Detox Alert: Body Cleanses Can be Dangerous for Your Health

WELLNESS-Obviously, the best way to live healthy is by eating a clean diet, breathing clean air, and drinking clean water combined with a low stress life. While this sounds great on paper, let’s face it folks, this is easier said than done. If you’re like most people out there, vices will occasionally get the best of us, and in the process of trying to balance out our less than ideal choices, many people end up going on extreme and even dangerous cleanses.  

There are so many different  body cleanses or detox programs out there it’s tough to know which one to use … if any. Some say that there is no point to detoxifying the body and that all the programs out there are a sham. Others live by certain strict detox programs and do them every four months or so and claim to feel great afterwards. As usual, the truth regarding detoxification programs falls somewhere in the middle.  

For starters, many of these detox programs focus on the liver and gallbladder. The liver is a rather large organ that is located underneath your ribs on the right side of the body. It is the second largest organ in the body outsized only by the skin and weighs roughly 3 pounds in an adult. The gallbladder sits below and slightly to the left of the liver and is a much smaller organ about the size and shape of a small pear. The liver makes bile and gallbladder stores this bile. When we eat fats, the gallbladder releases bile through a narrow duct into the small intestine to help break down those fats.  

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Very often, liver and gallbladder cleanses include a period of fasting or juicing followed by a large intake of extra virgil olive oil. The point or idea of this action is to shock the gallbladder into contracting aggressively so as to release or pass gallstones if there are any present. This style of cleansing can be very dangerous when the stones present in the gallbladder are larger than the duct. If a stone were to get stuck in that duct it can be very painful and may even require emergency surgery.  

There are healthier ways to detoxify the body. I try to stress a healthy diet and clean water all the time, but if someone feels like they need to do a cleanse, I tell my patients to take a gentle approach. Your best bet is to skip overpriced and often dangerous detox programs and instead simply cut greasy fatty foods from your diet and eat fruit and vegetables for a period of time. It can be as short as one day for beginners or as long as 3 days for people used to this practice. 

The body knows how to use what you give it, and by simply cutting certain foods from your diet like simple sugars (cake, bread, pasta, chips), along with greasy foods and dairy, you will be giving your body a break from the foods that are taxing your organs. Other items to consider reducing or eliminating are alcohol, chemical laces foods like diet soda or artificial sweeteners, sugar especially of the refined type, and all pizza and fast foods. 

At the end of a short period of eating very healthy for 1 to 3 days many people find that they don’t even crave the junk food any more. Consider this a hard reset for your physical body, and know that a short gentle cleanse may be just what the doctor ordered.

 

(Christian Cristiano is an acupuncturist, TV host of Wellness for Realists and writes on wellness regularly for CityWatch. Christian can be reached at 323.935.3420 (d) or 310.909.6956 (m).

-cw

  

CityWatch

Vol 13 Issue 15

Pub: Feb 20, 2015