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Dr. Weil discusses detoxification and whether or not detox diets are beneficial.
Dr. Weil:
I think many people are obsessed with detoxing today, and I think some of this is from fears of all that we hear and read about toxins in the environment.
The first rule of detoxing is to stop putting toxins in. If you stop putting toxic things into your body the body has many mechanisms for clearing itself out.
And I think it’s probably a waste of time and money to invest in detox products that you find in stores and sold on the internet.
Rather I would suggest that people rely on the body’s own natural mechanisms of detoxification and they include urination and you can improve that by making sure you are drinking plenty of water all the time.
Elimination through bowel movements, you can make sure that you are doing that regularly by eating enough fiber, exercising, enough fluid and so forth.
Sweating, a very powerful method of detoxing and you can rev that up by sitting in saunas or steam rooms and making sure you drink plenty of water when you do that. Or by doing aerobic exercise that stimulates sweating.
Breathing, exhalation is a way of ridding things from the body. You can rev that up through doing aerobic exercise.
So those are natural mechanisms of detoxification. There’s also a very effective non-toxic, natural substance that improves liver function and the liver is really the master organ of detoxification in the body, and that product is milk thistle.
This is an herb; you can get extracts of milk thistle in health food stores. Completely safe, completely non-toxic.
I often recommend this to anybody that drinks alcohol heavily, people would take drugs that might be liver-toxic; people who are concerned about toxic exposures.
So those are all some simple detox tips. I don’t think you have to buy expensive detox products and kits.
About Dr. Weil, M.D.:
Dr. Andrew Weil, M.D., was born in Philadelphia in 1942, received an A.B. degree in biology (botany) from Harvard in 1964 and an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1968. After completing a medical internship at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, he worked a year with the National Institute of Mental Health before writing his first book, The Natural Mind. From 1971-75, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, Dr. Weil traveled widely in North and South America and Africa collecting information on drug use in other cultures, medicinal plants, and alternative methods of treating disease. From 1971-84 he was on the research staff of the Harvard Botanical Museum and conducted investigations of medicinal and psychoactive plants.
Visit Dr. Weil at his Web site