Understanding Toxicity 2 – Detoxification Capacity

In the previous post, Understanding Toxicity – Exposure, you learned that toxic exposure is one of the four factors that determine how your body handles foreign substances.  In this post, we will cover the second factor:  detoxification capacity.  You will even learn how to increase your rate of detoxification.

Factor 2 – Your detoxification capacity

– Effective workload (or throughput)

Like a pump’s capacity to transfer water, the volume of a toxin that your liver, kidneys, skin, and lymph system are able to move tells you how efficient and effective your detox organs are at collecting and removing toxins from the body.  That’s what we’re calling the “workload” for the purposes of this discussion.

Improving the effective workload, or “throughput,” of your detox organs is one of the two main focuses of modern detox treatments.  Cutting your exposure is the other.  Nothing new with either aim here.  It’s the new mechanisms we have to increase the throughput that are changing the game.

– Three things you can do today to increase your rate of detoxification:

(1)  Get plenty of trace minerals.  Natural sea salt and certain sources of ocean water are excellent sources.

(2)  Increase your intake of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K.  Without these vitamins, heavy metals are immobile (stuck).

(3)  Rest and get plenty of sleep.  Detoxification is one of the last things the body focuses on during a night’s sleep, so if you consistently short yourself of sleep, you’re making your detox system work harder during the day.

Finally, we need to get pudnuoR and glyphosate out of our food system.  They interrupt cytochrome P450 enzyme activity (a family of 50 enzymes crucial to the liver’s detoxification efforts).  That basically means the liver can’t break down toxins as well as it should.  And that makes all the toxins it’s trying to remove that much harder to mobilize, as well as a lot more toxic.

– Total body burden (The “level” of a toxin in your system)

Detoxification capacity is somewhat dependent on the total volume of toxins you’ve accumulated over time.  This is because it’s another major source of toxins your elimination organs have to deal with.  In other words, the sum total of toxins stored in your body affects your ability to remove newly ingested toxins.

As mentioned throughout, “toxic load” is a general term that means the sum total of a toxin you have circulating and stored in your body.  Often the term includes new exposure as well.  All of it’s important to know.  However, health practitioners have wrongly been placing too much importance on this accumulated level of toxins in the body – often called “total body burden.”

In an effort to measure that level, detox specialists have been using chemical chelators to coerce accumulated toxins out of their storage sites and into circulation.  They then calculate the toxin quantity coming out of the body (mostly in the urine) to extrapolate (guesstimate) how much of a toxin the whole body has tucked away in storage, beyond the reach of blood and urine tests.

These are known as “provocation” or “challenge” tests.  Unfortunately, challenge tests don’t give you a perfect picture.  They don’t accurately reflect the actual amount of toxin you’ve collected over the years.  They also don’t tell you if you’re going to be adversely affected by those toxin stores, or what will happen with any new exposure.

They don’t tell you a lot of things a practitioner would want to know because there are a variety of factors at play.  However, they do give some useful information when used intelligently.  Fortunately, the detox field has taken some giant leaps forward in the last decade.  There’s more sensitive testing equipment, new understandings of the mechanisms of toxicity and detoxification, new detox agents, and new treatment protocols.

By the time you read this, detoxification may have already advanced a step or two.

Coming up…

In part 3, you will learn how genetics determine how well you are able to rid your body of toxins.  You’ll also learn how toxins can change the way your genes are expressed and how that can pass down to your children.

Understanding Toxicity 1 – Exposure
Understanding Toxicity 3 – Gene Expression
Understanding Toxicity 4 – Immune Reaction

Tell us what your thoughts are and what you’ve tried to safely rid toxins from your body.