Total Body Detox Diet Tips

It is important to eat well when starting a body detox diet and avoid foods that challenge the system, but this is not the whole story. There are lots of other techniques that can support and intensify your detox efforts, helping you to shed more toxins and cleanse your whole system from top to toe. Here I'm going to take a run-down of the many treatments that you can try for yourself, in your own home, using easy-to-find products.

Intensive farming has significantly decreased the levels of vital minerals in our foods over the last 30 years.

It is estimated that the average person's daily intake of selenium was 60 micrograms in 1974 and is now only half of that.

Selenium is an essential nutrient for helping your liver detox carcinogenic chemicals. Make sure your daily supplement contains 100-200mcg.

Native Americans, such as the Sioux, have long used echinacea to counteract the toxins from rattlesnake bites and scorpion stings. Back in the fifteenth century, European mushroom gatherers knew that milk thistle could help you survive if you ate a bad mushroom.

The sixteenth-century herbalist John Cerard advised step children to have lemons handy in case they were poisoned by their stepmothers.

If you're sitting on the fence about learning how to detox your body, or not sure if you really can be bothered to start a healthy detox diet, here's a list of compelling reasons why you might want to consider undergoing a full body detox program.

Man-made chemicals poisonous toxins are everywhere - in our food, air, water; at home and at work; in the city and in the country. In fact, let me take you on a tour of the environmental poisons we encounter every day:

Air is polluted with chemicals from industrial activity; cars; cigarette smoke; and numerous indoor sources, including scented beauty and hygiene products, cleaning products, synthetic fibers, plastics, office supplies, plywood, particleboard, gas appliances and even wallpaper.

Water absorbs the chemicals that make their way into our rivers and streams as well as pollutants that soak into our ground-water.

Most water authorities do not have the necessary purification equipment and acknowledge that millions of people are consuming water containing levels of nitrates above the EU top limit.

Chemical fertilizers add their polluting effects, while the chlorine added to our drinking water - a key protection against typhoid, dysentery and similar diseases - may combine with certain substances to form carcinogenic hydrocarbons. Even if you drink only filtered or bottled water, you're not off the hook, since 50 to 70 per cent of adult exposure to waterborne pollutants comes in our bath or shower.

Food is contaminated by chemical fertilizers, pesticides, polluted groundwater, additives, plastic packaging, leaded cans, and aluminum containers. Imported foods carry the extra whammy of pesticides, including DDT, banned in Britain and the United States but not abroad. Fish are increasingly polluted with mercury, and believe it or not, highly toxic PCBs continue to lurk in our food, air and water long after the ban on their manufacture.

D. Lindsey Berkson, a bioenvironmentalist educated at Tulane University, adds a chilling note in her book Hormone Deception, in which she cites a shocking Associated Press story. It seems that toxic heavy metals, such as cadmium, lead and arsenic, along with dioxins and perhaps even radioactive waste, are routinely used to fertilize fields in America. In Gore, Oklahoma, for example, low-level radioactive waste from a nearby uranium processing plant is licensed as a commercial, fertilizer and sprayed over 9,000 acres of grazing land, where it presumably makes its way into the livestock that munch on the newly fertilized grass.

Although many other industrialized nations regulate the use of fertilizers, the United States does not, which means chat medical, municipal and industrial waste can all be spread over the ground where crops grow and cattle graze. Municipal sewage systems alone sell some 36 per cent of their 11.6 billion lb of waste materials to farmers looking for fertilizer. Sewage is also used as fertilizer in the UK, and is often 'spread on suitable farmland'.

They say that crying is good for you - as it helps release stress and tension, but did you know that the eyes have their own natural detox defence system to prevent toxins getting in. Our eyelashes sweep away larger particles, while our tears contain an enzyme called lysozyme, which can destroy bacteria, and the liquid washes away micro-organisms.

Bowel Movements.

Ideally, food remains should pass through your digestive system within about 24 hours. However, most adults in the Western World retain waste products within their colon for between 2 and 7 days - and in some cases even longer!

This means that toxin substances have a much better chance of being reabsorbed into the blood stream again.

Another good reason why it's vital to follow a healthy detox diet, on a fairly regular basis, to help your body detox itself.