Detox Diet
What you eat is the first line of defence against toxic attack. By controlling what goes into your mouth, you have the power to reduce a huge number of the toxins that could otherwise enter your body. This traditionally means giving up coffee, bread, milk, alcohol and red meat completely. If you want to do this, fine; but if giving up your morning coffee stops you detoxing your body in other ways, why bother? It's no fun and it's also unnecessary. As already mentioned, scientific evidence has shown that your body can tolerate one to two alcoholic drinks a day with no health problems and can easily deal with up to three cups of coffee a day with out adverse effects.
You may be surprised to learn this but your body can even tackle around 20g (%oz) of saturated fat a day (the amount found in a 75g (3oz) serving of any lean red meat) with no health problems. If you are not intolerant to them, eating wheat and dairy foods will also have no ill effects. Therefore, despite their 'toxic' reputation, there's no reason why these foods shouldn't be part of your life - so long as you don't exceed those limits. What is important is reducing serious pollutants like pesticides, hormones and heavy metals.
Reducing toxin intake
In an ideal world, we would eat all organic food and get our eggs from free-range chickens, but the price of organic food means this isn't always feasible. There is a middle ground, however. If you can't eat all organic, the advice from the British Soil Association is to switch to organic versions of foods like bread and milk if these make up a large part of your diet. Also, buy organic if you're eating the foods most exposed to pesticides - squashy fruits like strawberries or blackberries, which absorb them more readily, and salad crops, which are heavily treated to prevent crop destruction. In the USA, the Food and Drug Administration has also ranked bell peppers, spinach, cherries, apples and peaches as often showing higher than normal pesticide residues, so you may want to switch to organic versions of these too.
For other fruits and vegetables, simply cleaning them well can help reduce pesticide residue. To do this, wash them under running water and use a small produce brush (or a new nail brush) to scrub the skins. Also, be careful where you buy fruit and vegetables - produce from roadside stalls, or shops on busy roads that display wares outside, can actually be polluted by heavy metals from car exhaust fumes. Finally, as we've met in humans, toxins in animals are also stored in fat. Therefore you should aim to eat only lean cuts of meat and also try to cut off any noticeable bits of fat. Do all of the above -or even just half of it - and you'll start to substantially lower your body's toxic load.
Enzyme-stimulating foods
There's more to healthy detoxing than just eating foods that are low in toxins. By choosing particular kinds of food, you can dramatically enhance the efficiency of your natural detox system. As explained earlier, much of the processing of toxins in our body occurs in the liver, where enzymes transform them into water-soluble forms that can be readily excreted. Eating particular foods can boost the levels of these enzymes that you produce. What's more, many enzyme-stimulating foods further enhance detox by actually binding with the toxins and carrying them out of the body. Combine this with the foods that stimulate your bowel and kidneys to work more efficiently, and those that neutralize harmful free radicals, and you've got the equivalent of a toxin vacuum-cleaner working hard to improve your health.
Choosing detox foods
Which foods carry out these roles? Well, practically every fruit and vegetable fights toxins in some way, but some positively excel at it. If you're not following one of our specialist detox plans at any point, incorporating four or five portions of these foods in your diet every day will still help to keep your system working at full strength and reduce the toxic load your body is under. If you are following a detox plan, you'll see how these and other detox foods can dramatically boost the plan's success. Know more about avaiable detox foods.