Detox the Natural Way
by author Patrick Wright, PhD
The best time for body cleansing is spring, when new life starts all around us in the kingdom of plants and animals. In spring our bodies also start a new cycle. That’s why we should eat a 100 percent raw plant food diet this month–to cleanse. To detoxify. To maintain health.
Good health requires that all our body systems work how they are supposed to work. This means we need a healthy body chemistry, which comes with a strong immune system that can handle all kinds of "germs."
A really healthy body can tolerate many abuses. But is testing the threshold of our abuse tolerance effective health care? Putting foreign substances into our bodies impairs healthy chemistry and causes trouble in the long run. Many of us don’t realize these troubles are typically a result of the food we eat, and this self-deception allows us to continue our bad food habits.
What are body toxins? They are molecules of foreign substances that we don’t need and don’t belong in our body. Eliminating these toxins improves our health in the same way that ingesting foreign substances impairs our health, and spring is the best time of the year for internal cleansing. Everyone can do it. It’s cheap and saves us money because good food is less expensive than processed and packaged goods. Good health through cleansing also saves us in "health-care" bills. Ironically, these bills don’t keep us healthy.
Food-related diseases are the result of long-term abuses of our body chemistry. It’s useless to try to cure or prevent these diseases by medication, radiation or surgery. What is needed is overall detoxification–through 100 percent raw plant food.
No medical intervention can really re-establish or maintain a healthy body chemistry. Conventional medicine has not yet sufficiently discovered the long-term effects of substances that impair our health. That’s why millions of North Americans die annually from heart attacks-the result of the excessive long-term consumption of "healthy" protein. Too much animal protein deposited in the heart muscle causes heart disease and heart attacks as medical professor Dr Lothar Wendt has explained in 60 publications since 1948.
Diabetes is another disease caused by excessive animal protein in the membranes of body cells. However, raw plant food can remove excess protein through detoxification. Dr John Douglas published his success of curing diabetes and re-establishing health through raw plant food in The Lancet as early as 1975.
How do we eliminate toxins? The parrot answer is "through diet and exercise." This answer should be taken with a grain of salt. It is true that we can eliminate some toxic substances through the skin by sweating. However, sweating does not get rid of the mercury from amalgam fillings or the stored animal protein in the heart or cells. Plus, most people who say "diet" don’t mean "raw plant food" so they are left to themselves to decide what a "healthy" diet is.
Making use of the body’s ability to regenerate itself is the easiest and cheapest way of eliminating toxins. For this job the body needs fresh raw plant food and a lot of good water. In just a short time of eating raw plant food, you can achieve the following results:
- the elimination of accumulated wastes and toxins
- the restoration of the sodium/potassium balance and the acid/alkaline (pH) balance
- the restoration of the normal nutrient levels essential for optimal cell function
- an increase in respiration at the cellular level
- an increase in immune power.
Can you ask any more from a medicine that does not cost anything?
Patrick Wright is director of the Institute for Research of Food-Related Disease and author of Food for Humans. He resides in San Rafael, Calif.
Source: alive #233, March 2002

