Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (12 page)

Seventy percent of Earth’s surface is water; our bodies are also seventy percent water. It is one of the essentials of life. Without enough water, the cells cannot function properly. Water is essential for detoxification, because our bodies eliminate most waste products with the help of water—in urine, in feces, which need enough hydration to move, and also in sweat. Most people today are dehydrated not only from not drinking enough water, but also because many foods and drinks, especially caffeinated ones, soda, and alcohol, have a dehydrating effect.

SAVING MILLIONS TO OWN A PENNY

Chronic undernourishment contributes, ironically, to one of the other crises of our time, overeating and obesity. When the body is starving for a certain trace mineral it needs, it will disrupt the normal signals that tell you to stop eating so that you consume more food in the hopes of grabbing the missing nutrient. All the extra food consumed has to go somewhere—and is typically stored as fat. If the diet is deficient in zinc, for example, which is common today, the body won’t give a “satisfied” signal until it’s found what it needs, even if that means eating three pounds of food to get a microgram of zinc. Doctors sometimes report a curious syndrome in which people with an iron deficiency get an urge to eat paint, because their bodies are desperate for metal. This very unnatural act is highly toxic—it causes lead poisoning.

The other basic raw material missing in the modern diet is fiber. Fiber from plants doesn’t get absorbed into the body as a nutrient; instead, it “sequesters” or pulls toxins out of the lower intestine (colon) after they have been processed in the liver and sent there for elimination. Without a quantity of fiber, the toxins can sit in the intestines, irritating them, and getting reabsorbed back into the body.

Wildfires

Though “inflammation” is the buzzword in diet books and health magazines, most people understand just part of what it means. It is thought of as a localized area that is swollen, painful, red, and warmer than the areas around it. But inflammation is a survival mechanism of great complexity. Inflammation occurs when a set of chemicals in the blood are activated by something foreign or broken. These chemicals attract defense cells that protect tissues against whatever is injuring them, from a thorn to a disease-causing microbe. The repair system is also activated by calling in different cells to fix the damage. Normally, inflammation is self-regulated, which means that as soon as it is triggered, it will start reactions that will stop further inflammation. However, if the body is constantly exposed to irritants, the inflammation response is switched on all the time—not just at small specific sites, but systemically all over the body and throughout the blood. This is what happens when exposure to toxins is high: modern humans are chronically inflamed. Inflammation (from the Latin word inflatio, “to set on fire”) becomes to the body’s environment what wildfires are to the planet’s.

The body is built to work in harmony with nature, to make sure inflammation stays in check. It naturally sucks up certain nutrients from food that can switch inflammation on and off. An example of a nutrient that supports inflammation is omega-6 fatty acids; an example of one that switches it off, omega-3 fatty acids. These nutrients are designed by nature to exist in a balanced ratio everywhere, in our food and inside ourselves. Inflammation is not supposed to be left “on” for long, just neutral and always ready, if needed. Other essential antiinflammatories such as polyphenols, curcumin, and MSM (methylsulfonylmethane) should be available in our diet.

A diet loaded with the anti-inflammatory nutrients could do the trick, even with the modern volume of toxins triggering the inflammation response. But without it, inflammation is “on” constantly. Soon, it is propagated throughout the body like the shockwaves of a grenade. It can become chronic and actually start degrading tissues, instead of fixing injuries. This lays the foundation for diseases like cancer, diabetes, and most notably cardiovascular disease. Clean is designed to boost your anti-inflammatory nutrients while reducing the triggers for inflammation to a large degree.

INFLAMMATION AND DIET

“Fish oil” is one of the common names today for the essential omega-3 fats. But they don’t only exist in fish; they exist in almost every living organism. Cows have plenty of these fats in their bodies when they live naturally, roaming free and eating grass. But when cows are confined to small spaces and fed corn, they become inflamed, generating excess amounts of omega-6 fats. Both omega fats and others are needed in the right proportion to sustain the balance of life.

This right proportion exists in nature; grass-fed cows have balanced ratios of them in their bodies, because they eat as nature intended. This balanced ratio no longer exists in the foods we eat—and therefore, in us. Unnaturally raised animals are inflamed themselves. Even human consumption of plant food has contributed to this problem. Consider that our fertilizers are mostly made of three components, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Missing are all the others—selenium, zinc, magnesium, and manganese, to name a few of the fifty-two minerals that plants need to grow healthy. Plants are malnourished too. Their immune systems grow weak. When insects attack, plants respond with a defense mechanism of their own, getting inflamed. We created an inflamed society by eating inflamed plants, inflamed animals, and inflamed fish. We eat the inflammation when we consume the food we produce and, so, become it ourselves.

Melting Icebergs

When the organs of detoxification and elimination are overburdened and undersupported, they cannot do their job for the rest of the body. Depending on which cells or organs are affected the most, different diseases will manifest: arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and so forth. Some diseases occur when a body with reduced detoxification ability starts recruiting other systems to perform secondary “emergency” duties to help, sometimes in the extreme. This is all part of its design to survive. Take osteoporosis, for example. When acidity is chronic due to a bad diet, the bones can get recruited. Acidity control is more urgent for the body than bone formation, because high acidity is more lethal than osteoporosis. So the bones compensate by releasing some of their naturally alkaline bone salts, like calcium and phosphorus, to buffer acidity in the blood.

A specialist might then prescribe an expensive drug to stimulate the osteoblasts (the cells that “manufacture” bone) or large doses of calcium to encourage bone strengthening. But none of this makes sense without reducing blood acidity at the same time. Without the right alkalinity in the blood, that calcium will not be assimilated into bone and may actually end up in the coronary arteries or joints. (Furthermore, calcium is not deposited in the bones without adequate levels of vitamin D, a test for which is rarely ordered by primary-care physicians.) This is why drinking milk is now understood by some to be the worse possible way to combat osteoporosis. Milk generates acidity, which in the long run causes bone loss—not bone formation, as the milk industry wants you to believe. But we should take it back one step, before the treatment, and start with the question, “Why is the patient acidic?”

Quantum Toxins

Toxicity is not limited to the realm of food and chemicals. There is another kind of toxicity that is just as pervasive and influential on modern health—even though it’s harder to measure or isolate. Toxic thoughts, toxic relationships, the undercurrent of anxiety that is almost an automatic by-product of making it in the modern American world—all these things are pollutants in that they disturb the peace and normal body functioning we were born to have. Although it doesn’t come up on the EPA’s list of worst environmental dangers and is still not fully recognized by many busy doctors in hospitals (as the lack of adequate therapies in them reveals), the stress of modern life is as much a toxin as the chemicals in our food, water, and air.

Today there is a constant assault on our attention that keeps the mind switched on at all times. There is more information circulating than at any other time in human history. (Even the TV news is no longer just an anchorperson sitting at a desk. Now it has three lines of ticker-tape information streaming across the bottom. Our attention is literally being divided.) Add to that the situation where we are all available for communication at all times (and in all time zones). Cell phones, Bluetooth headsets, e-mails, text messages, faxes—it has become almost taboo to ever be disconnected. On top of this we are so busy all the time, striving for great careers, great relationships, great children, great homes—the pressure to achieve has never been higher and has us living in a constant state of planning, working, trying. All this energy going on in the brain keeps it from being available where it is needed in the body. In fact we are a society of people barely aware of our bodies—which may be suffering and breaking down under our noses as we keep thinking and worrying.

It was incessant, negative, fearful thinking that started me on my journey of self-healing. I could somehow cope with my allergies, my weight gain, and my irritable bowels, but it was my toxic thoughts that stopped me in my tracks and made me look for a deeper understanding. The toxic food I was eating, the toxic schedules I was working by, and the toxic hospital environment, full of fear and frustration, within one of the most toxic cities in the world had taken a toll on my body. But it wasn’t until my incessant worrying and the chest pain it generated got me wondering if I was having a heart attack that I began searching for a different solution. My initial experience with meditation gave me hope and a clear goal, to silence my mind. In my case, at that time, everything else took second place—propelling me onto that plane to India.

I am still working on that goal for myself. But whatever ability I have gained to quiet my own mind allows me to recognize a similar level of distraction and the constant loop of thinking and worry in my patients. It is rampant in modern life; unproductive thinking rules us and controls our lives. We get stuck not just in habits of eating that hurt us and drain the energy necessary for our body’s needs, but stuck in incessant thought. It also drains energy and leaves us fatigued, worn down, and with a physical body deprived of the resources it needs to heal itself. I call the negative effects of stress “quantum toxins” because they exist outside of the scope of doctors’ measuring tools. Stress finds many ways to manifest in body, behavior, and outlook, influencing eating patterns, addictions, and belief in our own potential to be (or never be) well. Quantum toxicity is without doubt one of the greatest obstacles to vibrant well-being. How did it become this way?

Quantum toxicity is not new. In fact, thousands of years before humans invented preservatives, antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers, or any chemicals whatsoever, detoxification was the main topic for some very influential people on our planet. Buddhism, one of the oldest spiritual paths, was described as a path of detoxification by the Buddha himself. Professor Robert Thurman, who teaches Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University, is a dear friend and one of my teachers. He once explained it to me in this way:

In the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the center has a circle in which there are three animals, a pig, a cock, and a snake, holding each other by the tail. The pig stands for the delusion or ignorance that says, “I am the real thing, the center of the universe, and the most important being in it, and the rest and all others are separate from me!” This deep conviction of the egoistic being places that being in the unwin-nable situation of confrontation with the universe, which any single being has got to lose, sooner or later. Based on this perspective, the being wants to consume lots of the universe, to turn it into him-or herself, and this is called greed, represented by the cock. If possible, the being would devour the whole thing and then would no longer need to fear it. But the universe is infinite, so that never succeeds. Also, based on the same perspective, the being fears others want to devour him or her and so becomes paranoid and seeks to repel them all, and this is called anger and hatred, symbolized by the snake.

These are the three poisons or toxins (Sanskrit trivisha) that make the unenlightened world go around, the samsara of endless suffering. In Indo-Tibetan medicine they correspond to phlegm, wind, and bile in the physical realm (the kapha, vata, and pitta body types), or more generally, cohesion, movement, and heat. Health for an unenlightened person is the balance of these poisons and energies—that is the best that can be achieved. But real health, durable and joyous, comes from detoxification, removal of the poisons by wisdom, insight into the true nature of reality, the experience of the self being one with the universe, filled with energy and bliss, not needing to be greedy, not fearing or hating anyone, but being joyfully compassionate to all, seen as ultimately the same as oneself and beautiful in their relative difference—just as one sees one’s beloved child or lover or good friend. This is the true health of enlightenment.

Enlightenment as true health may seem unattainable for so many of us, but getting rid of the poisons that Buddha spoke of could be, from this point of view, more urgent than anything we can do at the level of food, drink, and natural cleaning products. Only when freed of delusion, greed, and anger can we return to an enlightened state in which we live with the knowledge that we already have everything we need. Only this will truly stop the rampant consumption and humanmade madness of modern life.

As part of Clean, you will be invited to start a short daily meditation practice, a chance to unload some of this mental burden and explore the very beginning of what “real health, durable and joyous” may mean to you.

CHAPTER SIX The Common Root of Dysfunction: Digging for Answers

When the leaves of a plant start looking sick, wise gardeners will dig out the root to take a look. Even though it is buried in the soil, hidden from view, gardeners know they must go to the root to find where most plant diseases begin. It does not surprise them that it was far away from the root, on the leaves, that the first symptoms appeared. They know that for the leaves to be healthy, they must receive nutrients from the roots, where they are absorbed from the soil. I learned this as a kid, watching the gardeners in my own backyard.