Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself (15 page)

With the Clean program you optimize your genetic expression in a simple and effective way. By changing your metabolism and reducing your blood acidity, your inflammation levels, your stress levels, and the toxins you are exposed to, you are improving that crucial environment in the cells on which genetic expression depends.

Your Genes Can Tell Your Doctor

How to Write Your Prescriptions

Individual gene variation explains why the current “one dose for all” approach to prescribing medications is useless half the time and dangerous the rest. There are very small components of the DNA strand, the nucleotides, that have a big job. A certain kind of nucleotide, when present in the gene, signals the production of a liver enzyme that accelerates the metabolism of specific prescription medications. The presence or absence of this single nucleotide variety explains why some people bleed to death while others develop clots on the same dose of a blood-clotting inhibitor.

When this nucleotide is absent, the same medication may take ten times as long to be eliminated. This increases the chances of overdosing. Depending on the medication in question, it can be life-threatening. Such small differences in people’s genes are called SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms). Deciphering their message is allowing a personalized, individualized approach to treatments. Gene testing that reveals this information is available, but not yet covered by health-insurance policies. The high cost of DNA testing is bound to drop, a trend that will support this direction in medicine.

Whenever I see a new patient, at our first meeting we spend an hour or more talking about the person’s present state of health. Frequently patients tell me they have been diagnosed with a disease and have been given prescription medications, mostly to alleviate their symptoms. Before I agree with any diagnosis, I tell my patients that their symptoms are the way their bodies and minds are telling them that things are not really working. Whatever they are doing, eating, and thinking has created an imbalance and their body is screaming at them that something needs to change. We are designed by nature to survive and procreate, and we have evolved to do so incredibly successfully over millennia. So the symptoms they are feeling are part of evolution’s most powerful and sophisticated driving force, survival. To kill the symptoms without changing the conditions that caused them is insulting to the body’s intelligence.

Some symptoms do point to immediate life-and-death situations, in which case emergency measures are needed to preserve life. For acute situations, modern medicine has developed life-saving technologies that are nothing short of miraculous. As a cardiologist I know that chest pain moving into the left arm classically happens when a clot stops blood from flowing through the arteries that feed the heart muscle. In this emergency scenario, catheters can be guided inside the arteries, from the groin up into the heart, to confirm this diagnosis and to allow doctors to break the clot by blowing up balloons that will stretch the arteries open. Science fiction has nothing more impressive than a modern cardiac catheterization lab, where saving lives is the daily routine.

But most patients’ complaints are not indications that something is really “broken” and endangering their lives. The great majority of physical symptoms point to problems that would take much longer to cause death. These are symptoms of the chronic diseases that, according to statistics, most Americans will present with, sooner or later and to varying degrees, in their lifetime. These are the diseases that cost so many so much suffering and money. For these chronic ailments and their related symptoms, modern medicine has little to offer. The wonder chemicals and surgeries that are so effective in emergencies are the cause of worse suffering or even death when used to silence symptoms long-term.

I believe that whatever health problem is affecting my patients, their incredibly intelligent body will attempt to survive. The mechanisms it puts to work in order to do that get confused with the disease. Symptoms are the alarm system that makes us aware and demands we try something different from whatever we’re currently doing—since that was what got us into trouble to begin with. To expect different results from doing the same thing is the definition of madness.

Instead of blocking the symptoms with medication, I try to answer the question, “What is it that my patient is trying to survive?” Something doesn’t add up. We have split the atom and broken the genetic code, yet our society is sicker that it has ever been. What are we missing?

The Natural Ability to Heal

The human body has an amazing natural ability to defend, repair, heal, and even rejuvenate itself. It is the magic you would see if you were to look at a magnified, high-speed movie of a cut on your skin. You would see that the bleeding stops when corklike bundles of cells, blood platelets, stop the bleeding by clumping up and filling up the blood vessels where they are cut, but nowhere else. And then, as if guided by an invisible hand, the skin cells on each border of the cut would start dividing and bridging the gap, until the whole surface was covered by skin, and the cut completely vanished, leaving just a reminder—a scar.

I tell my patients that even though they can’t see it, the healing process is the same under the skin, deep inside the body. When damage occurs inside a healthy body, a number of mechanisms are triggered that are perfectly designed to stop the insult and then repair the damage, provided the conditions they need to complete the work are available. If they are not, the healing process fails and symptoms persist or worsen.

Two basic problems are responsible for the loss of this ability, resulting in chronic disease:

Obstacles that block cell functioning and chemical reactions

Lack of the ingredients needed for this process to occur

Modern Medicine’s Blind Spot

When I look at what is happening with a patient’s health, I ask myself these questions:

What was the original insult that caused irritation or injury?

What obstacles are preventing the body from healing?

What is lacking that is needed to repair things?

The answer to the first two questions is often the same: the toxic overload we are exposed to in our daily lives. The air we breathe, the water we drink and shower with, the buildings we live and work in, the cosmetics we use, and the foods we eat are loaded with chemicals that alone or in combination damage our bodies and every other living creature on this planet. The chemicals we prescribe actually worsen the toxic burden we intend to correct.

Toxicity irritates tissues, damages our own cells, and kills other cells that we host in harmony and need for our health. When our body attempts to defend itself and repair the damage, toxins are often the obstacles that prevent it. The toxins bind to useful chemicals and prevent them from doing their work. They irritate cells persistently, forcing the inflammatory, allergic, and defense mechanisms to act longer and more intensely.

Minerals, vitamins, and other nutrients in our foods is the answer to the third question. All the chemicals needed for our body chemistry and architecture would be provided by nature if we respected its ways. Comfort and greed drove us to change nature’s design for growing plants and animals, resulting in a severe depletion of the nutrients that our body needs to function. Mass agriculture in exhausted soils produces plants that are depleted. Then we irradiate them, wax them, and turn them into all kinds of products that are loaded with toxins such as preservatives and additives. Growing cattle, chicken, and fish on an industrial scale has resulted in massive toxicity as well.

For all these reasons food lacks essential nutrients and turns out to be the biggest source of toxic chemicals. When you add the thousands of other chemicals of modern life, as well as the toxic influences invisible to the naked eye (thoughts, emotions, radiation), you have the perfect recipe for chronic diseases.

Whether toxicity is the primary or secondary cause of illness, it seems to be an integral part of the disease equation, since nobody is able to escape it completely. Everything is connected in such an intricate way, often with so many points between first cause and ultimate effect, that it is impossible to map every reaction. The time has come when we are waking up to an alarming truth. We are killing ourselves with the same chemicals we invented to make life easier. This concept has never been more relevant than in our modern life, yet so under the radar of our collective awareness. Until now.

What Is Cleansing?

Cleansing is turning up the intensity and effectiveness of the detoxification system. Supporting the process with the right nutrients is safe cleansing. Going beyond this to also promote the repair of the gut system is the essence of Clean.

Cleansing and detoxification programs may be returning to popularity today, but they are certainly not new to humans. Every ancient system of health care had ways of regularly attending to the body’s detoxification systems and making sure the lines of defense in the body were working properly—and this was centuries before industrial chemicals filled the air. Humans have always instinctually known that a regular period of resting and recharging the body will let it shed the accumulated toxins and waste materials that tend to build up in all of us simply from living. It is also a way to boost healing when systems are taxed and are beginning to show signs of stress.

Every creature in nature does this periodically, alternating cycles of growth and activity with cycles of rest, such as hibernation. This keeps things in balance. Animals stop consuming food when they get sick. They rest the digestive system, so that energy can be diverted toward defense and healing.

As I learned during my own time in India, the Sanskrit word “Ayurveda” can be translated as the science of longevity. Its core philosophy is that health is a state in which the body is clear of toxins, the mind is settled, emotions are happy, wastes are constantly eliminated, and organs are working efficiently. To achieve this goal, Ayurvedic doctors give their patients balancing diets and herbs as part of a treatment plan. But they also prescribe regular periods of deeper detoxification known as panchakarma, during which the patients follow a cleansing program for several weeks and have hands-on treatments to pull toxins out of tissues and quiet the busy mind. This was developed millennia before smokestacks and diesel trucks arrived on the scene. Ayurveda understands that a part of ordinary human experience is the tendency to build up waste and accumulate stress, and if we don’t spend some time alleviating this at a deeper level, our systems and organs get fatigued, making us sick.

Chinese health care is similarly wise. Frequently Chinese doctors put their patients on a program of teas, tonics, and treatments to help them throw off the toxins and mental fatigue they accumulate just by eating, breathing, and meeting everyday demands. Native Americans and members of other indigenous cultures around the world have used fasting and sweat lodges to purify body, mind, and spirit. Done periodically, the sweat-lodge experience returns participants to a path of clarity on every level, or is used strategically to heal disease.

All these traditions know that the simple experience of being human brings with it the need to periodically focus on cleansing and detoxifying. When we consider the weight of our modern toxic load and its taxing effects on our inner environments, a period of detoxifying practically becomes obligatory.

It’s important to distinguish between a detox program (a cleanse) and the more generalized practice of slowly “cleaning up our act” by making gradual diet or lifestyle changes over several months. A cleanse is a distinct program, done for a concentrated period of time, that puts the body in a more intense detox mode. It has a start and an end date and a specific purpose.

These kinds of detoxification programs have also long been valued as a chance for the mind to come back to a peaceful center. In ancient times, cleansing through fasting was used as a tool to gain spiritual clarity. Cleaning out the amma wasn’t just about diet; it was a process of cleansing the spirit of the toxic feelings and thoughts that cause suffering in the heart and soul. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights; Muhammad, Gandhi, and Buddha all fasted. Fasting for ultimate clarity about the nature of life is a part of many spiritual traditions and has been ingrained in humans for thousands of years.

For most people living busy lives today, the primary motivation to cleanse and detoxify is to remove the heaviness, fog, or lack of energy that is a consequence of contemporary lifestyles and stress. But dig a little deeper and there’s often an underlying eagerness to simplify and strip away excess for a period of time, make some space, and get a new start by taking leave of some old, stuck patterns. There is an inevitable awakening in the mind and emotions, even if the stated goal of the cleanse is more physical, such as to enhance beauty, encourage weight loss, or look younger.

Health care in the twenty-first century is in the process of being radically reinvented. Ancient methods of protecting and preserving body and mind are being integrated with new discoveries in biochemistry and quantum physics. A new era of detox programs is being born. Clean sets the standard, for its design intentionally addresses both ingredients of good cleansing practices: the elimination of toxins and the repair of the gut.

How Clean Works

Everywhere I look today, there is growing curiosity about cleansing. As information is exchanged between individuals and as articles and tips are posted online about the many methods for detoxifying, there’s more confusion than ever. It can be overwhelming. Descriptions of extreme programs can deter people from starting. Also people often get disillusioned a few days in, when the program they’ve selected turns out to be incompatible with their needs or simply uncomfortable. Sometimes the program they’ve picked can even be dangerous.

When we understand that a cleanse is a way of harnessing the body’s natural intelligence, we learn that we can drive it in specific ways. Picking one type of cleanse-detox program over another is really about adjusting the intensity and speed of detoxification to best suit our bodies and lifestyles while we do it. Clean is a comprehensive program designed for the daily requirements of the busy lives we lead. There are benefits that happen quickly and I urge you to do the best you can. If for any reason one week of the program is the limit you can accomplish on the first try, you will still see and feel a difference. Perhaps next time one week can turn into two weeks or even the complete program.