A Detailed Directive on Detoxification: What It Is, Where It Goes Wrong, and How to Support It
It’s been awhile since I last wrote a blog post… three years to be exact. There are many reasons for that, but a big one is time. Time because I hate short blog posts—now written with AI—that are generic. I tend to go ‘all in’ on blog posts because I want them to truly understand and embody a process, and give you takeaways so you can understand why you’re doing-taking-engaging in something. Also time because school and work take up majority of it—and Instagram—and this is just lower tier! That said…
Today I wanted to talk all about detoxification (i.e., ‘detox’). We talk about it, we talk about it like it’s botox or some other hot trend. But what exactly is it, how does it get blocked up, why is it so impaired, and why do castor oil packs, red light, sauna, and shoving coffee where the sun don’t shine actually even help? ~*All that and more in this week’s (year’s, at my rate) blog post!
I like to tie in the balance of my worlds, as it’s how I integrate and practice. Medical school and the knowledge I’ve learned has been invaluable at understanding how the body works. Comprehending complex bodily processes and ‘how’ things work has allowed me to understand and postulate why and how certain adjuncts and holistic modalaties work. This, undoubtedly, provides the ultimate ‘biohacking’ experience and outcome, of course!
INTRODUCTION TO DETOX SYSTEMS
So… introduction to detox systems. To understand how to support something, it’s undoubtedly pertinent to understand the underlying process of detoxification. While we often (may) think, “I take X substance, Y process (detox) occurs,” it really isn’t like this. Instead, many supplements support one part of a multistep process that we cumulatively call detox. This is why or how using one adjunct might actually make you feel worse; you may have issues upstream or downstream with other steps of detoxification (something similar to the multistep process of digestion).
In short, we can summarize the process of detoxification in a step-by-step format into the following:
Cellular detoxification
Lymphatic detoxification
Circulatory detoxification
Hepatic (liver) detoxification
Renal (kidney) detoxification
Intestinal detoxification
Pulmonary detoxification
Skin detoxification
In addition, other factors have to be aligned for the above to occur, which we’ll get into towards the end of the blog article.
Much like digestion (again, you can revisit my past blog posts on this involved process in this blog post here), there are a lot of steps that go into it. And, they are all dependent on one another. Hence, we refer to this as a ‘north-to-south’ process, and any lapses in phases ‘downstream’ could contribute to ‘blockages’ from preceding processes—kind of like a kinked hose (you wouldn’t turn the water on without making sure your friend’s foot was off the line so it could flow, get me?).
BUT WAIT… WHY DO WE NEED DETOX ANYWAY?
Detoxification is a process, a process where we remove wastes. But where do wastes even come from? And what’s the problem with them, anyway?
For starters, wastes are a product of metabolism. This means that even if you live the most toxic-free life, you will have toxins in your body. As enzymes in the body orchestrate metabolism or as the good Na-KATPase moves stuff to and from, wastes like carbon dioxide (CO2) can be created. Hence, something as simple as CO2 is considered a waste that needs to be eliminated.
While your body has it’s own junk to worry about, your organism has to handle the junk that inhabitants of it produce. Yes, bacteria—good and bad—fungi, parasites, yeast, and viruses (with the help of your cells) all produce their own wastes, which—again—you have to handle and eliminate. You also have to handle old cells that have died and been broken down as well as the stuff they contained.
Additionally, we are constantly interacting with our environment. From the water we drink, to the air we breathe, to the food we consume, things are constantly moving into and out of our organism.
Water contains a lot of good—you’d be dead without it—but with the increased toxicity of our environment—which interacts with water, of course—we can see an increased intake of heavy metals, bacteria, viruses, plastics, and xenobiotics including xenoestrogens which our bodies have to handle.
Food obviously gives us an abundance of life-giving substances, from fatty acids to carbohydrates (yes, they are life giving… let’s not start this debate today) and amino acids from protein to other micronutrients like vitamins, minerals, water, and the abundance of phytochemicals we are still learning about. BUT, it can also contain similar toxins to the ones listed above. Additionally, food—and water, too, to be honest—can contain pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, mold, fungi, dyes, colorings, flavorings, aromas, artificial sweeteners, and other undesirables that the body, once again, has to metabolize.
And finally, the air. The air—depending on where you live—can have more or less than just nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and other gases. Say, here’s some fun trivia for you, which is the most abundant gas in the air we breathe in each day (hint: not O2!). To date, there’s excessive amounts of air pollution as we know from manufacture, energy synthesis (oil and gas), and even air fresheners. Paints can off-gas, as can building materials and molds that inhabit them.
Aside from these very ‘basic’ inputs, there are also the ‘extras’. You can get toxins from the junk you smear on your body and face, and basically anything that interacts with your organism. The skin has the greatest raw surface area of the body, meaning it’s one big ol’ absorptive surface. If you’re bathing in toxic makeup, lotion, and cream, you’re just adding to your burden.
A bajillion substances are going into you EVERY day whether you like it or not, but you’re forced to handle. And the more you willingly let go into it, the more it has to handle! So, this is why it’s best to minimize the inputs and optimize the process of detox. It makes getting well much, much easier, and it also makes feeling better easy, too!
So, now that we’ve cleared up the inevitable of how you get to the point of accumulation, we can dive into the interconnected and somewhat complicated process of detoxification. Shall we? Let’s start at the beginning with the cells, and go through this team-mediated track race one by one.
CELLULAR DETOXIFICATION
Have you ever thought about where detoxification starts? Well, it’s (mostly) in the cells (or the organelles, depending on how you look at it).
Your body is made up of a bunch of little seemingly-independent beings, each with their own agenda that they coordinate into one. This structure is hierarchial, with individual roles feeding into the purpose of an organ or organ system, linking into the organism. It’s kind of wild, isn’t it? Nonetheless, each and every organ you think of is composed of a bunch of little (specialized) cells just ‘doing their thing’. In the liver, for example, you have the liver:
We have parenchymal cells known as the hepatocytes, making up 70-80% of the liver’s mass. These cells do things like macronutrient metabolism, detoxification, subsequent bile production, and storage of nutrients like glycogen, minerals, and vitamins.
We also have Kupffer cells, which are specialized white blood cells that filter the junk passing through the liver to be removed (i.e., old red blood cells, pathogens, and wastes).
We have stellate (Ito) cells that store the important fat-soluble nutrient vitamin A, and can produce excess collagen in times of fibrosis (when activated).
There are liver sinuisoidal endothelial cells (LSECs), which line sinusoids. They exchange molecules between blood and hepatocytes, and aide in immune tolerance.
There are also cholangiocytes, which line bile ducts and alter bile composition and initiate bile transport.
And dinally, there are pit cells which are natural killer (NK) cells unique to the liver that scour the incoming blood supply for tumor and virus-infected cells.
This literally is Team Liver - you have the goalkeeper, midfielders, defensive backs and center, and forwards all lined up, ready to complete your main mission: hepatic metabolism. Cumulatively, these give you the organ we know as, well, the liver, and the liver (hepatic) functions!
So aside from some interesting histology and pathology info, I wanted to highlight that within one organ, there are a bunch of little cells doing their own specialized-but-coordinated jobs. This isn’t unique to the liver; other organs you may think of—the stomach, kidneys, brain, heart, adrenal glands, and even the bone—have similar hierarchial structures.
And—for the importance of this article—each individual cell doing its thing has its own metabolism and ongoing metabolic processes. Metabolic processes can include synthesis (usually of proteins, carbohydrates, and its own fatty acids or derivatives), storage (of heavy metals, for example), transport of these molecules (which can require energy, which produces CO2, for example), and energy synthesis depending on the cell type. That means it has its own wastes from these processes, as does its neighbors. And while I’ve stepped into this analogy of ‘neighbors’…
You can think of waste removal of the cells like trash pickup from your neighborhood. Each cell (house) has its wastes, often from the kitchen and cleaning house. At the end of each day, everyone (or every cell) might bring their wastes out to the big bin for the waste to be excreted. And, X times per week, that waste is hauled away.
Now, in order for cell excretion and elimination to occur, we must optimize water, air, light, and nutrient intake. Kind of ironic how the same things that give us toxins also take them away, eh? This is because:
O2 is required for energy-dependent processes that may be involved in the facilitation of metabolism and elimination;
H2O (water) is the same, and cells must be hydrated for substance exchange to occur and to be moved; and
nutrients (fatty acids, amino acids, vitamins, minerals) are required to facilitate the actual processes involving proteins and enzymes.
light (and certain wavelengths) has been shown to stimulate organelles like the mitochondria (photobiomodulation) to increase ATP production, modulate reactive oxygen species, and improve ROS signalling to improve endogenous antioxidant release. It has also been shown to upregulate detox genes, autophagy, and toxin breakdown.
So, cellular detox is step 1. But where do those cell trash trucks take the trash after the bins have been picked up and emptied…?
THE LYMPHATICS
I’ve written quite a bit about the lymphatics on Instagram. You could call them the trash trucks of the human body, or you could also call this system the ‘sewer system’ of downtown Chicago (especially if your lymph is super dirty, then definitely downtown Chicago). Regardless, the lymph is the in-between of the cells and the metabolically-active organs involved in detoxification like the liver, kidneys, and lungs.
There are a few things to get straight off the bat with the lymph system in terms of understanding it:
There aren’t lymph-specific cells, per se, but this is where immune cells like lymphocytes, natural killer cells (NK), and other white blood cells (especially dendritic cells, macrophages, monocytes, and eosinophils) like to hangout. The lymphatic system is a component of the immune system, but the immune system is not unique to the lymphatic system, if you get me. The lymph does ‘distribute’ lymph cells, though.
The lymphatic system does not have its own pumping system; instead, it relies on the circulatory system and surrounding musculature to ‘pump’ it. Hence, when blood is not flowing and muscles are not moving—you are immobile—lymph is not flowing.
Your fat-soluble nutrients and large-chain fatty acids from animal fats and coconut oil are transported through the lymphatic system because of their size. So, if you are not so good at digesting fat, have a taxed GI system, or have poor lymph flow, it could be why fat doesn’t seem to work for you.
The lymphatic system handles around two to four liters of interstitial fluid (fluid in between the cells) per day, returning it to venous blood.
The lymph is found throughout the body, with a loose-to-formal collection system. It begins with:
lymph capillaries, which are small, blind-ended vessels intertwined throughout tissues. They really can’t be seen, but guide fluid forward to be collected and ‘herded’ together. This ‘fluid’ is interstitial fluid, which is the fluid that is ‘in between’ cells.
From there, collecting lymphatic vessels take over, which have backflow valves on them so fluid can’t come out and can only move forward. These move what they’ve collected onward to…
lymph nodes, which you all are likely familiar with. There are lymph nodes scattered throughout the body, most notably in the neck, gut, groin, armpits, breasts, and thorax. There aren’t actually any nodes in the head itself! Anyway, the nodes serve as regional ‘filters’, where white blood cells like B and T lymphocytes peruse, looking for antigens that can be found in pathogens or outside wastes. Once engaged, they swell, which you may feel with an infection.
These nodes carry lymph fluid onward via efferent lymphatic vessels, which simply means outgoing or away from lymph vessels. From here, they merge into…
Lymphatic trunks, which drain regions of the body. There are a few large ones, including but not limited to the jugular, subclavian, lumbar trunks, and intestinal trunk. They drain the head/neck, upper limbs/thorax, lungs, lower imbs/pelvis, and digestive organs, respectively.
Next you have the lymphatic ducts, which are th final collectors. You have the thoracic duct, which drains the left and 1/2 the right side of the body, and you also have the right lymphatic duct which drains the right head, neck, arm, and thorax. Together, these drain into the venous system, which pumps all the waste collected into circulation so the detox organs can get to it. This is right above your subclavian, which you can pump just above your clavicle bones to get things moving.
The cisterna chyli is a large ‘pot’ if you will of lymph fluid sitting in the thorax that collects fluid from the abdominal organs and lower pelvic organs; it sits near L1-L2, and transports a lot of lymph fluid from the GI.
You also have lymphoid organs, like the spleen, bone marrow, thymus, appendix, gastrointestinal tract (gut-associated lymphoid tissue, or GALT), tonsils, adenoids, and lymph nodes (as mentioned above). If these are ‘dirty’, or constantly paraded and trampled with wastes, the lymph can be bombarded and the intertwined-immune system can be overengaged.
So, IN SUMMARY, we have:
Lymph capillaries -> collecting lymph vessels -> lymph nodes -> lymph trunks -> lymph ducts -> venous system
If you didn’t guess, to keep your lymph functioning fully and freely, hydration is the greatest thing you can give it. Additionally, movement—even if it’s just walking or deep breathing to pump the cisterna chyli—are probably numbers 2 and 3. From there, you can get into lymph-supportive substances like enzymes, acidity to thin thickened fluid, and nutrients that support circulation are probably the best things for it. And, of course, avoid putting too much junk in to clog it up!
Additionally, castor oil packs tend to be helpful as well as lymph massage like The Big 6 Lymph Clearance. You can do this multiple times per day, if you so have the time!
So, now that we’re through the hierarchy of needs for the lymph—and now that it’s flowing high and mighty into the cirulation system—we move onto the next system, which we’ve already kind of talked about.
THE LIVER
While we took a dive into liver cell hierarchy earlier, we might be able to infer a bit about what the liver does.
For starters, the liver is a mega-metabolic organ. In fact, it’s probably THE metabolic powerhouse of the body. Not only does it detox and eliminate a big heap of wastes that come to it, but it also regulates energy balance in the bloodstream by keeping blood glucose in balance. This means that when its high, it synthesizes components like glycogen (glucose storage) and fatty acids (like cholesterol), whereas when it’s lower it might create glucose from protein (gluconeogenesis), breakdown glycogen and stored fat so we have glucose and free-fatty acids. It metabolizes, or rather, inactivates hormones (i.e., insulin) while also making others inative (i.e., thyroid hormone - T3). It stores minerals (iron, copper), water-soluble vitamins (B9, B12), fat-soluble vitamins (A, D, E, K), and even heavy metals. It it produces a slew of proteins required for drug transport, hormone transport, nutrient transport, blood clotting, and more, while also having immune functions, like scouring the blood for pathogens. The liver removes wastes like alcohol and ammonia from the blood, and renders them inactive to avoid damage. And finally, for today, it produces bile—for waste removal and fatty acid emulsification—from all these things that are left over.
But into the subject of detoxification with regard to the liver, it occurs in a few successive ‘phases’ if you will, once we get into cells. And again, we go into the cellular level of detox that we talked about in the previous paragraph.
LIVER: PHASE I
So, phase I liver detox is something some of you may have heard of. It predominantly occurs in hepatocytes, or liver cells that we mentioned earlier, in the endoplasmic reticulum. This is an organelle within the cell, if you can recall back to high school bio (I can’t, so no shame if you can’t, but I had to make the point). Now, the liver as an organ has different lobules that we divide it into to spatially orient ourselves, but phase I often occurs in zone 1 as it is richer in endoplasmic reticulum enzymes. Think of it as a handoff between a chef and a sous-chef (we’ll talk about the sous-chef in phase II).
Anyway, the purpose of phase I reactions are to transform a toxic substance into one that is more water soluble so it can be more easily eliminated from the body. We call this process biotransformation, which is a synonym for phase I. Nonetheless, this process requires a slew of enzymes we call cytochrome p450 enzymes, or ‘CYP’ for short (i.e., CYP3A4, CYP2D6, CYP2D9). You may have heard of some of these enzymes for their roles in drug metabolism, too. They aren’t unique to the liver, either, and can be found throughout the GI tract, the liver, and even the lungs!
Anyway, these enzymes are catalyzed by nutrients to be executed properly, including but not limited to B vitamins (all), amino acids like cysteine, glycine, and glutamine, iron, magnesium, copper, zinc, vitamin C, vitamin E, carotenoids, and selenium (to name a few, and I’m sure I’m missing some). So, if you don’t have these nutrients, it can be hard for this process to take place (kind of like not having eggs or that 1/3 cup of vegetable oil to make a box cake).
In the process of phase I reactions—like reduction, oxidation, and hydroxylation being some of the main ones—we actually temporarily make an already-toxic substance into reactive intermediates which can be more harmful than the parent compound. While this is unfavorable as it can create oxidive damage if not ‘passed off’ to phase II reactions in a timely fashion, it is essential to, again, make the molecule we’re trying to get rid of more water soluble.
LIVER: PHASE II
So, now onto phase II liver detox, and this is a section I’m sure some of you have heard about! Once we’ve gone through phase I detoxification, it’s paramount that phase I takes the cake—otherwise, you have some of those harmful substances that were temporarily made more harmful floating around circulation and creating oxidative damage. Phase II liver detox, in contrast to phase I in the endoplasmic reticulum, takes place in the cytosol (mostly) and smooth endoplasmic reticulum of the hepatocytes. Phase II liver detoxification thus includes processes you may be familiar with already, like glutathione conjugation, sulfation, glycine conjugation, acetylation, glucuronidation, and (minor) methylation. Let’s review these a bit more in depth:
Glutathione conjugation - perhaps the most well-known phase of phase II liver detox, it takes care of polycyclic hydrocarbons (charred meats), aflatoxins (mold), metabolites from acetaminophen, heavy metals, and reactive compounds from phase I.
Glycine conjugation - glycine is an amino acid found in collagenous meats. However, it’s also used by the body to metabolize compounds like salicylates, aspirin (hence salicylic acid), some environmental pollutants, bile acids, and certain drugs.
Glucuronidation - attaching of glucoronic acid. Used in detoxification of steroid hormones like estrogen, testosterone, and cortisol, as well as bisphenols, bilirubin, and fat-soluble vitamins.
Methylation - the attachment of 1 methyl group, or CH3. Often a main detox mechanism for catecholamines, histamine, estrogens, and heavy metals like arsenic and mercury.
Acetylation - aside from drugs, we acetylate substances like caffeine, dyes, tobacco smoke, and heterocyclic amines in cooked meats.
Sulfation - sulfation gets a good bit of attention for its role in autism; it’s why epsom salt baths are also so helpful! We use sulfation to eliminate phenolic compounds like neurotransmitters (dopamine, catecholamines, thyroid hormone, and serotonin), steroid hormones (estrogens), and phenols from food and fragrance.
While you might jump up now to go buy bottles and bottles of glycine, NAC, and glutathione, I’m going to advise you not to do that. Your bodies make a lot of these nutrients on their own (i.e., glutathione, sulfate, glucoronic acid). And while taking a ‘magic pill’ can be helpful sometimes when the body is taxed or SNPs are active, it’s not a universal thing for everyone, even despite the environment being ever-so toxic. Instead, the body produces many of these substances it uses for phase II detoxification endogenously, or on its own, in house. But how?
Nutrients.
And this is where I believe mineral balancing to be so helpful, as it supports these processes—and the very glands that get depleted and way-laid after years of toxin inundation—on its own. And it’s why it’s (usually) a foundation within my practice! Note: it does not force them to detox, which can be equally exhausting as you would by taking glutathione. Instead, it gives them the nutrients it requires to do it on their own!
And aside from nutrients from something like mineral balancing and perhaps more importantly (definitely more importantly) is to eat a healthy diet full of foods and low on toxins (buy organic, people). Food is the OG source of nutrients, and no matter what Influencer NPC #1 says, artificial nutrients are not equal to what we find in food.
But, nonetheless, we need nutrients to execute phase II.
So after substances are metabolized via phase I and phase II, they are deemed ‘water soluble’ and can be excreted. This is where the intestines and phase III comes in.
INTESTINES
The intestines have a somewhat unique role in detoxification, and they ‘interplay’ with a lot of other steps (i.e, lymphatics). But first, let’s cap off phase III of liver/GI detox.
In phase III, the waste we made from phase I and II is shunted into the bile by hepatocytes. This bile is used to emulsify your fats and catalyze fat digestion and fat-soluble vitamin absorption, yes. But it’s also used to rid yourself of the toxins in your bile! Cool multiuse, eh? Anyway, the importance of phase III is actually excreting the wastes we’ve created. To do this, bile needs to bind to something in the GI tract—soluble fiber. This is the fiber in food that swells when it hits water and expands, kind of like psyllium husk if you’ve ever seen it (see a picture below). This ‘heart-healthy’ fiber is called this because it can bind to the cholesterol in the bile, reducing circulating levels.
In addition to soluble fiber, you also need insoluble fiber, which is the fiber you probably think of when you think of fiber—it’s the fibrous green roughage in broccoli and lettuce. This is the ‘colon-cancer preventing’ fiber, as it serves as the battering ram we can’t digest that catapults and shoves food through the tube of your GI.
So, you can summarize phase III detox as bile formation and elimination—aka, pooping. In addition to soluble and insoluble fibers, you also need phosphatidylcholine, water, salt, vitamin C, taurine, glycine, and cholesterol to make bile, and a consistent poop schedule to ensure the stools you’re making actually make it out of the chute. Additionally, you eed a little bit of dietary fat (at least 15-20% calories from fat) to trigger the release of that bile.
Now, bile is extremely laborious to produce, and your body is one lazy sun of a gun. So, to be more energy efficient, it recycles bile by reabsorbing it in the distal part of your small intestine. And while this saves it time and resources, you want to get some of it out. So, eat your bile-baking precursor nutrients, hydrate, and make sure you poop EVERY DAY, optimally more in the range of two to three times per day (not week!).
Aside from the role in physical excretion, the intestines also contain a great bit of lymphatic tissue. Hence, if your intestines are full of junk from a low-fiber, high-processed-food, high-sugar diet that feeds bacteria, yeast, and whatever else, your lymph is more likely to be backed up. So, intestinal health is critical for the ‘upstream’ health of your detoxification shunt. You can read here about digestive function, and how poor GI function can influence health in this blog post I wrote.
Additionally, your intestines play a role in enzymatic degradation of substances, much like the liver. As I mentioned in the last section on liver, phase I enzymes like CYPs can be found in the GI tract. So, metabolism of a lot of substances thus begins in the gut—this is why some drugs are taken topically or sublingually, to avoid this early degradation.
I think that’s all I wanted to say on the intestinal role of elimination. Oh, and intestinal elimination supports can include—most famously—colonics and coffee implants. Additionally, binders and aDsorbant agents can dramatically help to bind and eliminate toxins within the GI tract (I have a ‘playlist’ of them, here for a hefty discount). Simply supporting digestion and bringing the gastrointestinal microbiome back into balance goes a long way without the former two, too.
So, now onto the…
KIDNEYS AND RENAL ELIMINATION
The kidneys are paramount for waste exchange, using urine as their outflow mechanism.
As blood arrives at the kidneys, it flows to a nephron where wastes and solutes are separated out. Some are reabsorbed to maintain concentration gradients that help for fluid to be filtered out and maintain a concentration gradient funnel (i.e., urea), but others are released in areas like the proximal tubule via energy-requiring secretion. This includes but is not limited to heavy metals, drugs, hormones, ammonia, and more. Failures or damage to the sensitive and fragile kidneys can result in impaired secretion.
Additionally, certain constraints can impair the kidneys from doing their jobs. If you are chronically dehydrated from inadequate water and essential electrolytes (i.e., sodium, potassium, magnesium, or calcium), it not only makes it tough for fluid to flow into and out of the kidneys, but it also makes exchange difficult to occur. The kidneys are also a main site acid-base regulation, so if you’re someone who has been chronically ill for some time, renal function and support is critical to keeping this in balance so your body can function optimally.
SKIN/INTEGUMENTARY ELIMINATION
As I said earlier, your skin has the largest surface area with the outside world. It is not completely impermeable, although we are ‘waterproof’. As you know, pores are the little holes we see on our faces that give us nightmares when we look in the mirrors sometimes (some more than others). These are communications between the inside world and outside allowing for permeability yielding absorption and excretion of substances we touch. We also have sweat glands, but these are more outflows.
While we’ve mentioned that we can absorb stuff from skin products, clothes, and whatever our skin touches, this bidirectional barrier is also shown to excrete stuff via sweat. While the liver is a main metabolizer for toxins, studies have shown small amounts of heavy metals and xenobiotics in sweat.
If you’re into supporting this aspect of detoxification, try and get in a sauna a few times per week. Near-infrared sauna (NIR) is likely the easiest; think of a dry sauna after your workout for 15-20 minutes just to get a decent sweat on. Far-infrared saunas (FIR) are a bit more intense, so I do not recommend them as often but they are nice, too!
THE LUNGS AND ELIMINATION
Although not a posterchild for elimination, the lungs serve as an avenue of detox directly and indirectly. For starters, many metabolites like/from carbon dioxide (CO2), ketones, drugs, and alcohol are excreted through breath. If you remember those CYP enzymes from the liver section, the lungs have some of those, too.
Additionally, the lungs provide oxygen for us, which is a critical precursor nutrient for a slew of energy-dependent processes involved in metabolism and excretion. And, finally, the lungs require us to breathe, which requires our diaphragm to move up and down. This pumps the cisterna chyli of our lymphatics, helping lymph to flow.
Cool how it all connects, eh?
To optimize this aspect of detoxification, ensure you’re breathing—and breathing deeply. Breathe into the belly, not the chest!
OTHER HONORABLE MENTIONS IN DETOXIFICATION
Aside from straight organ systems that coordinate to optimize the stuff going out of you, there are other ‘barriers to entry’—or exit, as I should probably say—that could keep your detox series of events from occuring in a successive fashion. Some of these include—but are of course not limited to:
Physical barriers.
Lack of movement can impair circulation and thus lymphatic flow. If you can recall, lymph does not have a pumping system and relies on muscles pumping and blood flowing to carry it forward. Hence, being too sedentary can contribute to lymph stagnation as well as blood flow to essential detoxification organs.
No sweating. As we mentioned above, sweating is a means of detoxification. If you’re not moving or you’re in air conditioning all the time, it’s tough to work up a sweat and ‘offgas’ some of that junk within you.
While it sounds elementary, not breathing / not breathing deeply can impair your ability to eliminate. While the lungs help you expel toxins, the oxygen you require to fuel elimination processes also comes in via the lungs. And, finally, breathing and the use of the diaphragm muscle also pumps the cisterna chyli of the lymphatic system.
Structural barriers.
Muscles/muscle imbalances. Your posture—which is held into place by your muscles—can dictate and contribute to how well—or not well—your lymph or blood vessels flow. If you’re someone with extreme muscular imbalances, you may be deviated too much or too far to the left, the right… nonetheless, it can alter flow. This also plays into…
Fascia, or the seran wrap that essentially encircles muscles, nerves, and blood vessels to keep them in place (or conduit-like tissue, if you like the construction analogy better), is essential to keeping the body in an organized fashion. But fascia is constantly remodeling, keeping the muscles you’re using (or not) in the place that you left them. If you deal with chronic pain, hypermobility, or chronic pain from hypermobility, pay attention to your fascia! Nonetheless, fascia wrapped around related structures can impinge on its ability to flow. Hence, work on your fascia!
Surgical or anatomical abnormalaties. After surgeries, sometimes someone can develop lymphedema. Come to find out, lymph nodes may have been touched, removed, or disturbed, which alters the flow of lymph (negatively). As a result, lymph may now flow so well. This can be common after certain cancers and their subsequent surgeries to remove them.
Biochemical barriers.
Nutrient deficiencies. As we mentioned, nutrients are the ‘raw ingredients’ that not only drive a lot of the enzymes chemically detoxing you, but that also go into synthesizing the substances that neutralize them. For example, glutamine, glycine, and cysteine are critical precursor nutrients needed to synthesize the antioxidant glutathione. On a different aspect, other nutrients like B6 and molybdenum are responsible for ‘transforming’ precursor substrates from amino acid derivatives of sulfur into sulfite, and then sulfate (eventually). Without ALL ESSENTIAL NUTRIENTS it becomes hard to do all essential processes. This is also why it’s important to get the spectrum of nutrients vs just one, two, or three you read about on Healthline. Please—eat good food AND take nutrients that suit you, as a program like mineral balancing recommends!
Excess toxins in. If you are living in an excessively toxic lifestyle and have an internally-toxic environment, it’s hard for your nutrient reserves to keep up as well as your organs. Hence, clean your environment up! It’s as much about minimizing toxins going in as it is maximizing them going out!
Biological barriers.
No sun. Sunlight is responsible for a host of effects on the body; we are learning more and more what those are! Aside from giving us the ability to transform cholesterol into vitamin D and quell inflammation that could be impairing lymph flow, it also has been shown to stimulate organelles involved in elimination, like mitochondria via photobiomodulation. Hence, starving yourself of sun might have other detriments we are still learning about. It also can make it harder for you to sweat. To optimize this aspect of elimination, red light devices are really helpful; they’re also great for engaging the parasympathetic nervous system.
SNPs. While I hate the tendency for everyone to jump to single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for detox, I really don’t believe they’re everything everyone says they are in terms of importance for being XYZ. You are not your genes, and unless you’re dealing with a monogenic anomaly (i.e., a genetic mutation), your enzymes are still working. However, they may not function as optimally as someone without the SNP variation under stress. And that’s it—under stress, including environmnetal, emotional, mental, physical, or biochemical. And we do live in an increasingly toxic world, where it would matter much more when you have an enzyme capacity that might work slightly worse than your neighbor’s. Which makes sense, right? If you run on an ankle you previously broke, it might not work as well as the other one. Nonetheless, supporting SNPs out of stress CAN be helpful if there is relentless intolerance. In other words, it can show you where you can support your weaknesses to get to the other side. But I do not believe in the idea of ‘treating a gene’ as some others tend to go about. In other words, just because your gene says X (ex: you have the infamous alteration in methyl-tetrahydrofolate-reductase, or MTHFR) does not mean you need to eat folate pills for the rest of your life (but you should eat folate from green stuff pretty regularly). Do you get me?
MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL HEALTH ON DETOXIFICATION
Many of us think mental and emotional health are separate from physical, but did you know mental and emotional dysfunction can physically obstruct detoxification?
Mental and emotional imbalances—stressors—tend to increase the function of the sympathetic nervous system—and if you’re unfamiliar with what that is, check out this blog post I wrote. This, in turn, can (does) lead to vasoconstriction of the blood vessels. Subsequently, detox organs and the gastrointestinal tract can see limited blood flow, limiting processing time. If you’re familiar with the sympathetic and parasympathetic sects of the autonomic nervous system, you would know that the sympathetic nervous system ‘shuts off’ the parasympathetic—the ‘rest-and-digest’. In a rest-and-digest state, the body can regenerate, circulate, heal, clean house, and regulate flow of digestive juices.
Sympathetic tone can also impair digestion and digestive transit. It inhibits or decreases the secretion of digestive juices like stomach acid, bile, and pancreatic enzymes, which help with peristalsis (movement of food throughout GI) and the actual chemical process of digestion. You can also check out this OTHER blog post I wrote on gastro function, in detail. This not only can impair the elimination of bile, but it can also create more maldigested wastes to sit in the intestines and lymphatics. Blood flow is limited to the gastrointestinal tract (GIT), too, which can impair bowel contractions and facilitate constipation.
High cortisol can also affect phase I-II enzymes in the liver and create an imbalance. For some, this means increased phase I relative to phase II, which could leave someone with more reactive intermediates from a sluggish phase II to ‘catch’ them. Cortisol also speeds up metabolism, which can deplete resources (nutrients) more rapidly. It also drives inflammation and oxidative stress as it is a catabolic hormone, which can impair healing processes and take a toll on the detoxification system.
Although secondary, stress can impair sleep, increase stress eating, decrease motivation, and increase distraction. For some, it can also draw us to the use of certain substances (alcohol, tobacco, nicotine, and drugs). These compensatory behaviors themselves can wreak havoc on inflammation and detoxification. Finally, mental and emotional stress can contribute to tight muscles and fascia, which ultimately can impair circulation of the lymph and circulatory systems.
So, emotional and mental health can greatly affect your ability to detoxify, although we normally don’t think the two intertwine!
TOXINS IN DISEASE: WHY DOES DETOX EVEN MATTER?
If you’re perfectly healthy and reading article, good on you. Keep reading to be encouraged to focus on detox so you can evade illness. And if you’re not, I’d like to delve into how too many toxins could be contributing to your sickness.
So, there is/are a myriad of conditions that toxicity and toxin overwhelm can/could contribute to, including but not limited to:
Autoimmunity
Diabetes
Metabolic Syndrome
Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD)
Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (AFLD)
Cirrhosis
Cancer
Obesity
Heart disease
Fibormyalgia
Chronic pain
ADD/ADHD
Autism
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Mesothelioma
Parkinson’s
Alzheimer’s
dementia
Bipolar
Mania
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD)
Premenstrual Syndrome (PMS)
Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS)
Endometriosis
Immunodeficiency conditions
…many more I won’t take the time to type out!
In terms of autoimmunity, toxins are largely flowing past the immune system in the gut and lymphatics. If they’re there for too long or there excessively, the immune system becomes activated. If inflammation goes on long enough, you can see a myriad of conditions occur, from autoimmunity, to obesity, cardiovascular disease, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, or attention conditions.
Additionally, toxins have the ability to alter how well or not well the body and immune system surveillance cells flowing through it. If it lets too many of its own cells that are too old to function to continue, these cells evade autophagy and regulated cell death. As a result, you could get cancer.
Toxins also damage vital cell components like DNA, which alter how well the cell divides and procreates. Again, this can contribute to cancer if sick cells continue to live and forego apoptosis (programmed cell death), or if they essentially continue to procreate at defective times.
Toxins can alter how well or not well enzymes function. Certain toxins, like heavy metals, have similar valence structures and charges to essential nutrients. For example, lead (Pb) looks very similar to calcium (Ca) and iron (Fe) in terms of charge. So, when the body is ‘making’ enzymes containing calcium and it doesn’t have enough but lead is abundant, it can insert lead where calcium or iron should go. As a result, some enzymes that contribute to detox might not work so well, or they may junk up certain metabolic processes yielding more waste.
Toxins also draw on nutrient stores to be eliminated, as in the case with plastics, pesticides, hormones, and other junk we’re exposed to more and more frequently. If we don’t have those nutrients because we’re using them excessively, guess what resources we have to eliminate other stuff and heal? Well, much, much less.
If toxins are excessive, they can create more oxidative damage in their path throughout the body. This can create inflammation, which is a catabolic—or destructive to bodily tissues—process. Subsequently, the body can respond with fibrosis, scarring, calcification, and ongoing tissue breakdown and ‘patching’ with junky substances. Conditions like atherosclerosis, cirrhosis, heart disease, COPD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, neurodegeneration, and neuropathy all have ties to this means of toxin damage.
Excess of certain hormones that ‘look’ like hormones within the environment—AKA xenoestrogens—can contribute to high or low endogenous hormone activities. This can manifest as estrogen-dominant conditions like PMDD, PMS, endometriosis, or high-estrogen cancers. Additionally, it can contribute to high-androgen conditions like polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS. Because of hormonal homeostasis, we can also see infertility or frequent miscarriages in women, infertility, gynecomastia, and low sperm counts in men, and higher incidences of birth defects in children. In both, it can contribute to obesity.
While we are on the topic of children, increased toxin load has been tied to conditions spanning from autism to ADD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression. And while on the topic of mental health, toxins like heavy metals have been linked to mood disorders including but not limited to schizophrenia and bipolar.
CONCLUSION: IF YOU KNOW HOW IT WORKS, YOU KNOW HOW IT BECOMES DYSFUNCTIONAL
In my messed up brain, I have come to realize I do not do a behavior unless I know why I’m doing it. So I hope you can understand what detox is, how it works, and where it can go wrong so you want to make and implement changes into detoxification and elimination!
