# What is the best way to Detox your body?



## KelseyAlena (Jan 15, 2012)

I get herbal supplements for my allergies and i have heard if you detox your body it can help tremendously if you have allergy problems. Just curious what are the best ways to detoxify your body?


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## T-Bone (Oct 1, 2010)

Defecation and urination most likely.


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## ApathyDivine (Feb 28, 2012)

A supplement called milk thistle is supposed to help


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## TrcyMcgrdy1 (Oct 21, 2011)

Green tea and exercise. Sweating is a great way to get rid of the crap in your system!


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## Duke of Prunes (Jul 20, 2009)

SomebodyWakeME said:


> Defecation and urination most likely.


This. Your GI tract, liver and kidneys are already 'detoxing' you right now, and any so-called 'detox' diet would probably lack the nutrition required for them to work correctly. There is absolutely no need to 'detox' yourself, it's just pseudo-scientific nonsense.


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## pisceskyuu (Jul 29, 2012)

#1 way to detox quickly is to fast. when you fast you are not eating so instead of your body spending energy through the day digesting and processing food into energy, etc., your body can focus on healing and detox. when you get the cold or a flu, fast and you will be back to health more quickly than those who dont...

or you could try pysllium husk powder with bentonite clay...


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## Duke of Prunes (Jul 20, 2009)

pisceskyuu said:


> #1 way to detox quickly is to fast. when you fast you are not eating so instead of your body spending energy through the day digesting and processing food into energy, etc., your body can focus on healing and detox. when you get the cold or a flu, fast and you will be back to health more quickly than those who dont...
> 
> or you could try pysllium husk powder with bentonite clay...


No, when you fast, you are putting your liver under excessive load with gluconeogenesis to compensate for the absence of dietary carbohydrates, and your kidneys under excessive load with all the myoglobin going through them from all the muscle that has to be broken down as a source of amino acids to compensate for the absence of dietary protein. Fasting does not 'detox' you, rather the opposite, as the organs that should be doing that job cannot function efficiently when they are instead being used to create emergency glucose or filter out the toxic by-products of dying muscle tissue. Prolonged fasting has even scarier effects. Basic knowledge of biochemistry to the rescue...


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## lonelyjew (Jan 20, 2010)

I really doubt the validity of that claim sadly. The best theory as to the causes of allergy is our immune system not creating a certain antibody (IgG) when we are young because we were kept too clean and weren't able to expose it well enough. When you are exposed at a later age, you develop a different type of antibody (IgE) instead, which is responsible for allergic reactions. Honestly, I don't know what "detoxing" one's body actually even means, if it means anything definitively, but one thing that could help would be to eat foods that are considered to be low inflammatory foods. If you can drop levels of systemic pro inflammatory substances, perhaps it would make the cells responsible for the allergic reaction calm down and produce less antibodies and/or not go as crazy when they are activated by allergens. 

As far as I know, the only proven treatment is to slowly build up a tolerance by receiving injections with tiny doses of the allergen. The idea here is that small doses will not activate allergic responses, and will expose the allergen to other immune cells, and eventually lead to the creation of IgG (the non allergic antibody). Eventually the IgG will grab the allergen before the IgE is able to, and I think during the process, you begin to make less IgE as well. 

Lastly, another promising treatment I've heard about is.... hookworms. IgE is our bodies defense against parasites and parasites have evolved ways to suppress our immune system in a way that reduces the effectiveness of IgE. This suppression, from testimonials I've heard, can apparently completely eliminate allergies. While hookworms are parasites, and too many can be dangerous, these sources say that if you take only a few, that you could be completely fine.


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## Fawnhearted (Jul 24, 2012)

Duke of Prunes said:


> No, when you fast, you are putting your liver under excessive load with gluconeogenesis to compensate for the absence of dietary carbohydrates, and your kidneys under excessive load with all the myoglobin going through them from all the muscle that has to be broken down as a source of amino acids to compensate for the absence of dietary protein. Fasting does not 'detox' you, rather the opposite, as the organs that should be doing that job cannot function efficiently when they are instead being used to create emergency glucose or filter out the toxic by-products of dying muscle tissue. Prolonged fasting has even scarier effects. Basic knowledge of biochemistry to the rescue...


omg I love you so much in this thread.


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## komorikun (Jan 11, 2009)

My roommate who had allergies was using a neti pot to clean her nasal cavity. Just don't use tap water cause you can get a rare brain infection.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasal_irrigation

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias=hpc&field-keywords=neti+pot

I don't have any allergies probably because growing up my home was sort of messy and we had cats. My mom was an artist and she was more into drinking a bit of wine (pot occasionally) while painting with her daughters than cleaning. They say the more pets and especially the more siblings you have while growing up the less likely you will get allergies. I also had pinworm for many years (I didn't tell my dad about it till I was 15). My sister doesn't have any allergies either.


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## Noca (Jun 24, 2005)

NAC, Acai berries, Vitamin C, blue berries are all good anti-oxidants.


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## MachineSupremacist (Jun 9, 2012)

Did Acai berries even exist before two years ago? 

Duke of Prunes/Fawnhearted 2012! Somebody's gotta tell the alternative health people they're wrong.


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## DeniseAfterAll (Jul 28, 2012)

Go veggie xD > and do it right.. 

By the way - 666 Threads in the Health category.. lolz


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## Equimanthorn (Aug 5, 2012)

Duke of Prunes said:


> No, when you fast, you are putting your liver under excessive load with gluconeogenesis to compensate for the absence of dietary carbohydrates, and your kidneys under excessive load with all the myoglobin going through them from all the muscle that has to be broken down as a source of amino acids to compensate for the absence of dietary protein. Fasting does not 'detox' you, rather the opposite, as the organs that should be doing that job cannot function efficiently when they are instead being used to create emergency glucose or filter out the toxic by-products of dying muscle tissue. Prolonged fasting has even scarier effects. Basic knowledge of biochemistry to the rescue...


There are many people who would disagree with you about that. People with PhDs and stuff like that. But it's 5am and I don't feel like debating fasting right now. I think it serves a purpose though. Fasting has been debated forever and will continue to be, so touting your "basic knowledge of biochemistry" and posting a cute little gif doesn't quite wrap up the argument. Sorry you just came across as a little insulting.

Anyways, as far as the question at hand, don't fall for all the stupid trendy detox diets or products. Just go on a raw food diet for a bit. Yes, the raw food diet is becoming quite trendy itself, but at least it isn't selling you any products or magic pills and is rooted pretty firmly in common sense. Eat the natural foods that were provided for us on this planet and stay away from cooking everything to death and killing all the enzymes. Drink a decent amount of water. Exercise to get your lymphatic system moving. Get fresh air and sunlight.


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## Olesya (May 8, 2011)

a huge watermelon always helps me; and you're gonna pee a lot after eating it, kind of cleaning the stuff out


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## KelseyAlena (Jan 15, 2012)

Thanks everyone for your input. But now I'm even more confused at what's good for your body. My aunt is a health nut and she does cleansing techniques (like not eating for a day) and she swears by it. But I feel like crapnif I don't eat all day.


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## Paper Samurai (Oct 1, 2009)

KelseyAlena said:


> Thanks everyone for your input. But now I'm even more confused at what's good for your body. My aunt is a health nut and she does cleansing techniques (like not eating for a day) and she swears by it. But I feel like crapnif I don't eat all day.


Fasting can be helpful in some circumstances, but most people that do it take a day off and just relax rather than do their normal schedule. If you were to try and fast when doing a normal hectic day you'll probably pass out !


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## KelseyAlena (Jan 15, 2012)

Paper Samurai said:


> Fasting can be helpful in some circumstances, but most people that do it take a day off and just relax rather than do their normal schedule. If you were to try and fast when doing a normal hectic day you'll probably pass out !


True. Have you fasted before? How was it for you?


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## Paper Samurai (Oct 1, 2009)

I have indeed fasted, but saying that fasting is not the be all and end all that some people like to make out. 

It's basically energy re-distribution. Digestion takes up a fair deal of energy so the thinking is by fasting we save on it's usage and instead the body will heal up - which it does so some extent anyway day in day out (mostly when you sleep) 

When any animal (which includes humans) are ill, they naturally lose their appetite - your body's natural response to attempt to re-allocate energy to heal up so it shuts down the hunger mechanism to avoid any unnecessary digestion.

So yeah, basically fasting can be helpful in some circumstances, but at the same time it can also be harmful. If you have a low body weight, do not fast ! You don't have the energy reserves for it. Also by eating periodically throughout the day you regulate blood sugar, so by not eating any stressor which naturally taxes the energy regulation system will be twice as noticeable - in other words expect to be light headed and dizzy particularly when under any kind of stress. Long term you have to be careful to, because fasting on and off can lead to a situation where you are eventually malnurished.


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## lonelyjew (Jan 20, 2010)

Equimanthorn said:


> There are many people who would disagree with you about that. People with PhDs and stuff like that. But it's 5am and I don't feel like debating fasting right now. I think it serves a purpose though. Fasting has been debated forever and will continue to be, so touting your "basic knowledge of biochemistry" and posting a cute little gif doesn't quite wrap up the argument. Sorry you just came across as a little insulting.
> 
> Anyways, as far as the question at hand, don't fall for all the stupid trendy detox diets or products. Just go on a raw food diet for a bit. Yes, the raw food diet is becoming quite trendy itself, but at least it isn't selling you any products or magic pills and is rooted pretty firmly in common sense. Eat the natural foods that were provided for us on this planet and stay away from cooking everything to death and killing all the enzymes. Drink a decent amount of water. Exercise to get your lymphatic system moving. Get fresh air and sunlight.


You know, I tend not to want to be critical in these sorts of discussions because, if anything, having learned a decent bit about this stuff already, I'm only made aware of just how ignorant I am. Anyways, I love the irony of saying "sorry, you just came across as a little insulting," right after you make a post just as, if not more, condescending, calling their knowledge _basic _ and then not even putting anything forth of your own besides pleading to the authority of anonymous PHDs (there are creationists who hold PHDs in sciences...).

As long as we're going to be flexing the knowledge of our sources, I'd love to see what articles you read to support that cooking is somehow unnatural to humans even though we've been cooking for hundreds of thousands, if not well over a million years, or that cooking somehow destroys "enzymes" that would otherwise somehow aid in digestion. Oh, but they have amylases inside to breakdown sugars.... except that if we had problems digesting carbs, as lactose intolerant people will be able to attest to, we'd have horrible GI symptoms from those carbs getting to the hungry bacteria of our lower intestine. But wait! There's lipases there to breakdown lipids! Maybe, but I really wonder how they work without significant amounts of surfactant to do any significant amount of breakdown - the purpose of bile. The proteases though, those are the real important! The thing is, lifeforms are not interested in melting themselves with their own enzymes, and so they're kept under very strict controls and kept in an inactive state, out of the very narrow environmental window in which they'd work optimally, only being activated in small pockets when they need to be used (outside the digestive system anyways). Hell, that's all ignoring that in any short period of time in the stomach, these enzymes and other proteins would be denatured by the low pH of the stomach and cut to ribbons by pepsin, destroying whatever function they had.

Mind you, this is a good thing, because if our stomach allowed most proteins and enzymes to survive, our stomach wouldn't be killing most of the microbes that have the poor luck of getting swallowed, opening us up our relatively vulnerable gut to all sorts of pathogens. Actually, the heat cooking basically plays the same roll as our stomach acid in that it denatures proteins, making them far easier to digest (and releasing certain nutrients that are made unabsorbable otherwise). It's this denaturation that does the microbes/parasites in, and is exactly why you see a lot more food poisonings from undercooked food than overcooked food.

Now, with all of that said, I don't think a mostly raw food diet is a bad thing at all, despite some of the "science" behind some of it. There are certainly lots of benefits that are far more reasonable that could come from it (less carcinogenic, introduction of a greater diversity of flora into the GI tract, generally diverse in content/nutrients/fiber, etc.), however it is important to balance everything, and in this case, with certain cooked foods that contain the nutrients raw food diets are usually extremely lacking in like B12. In the OP's case, that extra flora exposure could perhaps have prevented allergies from being formed in the first place, and though I'm unsure if it could do much at this point, if she was lucky enough to get a mild parasite from not cooking her food, that would probably do the trick .


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## lonelyjew (Jan 20, 2010)

Paper Samurai said:


> It's basically energy re-distribution. Digestion takes up a fair deal of energy so the thinking is by fasting we save on it's usage and instead the body will heal up - which it does so some extent anyway day in day out (mostly when you sleep)
> 
> When any animal (which includes humans) are ill, they naturally lose their appetite - your body's natural response to attempt to re-allocate energy to heal up so it shuts down the hunger mechanism to avoid any unnecessary digestion.


This is actually a pretty interesting topic, though unfortunately a pretty darn complicated one with a quite a few facets and theories. In short, yes, one theory does hold that energy saving has something to do with it, but this has more to do with reducing the drive to get the food than anything else. This, in theory, is not only because getting food for animals can be very energy intensive, but that in trying to get food they leave themselves vulnerable to predators.

Another important part of it is how intertwined the signals our different cells use are in our body state. There is a lot of sharing of signal molecules between the immune system, the nervous system, and the digestive system, and this does not seem to be a coincidence. These connections play off each other so that, as you so well observed, when you're sick, you don't get hungry. As your immune system ramps up a response, some of the signal molecules your cells give off go up to the brain, and shut off the gut. Interestingly, if you don't eat, the gut and nervous system can signal your immune system to become more sensitive. This was demonstrated in study that showed rats who were force fed while infected with bacteria died more often from that infection, and similarly, rats who were starved for 3 days prior to being infected showed a huge amount of protection! As counter-intuitive as it seems, by being starved, you protect yourself by dropping nutrient levels in your fluids (iron for instance), and this may be why hunger be so helpful in fighting an infection.

Finally, I've also read that the part of your immune system that is ramped up by starving is actually the one you'd want to be turned down for allergies. Anorexia and stress in general will boost cells called TH2 cells, which are the same ones which are very involved in allergies, by shifting activity to them and away from different cells called TH1 cells. The only curative therapies for allergies that I know of actually work to downplay these allergies work in the opposite way, by shifting the immune response away from the TH2 cells to the TH1 cells.

OMG so much time spent on this! Thanks at least for getting me to do a bit of research and reading on the topic, I definitely learned some new interesting things while crafting this post .


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## JuanitaFrapp (Sep 11, 2013)

Resting the organs through fasting, stimulating the liver to drive toxins from the body, improving circulation of the blood and Refueling the body with healthy nutrients, exercise according to your body like swimming, walking, running etc. Sweating is a great way to get rid of the crap in your system.


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## Sacrieur (Jan 14, 2013)

Lots of water.

Errm. Yeah that's all that I know to help detox, except maybe stopping the ingestion of toxins.

Maintaining a proper sleep schedule would be preferable as well. It wouldn't necessarily clear out toxins to begin with, but being sleep deprived has a huge detrimental impact on all sorts of physiological processes.


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## alenclaud (Mar 31, 2013)

A good way to go is with lots of veggie/fruit smoothies, preferably without adding sugar. You may blend about anything, from beet roots to oranges, or make up your own mix.

Also check out Chia seeds. Adding water to them and eating the gelatinous substance that forms helps with detox by cleaning the stomach lining or something, so I've heard.


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## tea111red (Nov 8, 2005)

Eating clean, sweating, juice fasting, water fasting, dry skin brushing, and rebounding (jumping on a mini trampoline....doing it for a few mins. supposedly helps clear out the lymph system) are all good examples of ways to help promote detoxification in the body.


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## changeme77 (Feb 22, 2013)

jon snow said:


> A good way to go is with lots of veggie/fruit smoothies, preferably without adding sugar. You may blend about anything, from beet roots to oranges, or make up your own mix.
> 
> Also check out Chia seeds. Adding water to them and eating the gelatinous substance that forms helps with detox by cleaning the stomach lining or something, so I've heard.


This. When you're juice fasting you are not starving your body of any nutrients. Quite the opposite actually! You can read more about it at www.juicedietblog.com


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## Sacrieur (Jan 14, 2013)

Haha, I wonder how much of the information presented here is scientifically sound.


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## Alienated (Apr 17, 2013)

KelseyAlena said:


> I get herbal supplements for my allergies and i have heard if you detox your body it can help tremendously if you have allergy problems. Just curious what are the best ways to detoxify your body?


Well Kelsey,, I suggest....

SEX !! Lot's and LOT'S of wild SEX... In every imaginable way !! 
I need to detox too :yes !!


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## Dylan2 (Jun 3, 2012)

Sacrieur said:


> Haha, I wonder how much of the information presented here is scientifically sound.


"Proponents of alternative detox have never been able to demonstrate that their treatments actually decrease the level of any specific toxin in the body. Yet such studies would be very simple to conduct: name the toxin, measure its level before and after the treatment and compare the readings. Why do such studies not exist? I suspect it is because the promoters of detox treatments know only too well that their results would not confirm their assumptions. And that would, of course, be bad for business.

The concepts of detox are not just wrong but also dangerous. They imply that a person can happily over-indulge, ie poison his/her "system" with toxins, and subsequently put everything right again by applying this or that detox method. This message might prompt people to live unhealthy lifestyles in the belief they are causing no harm to themselves. A recent study concluded that "dietary supplement use may create illusory invulnerability, reducing the self-regulation of smoking". In this trial, 74 smokers were randomised in two groups. One lot were given pills to take and told accurately that they were placebos. The other group were given the same pill but told it was a dietary supplement with positive health effects. Those volunteers thinking they were taking the supplement smoked more as a result. A further experiment then demonstrated that the effect was due to people feeling a higher degree of "invulnerability" when taking a "healthy" supplement."

- Dr. Edzard Ernst

http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2011/aug/29/placebo-effect-detox-harm


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## james251 (Aug 27, 2013)

The ideal way to detox your body is to begin with a 24-hour fast, if you feel up to it and are not on any medications. Choose a day when it is not necessary to be very active – preferably a day when you are not physically challenged. These detoxification processes also rely on many critical nutrients to function properly.


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