Dr. Kalish: Welcome, Dr Dan Kalish here once again. We’re going to talk about detoxification today. That’s me on the right back in the day and on the left is my friend Jim, was his name at the time. This picture was taken when we were living in a monastery in Southern Thailand called Watswan-Mok. We were both students of Ajan Budadas who was one of the enlightened Buddhist masters in Thailand. In Thailand, there was a resurgence of enlightened Buddhist masters ... I don’t know why this happened but there was a surge of them. When we were in Thailand 25 years ago, there were 50-100 of these people. For some reason, they had this generation of enlightened Buddhist masters. Jim and I lived in the monastery together for 1-2 years. I ended up coming back home because I figured I still had some things to do here, and Jim went on an ordained and became a monk. He stayed in Thailand for many years ... he’s an amazing man, he now has his own monastery in New Zealand. One of the things that happened to me in Thailand was I got really sick, you can see how skinny I was. That led me to get interested in functional medicine. I came back with a really nasty parasitic infection, it took me about 14 years to figure out how to get my health back which is a long time. The doctor I am today, if I had seen me in my 20s I would have fixed me in 1-2 months. It was a 14 year journey of seeing a lot of doctors to get better. I’m dedicated now to getting this information out to people. If I had just listened to a webinar about GI function, I probably could have solved my problem in a year instead of 14. I had pretty severe chronic fatigue for a long time. I was functional but not that much, I had to sleep a lot during the day. I managed to make my way through school, but it really was a debilitating period of my life. I’m dedicated now to getting this information out, information is really a critical step for all this.
Let’s talk about big picture here – pretty big, like global. It took me a long time to piece these things together. We clearly have this problem of chronic illness that’s just escalating. The standard ones are heart disease, cancer, obesity and depression we all know about but also the non-standard ones – the wounded ones who go to their regular doctor, they are sick but they can’t figure it out in a conventional medical context. They have an autoimmune disease, some toxicity related illness or neurological symptoms that are hard to classify. A large segment of our population now is either chronically ill with diagnosable problems, or they’re chronically ill with things that medical doctors can’t diagnose easily which is why there is a whole functional medicine area. This is not random and it’s getting worse. I was at a conference in Texas; any doctor who you talk to in this industry who’s been in practice for more than 20 years will tell you the same thing. Patients are getting sicker, these problems are getting worse and it’s not random. The problem that we’re seeing on the inside is happening to the physical body – increases in autism, neurological conditions among older adults like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s ... these are not unrelated events. The increases in allergies and asthma that we see in children are not unrelated events. They’re all related to this problem on the inside which is toxins, but that’s all directly related to the problem on the outside, which is the destruction of our natural environment as a direct result of industrial waste generation and burning up fossil fuels. These are not unrelated things. The fact that we’re burning a lot of coal throughout the planet and the mercury from the coal is getting into the food, water and air is directly related to why people are getting sicker. We’re making the planet sicker but it’s affecting us internally as well. I don’t think there’s a culture-wide recognition of this yet. We’re still struggling in the US with the idea of climate change. What I’m talking about is even more radical which is that there’s a global change in the internal environment of the human body that is toxin related, and is just as significant and easy to see if you’re looking for it, as the changes that we’re seeing in the environment from the pollution that we’re generating. These 2 things are related, we’re internally polluting ourselves. We’re smart enough still to figure this out, and I have hope that this is going to work out with a happy ending.
Talking about tonight, liver function and detox pathways; we’ll get real specific about specific nutrients. I think the science is pretty cool. We’re going to talk about impaired detoxification and some ideas about reducing toxic exposure. The main issues we always confront are what detox pathways are blocked, what level of antioxidant protection do you require and which of your symptoms are detox related? This is really hard to figure out. You’re not going to self-treat your way to a completely detoxified body, it’s too hard. You’ll probably make yourself sick along the way if you try to do that. This is where you need a coach and some guidance. I want to present a lot of self help ideas. If that’s not enough to get you well, find someone who is really skilled in running detox programs. If you don’t have a lot of money or you just want to be practical or if you feel like you’re toxic and you don’t like to take a ton of supplements, the most potent detoxifier known to mankind is water. If you drink water, your body will flush out water soluble toxins. It won’t flush out fat soluble toxins; tonight’s talk is all about fat soluble toxins. You could get rid of the water soluble ones simply by hydrating adequately. If you’re dehydrated, it makes no sense to do other fancy things. It doesn’t even make sense to eat organic food if you’re dehydrated. You’re not flushing out pesticides, herbicides and toxins if your body is dehydrated. The vast majority of people I work with, eat great and don’t drink enough water. Right off the bat, that’s something you can do for yourself. People argue about exactly how much water to drink; for most of us, it’s at least 2-3 quarts a day. That’s the absolute minimum for most people. If you’re toxic, you need to double that for a while. One thing which I’m doing with patients now is whatever amount of water you’re drinking and you think it’s enough, just double that amount for 3 days and see if you feel better. Another way of marking how much hydration you need is based on how much you’re peeing; you should be peeing every 2-3 hours throughout the day. That’s a minimal amount of urine you should be producing.
Signs that your detox capacity could be impaired: any symptom that has to do with your brain, because many of these toxins are neurotoxins. They get to your brain and cause problems in the brain; memory, concentration, focus, ADD, ADHD, depression, fatigue, overeating. When the brain chemicals get messed up, we tend to compulsively overeat. The heavyweight version of detox problems is what I mentioned earlier: kids with autism, they universally toxic which is why they have autism. One of the leading autism experts in the US told me a few years ago, autism is just another word for toxicity. Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, all these neurological conditions are a direct result of exposure to environmental toxins. When we think about how the body breaks them down, I always look at this from a systems standpoint so we have a context in which to put this. We’re talking about 2 kinds of toxins – neurotoxins that get into the brain and damage brain cells, and endocrine disruptors for example xeno-estrogen, a chemical compound that mimics the effect of estrogen. It’s not a good thing for men to get exposed to estrogen; not a good thing for women to get exposed to excess estrogen. Estrogen is a growth hormone, it stimulated cell growth which we call cancer. Toxin overload, antigen overload so now we’re in a high stress panic mode on a physiological level; that eventually leads to damage in the gut toxins build up even more because the gut is damaged, and then the detox pathways get overwhelmed. Most of the people I work with are in a state of adrenal, GI and toxin overload. According to the current science, every American has somewhere between 400 and 700 toxins in their body. Every baby born in the US has between 50-60 toxins the day they’re born. We used to think that the placenta filtered them out, but they know now that’s not true. The mom gives toxins to the baby. The next time you’re in a good mood, Google ‘CDC fourth report on human exposure to environment chemicals.’ The government is tracking the toxicity levels of the American population, and they update this report every year. Environmental phenols, fungicides, herbicides, pesticides ... they’re looking at every one of these chemicals that they’ve identified. Phyto-estrogens or xeno-estrogens are chemical compounds that mimic estrogen. They’re in plastic and all around us the whole time. They’re analyzing this in a way that’s fascinating and disturbing. They break down the report based on age, ethnicity, gender and it’s a 400 page report. It’s not a random thing that’s happening that no one is paying attention to; it’s just that people aren’t motivated to change all this yet. If you’re in a good space and you’re clean with everything, you may have a couple hundred toxins instead of 400-700. We want to correct the body systems in the order in which they occurred. We always look at adrenal hormones, GI and then detox. Detox always comes last because if you start to detox too early in the healing process, you’ll get really sick. You need the gut as a way to eliminate toxins,, so good gut function is essential prior to doing detox. One of my main teachers was made very sick by heavy metal detox trying to pull mercury fillings out; he put himself into health crisis for many years because he detoxed too early. It’s really the most important, but we put it last because it’s dangerous to do it too early. I think about this as levels of functional medicine. The problem here is multi-faceted. You could have a root cause of your health problem be exposure to mercury; maybe you have fillings, maybe you ate too much fish, maybe you breathed air which is full of mercury. Now you have some cognitive impairment problems. Your memory and mood isn’t great, you’re depressed and anxious. Then your adrenal glands burn out, eventually you get overweight and depressed. That whole process could take 5-10 years or 20-30 years. The problem is we’re always thinking about symptomatic expression, and we’re not at all relating to the underlying cause of the problem. As much as possible within functional medicine, we want to find the root cause of the problem, treat that, treat the body systems that have been damaged, and treat the symptoms that have shown up. You want to treat all 3 of those areas to get a complete program.
You could have someone who’s craving sweets every day, their memory is bad, they’re overweight, tired and depressed. We have to spend a lot of time treating the yeast overgrowth in their gut. We better fix the adrenal glands, get that working and at the end of the program, we can start to get the detox pathway working. When that’s working well, we can pull the mercury out of their body. Oftentimes the root cause of a health problem is dealt with last. It’s counter-intuitive. Getting the mercury out of your body might make you feel worse. Oftentimes dealing with the root cause problem doesn’t improve symptoms right away. We need to balance out treatments for the root causes, body systems and symptoms all together. If you come in to see a practitioner and you’re depressed and you have food cravings, you want those symptoms to go away. We have to treat symptoms sometimes to get people to feel better. We also want to treat the body systems that were damaged in the process of the mercury causing this toxicity reaction, we have to treat the yeast overgrowth, the adrenal glands and eventually when the time is right, we treat the root cause of the problem. You can’t always go to the root cause of the problem; in many cases that makes people sicker and the whole thing falls apart. As a patient, you should be aware of the root causes of your problem, what body systems are messed up, what are my symptoms and how am I going to treat each one of these separate areas. What am I going to do to fix my symptoms? Is that going to fix my root cause? Absolutely never. An antidepressant medication or ADD med never pulled mercury out of a human being’s body. Most of what we do for symptomatic treatment has no impact on root causes at all. People want to feel better, so we try to make the symptomatic treatments as natural and healthy as possible. You need to know symptomatic treatments and use them appropriately. Body system treatments include treating the adrenals, gut and detox pathways. Eventually you can treat the root cause when the time is right. Every program that you do should be designed to accommodate for symptom relief, treating the body systems and getting to the root cause of the problem. That’s really what functional medicine is all about in my mind.
GI and liver health. Let’s say we have a toxin coming in; you’re taking a bunch of medications or drinking a lot of alcohol, eating foods that you’re allergic to, you have some infections, you’re breathing air full of pollutants, you’re stressed because you have kids ... when we run the cortisol tests mostly on women, every kid knocks about 10 points of cortisol off them. It’s almost a rule of thumb in my practice. Normal healthy cortisol is about 40. If she has 1 kid it’ll be around 30, with 2 kids it’ll be around 20; women with 3-4 kids, their cortisol could be down at 10. Whatever the stressor is, these things accumulate and they end up over-burdening the GI tract. Now you’re not absorbing nutrients well, and there are a lot of toxins getting absorbed because the gut lining is damaged. The gut lining is structured to absorb nutrients and to keep the bad stuff out. As it gets damaged to what we call leaky gut, stuff leaks in that’s not supposed to be there ... that all ends up hitting your liver. Your liver gets overburdened, plus it’s dealing with all the toxic chemicals so the liver starts to crash. You don’t have enough nutrients for repair. The toxins are building up because you’re not dumping them out. The increase in toxins causes something that we call oxidative stress. Oxidative stress causes free radical damage and mitochondrial problems. A healthy liver means that toxins are correctly broken down and they’re dumped out. If you cut out a piece of a person’s liver, it grows back. I think it’s the only organ in the human body that does that. Your liver is incredible. If we didn’t have resilient livers, we’d all be shrivelled up and dead. What we’re worried about now is impaired detox; there are 2 things to remember, phase 1 and phase 2 detox pathways. If either of these is overloaded, then toxins build up and we don’t do very well. Many of these toxins are fat soluble and they incorporate themselves into the fatty parts of the body where they’re stored. Breast tissue is fatty, your brain is lined in fat, your liver has fat ... these are not great places to store toxins, but that’s what your body does because they have to go somewhere where there’s some fat tissue. Toxic overload can lead to all these different symptoms: fatigue, depression, anxiety, allergies and skin reactions are classic with toxin overload, accelerated ageing. You’re also going to get because of oxidative stress, an increase in the risk of degenerative diseases. If that wasn’t bad enough, when your liver is congested and it’s trying to deal with all these toxins, it does not do a very good job of burning fat. If your liver is trying to break down all these toxins, its fat burning capacity is minimized and then it’s harder for us to lose weight. A common reason for weight loss resistance in people is the fact that their liver is toxic. In an unhealthy liver, we have incomplete detoxification of toxins and we’re not good at getting rid of them. Women obviously have breast cancer with toxins stored in the breast. None of us, men and women both want toxins stored in the brain yet that’s where they go. The brain is lined in fat tissue and it’s very easy for fat soluble toxins to penetrate the brain. You could say that that’s a design flaw, but really nobody anticipated neurotoxins. Our detox pathways are set up for the occasional poison mushroom; if your liver is good enough, you wouldn’t die. No one ever anticipated billions of pounds of chemical toxins being dumped into the environment, or putting lead in lipstick and women consuming 3 pounds of lead throughout their life. No one anticipated a couple of pounds of toxins for every t-shirt that we produce. The fact that the liver is even functioning at all is pretty much a miracle. It wasn’t designed for this kind of a burden.
I like this slide a lot. If it’s too much information for you, just think phase 1 and phase 2. Phase 1 is run by cytochrome p450 enzymes, but you don’t have to remember that. Phase 2 is dominated by conjugation pathways ... they have these fancy names but you don’t have to remember that. I think of this as if we’re trying to wash clothes, and most of us have a washer and a dryer. Think about it that way. Would you wash your clothes and not dry them? Probably not, because then they would get moldy and gross. Would you throw them in the dryer first? It’s a 2 step process just like a washer and dryer. If either one breaks down, you’re in deep trouble. Let’s say your hands get really oily and dirty, you’ve got fat or greasy stuff all over your hands. You wash your hands in hot water with soap. The soap binds up the fatty things and pulls them of your hands, so you feel like your hands are clean. That’s exactly what’s happening here. The fancy term for fat soluble is lipid soluble: lipid means fat. We’re taking something fat soluble, and at the end of the process wanting to make it water soluble so you can dump it out. The water soluble ones are flushed out with water, the fat soluble ones we have to run phase 1 and 2 on to get them out of the body. There are very specific nutrients that run phase 1 and 2. If you’re living a normal modern life, even with a really clean farm fresh organic diet it’s pretty much impossible to get enough phase 1 and 2 nutrients to run these pathways properly – hence the reason why every American has 400-700 toxins in their body. A hundred years ago, I’m sure it was fine. Fifty years ago, it was probably starting to be problematic. These days, there’s no way you can get sufficient nutrition from your diet to run the detox pathways as aggressively as they need to be run, based on the number of toxins we’re being exposed to. We’re past the point where food is enough to keep us healthy, and that is just sad. Phase 1 is dominated by B vitamins and antioxidants – Vit A, C, E and so on. Phase 2 is dominated by sulfur containing compounds – taurine, glycine, cysteine, NAC, methionine. You find all these things in fruits and vegetables. Here’s the same information presented in a different way. Glutathione is the mother of all antioxidants. The water soluble toxin is flushed out when you hydrate; don’t assume you’ve got that covered unless you’re drinking plenty of water. If you have a history of alcoholism, if you’re using prescription drugs - anything from Prozac to Aspirin, Ibuprofen; if you have a history of recreational drug use, heroin, speed, cocaine, chances are your liver is not doing great. It could be from contaminants, pollutants, food additives and so on. In my training program, we had about 1500 slides on the toxin section. There’s a lot of interesting information about toxins if you read about it. Step 1 required nutrients are B vitamins, methylfolate, glutathione, antioxidants, carotenoid, Vit E. Step 2 requires taurine, glycine, cysteine, NAC, methionine, glutamine. You want to make it water soluble so you can flush it out. There are 3 major exit routes for toxins – urine, stool and sweat. If you want another safe, time tested and effective way to flush out all the chemicals and heavy metals from your body, you can flush them out through your skin with sweating, exercise, hot baths or sauna. If you’re using a bath, try to get non-chlorinated water and run the shower through a shower filter so you’re not soaking in chlorine. Saunas have been used forever in order to open up our pores and flush out fat soluble toxins that are stored in fat tissue. We already mentioned hydration, and then making sure your digestive tract is working properly so you can flush out toxins through the stool. The last thing you want to do is bind up a bunch of toxins, pull them out of fat tissue and then re-absorb them because you’re constipated. That’s not a healthy thing to do.
There are 2 basic types of supplement protocols. You can use supportive supplements that help the liver function improve. I personally think those are safe to take, even if you’re not being monitored by a doctor. They’re pretty much time tested, it’s hard to hurt yourself with them. You can also couple that with detox products that are going to stimulate the body to dump toxins out of storage. That’s where people can get into trouble. If you’re taking really powerful detoxing agents, you’re going to pull out mercury, benzene, toluene, arsenic from your tissues and it can make you sick if you’re not careful about how you do it. There is this basic rule in health care which is ‘do no harm.’ You need to balance out the supportive supplements and you can do those on your own without any help. When you get into the more aggressive detox products, be a little careful. You can also reduce your exposure to toxins, that’s the obvious thing. You could get an air filter for your home. You could try and exercise away from motor vehicles. You can certainly limit your exposure by avoiding foods full of chemicals. For women, you can use beauty products like skin care/lipstick that’s chemical free. Your skin absorbs chemicals. Anything that you rub on your skin, you should be able to put it in your mouth. You want to get lead-free lipstick and make sure that your beauty care products are non-toxic. You can read books about this that steer you in the right direction. Things that we use for cleaning around the home, make sure those are not toxic. If possible, avoid drugs, alcohol, cigarettes and toxins that are recreationally oriented. You also want to improve the functioning of the main systems. Make sure you’re taking fiber. Fiber can bind up toxins – you can use food grade diatomaceous earth, psyllium fiber, apple pectin fiber. These binding agents help pull in toxins so you can dump them out through the stool. You want to make sure that the toxins are eliminated through the digestive tract, and you don’t reabsorb them – they call that auto-toxication. If you have a bunch of toxins in your brain, you take all the time to flush them out, they get into your gut and your gut reabsorbs them because it’s not working well or you don’t have fiber in your system, it’s not a good thing. I use diatomaceous earth because it’s easy and well tolerated, just get the food grade version. Water and fiber are simple, inexpensive ways to bind up toxins. Then you can use general detox and antioxidant support supplements in low dosages; I wouldn’t go crazy because you can make yourself sick. The general supplements for the liver are silymarin, artichoke and turmeric. Vitamin C is probably the safest antioxidant. You should be doing this stuff on your own anyways, but you can also test for this stuff. It’s a miracle that these tests are available. The technology has been around for a while but people don’t know about it. You can test for oxidative damage in a urine test. This panel costs $400 but it’s worth doing it once a year. This marker number 28 is 8-OHDG, there are hundreds of research studies on it. It’s an incredible marker for antioxidant levels. There’s all kinds of research that links this with increased risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. This is a marker for oxidative stress from a toxin. The way oxidation works is that you’re exposed to a toxin, which then generates free radicals in the body. The free radicals damage tissues and that’s what we call oxidative stress. If you slice an apple and it starts to turn brown, or when you see a nail that’s rusting, that’s oxidising. Our tissues inside our body oxidise and that is not a good thing. If you have too much oxidative stress, you’re going to end up developing a chronic degenerative disease. You might just be walking around inflamed all the time with joint pain, depression and tiredness from oxidative stress. This is one of the keys to the problems that we have with toxins, is that we have oxidative stress. This panel includes 46 different parameters, but this one is my go-to thing for overall exposure to toxins. That number should be below 4.
In addition to measuring oxidative stress, you can also measure detox pathways themselves. You can measure your sulphate levels and see if they’re low. Low means you don’t have enough of the sulfur compounds to run phase 2. If your 8-OHDG is high, it means you don’t have enough antioxidants which means phase 1 is not working well. I can’t say enough good things about antioxidants. They come from fruits and vegetables. You use up a lot of antioxidants when you’re trying to detox, so you need extra support. If you’re a plant, you’re getting exposed to the ionizing radiation of the sun. How do you deal with it? You develop antioxidants to protect yourself from the oxidation of the sun. We see them as colors; blueberries are blue. They’ve created blue antioxidants to protect themselves from radiation of the sun. Strawberries decided to go red; the red pigments are the antioxidants. You want a wide variety of colors in your diet – blueberries, red pepper and strawberries, yellow squash, green foods like kale, olive greens and so on. The plant spends its whole life outdoors growing these pigments to protect itself from oxidative stress. We eat the plant and we absorb all the antioxidants that it created for itself. Any kind of vegetable or fruit is in this category. There are specific ones for specific pathways, but this is how nature has this all set up. You don’t need to be a vegetarian but you have to eat plants in order for all this to work. The 8-OHDG marker is a direct measure of free radical damage. You generate free radicals just by eating a meal, by breathing and walking. We’re talking about really large amounts of free radicals that cause damage. You can also get free radical exposure from heavy metals, chemicals and from various kinds of infections. You can have a build-up of free radicals if you’re exercising too much. Tons of oxidative stress means that you need a lot of antioxidant protection. It can end up being a major problem, because most of the chronic degenerative diseases of ageing – neurological problems, heart disease, stroke, various forms of cancer and diabetes are related to our exposure to oxidative stress. We have a cell and we’re trying to protect it with antioxidants. The free radicals are trying to penetrate like a missile trying to hit your ship, and we have these barriers to penetration that are antioxidants. If the free radical can get through our protective system because it’s weak, it heads right for DNA. When that damaged DNA goes to replicate, that’s what we call cancer. These free radicals go right for the tissues that cause cardiovascular disease and diabetes. The more free radicals you have, the more potential damage you have to lipids and the DNA inside your cells which can lead to cancer. What happens as another effect of lots of oxidative stress, is that we get chronically inflamed where we can’t handle our oxidative stress. Chronic inflammation causes joint pain, bloating and weight gain. You can just see it on a person’s face, they look swollen and inflamed. These markers are for phase 2, the sulfur containing amino acids. We can test for these and if these markers are elevated, you know the person has a problem. It’s a straightforward urine test.
What’s of particular concern is when these toxins build up, all this damage starts to impact the brain. You’re going to get tired, depressed, anxious and you’re going to have neurotransmitter dysfunction as a direct result of this neurotoxin exposure. Here’s how it works. A chemical toxin like a mercury or lead molecule enters your body. That goes into the brain and it hits the target neuron. When things are breaking in the brain, it means that neurons are being destroyed or killed, or that the ability of the neurons to send signals is being compromised. We try to make up for all this by moving all the chemicals around in the brain, but that doesn’t work very well. Enzymes start to break down the chemicals more and more, and eventually you end up with what they call brown brain. You have low levels of neurotransmitters and a bunch of nerve cells themselves are destroyed. You should watch this video that was produced by the University of Calgary. It actually shows a nerve cell, the introduction of a mercury molecule and then it actually shows the mercury molecule chewing up the brain cell. It’s killing the brain cell. This is not damage, the neuron is being physically destroyed and eaten up. Within the brain, we’re worried that the conductivity of this system isn’t going to work well. The way that it should work is you have a pre-synaptic neuron. It’s creating a signal that goes across the synapse, and that stimulates the post-synaptic neuron to fire. With a neurotoxin, the post-synaptic neuron is damaged so it doesn’t fire well. Eventually the amount of neurotransmitters in the system can drop as well. Most people end up with low neurotransmitters and a damaged post-synaptic neuron, so the system just doesn’t work that well. We’re getting hit from 2 sides at the same time. Solution wise, we’ve talked about things that you can do on your own – hydrate, over the counter liver support like silymarin and turmeric. You can do healthy, simple antioxidants like Vit C, fiber, food grade diatomaceous earth is my favorite because it’s the best tolerated. Just mix it in some water and chug it down. Vegetables of different colors provide antioxidants. Sulfur compounds are found in cruciferous vegetables – broccoli, broccoli sprouts, cauliflower. If you ever cook broccoli and leave it in the fridge, you find that it smells nasty – you smell the sulfur compounds. If you have a thyroid condition, you don’t want to eat a ton of sulfur. In order to protect this delicate system, we can use the antioxidants and flush out the toxins, remove our exposure to new toxins coming in. If you really want to get into it, you can do lab testing and measure phase 1 and 2. That’s when you can get more aggressive with supplement protocols. You can get more information at kalishwellness.com. I personally feel that this is literally the plague of our time. When I first started doing heavy metal testing for mercury 25 years ago, I would get physically excited when I would see that someone was toxic in heavy metals. Now we see it in almost every patient that we screen. This is getting worse and it’s not random. It’s tied into how we treat the environment.
Let me read off some of these questions. I wonder if Dr Kalish can discuss his views on the effects of recurring infections like sinusitis, rashes or other autoimmune responses. How are the antibodies made over time affect adrenal function? Let’s say you’re exposed to a virus, parasite or heavy metal – that’s the antigen. Your body makes antibodies against these bad things. If your body is making too many antibodies and it’s attacking too many antigens, then it spills over into an allergy reaction where you get allergic to food. Eventually if this really goes south, you start to develop an autoimmune disease. Your immune system has been attacking antigens for so long by making these antibodies, it slips up and attacks your thyroid – now you have Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. It can attack your joints and you have rheumatoid arthritis. Autoimmune diseases are rooted in this overactive immune system that’s making too many antibodies. You’re not supposed to attack your own food, your thyroid or joints. Food allergies are not supposed to ever happen. This is an aberration from normal function. When you generate a lot of antibodies that are attacking antigens, they all go to your liver. Your liver has to detoxify and remove these antigen-antibody structures. If you’re in an autoimmune state, by definition you have a major problem with phase 1 and 2. You’re not able to handle the antigen-antibody load. The same thing is true for people with allergies. When you get around an antigen like cat dander or the trees are blooming a certain time of year, that irritant should be brown down by phase 1 and 2. If your body can’t run phase 1 and 2 well enough because it’s toxic, all of a sudden you get allergic reactions because your body can’t handle those new antigens. That is a sign of a liver that’s toxic. Allergies and autoimmune disease are directly related to what we talk about.
What would be the course of treatment when trying to eliminate a parasite and Candida infection, when the detox pathways are compromised due to a heterozygous MTHFR mutation? With genetic testing, we’re finding out that we’re way more messed up than we ever realized. There are a lot of people who have major phase 1 problems, and that’s this MTHFR mutation. You need a super special form of folate, B6 and B12 all together, so it’s a repairable problem. It’s all under phase 1. Many of us were born with a bad phase 1 system. If 10 people eat tuna which has a ton of mercury and I don’t have this MTHFR problem, my body breaks down 99 of the 100 mercury molecules. If someone has a genetic mutation with their detox pathways, they can only break down 50 of the mercury molecules while the other 50 go right into their brain leading to depression and anxiety. Another person may have a double mutation, so they can only break down 10 mercury molecules, the other 90 go to the brain and they get super depressed. If you have one of these MTHFR problems, you’re going to be very acutely aware that this toxicity problem is serious. You’re going to walk into a clothing store and react to the air from all the formaldehyde in the clothes. You’re going to open a newspaper and react to the ink. These people become universal reactors because they can’t detoxify well. If you’re trying to get rid of a gut problem, you have to support the liver. The more damaged the gut is, the more you need to support the liver. These are the supplements that we use. Question about reference ranges for DHEA: every lab has a different range. You just have to go with whatever your lab is because there are different ways of measuring this stuff.
You don’t want to over-hydrate ... I said double your water intake, but just for 3 days. You can die from over-hydrating, it’s rare but it happens. One way you can balance your electrolytes is put a little pinch of sea salt in every quart of water that you drink, so you’ll retain the water a little better. Can heavy metals caesium, cadmium, platinum be detoxed using the same methods as mercury and lead? There are slightly different chelating agents for different metals, but you’ve got to see a medical doctor for that. I’m a chiropractor, I don’t do the chelation programs. Fiber tends to damage the gut lining as it sweeps out waste, and too much fiber is one of the causes of leaky gut ... how many people have I met that eat too many vegetables? I think that maybe is a theoretic concern. If you’re worried about that, use diatomaceous earth because that’s really gentle. People who are sensitive in their gut do well with it as a binding agent. What do I think of coffee enemas? They’re great, it’s an old school naturopathic solution. What liver detoxes are more dangerous out of the ones you mentioned? I absolutely think this is why there’s an epidemic of depression in the world, not only in the US ... because the world is becoming more toxic. This is going to become the main work that we do. Let’s say you live in New York and you would really like it if the person next to you died, so you can take over that apartment and have a bigger apartment ... maybe you just want them to get sick so they leave the city, here’s what I would tell them: what would be really good is if you up-regulate your phase 1, because that makes people healthier. You would watch your neighbour get sicker and sicker, this is how people mess up detox. You don’t want to up-regulate phase 1 by itself; this is the most common problem that people get into detox with. They get all these intermediary metabolites developing, and these intermediaries are more toxic than the original compound. If you run phase 1 aggressively, you’re generating these intermediaries which are more dangerous than the original compound. Your body is counting on phase 2 binding them up and getting rid of them. If you accelerate phase 1 and you don’t handle phase 2 well, you’re going to get really sick. You’re not going to do this if you take Vit C at 1000mg a day; that’s why I try to use antioxidants that are pretty safe and aren’t going to make people sick. If you use powerful antioxidants for a long time and you up-regulate phase 1 and phase 2 is not working well, you’re going to generate an increase in toxins and the person is going to get really sick. It’s totally safe to do this with food, it’s totally safe to take things like Vit C and B vitamins but you don’t want to get aggressive with antioxidants because you can up-regulate phase 1 too much and make the person more sick. This is why people pay doctors like me to do this work because it’s complicated. I spent 20 years studying this. You want to work with someone who’s made a lot of mistakes, so they don’t make mistakes on you. You don’t want to try to do this complicated stuff on your own either; this is why there’s a profession on people that do this for you. The main problem is if phase 2 is broken and you up regulate phase 1 too much, then you can make someone sick. If phase 2 is working well already, then you can go to town with phase 1. Look at the lab test. If phase 2 is not working, we get that working really well first and then we increase phase 1. These dosages get really high in the programs we design based on the labs. If you’re not doing the labs, you can take 500mg Vit C twice a day, your basic B vitamins and you’re not going to get into trouble. When you get to therapeutic dosages, it can be a problem. It’s a balance between phase 1 and 2 that we’re really striving for. Most of the self treatment stuff that I mentioned tonight is completely benign, you’re not going to hurt yourself in a sauna.
Diatomaceous earth, I use about a tablespoon a day. The lab test we’re looking at is called an organics profile or organic acids test. It’s about $300-400, depending on how complicated you want to get. How can you tell outside of labs that phase 2 is working? You can’t really. If you took antioxidants and got really sick, you would know that you have a problem. All this stuff is being recorded. You’re welcome to go back and listen to these. It’s even better if you want to send the link to a friend, so they can start with the educational process. If you’re interested in more information, you can look at our website kalishwellness.com. We have one more talk coming up on the brain next week. If you miss the call, you can go back and listen to them. Thanks for joining us tonight, I appreciate it a lot. Take care, see you next time.
