Turning the Tables on Toxins & Toxicants: How to Use Food to Upregulate the Body's Detoxification Pathways with Kara Kroeger

Is it hard to believe that you can be exposed to  approximately 500 chemicals before ever leaving your home for the day ? This shocking fact is a stark reality that Kara Kroeger delves into in this episode of the Land Food Life Podcast. Join her as she embarks on a journey of understanding the importance of shielding our bodies from these everyday toxins and toxicants, and how we can actively pave the way towards better health with our food choices.

Kara narrates her deeply personal and moving experience of losing her father due to chemical exposure from Agent Orange. This unfortunate event ignited her exploration into the necessity of being mindful of our environment and the toxicants within it. She also touches upon the significance of compassionate practitioners in healing and recounts Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez's groundbreaking nutritional enzyme protocol that her father used for supporting his body through chemotherapy. Further, Kara sheds light on the differences between toxins and toxicants, understanding free radicals, their sources, and the roles they play in causing biological harm.

Kara then breaks down practical ways to use specific foods to boost health despite the hazardous impacts of toxicants in our environment.  She also emphasizes the importance of a balanced intake of amino acids, the power of cruciferous vegetables, and sulfur's critical role in our bodies. Lastly, she explores the benefits of cutting down on alcohol, enhancing sleep quality, and maintaining bowel health for effective detoxification. This episode will empower you  to protect yourself against free radicals by using whole foods as the foundation of health!

Show Notes:

LFL 28-Day Community Cleanse & Reset - https://www.landfoodlife.com/cleanse
Dr. Nicholas Gonzales Foundation - https://thegonzalezprotocol.com/
Detoxify or Die, Sherry Rogers, M.D.
Toxic Legacy: How the Weedkiller Glyphosate Is Destroying Our Health and the Environment, Stephanie Seneff

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I am your host, cara Kroger, and I am very glad to be sharing this time with you today. So this is episode four of this podcast and it is early on, and I just really want to say thank you so much to the people who have listened so far and to the people who keep coming back and listening to each episode. That means a great deal to me and I've been getting great feedback and I'm very thankful, and I am always excited to hear what you think about the podcast, so please don't hesitate to reach out and say hello. The listeners are the most important part of this, and so thank you.

Speaker 1: 2:00

So today we're going to be continuing on the topic of cleansing the body and avoiding toxins and toxicants in our environment, and if you listened to last week's podcast with Heather O'Neill, you got a good dose of lots of different tools that you can use for the body to help the body's detoxification processes. We talked a lot about infrared sonnet use, cold plunge therapy, cryotherapy, iv drip therapy with glutathione and vitamin C and various things like that that can help the body and its detoxification processes, and so today we're going to continue on with that conversation, and I just want to really hone in here on the fact that we are living in a very different world than we were 150 years ago. Our bodies are coming into contact with so many different chemicals that we really have to do all that we can in our day-to-day lives to help armor ourselves against these toxins and toxicants so that, as we age and our body has a harder time recovering from various things, we can give our body the tools that it needs in order to upregulate our detoxification functions in our body, and so we are going to be delving into some of the things that you can do from a nutritional perspective today, as well as some other body hacks that you can do to help prevent your body from becoming ill from these toxins and toxicants in the environment. I just want to share a fact that I think is pretty profound In our homes alone, we are being exposed to 500 chemicals just in our home before we ever even walk out the door for the day. So that's quite extraordinary, and there are so many more when we walk out the door, because the air that we breathe, the exhaust from cars that we are experiencing as we sit in traffic, the foods that we're eating that are wrapped in plastic are constantly putting different chemicals into those foods.

Speaker 1: 4:16

Additionally, the body care products we use, the home and lawn care products we use, and the different pesticides that are being sprayed in our homes or offices, even if you don't spray your home, you might be coming into contact with some of these chemicals in your office, unbeknownst to you. Now, that doesn't even touch the surface for all of the people who are working in environments that are having exposure to different chemicals, and this is occurring in agriculture. If you are a farmer or a rancher and you're using different pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, different things of that sort, you are coming into contact with a lot of chemicals, as are people who work in floral design and are constantly working with flowers from around the world that have probably been treated with pesticides and herbicides. Or maybe you work in a manufacturing facility and you're surrounded by many different manufacturing processes that are off-gassing either plastics or other things into the environment that you're working. Additionally, you may work in a furniture store, or you may have just remodeled your home, or perhaps you bought a new home and all of those chemicals that are in the materials that were used to build the furniture or to build the new home or to remodel the home are off-gassing, and they're off-gassing chemicals that we're breathing in on a daily basis. You may have also just bought a new mattress, and mattresses these days are made with a lot of foam, which is a lot of plastic and that is being inhaled by us as we sleep. So these are just a few of the things that we are coming into contact with that a lot of us don't even think about, so we're going to talk a little bit more about that today, but what I want to do is share with you an offer that I'm giving only to my Land Food Life podcast listeners. So listen up, because you're going to want to take advantage of this.

Speaker 1: 6:19

I am going to be hosting, in the month of October, the very first Land Food Life 28-day Community Cleanse and Reset. This guided, holistic journey is designed specifically by me to support and uplift you as you clear old debris from your body, your body's cells and metabolism, as well as from your mind, all while discovering joyful ways to live with more clarity, harmony and abundance. So, ultimately, you want to get your friends and your family on board for this and prepare to invest in the most precious and important thing you have your health. So there is a really long list of reasons why you should do this cleanse. Everybody should do it at some point, at least once a year but I'm just going to rattle off a few and if you hear something that rings a bell for you. Think about doing this. It's really, really beneficial for the body.

Speaker 1: 7:19

So, ultimately, if you're experiencing low energy, if you have regular fatigue every single day at a certain part of the day, maybe you have digestive issues like diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating. If you are having foggy thinking or a lack of focus or an inability to focus, a lot of that is caused by the foods that we're eating. So anxiety, depression, unhealthy cravings, self-medicating with food, things of that sort or skin issues, acne breakouts, or maybe you just have a low vegetable intake. In general, a lot of people experience irritability on a regular basis or they're having really intense premenstrual syndrome, and also people who are trying to get pregnant but are experiencing infertility issues can also benefit from a detox like this. This is great for both fathers and mothers who want to have a child in preparing their body with the nutrients that the body needs to be able to conceive and make a baby.

Speaker 1: 8:26

So also, maybe you just have a bunch of food intolerances or you've been gaining weight, or you just have a general feeling of yuckiness in your body, and this is the cleanse that you can do to try something different and get your body back on track. So this cleanse is going to focus on how you approach four key areas of your life Body, health and nutrition, your environment and your surroundings, space and place your emotional life and also social dynamics in your life, as well as how to better create an abundance mindset. So this isn't just about cleansing the body from a metabolic perspective, but it's also about cleansing the body from a mindset perspective. So there's a lot more that I could share, but ultimately, if you go to LandFoodLifecom or wwwLandFoodLifecom, you can read all about it.

Speaker 1: 9:18

I've put so much information up there and, exclusively for my podcast listeners, I am offering an additional discount than what the early bird pricing is on the website right now. That's available till September 10th. If you're a podcast listener, you will get actually $85 off instead of $75 off for the early bird pricing, and the code that you will use is LFLPOD. Lflpod is the code Check out. So, please, I'd love for you to join and it's going to be a really great supportive event. It's a virtual experience, but I will be sending you certain products that you will be using, as well as recipes and lots and lots of tools. We will be going through exercises for understanding how to look at your mindsets around the areas that I mentioned. Yeah, check it out. Lflpod is the discount for my beautiful podcast listeners. So let's carry on with detoxification, shall we?

Speaker 1: 10:23

So I'm not going to lie preparing for this podcast has definitely not been fun in games, because it's really truly heartbreaking to consider how irreverent we have become to life on this planet and just how much we are prioritizing profit and convenience over the health and welfare of all the beings on this planet. All of us who are inhabiting this place are struggling because of this irreverent behavior that we are all participating in today, and it is very disconcerting. And before I go on, I want to share a personal story. This story reflects a lot about why I am doing what I do today, and it is very much having to do with toxicants in our environment.

Speaker 1: 11:18

So when I was in middle school, my father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma cancer and as time went on, he became sick and it was a three and a half year long journey of him going in and out of remission and ultimately going through chemotherapy, and that, in and of itself, being very degrading to the body, was incredibly hard to watch as a daughter, and at this time it was becoming more and more talked about that a lot of people who had gone to Vietnam were struggling with this type of cancer, and, in the long run, it was due to the fact that many of these veterans were exposed to Agent Orange, which is a chemical that was used in the war to defoliate the trees so that they had an advantage in the jungle. And ultimately, my father had also run a tropical greenhouse for a number of years when he was out of the military. He had started this business, and in that business he also used a lot of pesticides and herbicides for the plants, and so ultimately it's very sad, but I lost my father due to cancer from some type of chemical exposure, and this was a wake-up call for me at a very young age. It made me realize, wow, okay, this is no joke and we really need to take into consideration all of the things that are in this world surrounding us that can be problematic in our body.

Speaker 1: 13:04

I also watched him go through the allopathic doctrine of healing cancer, which is very much all about kill, kill, kill, go in, use the chemo, kill the cells, degrade the body, break it down and we hope you survive, and that was also a big wake-up call to me, but it wasn't just the treatment that was a big wake-up call. It was also how the doctors approached talking about this with my father, everything was really cut and dry and there was a lack of emotion and a lack of compassion, and I really do believe that so much of our ability to heal comes from the practitioners that we're working with, having compassion and understanding and true care for what's happening in their patients and I'm not saying that this doctor didn't care for my dad, but ultimately, that allopathic doctrine doesn't really take time to look at a patient's emotions as they're going through this process, and things have changed a lot over the past 25 years since that occurred, but it still is something that I really think needs to be considered and addressed on a deeper level in the world of oncology and healthcare in general, and the reason why I'm bringing this up is because I think that our bodies have a capacity to heal and detox. When we have more compassion for ourselves, when we have better words that we tell ourselves, when we have thoughts that are positive about ourselves, all of those things contribute to our body's ability to heal, and so that is why I bring that up Additionally, while my father was doing chemotherapy and following an allopathic doctrine for dealing with his cancer, he also was working with another doctor out of New York and his name was Dr Nicholas Gonzalez and he was a really extraordinary doctor and basically he was working with people who had cancer, lupus, parkinson's and many other severely degrading illnesses and he created a protocol that really focused on nutritional enzymes to heal the body and a big part of the process in that was giving the body the nutrients that it needs to upregulate detoxification pathways, immune pathways and all of the other aspects in the body that help the body heal. And so it was pretty far out for my dad to be going to this guy at this time and this guy, this doctor, who I did get to see speak many, many years later at some nutritional conferences, which was totally unplanned, and I had the opportunity to go up and thank him very much because it's kind of choking me up. Yeah, it was. It was so nice to know that my dad had him as a doctor because he was a compassionate man and he really cared about his patients and ultimately it was like the complete opposite from the allopathic doctor who was treating my father with chemotherapy and there are still many practitioners who are using the methodologies that Dr Nicholas Gonzalez was researching, as he saw many patients over the years and was doing his own studies. But ultimately the reason why I bring him up is because he was so focused on nourishing my dad's body through this very intense chemical process of chemotherapy that he was going through.

Speaker 1: 17:09

So my dad was seeking out grass fed meat at that time because he had really low red blood cells at that time and that was helping him raise his red blood cell count. So he was seeking out grass fed meat, which was very hard to find. In the early 90s it was still kind of rare. Luckily, whole Foods had just opened in Texas, in San Antonio around that time, and they were carrying grass fed meat. Who later I was working with the farmers and ranchers who were providing that meat, which came full circle and was very interesting as well. But yeah, he was seeking out grass fed meat. He was doing a lot of carrot juicing for the vitamin A and the other nutrients that are in that juice. In fact, his hands turned bright orange and stayed that way for two years because of the beta carotene that he was taking in from the amount of carrot juice he was drinking. He was also doing coffee enemas to help expel toxins from his body. So I'm not going to lie, it was a hard core protocol. I was mesmerized by my dad's ability to do it all, because, on top of those foods and juicing, he was also taking so many supplements that were trying to help him upregulate his detoxification pathways and the nutrition in his body, and it was, on top of the chemo, really hard to keep up with. But he persevered, he wanted to heal, he wanted to get better, he wanted to live, and unfortunately he did not. He passed when I was 16, and it was incredibly impactful, and so just these influences turned me on, as I got older, to wanting to learn more about alternative healing modalities, and so that's why I am doing what I'm doing today.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Before I move on, I just really want to emphasize that the cure for cancer isn't high in some mysterious lab, and it's not going to come from discovering the right drug or the right gene therapy or the vaccine or from some surgery. It's going to come from the recognition that all disease is caused by free radicals, so reactive oxygen species that are in our environment and in our body, and so this is a reality check we all really need to think about. The real culprits are the free radicals that come from toxins that we are exposed to every day, and basically it's not just toxicants, right Like these manmade chemicals, but it's also just toxins that come from things like alcohol and tobacco and the oils that we fry our foods in, and many other kind of under the radar environmental toxins that we've already discussed. I feel like I should stop and take a minute to explain the difference between toxins and toxicants, because I haven't done that and I'm throwing these two words around, want to tell you the difference between the two. So toxins are poisons that are produced within living cells and organs of plants and animals and bacteria, whereas toxicants are synthetic, human-made toxic chemicals, and the difference is not merely one of semantics.

Speaker 1: 20:46

Late into the 19th century, nearly all of the toxic substances that were on earth were called toxins, because they were made up of animal and plants and naturally occurring minerals that were in the environment, such as arsenic or lead or mercury. But then, early into the turn of the century, a new term was created to describe chemical biological harm and its relations with living systems, and that's where the word toxicant came from. So they're significantly different from toxins, not only because of their synthetic origins, but also because of their mass tonnage and wide economic production and distribution processes. So they also have a really, really large compositional array and increasing ubiquity in our homes and our bodies and our environments. So some toxicants, like DDT or dioxins and PCBs, are so long-lived that they will outlast the human species, and there are also POPs, unfortunately, like those shedding off in your non-stick skillet, that cause harm for their entire life cycle, and so these are things that we are putting out into the world. More and more new toxicants are being created every year, and it is very problematic, and the reason why is because toxicants generally cause biological harm in different ways than toxins.

Speaker 1: 22:29

So toxins tend to work by destroying or disrupting our regular cell activity. For instance, if we were to be bitten by a snake, the venom goes in and destroys our red blood cells. Now toxicants, on the other hand, often make our body physiology work differently than it normally would. So, as an example, a carcinogen like espestos right, it's going to go in and it's going to make cells multiply differently and cause cancer. Endocrine disrupting compounds like bisphenol A and many others interact with the hormone system and they're what we call endocrine disruptors, and they can cause early puberty, heart disease, infertility and obesity, and so, in general, it is the difference between breaking or destroying bodily processes versus making them work completely different that seems to produce significantly detrimental effects when we come into contact with toxicants.

Speaker 1: 23:40

I'd like to also just take a minute here to explain what a free radical is. So, if you do not know, it is any molecule that is capable of independent existence that contains an unpaired electron, and so basically what's happening is it has to go into our body and steal an electron, either by poking a hole in our cell and damaging our DNA, or by way of an antioxidant that's circulating around in our bloodstream. It can also steal electrons. So we have these unpaired electrons that are kind of cruising around and looking to stabilize themselves. They steal an electron from our cell and ultimately that's what causes damage and can cause aging of the skin or a breakdown in our muscles and joints or cancer or many other aspects of aging that we experience.

Speaker 1: 24:41

And so free radicals and other reactive oxygen species are derived either from normal essential metabolic processes that are happening in our human bodies or also from external sources like exposure to X-rays and ozone, cigarette smoking, air pollution, industrial chemicals, etc. Right? So free radical formation occurs continuously in the cells and it's a consequence of both enzymatic and non-enzymatic reactions. And enzymatic reactions which serve as a source of free radicals include those involved in the respiratory chain, in phagocytosis, in prostaglandin synthesis and in the cytochrome P450 system, which is a huge aspect of our detoxification system. So free radicals can also be formed in non-enzymatic reactions of oxygen with organic compounds, as well as those initiated by ionizing reactions, and so, ultimately, some internally generated sources of free radicals is the mitochondria which makes energy in our bodies. Inflammation can produce free radicals, our immune system and phagocytosis, exercise can produce free radicals, cigarette smoking, environmental pollutants. So there's good and bad things that generate free radicals.

Speaker 1: 26:16

But the key is in all of these cases is having the right nutrients in our body to act as antioxidants, to neutralize them, to give that unpaired electron instead of it having to take from our cells, or to give a nutrient that is a cofactor in some enzymatic process in our body. So the cytochrome P450 process that I was just talking about is a slew of enzymatic processes that involves the detoxification of our cells, and particularly by way of our liver, and ultimately this is really important to nourish those processes with the cofactors that those enzymes need in order to do their work. So if molecule A needs to turn into molecule B to become the detoxifying enzyme that we need, it needs a cofactor to turn from A into B. So maybe it's zinc, maybe it is glutathione, maybe it is vitamin C. Whatever it is, we need that cofactor, and so, by way of giving our body deeply nourishing foods, we have the capacity to upregulate detoxification processes so that they work really well.

Speaker 1: 27:46

Now I wish I could say that most of us are in a state that, when we take in good nutrients from the foods that we're eating, that those nutrients were going towards helping our body work in optimal fashion. But the reality is, is that most of us, by way of taking pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, sugary, rich foods and highly processed foods that have a number of chemicals in them, just kind of breathe in in the air, drinking unfiltered municipal tap water. There's so many different toxins in the tap water that we drink, and toxicants both, and so I wish I could say that we were in this place where, if we just ate good food, we'd all be functioning optimally. But what's happening is that, in order for our body to process any drug that we're taking, it has to use those cofactor nutrients to detoxify that drug, not to go in and work in terms of rebuilding ourselves instead. And so we are at a deficit just by way of the fact that so many of the foods and other chemicals that we're taking in by way of ingestion in a compliant way it's our choice to take those they are limiting us from having really ideal nourishment going on in the body because those nutrients are going to the detoxification of those components. So we can do our best to take care of ourselves, especially when we're young, when we're not thinking about it usually. But if we can take care of ourselves when we're young, as we get older our body will have had to deal with less of the free radical damage that I've been talking about, and hopefully we'll have a better fighting chance, because I hate to say it, but we are literally all just kind of fighting for our lives at this point. We really don't have control over a lot of these toxins that I've talked about, and so, by way of doing our best with our nutrition, we can try to stave off some of these diseases that are caused by these things and nourish our body so that it can try to heal and take care of itself and we can live longer into the future in health.

Speaker 1: 30:21

Okay, listener, I hope you're doing all right. I know this is a lot of information to take in, that is not necessarily incredibly positive and can be downright hard to hear, but bear with me. I just have a few more things that I want to share in terms of things we can't necessarily control, but that we need to look out for before we move on to the solutions and I'm going to give plenty of solutions. So hold on tight, stay with me and let's keep going.

Speaker 1: 30:54

So one of the things that I haven't even mentioned yet which you might be wondering I can't believe she hasn't mentioned this yet is the pesticides and different chemicals that we're taking in by way of our foods and, in general, the main pesticide that is in the majority of the foods that we're eating that is, one of the biggest culprits in breaking down health in the body is glyphosate, also known as Roundup. Now, if you all listen to episode number one, revitalizing the soil and the guts, you know a little bit about what I am talking about, and I encourage you to go to listen to that episode if you want to hear more about glyphosate in the soil and how it damages the gut, because I'm not going to go into that in the depth that I did in that episode on this episode. But I do want to mention it because it's very important when we eat non-organic foods and oftentimes the tap water that we drink and even if it's not municipal water but well water it has glyphosate in it, because glyphosate leaches into the soil and can enter into the water table. It's also in the majority of the foods we eat, specifically the grains we consume, and that is going to be corn and wheat and oats and legumes. Many of these grains are sprayed with that chemical at the start of planting and then at the end of planting as a desiccant so that that crop will dry out before it's harvested. It causes it to die and dry out because what it's doing is it is going in and having an effect on the chigamate pathway in plants, which will basically kill the plant. Now, humans don't have the chigamate pathway, so they say that glyphosate is okay in our body, but what we are coming to find is that that is absolutely not the case and we really, really are taking in huge amounts of this chemical.

Speaker 1: 33:02

Now there's a woman named Stephanie Seneff and she's a senior research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and her research has focused on the effects of drugs and toxic chemicals and diet on human health and disease, and she has written a really awesome book called Toxic Legacy, and this book is not an easy read. It's very scientific. I think most people wouldn't even get through the first two chapters, but for science geeks like us, it really lays it all out and it's complicated, but ultimately, glyphosate is a major toxicant, and what she is finding is that, even though we've been told that glyphosate is safe for humans, animals and the environment, it is not, and more and more emerging scientific research is showing that it has deadly disruptions to our gut microbiome as well as the soil microbiome, and there are many, several landmark legal cases that are winning against Monsanto, who is the creator of glyphosate, and it's also got incredibly crippling effects on protein synthesis and its impact on the body's ability to use and transport sulfur, and these are really important things that we do in the body. And so what she is discovering and not just her, but many other scientists as well is that this chemical that we are just ingesting every day, all day, all of us, it's very hard to avoid is really having huge impacts on potentially creating Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and many other neurodegenerative diseases that we are seeing manifesting in older people at greater and greater rates. So one way is to try to filter your water and to eat organic food as much as possible. I understand that's not a reality for everybody and that's okay. You can do your best. A lot of times you can buy organic grains and beans, so rice and beans and other legumes online in bulk in organic forms for pretty inexpensive. So that's one way to consider trying to reduce your glyphosate load. And if you listen to that episode one, there's more ways that I give in that particular episode. So go back and listen to that one.

Speaker 1: 35:46

Now I also want to recommend one other book before we move on, and that book is called Detox or Die Great title, right, my goodness. It is by a woman named Sherry A Rogers, who is a medical doctor who's been working in private practice and helping people detox for many, many moons, and this book just lays out all the toxins, where they come from and a lot of different ways to cleanse the body and upregulate detoxification pathways through nourishment. So if you want to delve a little bit deeper, that is another one that I suggest, all right. So let's get down to business and talk about what it is you can do to protect yourself from all of these things that I've laid out on the table. So things are going to get brighter from here. Are you ready? I am, because, man, oh man, it's a lot. All right, so I want to begin arming you with tools to help detoxification processes in your body by educating you a little bit about how you can improve phase one and phase two detoxification in your liver. So these two phases work together to neutralize and eliminate toxins from the body, and you can adopt a lot of daily habits that are going to support both of these phases and that will contribute to optimal health and optimal detoxification.

Speaker 1: 37:22

Phase one is the initial step of detoxification, and this is where toxins are broken down into intermediate compounds through the various enzymatic reactions that I discussed previously. So this process can generate more severe free radicals and, if it's not managed properly, can lead to more oxidative stress and damage, and so we need to support phase one detoxification, and we can do this by consuming nutrient rich foods, such as those that contain a lot of B vitamins, because B vitamins are really important in this process. So where do we find B vitamins? Well, we're going to find B vitamins in whole grains and lots of leafy greens and lean meats, especially like grass fed meats, that contain B12 and B6 and all the other B vitamins as well. Vitamin C is also really important, which is abundant in citrus fruits, as well as peppers and many other of the colorful foods that we take in that are red and yellow, and so we also want to add flavonoids into our diets, and these are going to be found in berries and onions and green tea. A lot of these foods that I've just mentioned are also not only providing a lot of nutrients, but they are providing a lot of antioxidants, so these are going to basically improve phase one pathways and reduce the risk of oxidative damage.

Speaker 1: 39:02

Additionally, a lot of herbs and spices can be used in our cooking, and this just makes cooking good. When we use fresh herbs and we also use dried powdered herbs, such as turmeric and cumin and sources of spices that can act strongly as anti-inflammatories in the body, we are just benefiting in general from many, many different aspects that those herbs are providing in our body. So I've given you a few of the nutrients that are necessary for phase one liver detoxification, and those, as I mentioned, are B vitamins, vitamin C, flavonoids, antioxidants and things of that nature. But you're probably wondering well, how many of these foods do I actually need to eat? So let me break that down for you. Ideally, in the perfect world, we would all be eating about nine servings of vegetables per day. Just imagine when we were hunters and gatherers. We were moving around all day long, consuming leaves and berries and many different vegetable rich foods, including tubers and all, and including insects and many other things. We were just eating them as we moved throughout the day, and it wound up actually being quite a significant amount of food. And so if we eat five to nine servings of vegetables per day, not only are we getting a bunch of these nutrients that I just mentioned, but we're also taking in a lot of fiber.

Speaker 1: 40:38

The gallbladder, bile and fiber are all playing really crucial roles in the body's detoxification processes and our overall digestive health in general. So the gallbladder stores bile, which is a digestive fluid produced by the liver, and that's going to help break down fats and eliminate waste products, including toxins, from our body. So bile also plays a really vital role in the elimination of fat soluble toxins and it's going to aid in their excretion through the digestive system, and fiber is like a natural sweeper for the digestive tract, right, it's going to go in and it binds to toxins and waste products and it facilitates their removal from the body by way of our bowel movements. And so a well-functioning gallbladder and an adequate intake of dietary fiber are really essential for efficient detoxification and elimination of waste products. And, in general, as I mentioned, most of the fiber that we take in comes from vegetables, grains and legumes, and so there's two types of fiber.

Speaker 1: 41:48

There's soluble fiber and insoluble fiber, and they do different things in the body. Soluble fiber dissolves in water and it can form a gel-like material, and this can help lower blood cholesterol and lower our glucose levels. It's found in oats, peas, beans, apple, citrus fruits, carrots, barley and psyllium, and this particular type of fiber is what makes us feel full and satiated. So if we eat a lot of soluble fiber, we can actually increase our feeling of satiation, and this is a good thing, because if we can feel full by way of eating adequate amounts of fiber, we will often eat less junk food or go for empty calories, so eating a lot of soluble fiber is really helpful for decreasing cravings. Now the second type of fiber is insoluble fiber, and this is generally the type of fiber that you're going to find in most vegetables. They're also in those grains and legumes, but we get a lot more insoluble fiber in vegetables like cauliflower, green beans and all these kind of leafy greens and roughage type foods. And this type of fiber promotes the movement of material through your digestive system and it increases the bulk of the stool, and so it can really benefit those who are struggling with constipation or just a regular stool formation and things of that nature, but very, very important for detoxification.

Speaker 1: 43:29

In order to eat the amount of vegetables to do all of these beautiful processes that I was just talking about, we need to eat about five to nine servings per day. So what does a serving look like? A serving is a half a cup of any chopped vegetable, like carrots, broccoli, celery, tomatoes, etc. Or one cup of any leafy green like kale, lettuce, collards, even leafy herbs and things of that nature. So we want to get a combination of both the leafy greens as well as the insoluble, rich vegetables like cauliflower and broccoli and all of those other things. So if we want to get those five to nine servings, if we just eat one big salad per day for one of our meals, we can get a lot of those vegetables. So we usually use about one to one and a half or two cups of leafy greens in our salad and then if you add three half cup servings of other vegetables say a half cup of carrots, half cup of tomatoes and a half cup of celery right there you've gotten five servings of those non-starchy vegetables that provide a lot of the insoluble fiber that help bind detoxines and pull them out of our body.

Speaker 1: 44:57

If you are a visual learner and you want to get an idea of what nine servings of vegetables looks like, you can go to my Instagram page at LandFoodLife and see a picture that I took. I basically chopped up the vegetables and put some leafy greens in there and created a visual so that you can get a real understanding of how many servings this is and what those servings look like. So please check out that picture if you're interested and also, if you're only doing two to four servings right now, just slowly take it up incrementally if you feel more comfortable with that and nine is ideal, but you may not get that every day, and that's okay. Just do your best and keep trying to incrementally increase your servings of vegetables each day. You will notice benefits. For one thing, you have to drink less water when you eat a lot of vegetables, because there's a lot of water in those foods, naturally, and so you don't have to drink as much water because you're taking it in through those veggies.

Speaker 1: 46:03

All right, so now I'm going to go on to talk about phase two detoxification and the different foods that you can take in to help phase two detoxification pathways. So this is the conjugation step, where the intermediate compounds that were produced in phase one are further modified to become water soluble and basically excreted from the body. Now this phase requires various enzymes and cofactors, like I was talking about earlier in the podcast. So if these enzymes and cofactors are not present, phase two detoxification becomes thwarted and it's often going to produce more damaging toxins than those that went into phase one detox. So we want to support phase two detox by way of taking in adequate protein.

Speaker 1: 46:56

Now, whether you are a vegetarian or a meat eater, you want to get all the necessary amino acids that are utilized in phase two enzyme activity. So meat proteins are what we call a complete protein because they have all 20 amino acids that we need. Now, 11 of the 20 amino acids are produced in the human body and the other nine we have to get from the foods that we eat. In plant-based foods there's a few that are complete proteins, so quinoa, buckwheat, hemp seed, blue-green algae and soybeans are what we call a complete plant protein, and those foods can be consumed, but for other grains in legumes, sometimes you need to combine these foods in order to get the full 20 amino acids. This is one of the main reasons why it's really important, if you're a vegetarian or a vegan, to pay really close attention to the nutritional components of your foods and eat really a whole foods vegan or vegetarian diet and not just substitute a bunch of junk foods that contain a lot of processed things in it in lieu of meat products. So ideally, whether you're a vegetarian or whether you are a vegan or a meat eater, you want to be able to get complete proteins that are going to support phase two liver detoxification by way of the amino acids that they're providing in your body Another really powerful family of vegetables that we can eat to upregulate phase two liver detoxification is the almighty cruciferous vegetable family, and that includes things like broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, spinach and many others, cabbage and things of that nature.

Speaker 1: 49:01

Now, the reason why we want to consume these foods is because they are really high in sulfur compounds that are going to enhance phase two detoxification pathways. They also contain powerful compounds called glucosinolates, and these are really important because they are highly, highly effective in the body, conjugating to glutathione in the liver, and I'm going to talk about glutathione in depth here in a minute. But glutathione is the number one antioxidant in the body, and so we really need to have high proliferation of glutathione happening and make sure that we're preserving the glutathione that we have in our body and that we're giving it what it needs in order to reproduce and become a powerful antioxidant. And so ultimately, when we eat these foods, we are also getting a huge amount of sulfur, as I mentioned before. Now, sulfur is really important for a lot of different things, but mostly the formation of proteins. As I mentioned before, the glyphosate that we are consuming as a pesticide in many of the foods is basically messing up our ability to transport sulfur, and so sulfur is a huge component of phase two liberty detoxification, and we do not want this to be minimized in any way. So by eating these cruciferous vegetables, we're taking in many of the sulfur compounds that we need.

Speaker 1: 50:35

Now we do want to make sure that we eat a lot of these vegetables in their raw form, because those glucosinates tend to stay intact in their raw form. So adding these foods to a salad, making a coleslaw, or making a Brussels sprout slaw, or eating a kale salad, or maybe just slightly cooking your broccoli al dente and making a broccoli salad out of it, or something like that, can be really, really helpful for increasing the intake of those glucosinolates. Now you can also buy these standardized extracts of glucosinolates, which can be very, very helpful for people who have either had cancer and are now in remission and they want to protect themselves. These standardized supplements can be very, very useful because you're really making sure that you're getting adequate amounts that are in the form that the body can utilize With food. We get it, but we don't always know exactly how much we're getting because of the way that we're cooking them or the way that our body is absorbing in that moment, and so, ultimately, we want to sometimes use supplementation if we're dealing with more profound health issues.

Speaker 1: 51:50

Some additional sulfur-containing foods that you can ingest, which really are so much of a foundation of our cooking, are onions and garlic, and so consuming a lot of those foods can be very helpful for increasing your sulfur intake. Eggs also have a lot of sulfur, and I know that some people minimize their egg consumption due to the cholesterol, but eating some eggs on occasion can be helpful for that sulfur intake. And, of course, if possible, I recommend trying to get pasture-raised eggs that are raised fully outside and they can eat insects and vegetation and get sunlight on their skin from being raised outdoors. That increases the vitamin D in those foods as well. There are three main processes in phase two liver detoxification that are important processes, and those are methylation, transulfation and sulfation, and all of these things either require B vitamins, such as folate and B12, or they require sulfur because, as their name suggests, they are sulfurous processes, and so, in general, we really want to support by eating folate-rich foods, so leafy greens such as lentils, and then other grass-fed animal products that contain high amounts of B12.

Speaker 1: 53:27

Now you may have noticed that I've been referring to grass-fed beef or pasture-raised eggs or pasture-raised chicken, and I think it's really important when consuming meat to eat meats that are raised in a way that are having less exposure to different chemicals. So when a grain-fed animal is eating corn and soy and many other things that it's being fed, a lot of those grains have been treated with glyphosate, the pesticide that I've been talking about, and so that winds up in their meat and we consume it by way of their meat. A lot of grain-fed animals also have higher pro-inflammatory omega fatty acids, whereas grass-fed has an increase in the anti-inflammatory fatty acids in comparison to grain-fed animals. So, in general, that is why I suggest that, additionally, a lot of grass-fed animals not all, but many, and you need to kind of learn your sources are not being fed antibiotics, and so we're not getting those antibiotics either. So this is the reason why I suggest that they're also eating diets more natural to their genetics and the way that they've been living on the planet for many, many millennia. So that's one of the reasons why I suggest grass-fed, pasture-raised animals, all right.

Speaker 1: 54:57

So I want to move on here and talk a little bit about the genetic mutations that can impact how effectively our body detoxifies harmful substances. So we want to think of detoxification as a cleanup crew for our body and of course, it's going to help get rid of the toxins. But imagine if some of the members of this crew were a little bit slower or a little bit less efficient in their work and we all experience this in all aspects of our life somewhere. But this is similar to how certain genetic mutations can affect our detox processes. So many mutations can lead to toxins lingering in the body for longer periods and potentially causing many problems. They can increase inflammation and damage our cells, and so some people might have genetic differences that make their cleanup crew less effective at breaking down toxins and attaching them to harmless molecules for removal. And we really want to focus on supporting areas where we might be genetically at a disadvantage. And so ultimately, we can do genomic testing to see what our genetic differences are, and this can give us insight into how to better support our body's natural detoxification and overall well-being. And so, in general, if you're interested in looking into some of these genetic tests, I can be helpful with that. I can run those tests, because a lot of us have different genes that inhibit either methylation, transulfation, sulfation or the cytochrome P450 enzyme processes and things of that nature, and so when we know what our genetic mutations are, we can actually go in and support them, which can help prevent aging and just give us a better chance of being our healthiest and living an optimal health. All right. So if you're interested in that, please don't hesitate to reach out and I'd be glad to chat with you more about that.

Speaker 1: 57:11

So I want to move on and talk now about glutathione. You've heard me mention it a number of times, and this is a very, very important nutrient in the body. It's particularly an antioxidant, and we want to talk with you about why this particular antioxidant is the body's master antioxidant. So glutathione is made up of three amino acids glutamine, glycine and cysteine. So this is another reason why it's important to get your protein intake. And also sulfur is required for the synthesis and structure of many of the proteins, as I've mentioned before, as well as enzymes, and this includes glutathione, and sulfur is found in two amino acids methionine and cysteine. So by eating the sulfur rich vegetables that I mentioned earlier, you can reduce oxidative stress by increasing glutathione levels.

Speaker 1: 58:10

And also vitamin C intake is really important for boosting glutathione, because it generally tends to attack free radicals that are moving throughout our body first, which leaves and spares glutathione for other important functions, and some studies have shown that vitamin C taken in a supplement form, at about 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C for over the course of 13 weeks, was able to increase glutathione levels by 18% in white blood cells and 47% in red blood cells. So that's a really significant increase and a very easy thing to do to take a vitamin C supplement. I recommend liposomal vitamin C because it is more absorbable, because it's basically in a fat soluble form. Now there are some foods like spinach, avocados, asparagus and okra, and these are all naturally rich in glutathione, but unfortunately, glutathione is really poorly absorbed from foods and cooking can damage it. But these foods may also decrease oxidative stress, and so we can consume some of those foods, trying to eat them in their raw form, in hopes of just providing some antioxidants and potentially increasing glutathione levels. Now I've already mentioned turmeric, but turmeric is a strong anti-inflammatory and antioxidant, and so it can increase glutathione levels.

Speaker 1: 59:41

And one major factor that is very important for detoxification is getting a good night's sleep. A lack of sleep, as most of us know, can cause a lot of oxidative damage and hormonal imbalances, and so we want to really work on our sleep hygiene in order to help the body process toxins in the night as we sleep, because that's when the majority of that work is done, and so if you are not sleeping well, I highly suggest you start taking some actions to improve your sleep Ensure that your room is very, very dark, if you need to have some type of sound cancellation, and also making sure that you stop using your computer a couple of hours before bed or your phone, because those frequencies and lights that are coming from the phone can stimulate awakeness, and so taking that down a number of hours before you go to bed, using magnesium baths basically epsom salts and taking a bath before you go to bed can be really helpful at relaxing the muscles and getting you prepared for sleep. What also happens is those magnesium sulfate that is what epsom salts are also contains sulfur, and that sulfur can be absorbed transdermally and also help detoxification pathways. So really nice, simple thing to do is an epsom salt bath. If you don't have a bathtub, you can simply make a foot bath and it will be absorbed via your feet. You want to make high doses of those magnesium salts in the foot bath or in the bathtub. So in a bathtub I use about two cups or more of salts, and I soak my whole body in that, so that can be really helpful as well.

Speaker 1: 1:01:41

There's a lot of other ways that you can improve your sleep, and I suggest that you go online and look at what some of those are. There are some different things like melatonin, and melatonin can also be helpful in our hormone cascades at helping other hormone production develop, but some people find that to be useful and some people find it not to be useful, so you have to play around with it a little bit. Now two other things increase glutathione. Exercise, of course, will help our body produce glutathione, so getting active, sweating sweating is going to help you detox, by way of a different pathway, your skin, and that can be very helpful for eliminating toxins from the body, but also just in general. Exercise will help with our sleep and so many other things. So get out there and move y'all body.

Speaker 1: 1:02:40

Okay now, last but not least, decreasing alcohol intake. Let's talk about alcohol. Oh goodness, this is a hard one for a lot of people. A lot of people use alcohol to de-stress and to relax, and I totally get it, because I do too but as we age, it becomes harder and harder for our body to process alcohol, not that it's not hard when we're young, but we definitely tend to notice the effects of it more as we get older, and so my recommendation is that you try to drink no more than seven drinks a week and no more than two drinks per setting, and really, ideally, I think that it should be more like drink two times per week and two drinks per setting, so that would be equivocal to four drinks per week. Now if you're drinking a lot more than that at this point, then you can try cutting back. Some people have to just abstain completely because they can't basically manage it, and that's okay. There's nothing wrong with not drinking. There's a lot of ways to have fun without drinking, but I highly recommend that you look into ways to reduce your drinking. There's apps out there that you can put your drinks into, and it helps you track what you're drinking, because sometimes we fool ourselves and think we're drinking less than we really are, and this app helps you stay aware of that.

Speaker 1: 1:04:12

There are a lot of resources out there for learning to reduce or eliminate alcohol in your life, and one of my favorites that I read was called this Naked Mind by a woman named Annie Grace, and she gives just a lot of insight of what alcohol is doing in the body and talks a lot about the emotional components. But it's a beautiful read. Even if you decide not to completely quit alcohol, these books can help you gain a better understanding of why it's important to really reduce it in your life Now. Additionally, there is a great Andrew Huberman podcast that also goes over the effects of alcohol in the body, and I will put that in the show notes. But we really damage our body through excessive alcohol consumption and it's unfortunate because I know it's a fun thing to do, but it also can cause a lot of strife for a lot of people. So reducing alcohol can be a really beautiful way to enhance life. So before I wrap up today, I have two more suggestions that are also really key for detoxification.

Speaker 1: 1:05:23

Now you've heard me talk a little bit about elimination, and a lot of people are struggling with constipation out there, and what happens with constipation is when you're not moving your bowels and excreting the waist on a daily basis, those toxins can be resorbed into the body and wreak more havoc as they're resorbed. So we wanna make sure that we are setting ourselves up to eliminate every single day. Now I know that can be very hard. A lot of people try a lot of different things to eliminate constipation, or some people just don't even realize that not having a bowel movement on a regular basis is problematic. So there's three things that I suggest for trying to improve constipation. One is increasing your fiber intake, as I discussed earlier. Getting those five to nine servings of vegetables that are really high in fiber, particularly in soluble fiber, but also taking in those whole grains to provide soluble fiber as well. Now. Secondly, drinking a lot of water is very, very important, and I suggest drinking 80 ounces of water in the first 10 hours of the day that you are awake. I already mentioned the Andrew Huberman podcast on alcohol intake, but he has another really good one on the significance of drinking adequate water, and I will also put that in the show notes too. So, drinking water, getting fiber, and if you continue to have trouble, I would consider looking at an elimination diet to see if there's some food that could be causing constipation. I work with a lot of clients to help them figure that out, through food intolerance testing, as well as other things, looking at the gut microbiome function through stool testing, and so those are some other aspects that you can try as well. Oftentimes people will start using a probiotic supplement that can also be beneficial at introducing beneficial bacteria into the gut. That can help improve their bowel movements as well.

Speaker 1: 1:07:30

So proper elimination really important, and water intake is really important for flushing toxins out of the body, whether it's by way of the urine or the sweat or also the feces, because there's a lot of water in our stools as well and it's very important for keeping the stools in the form that is most easy to eliminate. So lots of good water intake. I highly recommend drinking purified water over tap water. If filtering your water is hard to come by, you can just allow water to sit on a counter in an open vessel and some of the different types of chlorines will evaporate out of the water. That is often high in municipal water. So also Brita filters can help some. They're not the most ideal filter but they can help some. Some people really like the Berkey filter and others will just do some type of filtration system that also has alkalization components that help to adjust the pH balance of the water into a higher pH and that can be helpful for providing minerals in the water.

Speaker 1: 1:08:46

So a little bit there on water intake and I've covered a lot of ground today. So we've talked about the importance of B vitamins. We've talked about the importance of eating antioxidants like flavonoids and other things that are really beneficial. We've discussed vitamin C and how it's super duper important for acting as an antioxidant in the body and sparing glutathione use in the body, as well as helping to recycle glutathione. We've also talked about the importance of fiber and how that helps with elimination, and we have discussed the use of sulfur rich foods for improving methylation and transulfation and sulfation, as well as the formation of proteins in the body. We've talked about eliminating alcohol, getting a good night's rest, exercising, and I think that mostly covers it. So in general, these are all a lot of really useful tools that you can do day in and day out to increase phase one and phase two liver detoxification in the body.

Speaker 1: 1:10:02

Now, if you really want to get an edge on doing all of these things, I highly suggest that you look into signing up for the Land Food Life 28 Day Community Cleanse and Reset. Now this is gonna be offered, as I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, october 3rd through 30th and remember Land Food Life podcast listeners get an additional discount on early bird pricing by using the code LFLPOD. So, lflpod, and please take advantage of this beautiful opportunity for not only cleansing the body but helping to cleanse the mind and reset your mindset around your environment and your community dynamics and emotional dynamics, as well as creating a beautiful abundance mindset, because it's more than just the body that we need to cleanse on a regular basis, and oftentimes we can get stuck in mindsets that don't benefit us. So I really appreciate you taking the time to listen. If you've made it this far in the podcast, I commend you. This is a lot of dense information and that means that you're very devoted to learning about this and taking care of your body, and so I really commend you on being proactive. So I'll be signing off for now, but I look forward to sharing this space again with you in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, take care and please again go to landfoodlifecom front slash cleanse to learn more about the upcoming cleanse opportunity we will be hosting October 3rd through 30th. Take care, bye-bye.

Speaker 1: 1:11:43

Well, my friends, there you have it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail, tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks, same time, same place. Bye for now.