I have been interested in and researching metabolic detoxification pathways for about a month now. In the pursuit of health it is becoming increasingly clear that the modern challenge to health is primarily the buildup of toxic poisons in our body. This is pretty new for the history of human kind. Throughout most of our history our major concerns were about getting enough food and shelter from the elements. Then suddenly (in terms of human history) we started clustering into cities about 5000 to 10,000 years ago. As we developed agriculture, we could develop skill specialization, since everyone no longer needed to be out gathering food every day. Skill specialization generated civilization. Clustering into cities created a new problem – sanitation. Now the new big threat to our health became disease. Plagues wiped out huge portions of the population regularly. Agriculture and animal husbandry also created competition for land resources, which meant wars – the other big cause of early death for humans.
This pretty much described the state of human suffering up until the early 20th century – the dawn of the chemical age. Now a new source of suffering showed up – chemical toxicity. This started with the development of chemical weapons in WW l and quickly became the major financial powerhouse driving industry here and in Europe. Chemical toxicity was initially confined to specific industrial exposures to workers in specific industries, but after WW ll the chemical industry entered our food chain and now we are all being exposed. “Better living through chemistry” became the tag line for American baby boomers. We wanted freedom from the drudgery of preparing and cooking food, so convenience foods were born that had long shelf lives – all through the miracle of chemistry. The problem is the “miracle of chemistry” really meant through the addition of poisons to our food to kill molds and bacteria that are designed to naturally degrade our food. Unfortunately these same poisons also kill the vital microbes in our gut that keep us healthy. Many of the poisons also get into every cell in our body and poison the metabolic pathways that keep us alive.
This metabolic poisoning took a huge leap for the worse with the population crisis in the late 60’s when we developed mass industrial farming techniques to feed the growing population of the world. Key to industrial mass farming is the use of massive amounts of poisons to control weeds, kill pests, increase yields, and time crop harvesting. The level of poisons are so high now that there is not one square inch of surface area on the planet that is not contaminated. The poisons are now in our rainfall. When checked at birth, the umbilical cord blood of every newborn is filled with these chemical poisons. Our bodies are being overwhelmed, and one of the consequences is our bodies are becoming intolerant to the foods we eat – not just the poisons, but the food itself. The innate intelligence of our bodies is becoming scrambled as the fundamental chemistry inside our cells is becoming deranged. Our immune systems can no longer even tell what cells are us and what are outside invaders. This is called autoimmune disease, and this is the big new threat to human survival for the 21st century. Gradually each of the degenerative diseases that kill most of us are being discovered to be autoimmune in nature. Autoimmunity is a direct consequence of our chemical over use and resultant toxic overload.
This awareness of the source of autoimmunity began my interest in detoxification pathways. In this research I came across several very specific detoxification processes that utilize the biochemical detox pathways already in our body. One of the main pathways involves the use of the master detox peptide glutathione. Glutathione is the major antioxidant of the body as it neutralizes reactive oxygen molecules by donating a hydrogen atom to calm them down. Reactive oxygen causes the slow burning of inflammation in the body. Glutathione is able to do its job because of a particular part of its structure called a thiol which is made with sulfur. Sophisticated detoxification methods rely on the use of thiols to remove toxic chemicals and heavy metals out of the body. This is all well and good, except about 10% of the population has become reactive to thiols. They react to foods that contain thiols with the same classic symptoms we generally associate with toxicity. So using foods that contain thiols to help remove toxins from the body only make the patient worse.
What kinds of symptoms am I talking about?
Asthma/shortness of breath
Brain fog
Chronic stress
Diarrhea
Fatigue
Flushing
Headaches
High or low blood pressure
Hives/itchy skin/eczema
Nausea
Do any of these sound familiar to you? Do you have any of these symptoms? If you do you may well be part of that 10% of people that have a thiol sensitivity. This is almost always missed by the medical establishment and the symptoms are blamed on other things. For me the important thing is that if you want to start on a detox protocol, you need to find out if you have a thiol sensitivity first.
How do you find out? It is really very simple – go on a thiol free diet for a week and see if your symptoms go away. If you are looking it up on the internet, it will also be called a sulfur free diet. Although truthfully it is not about the element sulfur, but the chemical thiol that people react to. To do this test you also need to avoid various drugs and supplements that increase thiol levels. This includes some of my very favorite supplements that are for decreasing inflammation like turmeric. Fortunately it should only take a week of avoiding these foods, supplements, and medications to tell if you are sensitive to the sulfur containing thiols.
The list of what to avoid is fairly long, as is the list of foods that it is ok to eat, so I won’t try to fit it into the newsletter. I will make up the list into a handout and have it available at the office for you. If you have any of the symptoms I listed above, it would be well worth a week of eating differently to see if thiols are at the bottom of your symptoms.