December 19, 2016
Last year, The Guardian released an article entitled, “You can’t detox your body. It’s a myth. So how do you get healthy?“
In the article, author Dara Mohammadi claimed that:
“…detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.”
If you read that article, you will see that it is a well-established, well-researched fact that – despite it getting an raised eyebrow in the white-lab-coat-wearing, Pubmed skimming, popular news media – detoxification is not a myth.
In fact, there are many nutritional and herbal products that help the body to support its innate detoxification pathways. For example, spirulina and dandelion reduce lead-related oxidation and mercury accumulation. Spirulina, ginseng, onion and garlic in combination decrease lipid peroxidation and increase endogenous antioxidant levels. Chlorella can be useful for inhibiting the absorption of dioxins from food and the reabsorption of dioxins stored in the intestinal tract. Curcumin, resveratrol, Vitamin C, E, selenium, zinc, and quercetin can all effectively protect against cadmium-induced lipid peroxidation and reduce the adverse effect of cadmium on antioxidant status. Milk thistle extract reduces oxidative damage and may reduce entry of toxins into cells.
Sure, these compounds aren't exactly some sexy lemon juice and cayenne pepper cleanse, but they're certainly evidence that oxidative damage and other damage from toxins can occur in tissue, and compounds we find in nature can assist with detoxification and mitigation of this damage.
But I didn't stop with that article in the Huffington Post.
Next, I interviewed Dr. Dan Pompa in the podcast episode “The Most Effective Detox You’ve Never Heard Of (And Exactly How To Do It).“
In that episode, Dan described a serious issue called “cellular toxicity” and explained why it is an underlying cause of numerous health issues, including gut problems, thyroid issues, sluggish metabolism, brain fog and much more.
Once again, these are not woo-woo toxins but measurable physical compounds: plastics, phytoestrogens, metals, pharmaceuticals, herbicides, pesticides and all manner of other chemicals that can overwhelm our liver, kidneys and built-in detoxification system.
And what's especially unfair is that you and me (even when we're living a clean lifestyle) have to get exposed to these toxins on a constant daily basis, whether from brake dust on car roads, or mercury from electronic equipment, or herbicides on the apples at our friend's house, or estrogens in the shampoo in the hotel, or mold on the carpeting at the gym…you get the idea.
Even if your waistline and fat cell storage survived the holidays, the same might not be said for your brain, your lungs and the rest of your insides.
How Your Body Becomes Toxic
For example, ever heard of Crohns, colitis, gastritis, diverticulitis, fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome? Any of these can make you feel sluggish, run-down, frequently sick and unable to feel like working out, unable to resist appetite cravings, and unable to have the energy you want, lose weight, gain muscle or even gain fitness adaptations from your exercise sessions.
Wait a second! Surely you can’t have any of those fringe issues, right?
But let me ask you a question: over the past year, was your body ever exposed to over-processed and refined foods, chemical additives, antibiotics and pharmaceuticals, pesticides, herbicides, chlorinated water, artificial sweeteners or anything else that might remotely be consider “unnatural”?
Did you drink many diet sodas?
Eat much non-organic or farm-raised meat?
Travel extensively?
Chomp on fruits and vegetables without washing them?
Get sick and have to get on a drug protocol?
Engage in a few excessive nights of drinking?
Get exposed to second-hand smoke?
Spend much time around cleaning supplies?
I know that I can personally check off at least a couple of these that I've experienced over 2016.
See, no matter how “clean” you live your life, just about everybody shows some evidence of a buildup of toxins, and it's important to understand what toxins actually are. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted the “Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals“, they found some pretty shocking results.
On average, the CDC’s report found 212 chemicals in people’s blood or urine, 75 of which had never before been measured in the U.S. population. The chemicals included:
- Acrylamide (formed when foods are baked or fried at high temperatures, and as a byproduct of cigarette smoke)
- Arsenic, found in many home-building products
- Environmental phenols, including bisphenol A (found in plastics, food packaging and epoxy resins) and triclosan (used as an antibacterial agent in personal care products such as toothpaste and hand soap)
- Perchlorate, used in airplane fuel, explosives and fireworks
- Perfluorinated chemicals, used to create non-stick cookware
- Polybrominated diphenyl ethers, used in fire retardants found in consumer products such as mattresses
- Volatile organic compounds (VOC’s), found in paints, air fresheners, cleaning products, cosmetics, upholstery fabrics, carpets, dry-cleaned clothing, wood preservatives, and paint strippers
When you put all these together, these chemicals represent can potentially present a toxic burden to the human body, and (as the CDC has found) can accumulate in your body’s blood, urine and tissue. While your body does actually have detoxification organs (your liver and kidney) that can process many of these chemicals and toxins, these toxins can cause medical problems if your liver and kidneys are not functioning properly or are overburdened the host of toxins we get exposed to on a daily basis in our post-industrial era.
To make matters even worse, the world's largest study on air pollution, just published October 25 in the European Heart Journal, found that when you breathe the average air in the average city (with all other variables held constant, such as eating healthy and exercising) you develop a huge risk for high blood pressure.
How? In the study, the biological mechanisms for the adverse effect of air pollution on the functioning of the heart and blood vessels included:
-local and systemic inflammation…
-oxidative stress (a build-up of damaging molecules in the body)…
-an imbalance in correct functioning of the nervous system…
This also means that no matter how healthy you eat, how much you workout, how clean your water is, etc…you're still getting blasted with toxins from air pollutant every time you step into a city, or airport, or public gym, or just about anywhere else they aren't using giant HEPA filters.
How I'm Going To Detox This Year
So why am I telling you all this? Frankly, this air pollution issue is just one of the many reasons that I'm going to detox my entire body and brain this January, and I'm asking you to join me.
That's right, I'm going to detox my entire body and brain, beginning Monday, January 9, 2017.
And I'm not going to do just any ol' detox like putting cayenne pepper into a nasty concoction or pushing giant grocery shopping carts full of random herbs through the supermarket. These popular detoxes can actually release toxins from tissues such as fat cells and shove them into the brain, causing even more damage. Oops.
That's a bad thing.
Instead, I'm partnering up with one of the most brilliant detox minds on the face of the planet: the guy I mentioned earlier named Dr. Dan Pompa, and Dr. Dan is going to walk me through his entire brain and body detox program that he's studied and perfected for years.
I'm then going to combine his proven detox formula with my own exercise and biohacking protocols so that I can completely clean up my body without losing fitness by doing only, say, hot yoga and trampolining for weeks and weeks.
See, I don't want to come out of my detox having lost my muscle or having to huff and puff whenever I climb a flight of stairs, so I'm pulling out all my fitness tricks that allow me to sculpt my body while I detox, without actually causing adrenal fatigue issues or ruining the detox protocol.
And I'm inviting YOU to join me.
The True Cellular Detox Challenge
My “True Cellular Detox” Challenge begins on Monday, January 9 (yep, right after the holiday feasting, alcohol, cookies and candy) and you can click here to join me. When you join, this means Dr. Pompa and I will walk you through every step of the detox, and you'll get things like:
-Insider access to the exact detoxification protocol I'll be following as I go through the program along with you…
-Monthly live interactive sessions with Dr. Pompa and I so that there is zero guesswork and you have all your questions answered…
-Full instruction on how to do my own personal exercises and biohacks I'll be implementing as I go through the detox with you…
-A full 90 day meal plan…
-Team accountability as hundreds of people around the globe join us in the True Cellular Detox Challenge…
-And much more!
Whether you can’t seem to decimate a single fat cell and you’re experiencing brain fog, achy joints and serious lulls in energy or you want to blast your brain and body performance through the roof, look good naked, live as long as possible and feel amazing while doing it…
…this challenge will completely reboot your body.
You can click here to read all the nitty-gritty details, but please be sure to get in on this detox soon because it will fill up fast and Dr. Dan and I want to be able to fit everybody in.
The same way you need instructions on how to detox the right way without harming your body, I need your help and your accountability to get me through this detox. Goodness knows that even though I'm a pretty healthy guy, I'm going to need a proper detox after both the holidays and an entire year of hard-charging, fast-living, daily post-industrialized world exposure.
And you do too.
So let's do this together.
Hey Ben, What a ludicrous suggestion to begin with, of course toxicity exists! and of course one can use various lifestyle and dietary/supplement factors to DE-tox. So much rubbish published on the internet, just a shame when it’s from a seemingly often good source/site…
Hi Ben
In the article on Huff Post, you seem to be putting down enemas a little. Has your opinion changed or developed since your 2014 article on coffee enemas?
All the best,
Ben
I am putting down enemas as a strategy to clear up "mucoid plaque" or colonic foods that have built up over time. That's bunk. But for glutathione releases, peristalsis, bile release, etc. I am a fan of enemas.
I usually leave the details of these reports to people like you Ben, who have the training and brains to decipher them and report them to us, but when the say 75 new chemicals have been found which had never before been measured in the U.S. population I believe they mean that literally, in that they’ve never before been targeted for measurement. There’s no single test or machine that can “look” at blood and detect and list every toxin or anything else, though I think they’re working on one. Instead they have to look for each individual toxin, chemical, nutrient, whatever. So I think they’ve just added 75 new chemicals to look for in this test. I’m sure the actual amount of chemicals in humans is much, much higher than 212, probably in the thousands. I read that the FDA approves nearly 2000 for use each year in the US alone.
I’m a believer in the human body’s ability to adapt according to need, as conditions necessitate (mother of invention) but over a long period of time – evolutionary. And we’ve evolved based on natural conditions. So the human body developed toxin removal systems that filtered toxins that were present and naturally occurring, toxins it could recognize such as mercury, lead, etc. But now we have so many of these new, man-made chemicals that the body doesn’t recognize. They never existed in nature. The human body is a miraculous thing, but to think that it can recognize an entirely new, never before seen, substance in our environment and know that it’s detrimental and needs to be removed is a little too miraculous for me to believe. Perhaps the human body also detects chemicals individually and doesn’t yet know to even look for these new unnatural, mad-made ones. And now were exposed to much greater amounts of the natural toxins the body has grown to recognize and remove, but not at the rate to which we’re now exposed in the post industrial world. My own blood tests have indicated higher amounts of many of these, so obviously my detoxification systems aren’t removing these at the rate I’m being exposed to them. Symptoms verify that.
Like the author of The Guardian article I used to believe that detoxing was bull, but not after this and learning all I have from you in recent years.
Hey Ben,
Do you ever do any research on your EXPERTS? So firstly Dr Dan Pompa is “a doctor of pastoral medicine” which is a scam degree. The Medical board in Texas filed “cease and desist” orders on a number of individuals who practiced scam medicine there, outside their allowed degree. I didn’t look into it in other states. He used to live in Pennsylvania and was sentenced to probation as described in this article:
http://patch.com/pennsylvania/cranberry/couple-pl….
In his defense after he looted the trust fun d he said “I didn’t know I couldn’t do that”.
He suffered from “chronic fatigue syndrome”. Ask him if he went on full disability for that, joined the “check of the month club”, quit his job as a Chiropractor, and moved to Utah after filing bankruptcy.
I suspect he got his online quack degree of D.PSc. and came up with his silly “detox” plan which is now , through you, going to scam more people out of $$$!
The body has unique detox pathways developed over millions of years by evolution. I agree it is not designed to handle “modern” toxins such as lead poisoning, and Allopathic medicine has not solved everything. But I cannot find any bonafide studies that prove a benefit from what you and Pompa suggest, only anecdotal stories from people like Pompa I presume that were “cured” from his chronic fatigue with his scam.
I have enjoyed listening to you up to now, I too am a capitalist like you. We all need to make a living. I treated thousands of patients as an Internist and Gastroenterologist over the last 35 years. Yes I made a nice living, but I used proven modalities when available. And yes there is/was a lot we don’t know yet.
But really! This cleanse stuff is a dime a dozen. Also, after doing more than 10,000
colonoscopies, I can say I never saw pockets “of decaying moldy, blah, blah blah food that need cleansing” as suggested in many cleanses.
Anyway, you should split from Pompa, he doesn’t do you justice.
Good day.
Hey Glenn,
Thanks for the heads up!
Glen, Dr. Pompa’s expertise has nothing to do with the letters he decides to put next to his name. It has to do with with his story, his triumph over illness and the priceless knowledge that came out of it. This man is genuine and is a world changer. I was a patient of his 5 years ago. If it weren’t for him I wouldn’t have ever put together how to overcome mold exposure which then led me down a road of chronic fatigue and multiple chemical sensitivity. True cellular detox is the most important piece to my recovery
Hey Glen, thanks for you feedback. I do in fact research the experts I interview and resources I recommend in my articles and post on my website, and I am very comfortable with my decision to undertake Dr. Dan Pompa’s True Cellular Detox program. You’ll find that Dr. Pompa’s detoxification protocol is well supported by medical research and clinical validation, and he is well known and respected in this field. Dr Pompa is one part of a large group, where there are more MD’s in the group than DC’s, anyway.
Ben, your support of Dr. Dan Pompa is well deserved. Dr. Pompa is widely recognized as a thought-leader among professionals in functional healthcare, including internationally renowned practitioners and scientists such as Drs. Joseph Mercola, Terry Wahls, Bruce Lipton, Stephanie Seneff, and Tom O’Bryan, to name just a few.
Dr. Nudelman criticizes Dr. Pompa’s affiliation with the Pastoral Medical Association (PMA). Allow me to set the record straight.
The PMA is a long-established ecclesiastical organization serving a community of hundreds of thousands of people who value and prioritize their health, who believe in freedom of choice when it comes to healthcare, and who are seeking natural means for restoring health and promoting lifelong vitality and well-being for themselves and others.
To these ends, the PMA licenses practitioners with diverse healthcare educational backgrounds and specialties (MDs, DOs, NPs, NMDs, DCs, DOMs, etc.) to practice “Pastoral Science & Medicine.” However, the PMA is not an educational institution that teaches healing arts. Instead, trained practitioners must qualify and pledge to meet PMA’s scope of practice and standards of care to obtain a PMA license.
Pastoral Science & Medicine helps people address chronic health concerns and regain health by restoring the body’s functional balance, reducing toxic burden and replenishing deficiencies using completely natural means (diet, nutritional supplementation, exercise, meditation, etc.) – all following scriptural-based beliefs and protocols.
Dr. Pompa’s True Cellular Detox program, using unique protocols and proprietary blends of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, RNA/DNA tissue factors, amino acids, and botanicals manufactured by Systemic Formulas and 180º Solution to ensure the highest standards of product purity, is an excellent example of this.
For your understanding, Ben, and that of your readers — Pastoral Science & Medicine is very similar to the rapidly expanding field of Functional Medicine, in which tens of thousands of healthcare providers (again, all licenses and specialties) are being trained by the Institute for Functional Medicine, Functional Medicine University, the Academy for Functional Medicine & Genomics, etc. As you may be aware, the world-famous Cleveland Clinic recently opened a dedicated Center for Functional Medicine, which is now expanding rapidly due to its marked success. See, https://www.holisticprimarycare.net/topics/topics-a-g/functional-medicine/1772-facing-huge-demand-cleveland-clinic-doubles-its-functional-medicine-center.html.
Like Pastoral Science & Medicine, Functional Medicine promotes dietary and other natural remedies and treatments, as well as smart lifestyle changes, to prevent, manage and reverse chronic disease.
As a seasoned lawyer, I became familiar with the PMA two years ago, when I learned that increasing numbers of healthcare practitioners – including hundreds trained in Functional Medicine — are seeking PMA licenses in order to practice free from secular governmental regulation and control and away from the battle brewing among healthcare professions in various jurisdictions as to which owns the field of nutrition.
The PMA offers a safe legal path for doing this, based on individual freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and upheld by a long history of U.S. Supreme Court rulings.
In this, the PMA is a powerful champion of health freedom for all Americans, contributing extensively in efforts to reverse the health crisis our country is facing.
As to Dr. Nudelman’s criticism, perhaps he should take his own advice about checking the trustworthiness of cited resources. He refers to actions by the Texas Medical Board (TMB) as if your readers should blindly assume that the TMB is some highly respected and responsible public agency protecting Texas citizens. In fact, to the contrary, the TMB is renowned for its abuse of power in bringing complaints against doctors working in various healthcare fields See, for example, the article titled, “Texas Medical Board as Out of Control as Ever“, published by the Alliance of National Health at http://www.anh-usa.org/texas-medical-board-as-out-of-control-as-ever/.
As noted in the article, the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) sued the Board in 2007, charging its members with “pervasive and continuing violations of…constitutional rights.” The lawsuit led to the resignation of the Board’s President, Roberta Kalafut, based on allegations that she “arranged for her husband to file anonymous complaints against other physicians, including her competitors in Abilene” and that she “worked inside the TMB with other defendants to discipline doctors based on anonymous complaints filed by her physician husband.” See, http://www.aapsonline.org/press/122107.php.
Dr. Nudelman admits he didn’t look into other states, as if doing so would somehow disparage the practice of Pastoral Science & Medicine. That’s not the case. For example, in late 2014, the Kentucky Board of Chiropractic Examiners ordered all Kentucky chiropractors to cease and desist from advertising and practicing under the PMA license. However, after challenge by PMA’s lawyers, the Board reversed its position. Acknowledging that “PMA practitioner services are pastoral in nature,” the Board filed notice on its website stating, “Kentucky chiropractors are free to join, advertise, and counsel under the Pastoral Medical Association, as long as there is a separation between the PMA services and the chiropractic services being rendered.” See, http://kbce.ky.gov/Pages/From-the-Board.aspx
Bottom line – The PMA license is distinct from and independent of state-issued healthcare licenses. It does not expand the scope of any state-issued license a practitioner may hold. In other words, the practice of Pastoral Science & Medicine stands completely on its own, free of governmental influence and control and available to every American who wants to take advantage of the natural, spiritually-based healthcare principles and protocols it has to offer.
Respectfully, it would be wise for Dr. Nudelman to stick to his own specialty (apparently, colonoscopies). He should be more introspective before publicly defaming an established health freedom association that works to protect and expand the rights of committed healthcare practitioners nationwide, or attempting lamely to discredit a doctor who has devoted his life to bringing meaningful solutions to help millions of people in our country suffering from chronic health conditions.
Love this reply, Peter Jenkins! Thank you!
Thank you so much for this well written and fact documented response!
As a gastroentologist, just how many cases of colitis did you completely reverse?
Functional and holistic doctors know it is viral (HHV-3 internal shingles) based and do it all the time, simply through good nutrition, chelating heavy metal deposits in the guts (which help feed the toxin-excreting virus), and rebuilding the immune system.
Are they therefore ‘quacks’ because they recommend something besides surgery or consuming semi-toxic patented chemicals?
Susan, you are awesome
These so called gastroenterist are only skilled in cutting polyps and charge big buck for that.
When it comes to other issue, they say “just live with it.
Hi GLEN,
Other than cutting polyps and charging huge money for that for your nice living, can you cure anything?
Can you cure inflammatory bowel disease, can you cure SIBO or IBS ? You can’t
Worse, you prescribed many toxic medication that damages many patients permanently like fluoroquinolone antibiotics. Call yourself an expert? What you know is purely what big pharmaceutical companies teach you.
Do some reflection
True
My life was finished after several rounds of CIPRO, I wonder if true cellular detox can somewhat reclaim my health.
To me Pompa’s stuff just sounds like someone else trying to get rich off of sick people. I’m so over it.
Thank you!
Is this available in Canada? I know someone that the costs were huge due to customs issues on the Canadian side.
Yes it is. Just order soon so everything gets to you in time!
It has been over 4 years. How did the detox go? Do you still recommend it?
I too am curious about the results