Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (11 page)

But serotonin levels are something we can optimize just in case and work with that. Time and time again, I’ve witnessed how restoring intestinal integrity reactivates the major serotonin factory in the intestines and causes the mental fog, sadness, or distress to melt away. This can be the massive first step toward real healing of the spirit. Frequently, as Kate experienced, the patient who is already on an antidepressant is able to reduce the dosage and often stop taking it entirely. (This should always be done under the care of the prescribing physician and never on your own.)

Antidepressants, when used conscientiously, can serve an important purpose. In cases of moderate or severe depression they can be the “bridge” that helps patients shift from a place where they are floundering to a place where they feel some solid ground. Like any drug, they need to be neutralized and eliminated by the liver, so they add to the toxic load. But antidepressants can be a good tool to use while repairing the intestinal flora during and after a detox program. Since the brain is “plastic,” meaning it is always changing and modifying, antidepressants can help create some new neural pathways through which your experience of the world gets processed. You are creating a new and improved memory of what it’s like to feel better over the few months it might take to restore your intestinal flora and get your intestines to manufacture their own serotonin, reestablishing the pathways to a happier perception of the world.

Because most antidepressants only work for a while and many people build up a tolerance after six months to a year, to treat depression without restoring the conditions in the body is negligent. Often patients are simply put on higher doses or on a second or third antidepressant. To rely on antidepressants as the only course of action long-term is like whipping a weak horse to make it run. It may run, but it will collapse after a while. Meanwhile the side effects of the medications—from decreased libido, impotence, insomnia, and weight gain or loss to dry mouth and more—can accumulate. (The most tragic side effect of all is suicide, which is little discussed in the medical world.) When, however, patients increase their serotonin naturally, it’s as if we brought a hundred new horses into the race and let the weak one go out to pasture and enjoy the grass.

MANUFACTURING HAPPINESS

Serotonin production is greatly influenced by diet. Like everything in the body, serotonin is built from the nutrients we obtain from food. It uses certain amino acids as building blocks, especially the one known as tryptophan, which comes from high-protein foods. Levels of tryptophan have hugely declined in the modern diet. When we ate wild animals that foraged on grasses and other plants, we got more tryptophan in our diets. Grain-fed animals have much less of it, just as they have less omega-3 fatty acids. In addition, the natural production of serotonin is inhibited by caffeine, alcohol, and aspartame; a lack of sunlight; and a lack of exercise. After repairing the damaged intestinal environment, creating a Wellness Plan with a nutrient-balanced diet and possibly a regime of supplements that include probiotics (foods supplying beneficial intestinal bacteria) is an important step in sustaining more stable serotonin levels.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome

An estimated 10 to 15 percent of Americans have irritable bowel syndrome; it accounts for 12 percent of primary-care visits. The word “syndrome” can include all sorts of symptoms, including bloating and digestive pain, but classically IBS refers to a situation where the bowels have extreme reactions with no predictability—such as alternating between constipation and diarrhea—and seemingly acting with a mind of their own. This phrase is apt. IBS is actually a kind of “depression of the intestines,” linked to diminished amounts of serotonin just like psychological depression. The nerve cells in the intestines orchestrate digestion and cause the muscle of the intestines to contract. When serotonin levels are inappropriate, the intestine gets disturbed, causing the alternating bouts of too much or too little activity or general discomfort. These symptoms are also exacerbated by chronic constipation. When toxic waste sits in the colon, the intelligent nervous system of the intestine can alternate between primal panic, giving you diarrhea to get rid of the toxins, and paralysis, making you bloated.

The concept of healing IBS naturally by restoring serotonin production and removing toxicity is not widely discussed. This is ironic, given that modern medicine pioneered the idea of treating IBS patients with antidepressants. The protocol evolved accidentally, after enough patients with depression who were being treated with SSRIs were unexpectedly getting relief from IBS (not surprising, given what we know about neurotransmitters and the scope of the suffering, which can in the most extreme cases lead to a high rate of unnecessary surgeries such as cholecystectomies, hysterectomies, appendectomies, and back surgeries). The medication these patients were given for their “psychological” symptoms alleviated the bowel conditions so well that this treatment has now become standard protocol for IBS, whether the patient is depressed or not. Yet little discussion has gone into why the SSRIs are actually helping the patients’ IBS to improve.

Diagnosing Toxicity

How do you even know if toxicity is affecting you? The symptoms are different from person to person, but when you are trained to see them, the clues are consistent. I always take a good look at my patients through my detox glasses.

Remember Tony’s tiredness and allergies? Kate’s depression and weight gain? Robert, in his sixties, suffers from unpredictable bowels, which only adds more stress to his high-pressure job. Told he has IBS, he assumes it’s something he has to live with and is not something he can fix on his own.

Tony’s, Kate’s, and Robert’s symptoms are common among my busy, hardworking patients. So are skin and sinus problems, fatigue and bloating after eating, constipation, headaches, muscle or joint pain, and arthritis-like tendencies as well as a general low-grade state of emotional malaise.

Their different responses show why, in general, doctors and patients today are detox-blind. How would we know that a single protocol of reversing the toxic state could relieve many of their problems, when the problems are all so different? The body’s response to toxicity is a complex web of possible reactions, not a single reaction that looks or feels the same in everyone.

On one level, toxicity goes hand in hand with the buildup of something that Eastern traditions call amma and that we simply call “mucus.” It is responsible for the puffed-up, bloated, heavy, or dulled feeling in body and mind that is so common today. At the next level, the toxic irritation goes deeper, causing allergic reactions to everyday things. And on yet another level, it stimulates the body’s immune system to get hyperactive and make mistakes in what it’s fighting; it starts attacking the body’s own cells and tissues, causing autoimmune disorders from gluten intolerance to arthritis and others.

What’s the consistent story behind the different cases? All these symptoms of dysfunction have as their root cause a state of irritation and mucus formation. And all of them begin to get cleared up when we remove the conditions that cause the irritation and facilitate the elimination of mucus.

Global Inner Climate Changes: The Weather on Toxicity TV

Our bodies are a wonder. Consider the trillions of chemical reactions that happen instant after instant, the sum total of which adds up to our experience of life. It is impossible to affect a single one of those chemical reactions without affecting many others. Yet modern medicine has evolved in the other direction, away from seeing these balancing agents as a single, connected picture. Western medicine came to value superspecialists over generalists. One doctor looks at and understands mostly throats; another, the lungs; a different one looks at your heart; and so on. We need to shift our attention to the whole picture and create the conditions for the most apparently insignificant chemical reactions to happen as they should. The Clean program does just that. I think of it as molecular acupuncture, a comparison from the mind of Jeffrey Bland, the father of Functional Medicine: a small action in one place, like restoring the right balance of pro-to anti-inflammatory fats or shifting the body’s acid-base ratio, triggers a cascade of positive effects in the whole body.

When a butterfly flaps its wings in Japan, the chain of cause and effect may well end up manifesting as a tornado in Argentina. In the same way, a failed chemical reaction involving a few molecules in your liver might just show up as a tumor in your brain. Everything is connected. One little point in space and time may trigger a cascade of reactions that affect a much larger system downstream—one on whose delicate balance life depends.

The reason many of these problems persist and get worse with time is that modern medicine tends to focus on making a diagnosis, instead of looking at what is behind it. What is the diagnosis behind all other diagnoses?

Many years ago, we started noticing that environmental disasters were on the rise: storms, hurricanes, floods, wildfires, melting of the ice caps. Early on, they seemed isolated, unrelated accidents of nature. Slowly the dots were connected. All these disasters were related and had something in common: global warming.

Inside our bodies, a similar crisis is brewing. The massive load of toxins we are exposed to changes our inner climate the way greenhouse gases change Earth’s atmosphere.

Acid Rain

Just like in an aquarium or a freshwater lake, where the degree of acidity must be carefully maintained for fish to survive, the environment inside our arteries needs to stay in a certain acid-base range or the cells circulating inside will die. The waste products of normal metabolism are almost exclusively acids, so the body is constantly neutralizing acids as part of daily life. Nature is the main provider of balancing alkaline molecules, in foods like green leafy vegetables. But modern “staple foods” like sugar, dairy products, meat, coffee, and junk food are acidifying. So are medications. So is stress, because the higher metabolic rates and adrenalin and cortisol created during stress speed up acidifying processes. (This is why practices like meditation help control excess acid formation.) It’s not an understatement to say that modern life is an acid-forming process.

Overly acidic conditions slowly but surely corrode our inner terrain to the point of causing damage. Acidity may corrode arteries, resulting in heart attacks or strokes. It may corrode joints, resulting in arthritis. It certainly promotes the malfunctioning of key processes like oxygen exchange in the red blood cells, inflammation, blood clotting, hormone production, and nerve cell conduction. In fact, I can’t think of one single chemical reaction in the body that is not affected by acidity. You will be reducing acidity during Clean by removing the foods that are acidifying, lowering stress, and boosting detoxification.

Drought

The modern-day phenomenon of nutritional deficiency is devastating to our health. Everything that happens in the body does so through chemical reactions. Digestion, healing, and communicating between cells all take place through little acts of chemistry; these chemical reactions need a certain supply of naturally occurring ingredients. We are designed to get most of these micronutrients from foods. If they are missing, the chemical reactions simply don’t happen, imbalances start, and over time sickness and disease develop. Many people have heard they need to supplement their diet with omega-3 fatty acids (fish oils); it’s popular knowledge. But there are three newly identified deficiencies that are about to become just as popular.

MAGNESIUM

Magnesium, a mineral, stabilizes and calms the nervous system and relaxes muscles. It is hard to absorb to begin with (only 10 percent of the magnesium ingested is absorbed), but its depletion is one of the contributing factors to the modern epidemic of stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, depression, edema, memory loss, irritability, and weakness.

VITAMIN D

Vitamin D is integrally involved in a multitude of vital processes. It helps the deposition of calcium in the bones and regulates the immune system, so a lack of it will contribute to bone disease and cause a predisposition to frequent infections. It plays an important role in mood chemistry and is critical for heart health. Because this vitamin needs sunlight for activation and we have shielded ourselves from the sunlight by living inside buildings, traveling in cars, and covering every inch of skin with clothing and sun protection creams, there is a new worldwide epidemic of vitamin D deficiency. Expect more diseases to be linked to the lack of this wonder vitamin soon.

IODINE

Iodine is the latest deficiency to come to my awareness at the time of this writing. It is the main building block for the production of thyroid hormones, which are responsible for keeping the furnace of our metabolism going. Without sufficient amounts, weight gain becomes an issue. This is only one of the consequences of deficient thyroid production due to iodine deficiency (but a critical one, as obesity is becoming a major problem now affecting millions of children). Modern science is now linking it to many other diseases like cancer, heart disease, and depression. It is implicated in the wave of thyroid depletion I see especially among women today, a problem that my colleague Dr. Frank Lipman brilliantly diagnoses and treats as one of the components of an invisible syndrome in modern medicine that he calls “Spent,” described in chapter 7.

The process of detoxification depends on chemicals that our body used to obtain from a balanced diet of nutrient-filled foods. The liver is where the bulk of the detox chemistry happens, and it requires a whole shopping list of natural ingredients, such as vitamins and minerals found in natural, whole foods as well as a good stock of antioxidants. It is like having a well-stocked cleaning supply cupboard, so you can clean your house efficiently and well. But because of nutritional deficiency, your liver struggles, unable to fulfill its function of detoxification. The Clean program restores your supplies by adding specific nutrients to your diet that may have been missing. In addition, it addresses the lack of antioxidants in the standard American diet.