How the Body Detoxifies

Then went he down, and dipped himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the saying of the man of God: and his flesh came again like unto the flesh of a little child, and he was clean. — 2 Kings 5:14

Every chapter before this one has been about where toxins come from: the tap, the cabinet under the sink, the fillings in the mouth, the field sprayed with weed killer, the bottle of seed oil, the packet of flavor enhancer, the can of soda, the router on the wall, the prescription bottle. Quite a rogues’ gallery. This chapter turns the question around. Once a toxin is inside, how does it leave? And what can we do to help the body do what it was built to do?

I want to begin with a story, because it tells you the spirit of this chapter before I give you a single fact.

Naaman, the Aramean general, came to the prophet Elisha to be healed of his leprosy and was told to wash seven times in the Jordan. Naaman was offended. The Jordan was a small muddy river. The rivers of Damascus were grander. Why this one, why seven times, why something so unimpressive? He almost went home unhealed. His servant talked sense into him. My father, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest thou not have done it? He waded into the Jordan. Seven times. He came out healed.

The work of helping the body detoxify is the Jordan. It is not impressive. It is not glamorous. It is not the heroic single intervention that the modern detox industry is selling in a box with a cucumber on the label. It is the patient, repeated, unimpressive work of keeping the bowel moving, drinking clean water, eating the foods the liver needs, sweating, walking, breathing, and lowering the load a little at a time. Nobody is going to film an infomercial about it. It is seven dips in a humble river, when you wanted one dip in something grand. The reader who is willing to do this work will, like Naaman, come out the other side of it changed. The reader who keeps waiting for the heroic fix in a box will keep waiting.

The body, which evolved in environments that contained nothing more toxic than the occasional poisonous plant or volcanic gas, was not designed for the chemical world we have built. It has detoxification pathways, but those pathways were made for the load of the natural world, not the industrial one: a country lane, now carrying freeway traffic. When the load exceeds the capacity, toxins are stored: in fat, in bone, in connective tissue, in the brain. You learned in Chapter 1 to think of this as the total body burden, the daily, decades-long total that the body must clear. The burden goes up when the daily inputs exceed the daily outputs, and it goes down when the outputs exceed the inputs. It is bookkeeping, only with molecules instead of dollars. The earlier chapters taught you to lower the inputs. This chapter teaches the outputs.

The Body’s Exits

I want to slow down here, because a reader who understands how the body clears a toxin will make far better choices than a reader who simply buys whatever the label calls a detox. And as you know by now, a label will call almost anything a detox.

Detoxification is not something a product does, whatever the packaging says. It is something the body does every minute of every day, no purchase necessary. Our job, and a coach’s job, is to lighten its load and to support its exits. The exits are these:

• The liver, which processes toxins and ships many of them out in bile into the intestine.
• The bowel, which carries bile and its cargo out in the stool. Last stop, everybody off.
• The kidneys, which quietly clear water-soluble toxins in urine.
• The skin, which clears some toxins, including metals, in sweat.
• The lungs, which breathe out volatile compounds with every breath, no membership required.
• The lymphatic system, the body’s cleanup crew, which collects waste from the tissues and returns it to the blood for the liver and kidneys to clear.

Hold that list in your mind as you read the rest of this chapter, because every practical step I am going to give you supports one or more of these exits. Water supports the kidneys. Vegetables and fiber support the bowel. Bitter foods support the bile. A sauna supports the skin. A walk and a deep breath support the lymph and the lungs. Nothing on that list costs very much. All of it is within the reach of an ordinary household, which may be exactly why nobody advertises it.

When a student tells me she wants to “do a detox,” I ask her first how her exits are working. It is a less glamorous question than she was hoping for. How often does her bowel move? How much water does she drink? When did she last sweat? Does she move every day? The answers usually tell us more than any test, and they tell us where to start.

The Three Stages: Mobilization, Processing, Excretion

I want to introduce a framework that runs under everything in this chapter and the next, like the plumbing under a house. It is the framework that Dr. Bryan Walsh, an American naturopathic physician who has spent two decades teaching detoxification to other practitioners, has developed and refined. It is also, in slightly different vocabulary, the framework that Dr. Christopher Shade of Quicksilver Scientific teaches in his work on mercury and other heavy metals.

The framework has three stages, and all three have to be working for detoxification to actually happen. Two out of three does not cut it.

Stage one is mobilization. Mobilization is the process of getting the toxin out of the place it has been stored. Most stored toxins are not in the bloodstream. They sit in the fat, the bone, the brain, the connective tissue and the organs, doing slow damage, and they do not come out by themselves. They are squatters, not tourists. Something has to pull them out of storage and put them back into circulation in the blood or the lymph, where they can be carried to an organ of elimination.

Sauna, exercise, fasting, weight loss, and some herbs and supplements mobilize toxins. Dr. Walsh has taught that fasting mobilizes stored toxins from fat tissue as the fat is broken down for fuel: most of the persistent chemicals in the modern body are fat-soluble, so when the fat comes out, the toxins come out with it, like passengers stepping off the same bus. But mobilization is not only something we choose. Pregnancy, breastfeeding, illness and stress also release stored toxins, sometimes without anyone intending it.

Stage two is processing, or detoxification proper. This is the chemical work of the liver, which changes the mobilized toxin into a form the body can excrete. Think of it as bagging the trash so it can go out to the curb. It happens in two phases, which I will describe in the next section.

Stage three is excretion. Excretion is the actual movement of the processed toxin out of the body: through bile and stool, through urine, through sweat, or through the breath. If any of these pathways is impaired, the toxin does not actually leave. A guest with packed bags by the door has not gone home yet.

Mobilization without excretion backfires. This is the single most important sentence in this chapter. If toxins are released from storage but the bowel is slow, the bile is sluggish, or the person is not drinking enough water, the released toxins are reabsorbed and stored again. The person often feels worse than before she started. Picture it: toxins released from fat, processed by the liver, dumped into bile, and then reabsorbed through the intestine because the bowel is not moving. That is not detoxification. That is moving the furniture from one room to another, and sometimes into a worse room. Lots of heavy lifting, same clutter.

This is why Dr. Richard Schulze, the herbalist whose cleansing program fills Chapter 13, insisted that the bowel be working before any other cleanse is undertaken. No exceptions, no shortcuts. The Schulze principle is the practical floor of everything in this chapter. And it is why the protocols that work are the protocols that address all three stages. The protocols that fail address only one, usually mobilization, and leave the others to chance, which is a little like opening the floodgates and hoping the drains will cope.

Every toxin you have read about in this book, fluoride, metals, mold toxins, PFAS and the rest, must be mobilized, then processed, then excreted. Nobody gets to skip the line. When you look at any detox program, for yourself or for someone you love, look past the glossy photos and ask three questions. What does it do to mobilize? What does it do to support the liver? And what does it do to make sure the toxins actually leave?

The Liver’s Two Phases

The liver is the great chemical workshop of the body, and it never closes for the night. Most toxins that reach it are fat-soluble, which is exactly why they were stored in fat in the first place. Fat-soluble substances cannot simply be flushed out in urine; oil and water, as any salad dressing will tell you, do not mix. The liver’s work is to change them into water-soluble forms that can leave. It does this in two phases.

Phase I. A family of enzymes called cytochrome P450 begins breaking the toxin down, often by adding a reactive group to it. Here is the part most people never hear: the in-between products of Phase I can be more reactive and damaging than the original toxin. Phase I also produces free radicals as it works. So Phase I is not the finish line. It is the dangerous middle of the road, and the in-between products have to be handled quickly by Phase II before they cause harm. Like a half-dismantled engine on the driveway, the job is a hazard until somebody finishes it.

Phase II. The liver then attaches a molecule to that in-between product, a bit like clipping a handle onto a hot pan so it can be carried out. This is called conjugation, and it makes the product water-soluble so that it can be excreted. Phase II has several pathways, each named for what is attached:

• glutathione conjugation
• sulfation
• glucuronidation
• methylation
• acetylation
• amino acid conjugation (with glycine, for example)

Phase III. Some teachers, Dr. Walsh among them, also describe a third phase: the transporters that move the processed toxins out of the cells and into bile and urine. Whether you call it a phase or not, the point is the same. A toxin that has been processed still has to be carried out. Bagging the trash is not the same as taking it out.

Keeping the phases in balance. If Phase I runs fast and Phase II is slow, reactive in-between products build up, and the body is in some ways worse off than it was before: picture an assembly line where the first station races and the second one dozes. What speeds up Phase I? Alcohol, some medications, smoking and some toxins. What slows Phase II? Poor nutrition. So the answer is never to rev the liver harder. The answer is to feed Phase II and to remove what is whipping Phase I along.

This is one of the places where the conventional supplement aisle gets things backward, in very cheerful packaging. A product that promises to “boost” or “activate” the liver may be doing nothing more than speeding up Phase I. Without the raw materials for Phase II, that is not help. It is pressure, with a nice label on it.

Feeding the Liver

Before the capsules, there is the plate. The liver’s two phases run on nutrients, and most of those nutrients come from ordinary food, the kind that needs no barcode:

• Protein, especially glycine (from bone broth, gelatin, skin and connective tissue) and the sulfur amino acids (from eggs, meat and fish). Phase II cannot conjugate what it has no molecules to attach; you cannot clip on a handle you do not have.
• Sulfur-rich vegetables: garlic, onions, leeks, and the cruciferous family, which includes broccoli, broccoli sprouts, cabbage, kale and Brussels sprouts. These help the body make its own antioxidant defenses, including glutathione, the body’s master antioxidant, and they feed the Phase II pathways. Your breath may object. Your liver will not.
• B vitamins, from liver, eggs, meat and leafy greens.
• Minerals such as selenium, zinc and magnesium.
• Bitter foods and herbs that encourage bile flow, such as dandelion, artichoke and radish, alongside the herbs Dr. Schulze used, such as milk thistle. Bitter on the tongue, good news for the bile.

A word on glutathione, because you will hear its name often, usually from someone with a bottle of it to sell. It is made inside the cells, mainly in the liver, from three amino acids: glycine, glutamate and cysteine. It neutralizes the oxidative damage the body’s own chemistry produces, and it is essential to the Phase II reactions that make toxins water-soluble. Glutathione levels fall with age, with chronic illness and with toxic exposure. A body that has carried a heavy load for years often has depleted reserves, and that depletion slows its ability to clear the next load. The loop closes, like a dog chasing its own tail. The best way I know to break it is to keep feeding the body the raw materials: eggs, meat, broth, garlic, onions and the cabbage family, every day.

Milk thistle deserves a special word, because it bridges the kitchen and the herb cabinet. Its active compounds, together called silymarin, protect liver cells from oxidative damage, support the regeneration of damaged liver tissue, and stimulate bile flow. It has been used for liver complaints since ancient Greek and Roman medicine, and it is one of the herbs Dr. Schulze used in his liver work. Dandelion root, from the very weed so many lawns get sprayed to kill, stimulates bile flow and supports the gallbladder, and artichoke leaf protects the liver in a way similar to milk thistle. These are the liver herbs you will see again in Chapter 13.

For selenium, one or two Brazil nuts a day is plenty. More is not better: too much selenium is harmful.

A plate of eggs, a mug of bone broth and a side of cabbage or broccoli is liver support. Not glamorous, not patented, and no less real for it. Anything you add from a bottle builds on that foundation; it does not replace it.

Keep It Moving: Bile and the Bowel

Now we come to the exit that most detox programs forget, and the one Dr. Schulze would not let anyone forget. It is not dinner-table conversation, but here we go.

The liver sends many of its processed toxins into the intestine in bile. Bile is made in the liver, stored in the gallbladder, and released into the small intestine, where it helps digest fats. From there, the toxins riding in it should pass through the bowel and leave in the stool, gone for good. One-way ticket, no return trip.

But the body is thrifty, a born recycler. Normally it reabsorbs most of its bile further down the gut and sends it back to the liver to be used again. This loop has a name: enterohepatic recirculation. (“Entero” means the gut, “hepatic” means the liver.) It is a wise design, because it saves the body from making all its bile fresh every day. But it has a cost. When stool moves slowly, or there is too little fiber to carry the bile out, more of the toxins riding in that bile are reabsorbed and sent back to the liver, and the liver has to do the same work twice. The toxin that should have left goes around again, like the suitcase on the airport carousel that nobody ever claims.

Think about what this means. The liver can do its work perfectly. Phase I and Phase II can be beautifully balanced. And if the bowel is slow, the whole effort leaks back in at the last step. All that work, and the ball is fumbled on the one-yard line.

What keeps this exit open? Nothing exotic:

• Daily, complete bowel movements. Dr. Schulze considered one bowel movement for each meal eaten to be normal, a much higher standard than most of us were taught. (Most of us, it seems, were taught not to talk about it at all.) I say more about this in Chapter 13.
• Enough fiber from vegetables to carry the bile out. Fiber is the moving van.
• Enough water. A dehydrated body pulls water back out of the stool and slows everything down to a crawl.
• Healthy bile flow, supported by the bitter foods and herbs above.

This is the biology underneath Dr. Schulze’s bowel-first rule. It is why the bowel work in his cleansing program, which you will find in Chapter 13, comes before everything else. And it is why, when a student tells me she feels worse on a detox, the very first thing I ask is whether her bowel is moving. It is never the question she expects.

Binders

A binder works in the gut, like a sticky net. It holds onto toxins, many of them sent there in bile, so that they leave in the stool instead of being reabsorbed. That makes binders a tool for the third stage of the framework, excretion. They do not pull toxins out of your tissues. They catch what the liver has already sent down, and they break the loop of enterohepatic recirculation. Think goalkeeper, not search party.

These are the binders I use and teach:

• Activated charcoal is very porous and powerful. It has enormous surface area: a single teaspoon of activated charcoal has the surface area of about a football field, which is a lot of real estate for something that fits on a spoon. It binds toxins, drug residues and many other contaminants in the digestive tract. I use it for short courses and for mild digestive upsets. A suspected poisoning is different: call Poison Control or emergency services first.
• Bentonite clay is a volcanic clay that binds metals and other toxins, and it is part of Dr. Schulze’s bowel formula. Choose a product tested for lead; the FDA has warned about clay products contaminated with it. Clay sold for cosmetic or industrial use is not for eating.
• Chlorella is a single-celled green algae, pond life with an impressive résumé, that binds mercury and lead and adds nutrition at the same time. Its natural cell wall is indigestible, so choose a tested, cracked-cell-wall product, and choose a brand that has tested the chlorella itself for metal contamination.
• Modified citrus pectin is a fiber from citrus peel, the part of the orange most of us toss, that Dr. Isaac Eliaz uses for metals and mycotoxins.
• Zeolite is a volcanic mineral with a crystal structure that gives it remarkable binding capacity. Its quality varies widely, so choose products tested and certified for human use.
• Fiber from food is the everyday binder: the one on your plate, from vegetables and other whole foods, no shipping required. Before you buy anything, eat your vegetables. The oldest advice at the dinner table still stands.

Three rules keep binders safe.

1. Take them at least two hours away from food, medications and supplements. Binders do not know the difference between a toxin and a nutrient or a drug. They bind those too, including medications such as birth control and thyroid medication.
2. Drink plenty of water.
3. Stop if constipation develops. A binder that stalls the bowel defeats its own purpose, because it holds the toxins in the very place they can be reabsorbed.

Notice how those three rules follow from the framework. Binders work at excretion, so they must not shut down excretion. A strong binder taken with no water by a person whose bowel already moves every two or three days is not a detox. It is a traffic jam, with the toxins idling in the very lane they were meant to leave by.

Sweat and the Lymph

Sweating: the skin as an exit

The skin is an exit most modern people rarely use. The traditional human, working outdoors and exposed to seasonal heat, sweated regularly. The modern human, working in air-conditioned rooms and rarely doing the kind of physical labor that produces real sweat, has largely lost this exit. For many of us, the sweatiest moment of the day is hunting for a parking space.

Every traditional culture that had access to heat developed a way to use it: the Russian banya, the Finnish sauna, the Native American sweat lodge, the Roman caldarium, the traditional Japanese bath. The modern research is catching up with them, a few centuries behind. Two studies are worth knowing by name. A 2012 review of sweat studies found arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury in human sweat. And Finnish research published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2015 found that men who used a sauna four to seven times a week had lower rates of heart disease and death than men who went once a week.

Here is how I recommend using it:

• Type. A traditional sauna works, and so does an infrared one. Far- and near-infrared saunas produce sweating at lower air temperatures. A sauna is not the only way to sweat, either: exercise and hot baths produce sweat too, and a bathtub is already waiting in most homes.
• Duration. The type of sauna matters. In a traditional hot sauna, about 10 to 20 minutes is enough; most sessions in the Finnish study were under 20 minutes. Infrared saunas run cooler, so sessions of 20 to 40 minutes are common. Whichever you use, start shorter and build up.
• Hydration and minerals. Sweating takes both water and minerals out of the body. Drink water before and after, and replace the salt and minerals you lose. Without that, regular sauna can leave you tired, cramping and depleted.
• Shower afterward. Wash the toxins you have just sweated out off the skin, so they are not reabsorbed; do not let them sneak back in by the side door. A brief cold rinse is an option for those who tolerate it, and a test of character for the rest of us.

Remember the framework. A long, hot sauna mobilizes. If the bowel is not moving and the person is not drinking enough water, the sauna that was meant to help can become the very thing that makes her feel worse. Sweat is one exit, not a pass to ignore the others.

Moving the lymph

The lymphatic system is the body’s second circulation, the quiet back road running beside the highway of the blood. It is a network of vessels and nodes that carries lymph, the fluid that bathes the tissues, through the body, filters it through the lymph nodes, and returns it to the bloodstream. It handles a large part of the body’s waste removal, its immune surveillance, and its fluid balance.

What makes the lymph different from the blood is that it has no central pump. The heart pumps blood. The lymph vessels contract gently on their own, but movement and deep breathing greatly increase its flow. In other words, the lymph moves when you do. Walking moves lymph. Gentle bouncing moves lymph. Deep breathing moves lymph. Massage moves lymph. The lymph of a person who sits at a desk all day and then sits on the couch all evening moves very slowly, about as briskly as rush-hour traffic. Many of my students know the signs: the puffy face in the morning, the swollen ankles by evening.

The work of Dr. Perry Nickelston, a chiropractor whose specialty is the lymphatic system, has been one of the most useful frameworks I have found for this. He teaches a sequence of six simple movements he calls the Big 6, which work on the main drainage points of the lymphatic system and take only a few minutes each morning.

The practices I recommend:

• Daily walking. Twenty to thirty minutes of unhurried walking, ideally outdoors, is the foundation. Walking pumps lymph up through the legs and into the trunk. Your legs, it turns out, are part of the plumbing.
• Deep belly breathing. When the diaphragm moves through its full range, it pumps the large lymphatic reservoir in the abdomen. Most adults breathe shallowly all day, often while frowning at a screen. A few minutes of slow, deep breathing changes that.
• Rebounding. Gentle bouncing on a mini-trampoline, with the feet not necessarily leaving the surface, moves lymph through the whole body. Five to ten minutes is plenty. Think gentle, not circus.
• Dry brushing. Before showering, brush the skin in long strokes toward the heart with a natural-bristle brush.
• Massage. Nobody has to twist my arm on this one.
• Dr. Nickelston’s Big 6, each morning.

A few minutes each morning is enough to start. The point is not a heroic workout. The point is that the body moves, and breathes, every day. Leave the boot camp to someone else.

When a Detox Makes You Feel Worse

Sooner or later, almost everyone who does this work has a day when she feels worse instead of better. I want you to know what that day means and what to do with it, so it does not catch you off guard.

When toxins are mobilized faster than they can be cleared, people can feel headache, fatigue, achiness, irritability, brain fog, skin breakouts, bad breath or mild nausea. Holistic practitioners often call this a healing crisis or a Herxheimer reaction. (The medical term originally described a reaction to killing certain bacteria.)

Here is the part that many detox programs get wrong. Feeling worse is not a sign that more is better. It is a signal that the exits are not keeping up. A woman who feels terrible on her detox and concludes, it must be working, I will double the dose, is about to make things worse. Very often, when I ask a few questions, I find that she has not had a bowel movement in two days, that she has been sweating hard without replacing water and salt, or both. Her toxins have been mobilized and have nowhere to go.

The right response is threefold:

• Slow down. Lower the dose or the frequency of the protocol, or pause it.
• Open the exits. Check the bowel and get it moving. Drink water, with minerals. Use a gentle binder. Move, and sweat gently.
• Rest and nourish.

When she restarts, she restarts more gently, and in the right order: exits first, then mobilization.

Some symptoms are not detox at all. Stop and see a doctor for:

• fever
• severe or worsening pain
• vomiting or diarrhea that does not settle
• blood in the stool or urine
• yellowing of the skin or eyes
• chest pain or shortness of breath
• fainting
• a racing heart
• confusion
• any symptom that frightens the person

These need medical care, and no protocol is worth ignoring them. Mild tiredness, a little extra thirst, or wanting more sleep are ordinary signals to rest. The list above is different. When you see it, the detox stops and the doctor comes in.

Taking Stock of a Client’s Toxic Load

Everything in this chapter comes together when you sit down with a person, perhaps yourself, perhaps a friend or a client, and ask where to begin. A careful assessment shows where to start, and it keeps us from beginning in the wrong place, which in detox work is no small mistake.

The exposure history. When I sit with a student for the first time, I want the whole picture, not just the highlight reel. I ask about:

• Home: its age, the water source, any past water damage or mold, recent renovation, a gas stove (Chapter 3).
• Work and hobbies: chemicals, solvents, metals, farming, painting, cleaning work.
• The mouth: amalgam fillings, root canals, past dental work (Chapter 4).
• Food: processed foods, seed oils, sweeteners, fish choices, organic or not.
• Body care and cleaning products, the whole crowded shelf.
• Medications, past and present (Chapter 11).
• Wireless habits, especially at night.
• Symptoms, and when they began. Did they start after a move, a renovation, new dental work, a new medication or an illness? Are they better away from home?
• The exits. How often does the bowel move? How much water does she drink? When did she last sweat? Does she move every day?

That last question is the one most people skip, perhaps because nobody likes to discuss the bowel over coffee. It is the bridge between where toxins come from and whether the body can clear them.

The home audit. The exposure history maps the person. The home audit in Chapter 3 maps the house: the water, the air, the cookware, the bathroom cabinet, the cleaning products, the furnishings, the food storage, and the places where mold hides. Walked through patiently, it shows in a few hours where a household’s largest sources are. Think of it as a treasure hunt where you are hoping to find nothing.

What lab tests can and cannot show. A person can order a blood lead level, blood and urine mercury, liver and kidney function tests and other standard labs through her own doctor, or herself from a consumer lab. Some integrative practitioners also use urine mycotoxin panels, provoked metal tests and hair mineral analysis. Mainstream medicine considers these unreliable or unproven (Chapter 4 explains why). Know what each test can and cannot tell you, and teach that honestly. The most useful test of all costs nothing: an honest exposure history.

The order of operations. Once the picture is clear, the plan always runs in the same order:

1. Stop the biggest exposures.
2. Open and support the exits: bowel, water, bile, sweat, lymph.
3. Nourish.
4. Only then, gently, and with professional help where needed, mobilize stored toxins.

The plan that starts with the strongest binder and the longest sauna has the order backward. Mobilizing stored toxins first, and fixing the bowel later, is exactly how a detox makes a person sick. And skipping the exposure history to go straight to a cleanse means clearing a body that is still being filled, like bailing out a boat without patching the hole.

I want to give you a word of honesty about the time scale. The total body burden of a person who has lived thirty or forty or fifty years in the modern world did not accumulate in a week and will not be cleared in a week, whatever the box on the shelf promises. The work is the work of months and years. Dr. Sherry Rogers, an environmental physician, put it in a sentence that has stayed with me: every night you can go to bed knowing you have made your cumulative load better, the same, or worse. That is the Jordan. Seven dips, not one. In the next chapter, I will show you how to walk into it.

Footnotes and sources for this chapter

Sources and Further Reading

• Walsh, B. Educational materials for clinicians through the Metabolic Fitness Pro platform, and Fat Is Not Your Fault. The three-stage framework of mobilization, detoxification and excretion.
• Walsh, B., with Ben Pakulski. “The Detox Doctor on the Phases of Detox” (podcast interview).
• Shade, C. Educational materials at Quicksilver Scientific on the three-stage framework for heavy metals and the role of bile.
• Rogers, S. A. Detoxify or Die. Sand Key Company, 2002.
• Baker, S. Detoxification and Healing: The Key to Optimal Health. McGraw-Hill, revised edition 2004.
• Liska, D., Lyon, M., and Jones, D. S. “Detoxification.” In Textbook of Functional Medicine. Institute for Functional Medicine, 2006.
• Pizzorno, J. The Toxin Solution. HarperOne, 2017.
• Crinnion, W. Clean, Green, and Lean. Wiley, 2010.
• Schulze, R. Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life. Natural Healing Publications. The bowel-first principle.
• Eliaz, I. Research and clinical materials on modified citrus pectin, Amitabha Medical Clinic.
• U.S. Food and Drug Administration warnings on clay products contaminated with lead.
• A 2012 review of sweat studies reporting arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury in human sweat.
• Finnish sauna research, JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015: sauna frequency and rates of heart disease and death in men.
• Wilson, L. Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing. L.D. Wilson Consultants, 2003.
• Myers, W. Limitless Energy: How to Detox Toxic Metals to End Exhaustion and Chronic Fatigue.
• Nickelston, P. “Big 6 Lymph Reset” (video), and the Stop Chasing Pain materials.
• 2 Kings 5:1–14. Naaman and the Jordan.