Nourish and Cleanse

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? — Isaiah 55:2

You met Dr. Richard Schulze’s rule for healing in Chapter 1: stop doing whatever it is that is killing you or making you sick, and begin doing what will heal you. Nearly every chapter of this book has been about the first half of that sentence. We have walked through the water, the house, the mouth, the field, the frying pan, the flavor packet, the sugar bowl, the router and the medicine cabinet, and we have learned to stop. It has been quite a walk.

This last chapter is about the second half, the part where we finally get to begin. Fair warning: it involves your kitchen.

Avoiding toxins is the first step. The second is helping the body clear what it has already stored. The third is rebuilding with nourishing food. You learned how the body clears toxins in Chapter 12. In this chapter I bring together two of my great teachers: Dr. Richard Schulze for cleansing, and Dr. Weston A. Price for nourishment. Think of them as the broom and the pantry. I will show you how real food answers every chapter of this book, give you a simple first week you can walk a family through, and tell you plainly who should not cleanse and how to start safely. And then I will say goodbye.

Peace Before Any Protocol

Before we come to a single herb, I want to say something that Dr. Schulze learned in his own body.

No physical protocol can heal a body locked in a chronic state of fight-or-flight. Stress hormones slow digestion, weaken immunity, and keep the body in defend mode rather than repair mode. A body that is defending itself all day is not clearing and rebuilding. It is bracing, like a house that never takes its storm shutters down.

That is why rest, peace in the home and a quiet heart are part of every detox I teach. They are not an extra for the spiritually minded. They are physiology. The same body that is asked to mobilize, process and excrete a lifetime of stored toxins is the body that needs to feel safe enough to do it.

Dr. Schulze put it this way, looking back on what had nearly killed him as a young man:

“Most important, I discovered that anger and hate were killing me and that I had to learn to be loving if I wanted to heal my heart.” — Dr. Richard Schulze, Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life

I have watched this in my own house and in the lives of my students. The cleanse done in a season of rest and peace goes gently. The same cleanse done in the middle of a crisis, on four hours of sleep, with the heart clenched, goes hard. So when you plan a cleanse, plan the quiet too. Put it on the calendar if you have to; it deserves the slot as much as any formula.

The Bowel Comes First

If you take only one thing from this chapter, take this. Write it on the refrigerator if you must. Dr. Schulze taught one rule above all others when cleansing: the bowel comes first.

“The first step in any health program, especially BEFORE any blood and lymphatic cleansing or detoxification program, is to cleanse and detoxify the bowel.” — Dr. Schulze

“If you are constipated, or not having regular frequent bowel movements, these poisons sit there, can re-absorb and make you really sick.” — Dr. Schulze

You already know the biology from Chapter 12. The body clears toxins through the bowel, the kidneys, the skin and the lungs. The liver does the chemical work of converting fat-soluble toxins into water-soluble forms, and it sends many of them out in bile, which empties into the intestine. From there they should pass through the bowel and leave in the stool, for good, with no forwarding address.

But if the bowel is sluggish, the toxins sit there. The body reabsorbs much of its bile further down the gut, and the toxins riding in it are reabsorbed and simply circulate again. The liver has spent real effort packaging them for excretion, and they come right back, like a parcel stamped “return to sender.” Worse, toxins that had been stored quietly in fat may now have been mobilized by the cleanse and be circulating freely. That is why a person who “feels worse” on a cleanse is so often constipated. Dr. Schulze watched patient after patient try liver flushes, metal protocols, fasting, juicing and sauna, and fail to get the results they hoped for, because they had not addressed the bowel first. Never, never, never underestimate the power of colon cleansing, he said.

What does it mean for the bowel to be working? The conventional standard for healthy bowel function is one movement every day or two, a bar set comfortably low. In Dr. Schulze’s framework, and in traditional herbalism more generally, that is not enough. Dr. Schulze considered one bowel movement for each meal eaten to be normal. A person eating three meals a day should be having two or three bowel movements a day: soft, well-formed, easy to pass, and complete. Yes, really.

By that standard, most of us are constipated, and we do not know it, because no one ever told us what normal looks like. It is not exactly a topic for polite dinner conversation.

I think of a woman in her early fifties who came to me with chronic bloating, chronic fatigue and a long list of symptoms her physicians had not been able to explain. She had been having one bowel movement every two or three days for as long as she could remember, and she had been told that this was within the normal range. She did Dr. Schulze’s bowel cleanse with my guidance. Within two weeks of finishing, her bloating had eased, her energy had come back to a level she had not felt in over a decade, and her bowel was moving two or three times a day. Nothing about her was unusual. She had simply never had her exits opened.

Constipation can also have medical causes. If it does not improve with water, fiber, movement and time, it is worth mentioning to a doctor.

Dr. Schulze’s Cleansing Program

Dr. Schulze apprenticed with the Master Herbalist Dr. John R. Christopher, who founded the School of Natural Healing, and he ran natural healing clinics with over 20,000 patient visits. He is honest that he is not a medical doctor; his authority comes from the clinic, from thousands of real people getting well. He founded the American Botanical Pharmacy, which still makes the formulas his patients used. Dr. Schulze taught one of the courses I took at the School of Natural Healing, I went on to learn his teachings outside the school, and no teacher has shaped my herbal work more. I have used his protocols in my own household and with my students for many years.

The flushes are not the whole of his program. They sit inside a simple, seasonal rhythm of daily habits, and the rhythm matters as much as any single formula. The flushes are the special occasions; the habits are the everyday.

Pure water every day. At least a quart, free of chlorine and fluoride (Chapter 2 tells you how to filter it). Every exit needs water, and none of them runs well dry. The kidneys cannot clear what they cannot dilute, and the bowel slows when the body is dry.

Fresh juice every day. Dr. Schulze called fresh juice a natural blood transfusion. His Blood Builder juice uses carrot, beet, beet greens and wheatgrass. In my own house, I like a glass of fresh, mostly green vegetable juice (celery, cucumber, kale, spinach, parsley, lemon, with a little carrot or beet for sweetness), drunk within about half an hour of pressing, because the nutrients begin to degrade as soon as the juice is made. Juice is not wine; it does not improve with age. A juice is a supplement to real food, not a replacement for it. Fruit juice carries a lot of sugar, and juicing removes the fiber the bowel needs.

A 5-day bowel cleanse. This is the cornerstone, the stone the rest of the house sits on. Dr. Schulze used two herbal formulas in sequence. The first stimulates the bowel to move. It combines herbs such as aloe leaf, senna, aged cascara sagrada bark, barberry, ginger, garlic and cayenne. It is started at a low dose and raised slowly: one capsule with dinner, and if the next morning brings no clear improvement, one more the next evening, and so on, until the bowel moves completely and easily every day. Then the dose is reduced again, over weeks, as the body relearns its own rhythm. (A person whose bowel already moves too often, with diarrhea, colitis or an irritable bowel, skips this formula.) The second formula then gently cleans the colon: flax seed, apple pectin, bentonite clay, psyllium, slippery elm, marshmallow root, fennel and activated charcoal. You will recognize the binders from Chapter 12. Because it binds, it must be taken with plenty of liquid, and the first formula is continued alongside it so that the bowel keeps moving.

A 5-day liver and gallbladder flush each season. Only after the bowel is open does Dr. Schulze turn to the liver. Each morning, on an empty stomach, he blended a drink of fresh juice (citrus with lemon and lime in spring and summer, apple in fall and winter), water, fresh raw garlic, a piece of fresh ginger, and olive oil, with the garlic and oil increased from one clove and one tablespoon on the first day to five on the fifth. After it came cups of a detoxification tea made from liver herbs such as milk thistle and dandelion with burdock and others. Food during the flush is light: juices, fruits, vegetables and salads. It is not a breakfast you will find on any café menu. The oil and garlic make the gallbladder contract and release its stored bile, which the herbs then keep flowing.

People who do the flush often pass small, soft, greenish objects. Some practitioners have argued that these are not true gallstones but products of the oil reacting with bile. I think the honest answer is that some of both is happening, and that the value of the flush is in stimulating the liver and gallbladder and draining the bile, whatever every object turns out to be. Two cautions. A person with known gallstones gets an ultrasound before a liver and gallbladder flush, because a flush can push a large stone into the bile duct and block it. And a person on prescription drugs uses lemon instead of grapefruit juice in the citrus base, because grapefruit raises the levels of many medications.

A 5-day kidney and bladder flush, with lemon, lime and cayenne and kidney herbs such as uva ursi, juniper and parsley, together with a great deal of water and a light diet of fresh fruits, vegetables and juices. It is the gentlest of the three, the easygoing one in the family, and it keeps the urinary exit open for everything the bowel and liver work have been stirring up.

Potassium broth, made by simmering potato peels, beets, carrots, onions, garlic and greens. So the peels you might have tossed become supper. It is mineral-rich nourishment during a cleanse, when the appetite is small and the body still needs to be fed. Think of it as a hug in a mug.

Movement, deep breathing, and hot and cold water therapy to move the lymph and the blood. The lymph has no central pump like the heart; muscles and breath greatly increase its flow. A walk, a few minutes of deep breathing, and a shower that alternates hot and cold water are all part of the program. The cold half is the part everyone remembers.

He had a way of saying these things that I love:

“And the best way to maintain a strong and healthy liver is to cleanse it regularly.” — Dr. Schulze

“Moving our body helps to eliminate more waste and toxins from our body and does it more efficiently and effectively.” — Dr. Schulze

“We can’t expect to put a couple of hundred thousand miles on our body and never do any maintenance or change the oil.” — Dr. Schulze

The herbal tradition depends on the quality of the herbs. Dr. Schulze’s formulas are sold by his company, the American Botanical Pharmacy. Many products on a pharmacy shelf with the same plant names on the label are made with weaker material and will not do the same work. A familiar name on the label is not a promise about what is in the bottle.

The tradition also requires patience. One round of the bowel cleanse is a tool, not a transformation. Dr. Schulze was plain that it takes most of us twenty or thirty years of rough living to develop a disease, so we are not going to heal in twenty-four hours. The body does not do overnight delivery. The person who uses these tools season after season, alongside everything else in this book, changes slowly and deeply.

Who Should Not Cleanse, and How to Start Safely

It would be dishonest of me to warn you about the harms of medicine, as I did in Chapter 11, and say nothing about the risks of my own tradition. Dr. Schulze was honest about this:

He gave the example of a salt-water bowel flush, which could be dangerous for someone with high blood pressure. Natural is not the same as automatically safe. So here are the limits.

• Pregnancy and nursing. A pregnant or nursing woman should not do herbal cleanses or flushes. Pregnancy is a time for nourishment, not detoxification, and any toxins mobilized during a cleanse can reach the developing baby or pass through breast milk. She focuses on clean food, clean water and avoiding exposures, and saves the cleansing for after the baby is weaned.
• Medications and serious illness. People on medications, or with heart, kidney or liver disease, diabetes, an eating disorder, cancer, or anyone who is frail, cleanse only with a qualified practitioner. Herbal formulas and juice fasting can change how medications work, and the charcoal and clay in a bowel formula will bind oral medications if they are taken too close together. Never stop a drug without the prescriber.
• Gallstones. A flush can push a stone into the bile duct and block it, so anyone with known gallstones or past gallbladder attacks gets an ultrasound before a liver and gallbladder flush.
• High blood pressure, heart or kidney disease. Avoid salt-water flushes, and check large amounts of potassium-rich broth and juice with the doctor.
• Children need different doses and an approach adapted to their age; they cleanse only with a practitioner trained in herbal work with children.

Start slowly. Dr. Schulze always started with a low dose and increased it gradually. So do I.

Know the warning signs. Severe abdominal pain, blood in the stool, fever, fainting or a rapid heartbeat mean stopping the cleanse and seeking medical care. These are not a healing crisis. (Chapter 12 gives the full list of red flags.)

And tell your doctor and your pharmacist about everything you take, natural or not. Responsibility runs both ways. We ask doctors to respect the body’s own healing. We owe the same honesty about the herbs.

A Cleanse Removes; It Does Not Rebuild

Here I part ways with my teacher, and I want to be honest about it.

Dr. Schulze recommends a vegan diet. I honor his cleansing work with my whole heart, and I use it in my own home. But a cleanse removes; it does not rebuild. For rebuilding, Arukah follows the foods that kept Dr. Weston A. Price’s traditional peoples strong for generations. You read in the Introduction what years of vegetarian eating did to my own body. So in my house, and in what I teach, the Schulze herbs and cleanses sit on a Price table.

You met Dr. Price in Chapter 1. Let me tell you a little more of his story, because it is a good one.

In 1931, a sixty-one-year-old Cleveland dentist named Weston Andrew Price closed his practice and set out to travel the world. He was not going for pleasure. He was going to look at teeth. Not exactly a postcard itinerary. He had served as the first research director of the American Dental Association, and in his own practice he had watched the children of his patients develop narrower jaws, crowded teeth and more decay than their grandparents had. He suspected the modern food supply. So, turning the usual approach on its head, instead of studying sick people, he went looking for the healthiest people he could find: healthy traditional peoples still eating the foods of their ancestors.

He and his wife Florence found them in the isolated Swiss villages of the Lötschental Valley, on the islands of the Outer Hebrides, among the Inuit of Alaska, the Maasai of East Africa, the Indigenous peoples of North and South America, the Pacific Islanders, the Maori and the Aboriginal Australians. Over a decade they visited fourteen distinct cultures on five continents. The diets were wildly different. But wherever people still ate their traditional foods, they had broad dental arches, straight teeth, little decay and strong bodies. And wherever the same peoples switched to what Price called the foods of modern commerce (white flour, sugar, canned goods and vegetable oils, a shopping list that may sound familiar), decay and ill health followed within a generation, visible in the very bones of the children’s faces. He published his findings in 1939 in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a book full of photographs that make the argument more powerfully than my words can.

Their diets differed, but none were vegan. Every one of those peoples prized certain animal foods. For rebuilding, these are the foods I teach:

• Meat from grass-fed, pasture-raised animals, including the fat. Yes, the fat.
• Organ meats, especially liver, which traditional peoples prized as the most nutrient-dense food on earth. A couple of ounces a week from a pasture-raised animal is a good start, and pâté is an easy way in. Liver has a reputation problem; pâté is its publicist.
• Wild fish and fish roe, and cod liver oil for vitamins A and D: old-fashioned, and old-fashioned for a reason.
• Eggs from pastured hens, especially the yolks. Leave the egg-white omelet to the diet books.
• Whole milk, butter, cream and cheese from grass-fed cows, ideally raw from a clean, trusted local farm where it is legal. (Milk from a careless farm can carry Listeria and other germs, and pregnant women, young children and anyone with a weakened immune system are the most vulnerable; for them, the farm's cleanliness and testing matter most.)
• Bone broth, simmered for hours, rich in minerals and gelatin. It is also glycine for the liver, as you learned in Chapter 12. One pot, two jobs.
• Fermented foods such as sauerkraut, kefir and yogurt, to rebuild the gut after glyphosate, drugs and sugar. A little sour goes a long way.
• Fresh vegetables and fruit, organic when possible, and properly prepared grains and legumes (soaked, sprouted or sourdough) if they are eaten at all. The quick-rise factory loaf does not qualify.
• Traditional fats: butter, ghee, tallow, coconut and olive oil, never industrial seed oils. Fats from the farm, not the refinery.

When a vegan friend or client asks me why Arukah includes animal foods, I answer with respect. Her choice is hers. I simply share what Dr. Price found: that every healthy traditional people he studied prized certain animal foods, and that their diets supplied far more minerals and fat-soluble vitamins than ours. I honor Dr. Schulze’s cleansing work, and for rebuilding I follow what Dr. Price found. She is free to decide.

The Wise Traditions Principles

The Weston A. Price Foundation, founded in 1999 by Sally Fallon Morell and her colleagues to carry on Dr. Price’s work, summarizes his findings in eleven principles, which it calls the Wise Traditions principles. These are the ones I want every reader to carry home:

• Traditional diets contained no refined or denatured foods. Not one box of breakfast cereal among them.
• All of them included some animal foods, and some of those animal foods were eaten raw.
• They supplied about four times the minerals and ten times the fat-soluble vitamins (A, D and K2) of the modern diet. That is not a rounding error.
• They included fermented foods, and their grains were soaked or sprouted. Patience, it turns out, was an ingredient.
• Their fats were mostly saturated and monounsaturated, with omega-6 and omega-3 fats in balance. Nobody was frying in seed oil.
• They included salt and bone broth.
• Every culture made special provision, with its most nutrient-dense foods, for parents-to-be, pregnant and nursing mothers, and growing children.

A few words on what lies behind them. The fat-soluble vitamins came from organ meats (especially liver), from the butter and milk of animals eating green grass, from egg yolks, from oily fish, and from the fat of healthy animals. One of them Price could not identify with the chemistry of his day; he called it Activator X, and we now know it as vitamin K2. Science caught up eventually. The traditional peoples who ate grains and beans soaked, sprouted or fermented them first: the Swiss villagers fermented their rye for days into sourdough, and the peoples of South America soaked their maize in mineral lime. Those methods tame the natural compounds in grains and legumes that make them hard to digest. And there was no refined sugar and no industrial seed oil anywhere on Price’s map, and not a soda machine in sight. Sweeteners, where they existed, were honey, maple and dates, eaten in small amounts. Dessert was an occasion, not a food group.

That last principle, the special provision for parents-to-be, mothers and children, moves me every time I read it. As a mother of seven, I feel it in my bones. The people Price visited did not leave the health of the next generation to chance. They fed it on purpose, before it was even conceived.

One Answer to Every Chapter

Notice how real food answers nearly every chapter of this book:

Chapter	How real food answers it
Fluoride (Chapter 2)	Filtered water; herbal teas; no processed foods made with fluoridated water
The Toxic Home (Chapter 3)	Fresh food in glass and stainless steel instead of plastic and packaging; cooking in cast iron and stainless steel
Heavy Metals and Mold (Chapter 4)	Minerals from real food (calcium, zinc, selenium) that help the body resist metals; small, low-mercury fish
GMOs and Glyphosate (Chapter 5)	Organic and local foods; grass-fed animals
Industrial Seed Oils (Chapter 6)	Traditional fats only
MSG and Excitotoxins (Chapter 7)	Cooking from scratch; homemade broth instead of bouillon
Sugar, HFCS and Artificial Sweeteners (Chapter 8)	Whole fruit, honey and maple in small amounts; enough fat and protein to steady blood sugar
EMFs (Chapter 9)	Time outside, sunlight and grounding; magnesium-rich foods
When Medicine Harms (Chapter 11)	A body that is less burdened and better nourished often needs less treatment

A diet built on real food removes most of the everyday burden without anyone having to count chemicals. If you want one habit that answers almost every chapter of this book, it is this: cook at home, from real, whole ingredients. Not more supplements. Not packaged “healthy” snacks. A pot on the stove and food you can recognize, with no decoder ring needed for the ingredient list.

Dr. Schulze said it in one sentence: it doesn’t make any sense to eat foods grown with poisons and sprayed with poisons when you are trying to get the poisons out of your body. Hard to argue with that. The cleanse and the table are one work.

A Simple First Week

When a family asks me where to begin, I give them one week. Nothing in it is dramatic, and nobody has to move to a mountaintop.

• Day 1: Install a water filter that removes fluoride and chlorine. Pour out the soda; the sink will survive it.
• Day 2: Clear the pantry of seed oils, HFCS and products with hidden MSG. Buy butter and olive oil. Enjoy all that new shelf space.
• Day 3: Find a local farm or co-op for grass-fed meat, pastured eggs and good dairy.
• Day 4: Make a pot of bone broth and start a fresh juice habit. Your kitchen will smell wonderful.
• Day 5: Check bowel regularity. If it is slow, address it before any deeper cleanse. Bowel first, always.
• Day 6: Walk, breathe deeply, try a hot and cold shower, and turn the Wi-Fi off at bedtime. The internet will still be there in the morning.
• Day 7: Rest. Make peace where you can. Healing is not only physical.

“Preventive maintenance is a lot cheaper and a lot more fun.” — Dr. Schulze

Notice the order. Clean water and clean food come first: stop the biggest exposures. The bowel is checked before any cleanse. Movement and breath open the lymph. And the week ends in rest. Not one miracle powder on the list.

After the first week, do not try to do everything at once. A person who reads this whole book and tries to change everything in a month usually gives up by the second. Enthusiasm is a sprinter, and this is a long walk. Pick the one source that, in your honest judgment, is the largest in your life right now. Fix that one. Then pick the next. One source at a time, perhaps one each month. A family that fixes one significant source a month will, after a year, have addressed twelve. The burden that has been climbing for most of their lives will begin to bend the other way.

And if you are helping others, this is your work: to teach, to help people see their exposures, and to walk with them, alongside their doctors, as they lower the burden and rebuild with real food. That is a great deal of good.

Toward Arukah

I want to close this book with a story from the Torah.

The book of Numbers describes the cities of refuge: six cities, three on each side of the Jordan, placed so that no one in the land was more than a day’s journey from safety. A person who had killed another by accident, through a slipped axe or a fallen stone, could flee there and be protected while the truth was established. But the protection lasted only as long as he stayed inside the city. Outside its walls, it did not reach him.

I tell you this because it is the shape of the work you have been learning. The cleanse is not the destination. It is the entrance into a different way of living. A body that has been cleansed does not stay cleansed if the household goes back to fluoridated water and seed oils and a pantry full of the foods of modern commerce. The cleansing gives you a body. The daily habits keep it. Staying in the city is the work.

I want to be honest about what I have not said. In all these chapters I have not promised you any particular outcome. I have not told you that you will recover from any particular condition, or live longer, or look younger. I do not know what your body will do with the work you do for it. What I have told you is what I have come to believe after many years of teaching and of living in my own body. The work matters. It matters because it is the right work, the work the Creator gave a human being to do for her own body and her own home. Sometimes it produces dramatic healing. Sometimes it produces quiet maintenance. Sometimes it produces a slow restoration that no single measure can capture but that you feel in your bones and in your capacity to be present with the people you love. The work does not make anyone immortal. It makes the years you are given richer and clearer than they would otherwise be.

I began this book on the night before Passover, with my husband walking through our house by candlelight, looking for the last crumbs of leaven. I want you to see the kitchen now, after the work has been done. The water from the filter at the sink is clean. The pans on the stove are cast iron and stainless steel. The food on the counter is real food, from healthy animals and clean soil, in its season. The smells of the kitchen are the bone broth simmering on the back of the stove, the sourdough rising, the herbs drying over the doorway, the lemon for the morning juice. They are the smells of a household at peace.

If this book has been useful to you, please tell the people you love. The work that needs to happen in our generation cannot happen through one book reaching one reader. It happens through one person telling another, one kitchen at a time. No billboard can do what one friend at a kitchen table can. You are not only the one who has been helped. You are the one who carries it now. And if you want to go deeper, I am at arukah.com, where the courses and the community go on long after the last page.

It is enough work for a life. It is good work.

The candle is in your hand.

— Mayim Vega

Footnotes and sources for this chapter

Sources and Further Reading

• Schulze, R. Dr. Schulze’s 20 Powerful Steps to a Healthier Life. Natural Healing Publications.
• Schulze, R. Common Sense Health and Healing. Natural Healing Publications.
• Schulze, R. “Creating Powerful Health Naturally” (talk, parts 1 and 2).
• American Botanical Pharmacy, the source of Dr. Schulze’s formulas, with educational materials.
• Christopher, J. R. School of Natural Healing. Christopher Publications, 1976.
• Price, W. A. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. Originally published 1939; eighth edition, Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation, 2009.
• Fallon Morell, S. Nourishing Traditions. NewTrends Publishing, revised edition 2001.
• Weston A. Price Foundation. “11 Wise Traditions Dietary Principles” (video), and the Foundation’s Wise Traditions journal and farm directory.
• Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.
• Isaiah 55:2.
• Numbers 35:9–34; Deuteronomy 19:1–13; Joshua 20:1–9. The cities of refuge.