods and inflammatory oils. These things kind of bog down the natural detoxification processes of the body and by having healthy oils you help support detoxification and also a healthy diet.

Speaker 1:

Engage in regular exercise, regular sweating. It can be even a sauna. Sitting in a sauna every day for 15 minutes or 10 minutes. Just getting a natural sweat response can help the pathway of lymphatic flow and release of waste through the biggest organ in our body, our skin. Reduce toxin exposure by using natural household products and skincare. We talked about this heavily in the last episode. I would follow up with that right after this. It's a short one. We kept it 20 minutes. Go listen to that, and that's a great one as well. So, toxins and how to detox Really, the point of this podcast is to find a good practitioner If you feel like you're inflamed or you're backed up or, uh, you're, you're toxic, which many of us can go through a healthy detox system and and get reap great benefits from it.

Speaker 1:

You want a detox that is powerful for you but must be done safely and correctly, and that's only going to be done with a doctor, because you're going to have some pre-screening tests, like we talked about, through blood testing, saliva testing, stool testing, hair testing, whatever it is checking for heavy metals, molds, pesticides, herbicides, lead things that are exposed in our environments and probably within us and we want to encourage all of you that are listening to avoid foods and instead focus on improving their daily habits for long-term results.

Speaker 1:

So just doing everything right rather than just one thing right, and then schedule a consultation with a full life chiropractic and our functional med doctors there. You can go to info at full life tampacom and virtually get connected witha doctor that can help you through your detox journey. Most of these things can be done by mailing things directly to your doorstep. Very cool stuff there and listen in next week for our next episode on how to keep you and your family healthy, and if you have any specific detox questions, please feel free to email us. We love answering your questions and helping you out. Stay well, stay healthy, take care.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
Head Shot

Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host
Head Shot

Dr. Crystal Corona

Co-host