Detox diets

gillyh.

Quite frankly - I'd bin it !!!

I was 19 1/2 stone at the beginning of the year after years of following the NHS 'Healthy how to kill yourself' diet. I very nearly did and ended up with a triple bypass heart op.
I was then given the same diet to follow. I didn't know any better so did as I was told. Potato/Rice/Bread/Pasta/ Root Veg etc. My weight just kept piling on and I ended up on an ever increasing cocktail of drugs.
It's a good diet if you are HEALTHY - for me as a Diabetic - it was a recipe for disaster.
I am now down to just under 18 stone after rigidly following a lo/reduced carbs/lo-fat/low salt diet since January this year. If only I had known about this before.
Try the lo-carb route - It doesn't have to be low carb/high fat (Atkins) - it makes more interesting reading than ANY Detox book.
I prefer a good History read myself.

Ken

Detoxing is not a valid metabolic thing. Our livers DO cope with what we eat and if we overshelm them with something very toxic, we need hospital care, NOT something written by unqualified "nutritionists"

Hi Gilly,

I would say that there is no doubt that there are far too many toxins and contaminants present in what we eat and these are known to contribute to many modern health problems. To name a few examples:
- our drinking water carries enormously high amounts of oestrogen and progesterone which is not broken down by the purification process, resulting in puberty onset in girls as young as 8 and 9
- our meat sources are pumped full of steroids, antibiotics and growth hormones, resulting in a massive increase in hormonally related cancers
- our fruit and veg is sprayed with pesticides and herbicides that cannot be broken down by human metabolism and result in a toxic build-up.

However, weight gain and retention is not something that has ever been proved to have any relationship to toxins.

I tend to agree with Dennis, we are bombarded with low levels of all kinds of clag. Some of these might be relevent to the increasing levels of "genetic" and other diseases.

However there are things you can do which can be guaranteed to have a major impact on your health, such as not eating toxic quantities of carbs and ensuring you stay topped up with micronutrients froma wide range of dietary inputs (see the Eat The Rainbow thread) which hopefully will improve your resistance to the Bad Stuff.