February 21, 2015

Podcast from:  https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/nutrition-podcasts/hidden-truth-behind-toxins-detoxification-detox-diets/

[00:00] Introduction

[01:31] About Dr. Tim Jackson

[04:04] Health & Homeostasis

[12:13] Diseases & Methods For Determining Them

[22:19] Testing The Body For Toxins

[27:49] On Detoxification & Drainage

[32:47] Methods of Detoxification

[37:32] Unda Numbers & Homeopathic Remedies

[45:56] Depuration As A Prerequisite

[51:13] Other Remedies for Drainage

[55:12] End of the Podcast

In this episode of The Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast:

“You're drinking water with the pH of 8.0 something or 9.0 something, you could be promoting the overgrowth of harmful bacteria.”  “A lot of times athletes, even though they may appear healthy on the outside, they may have a lot of imbalances on the inside.”  “Detoxification simply takes out a lot of the good stuff along with the bad stuff.”  “You know if you think about it, we breathe 12 to 16 times a minute.  Mud flying that out throughout the day.  We're breathing out carbon dioxide and the other toxins that we breathed in, and that it had been delivered to the capillary beds.”

Ben:  My guest today is Dr. Tim Jackson.  He is a medical ninja when it comes to nutritional biochemistry, digestive health, methylation and genetic testing, and functional endocrinology, also known as hormone balance.  Now Dr. Tim is not a stranger to bengreenfieldfitness.com, so there were a couple of articles that he's written.  One was called “Blame the Bugs: How Stealth Pathogens Are Making You Fat, Tired, and Brain Dead” and also, love these titles, “Broken Gut to Big Butt: How a Busted Digestive System Can Make You Hormonally Fat”.  I'll put a link to both of those articles if you want to read them over in the show notes for this episode, and those show notes are at bengreenfieldfitness.com/drain.

Well, now Dr. Tim is back with a vengeance and he actually was talking to me about detox in an e-mail exchange that we had, and I pretty much thought that I'd kick the detox horse to death on this show and thought that I personally knew everything that there was to know about detoxification and detox diets, and then he started dropping these knowledge bombs like xenobiotics and words like depuration, miasma, emunctory and even drainage which sounds like it has a pretty big yuck factor.  So these are all things that people aren't talking about when it comes to toxins, when it comes to detoxing, detoxification, so I really had to get him on the podcast to open your eyes about what's really happening inside your body when you detox and what you really need to know about detox.

So I guarantee that when you finish listening to today's episode, you're going to know more about detox than most of your neighbors and the other people that you play Trivia with, and I don't know anyone that actually sits around playing Trivia these days, and you're also going to be familiar with a lot of these terms that frankly most doctors aren't really familiar with when it comes to what's really going on inside the body.  Hopefully through that process, you're going to be able to really figure out how to take care of your body the rest of your life as far as keeping it clean.  So Dr. Tim,  thanks for coming on the show, man.

Dr. Tim:  Thank you for having me, it's always a pleasure.

Ben:  Well, I have a lot of notes that you sent over to me about detoxification and toxins, and one of the first things that you start off with is health and how we define health and the importance of homeostasis, and I know that most of our listeners know what homeostasis is, but the way that you define it and some of the specifics that you get into are really, really interesting.  So can you talk about the definition of health and where homeostasis comes in?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so basically the way I define health and a lot of my predecessors define health and some current physicians as well is they define it as the importance of just maintaining balance internally and externally.  In breaking down homeostasis, there's really four or five components that we look at.  Homeostasis obviously just means a state of balance, so at any point in time, our bodies can be in a state of homeostasis, in a catabolic state which you don't want.  That's where you're breaking down tissue, you're unable or repair to heal from injuries.  Or you can be in an anabolic state which is typically what happens after you have the workout, have your post-workout shake, you're recovering from the workout, and you're synthesizing new proteins, etcetera.

Homeostasis, we always want to try to find that middle ground, so internal stressors and external stressors are tugging away at us from either ends or both sides of the body, trying to pull us out of that state at homeostasis.

Ben:  Are you saying that you want to be in a balance of anabolism and catabolism, or are you saying you want to avoid catabolism all together?

Dr. Tim:  Well I would say, in general, you want to avoid catabolism from the most part.  Obviously there is a period when you worked out, where you're actually in a catabolic state.  You're breaking tissue down, so that's inevitable.  But people with chronic illness, they tend to be in an overall net catabolic state, so when we look at their hormonal balance, their digestive health, their ability to detoxify, that leaves them in a state where they're unable to heal or repair their bodies.

Ben:  Okay, gotcha.  So you were going into some of the things that would be necessary to be in this state of homeostasis or to not be in a state of constant metabolism?

Dr. Tim:  Right, exactly.  So when we look at some of the components of homeostasis, basically they consist of a concentration of salt and electrolytes in the body.  Electrolytes aren't really a sexy topic like hormones or gut health, but they're incredibly important for membrane traffic which all that means is getting things into yourselves and getting the bad stuff out of yourselves.  They also play an important role in maintaining proper pH in the bloodstream.  We also look at the volume and the pressure of the extra-cellular fluid, so fluid that's outside of the cell.  We look that the pH of the internal environment, and it's important, I want to make a point here about pH.  A lot of people talk about alkaline diets, these sorts of things.  It's like real estate, its location, location, location.  So if you look inside your cells in a part called the lysosome, pH is around 1-point-something.  Because that's your cellular trash talk.  But if you look in the bloodstream, your pH should be around.  Extreme deviations from that will cause major issues.

Ben:  Okay, so are you measuring pH in the lysosomes versus pH in the blood versus pH in the stomach, when you're trying to figure out if someone is in the state of homeostasis, are these things you're actually testing, or are these things you're just, well I guess that's just my question.  Is it already testing these things?

Dr. Tim:  For the lysosome, no.  That's basically just a factoid from cellular, molecular biology that the microbiologist have figured out, but the point being that if that pH was released into the other parts of the cell, that cell would die, and ultimately, that tissue would die.  As far as testing pH in the blood or in the urine or saliva, you can do that.  There are saliva strips, urine strips, there's some debate about which is more accurate, but in general, you want to be more alkaline.  Now you can be too alkaline, I see a lot of people using these alkaline water filters which, in my opinion, is not a good idea because what happens is the behavior of the bacteria in your gut is very dependent on the pH there.  So if you're drinking water with the pH of 8.0 something or 9.0 something, you could be promoting the overgrowth of harmful bacteria.  So in order to balance pH, I typically preferred people eat more vegetables to balance that out their meat consumption.  That's really where it's at in terms of balancing blood pH and overall body pH.

PH determines so many things in the body, our ability to detoxify, our brain chemistry.  A lot of things are affected by, and if you have say some adrenal issues and you're excreting a lot of your electrolytes, that can change the pH.  So pH is something that's important, and it's also affected by mineral balance, but to finish up the other components of homeostasis, the concentration of oxygen and CO2 is another one.  So basically to summarize the concentration of nutrients and waste products, so the good stuff and the bad stuff, the concentration of salts and electrolytes, sodium, potassium, chloride, etcetera.  The pressure and the volume of the extra-cellular fluid, so what's outside the cell, the pH of the internal environment and the concentration of oxygen and CO2?  So when any one of those things is too far to the right or too far to the left, your body has to exert extra energy and resources to try and bring it back into balance.

Ben:  Who came up with these components of homeostasis?  Are these things that alternative medical practitioners like yourself are now using?  Are these your own markers that you've come up with over the years of practicing?  Where do you find this stuff?

Dr. Tim:  These came from my years of practice, but also from Dr. Dickson Tom.  He's a dentist in a natural path out in Arizona, and he's an expert in biotherapeutic drainage and detox medication.

Ben:  Does he have a book or anything like that?

Dr. Tim:  If you go to, the company's name is Seroyal, they have some continue in education courses.

Ben:  How do you spell that?

Dr. Tim:  It's S-E-R-O-Y-A-L.

Ben:  Okay, cool.  I'll put a link to that in the show notes for people who are read-o-phobes and what to go check out our read-a-fills, want to go check out the book right there in their website.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah.

Ben:  Okay, so we have all these components of homeostasis that you want to have imbalance, and if they're not, then what happens when it comes to disease and pathology or whatever?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so it definitely predisposes you to all sort of disorders, and when we talk about pathology, Dr. Tom actually in the course I took described it as a state of adapted physiology, and what he meant by that was that your body is only attempting to return you to homeostasis.  It's not trying to harm you or to become dysfunctional in any way.  It's trying to achieve that homeostatic balance, and in doing so returning you to that state of homeostasis.  So he also says that if you look at someone's current pathology, it's a window into their past.  Physical injuries, emotional injuries, toxic exposures but also their potential for future healing.  So if someone comes to you with Stage 3 Pancreatic Cancer and they've never taken supplements, they've never exercised, then your chances of healing them are pretty low.  But if someone comes to you at Stage 1, then you have a longer, relatively speaking, to help these people return to the state of homeostasis in all those five components of homeostatic balance.

Ben:  How many people do you run into who are healthy 'cause a lot of our listeners, they don't have Stage 1 Cancer, they're not necessarily people who you would consider to be unhealthy, right?  People who look really good walking around looking pretty good in Spandex frankly.  How many people like that, the hard charging athletes, do you find have some of these components of homeostasis out of place like acidic gut environments or improper concentration of salts and electrolytes, nutrient waste product concentration imbalances, things along those lines.  Have you tested those type of people?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, a lot actually.  When I was doing orthopedic rehab, we had quite a minor league athletes and some NFL and professional baseball players and it's amazing that they perform as well as they do when they're typically so out of balance.  Some of them are health nuts, but there's another portion that eats fast food twice a day, goes to bed at three in the morning, and all of those things obviously add up.  We'll get into this more later, but there's basically three stages of disorder.  Energetic imbalance would typically be the first one, and if you ask these people what the energetic imbalance, they feel poorly or they feel bad, they're going to almost always say no.  And so an energetic imbalance is something that can be measured by biometrical impedance or EAV testing.  You might have heard of different devices like the ZYTO which is a hand cradle, or the Asyra System which is supposed to detect the primary, secondary and tertiary stressors on the body.

Ben:  I actually haven't heard of any of these.  Are these things you would find in a doctor's office, or are these things that people can actually purchase for themselves?

Dr. Tim:  People can purchase for themselves, and if you have a physician who's out of state or far away from you, there's a certain software you can download, and they can test you that way.  It's just a hand cradle that you put your hand into, and it detects the primary and secondary and tertiary stressors on the body at that point in time.  So there might not be things that you're aware of, but it may come up with an active virus or mercury toxicity, and depending on the software.  There's different versions of the software, some are more comprehensive than others, but the ones that are more comprehensive to only test what the stressors are on your body, but what remedies work best for you at that point in time.  So if there's a prescription anti-viral or a nutraceutical anti-viral, you can have all those into the system and test to see which one the person would respond best to.  At first, I thought it was complete hocus pocus, and I still don't use it a ton.

Ben:  They do sound like the kind of things you see at a chiro's office where they, and I totally don't want to shove chiro's under the bus 'cause some of the most intelligent folks I speak with are chiropractic docs and alternative medical practitioners, but it sounds like one of those things that they'll sometimes have in the office as a way to make money.  Put your hand on this and it spits out computer information, but there's actually something to these things, huh?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, and the way I found out was that I was running all this lab work on people, and they would say, “oh by the way, I had a ZYTO scan, and it showed exactly what you said based on the lab work.”  So in many cases it was corroborating what the blood work or the urine hormone test or the stool test said.  The ZYTO's basically spitting out the same information.  Now is it a 100% accurate or foolproof?  No, a lot of times if something comes up on the ZYTO, I tell people to still, if it's something serious, to have it confirmed via blood work or urine testing, etcetera.  The other system is called the Asyra.  That one I've never used it similar to the ZYTO and measures the stressors to the body, but also the potential remedies that would work best for you, and if you did a ZYTO scan today and you know you implemented some of the remedies and then you reset in say a month or six weeks, the results are going to be different because your stressors are going to be different.

Ben:  Interesting, so these are all forms of energetic testing?  You're testing the body's energy basically?

Dr. Tim:  Exactly, so those are the physical energetic imbalance test.  Also a type of testing called the autonomic response testing that was developed by a doctor named Dietrich Klinghardt, and he's an MB PhD, and if you just see someone doing it, it typically looks like your normal chiropractic muscle testing, but it's actually testing the autonomic nervous system's response to different vials.  So typically the doctor or the practitioner will have an assistant pull the vial and then try to pull your fingers apart, and they can test the same thing as the ZYTO, what your stressors are and also which remedies may work best for you, and it's actually incredibly accurate.  It was the first test that ever picked up that I had Lyme disease, and so at first I brushed it off, and then three years later, it was confirmed via blood work that I did have it.

Ben:  I've personally always brushed that stuff off.  I mean everything from, I think I've actually done this Asyra screen that you're talking about in somebody's office at one point.  I go to so many health expos and stuff.  I've always forget where I've tried what and thought it was total woo.  And same with the autonomic response frankly, holding the vials and the muscle testing.  That's never seemed to work for me, but what you're saying is that you've actually combined this kind of testing with blood testing or with other things to see that it really matches up with more quantitative measurements.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, and I haven't taken the autonomic response testing forces you have, but all the top environmental medicine docs I know, especially mold and lyme, docs use it, and it's crazy accurate.  When I first had my test on, I brushed it off as completely inaccurate, how can this possibly pick up on anything, but then I would go and have the blood test confirmed or have a blood test done that would confirm exactly what the autonomic response testing says.  So we found the surface, it looks like your typical applied kinesiology, but it's very, very different than that.  I probably don't do it justice in how I explain it, but Dr. Klinghardt I think is a genius.  It's like anything else, it's not a hundred percent accurate, but I've seen it being incredibly, incredibly accurate, and it obviously cut down on the cost for the patient or client because they're not having to get paid thousands of dollars per blood test.

Ben:  Okay, and that's what I was going to ask you actually.  Well, you just talked about different forms of energetic ways that we can test the body, the ZYTO scan, the Asyra, EAV screening and autonomic response testing.  It sounds to me what you may be suggesting here is we use these as a way to get clues about the toxic versus non-toxic status of the body to then be able to delve more deeply into other types of testing.

Dr. Tim:  Right, exactly.  So you may have eight to ten issues that you're concerned about.  Well if you do a ZYTO scan or the autonomic response testing, it may help narrow those down, so then you can go have those blood tests done, and you maybe narrow it down to three or four tests versus eight to ten tests, and there's some people who've had the ART testing done, and it missed some things, but in general, I think it's incredibly accurate, and actually a colleague of mine had the ART testing done, and the doc told her that the EMS in her bedroom were too high, and she brushed it off.  Three weeks later, the electrical socket caught on fire in the middle of the night.  So this sounds like complete hocus pocus like stuff, but the way Dr. Klinghardt has developed it over many, many years, all those 30 years, has been pretty incredible, and I'm not an ART practitioner, but I just bring that up because that's one way to gently test the body.

Ben:  Now what's another type of testing in addition to the energetic?

Dr. Tim:  After energetic testing, if you're in an energetic imbalance, those tests will be on that.  A functional imbalance would be the next stage, and that's where you have things like chronic fatigue syndrome where there's no specific markers per say.  There are some that are correlated with it, but none specifically define it, but it's still a very, very real and serious disorder.  It's not just I worked out hard, I'm too tired.  It's completely neural for an immune disorder.  So that would be the next stage, certain types of blood work could pick up on that, and the final stage which we call the legional stage which is the physical stage is typically where you see people present with disease.  So that's where X-rays, MRIs, traditional blood work would pick up on.  And the functional category, you might have some fatigue and stuff like that.  We can run blood work to see if you have high viral titers, and that would pick up on.  But most of the medical academies and organizations don't recognize the viral titers as being specific for detecting chronic fatigue syndrome even though that may be causing it.

Ben:  Gotcha, interesting.  So these three levels of embellishments, energetic imbalance, functional imbalance and legional imbalance are basically three different areas that people should test for if they want to get a full picture of what's going on inside their body.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, and I tell people test, test, test.  At least once a year, preferably every six months.  I'm sure you've heard of the nutritionist Robert Crayhon who looked great, felt great.  He was a brilliant guy, he hosted boulder fest every year, and he didn't do any lab testing because he didn't have any symptoms, and then they found out he had Pancreatic Cancer, I think it was.  It was too late, so I tell people no matter how good you feel, no matter if you have six percent body fat, do some form of blood testing even if it's just your basic metabolic panel, vitamin, CRP testing at least once a year.  That way we can gauge over time where things are headed.

Ideally if people can afford it and their doctor's open to it.  I think they should have thyroid and adrenals tested probably once a year especially if they have any sort of symptoms, but you asked earlier about testing athletes and how they feel and things like that.  I've seen quite a few people with very low percentage body fat, very muscular and are more battle-wise who had so many imbalances, and a lot of it came from abusing pre-workout supplements or stimulants combined with overtraining.  It really lead to a state of metabolic derangement for lack of a better word.  So a lot of times athletes even though they may appear healthy on the outside, they may have a lot of these imbalances going on in the inside.  But I know people like yourself, you're a fitness junkie, fitness guru, but you also maintain your health in homeostasis as well.

Ben:  Yeah, and that's what I want to get into and really the meat of our discussion is when we find that there are imbalances in people who maybe do appear healthy on the outside but feel like crap on the inside or even have underlying issues that they're unaware or turning away inside them potentially causing as you eluded to.  Risk for things like cancer or chronic disease in the future.  What's going on from a toxin standpoint?  I'm curious how you would define a toxin, and then I think we should probably jump into some of the types of toxins that are out there?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so toxins were originally defined as something that we're capable of creating or inducing antibody formation from the immune system.  So the immune system would recognize it as a foreign body, bind to it and now on an immune response.  From that definition to something that can be either endogenous that's produced from our normal cellular metabolism to external toxins that we ingest either to the food supply, the air we breathe or the water we drink.  Some of those toxins and current disrupting chemicals, I guess, is kind of the broad heading, but phthalates are very common from plastic, BPAs which are even from receipts on a cash register.  Heavy metals, mercury, aluminum, lead, arsenic cadmium, those are the most common toxins along with black phosphate or round up.  There's a lot of research, Dr. Stephanie Seneff at MIT, that's all she released.

Ben:  We recently had her on the podcast talking about vaccinations and glyphosates, so fascinating stuff.  But yeah, that's a scary one.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so all of those things had the potential to disrupt normal cellular energy production and normal cellular function.  If we get in to use some of these xenobiotic type things from plastics and other chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, etcetera, may not be recognized by the body very well, and so it may take technically detoxification to deal with them.  So if we can just brush over the difference between detoxification and drainage.  Detoxification is where we push the body beyond the normal physiological limit.  An example would be IV Chelation where we provoke heavy metals out of your tissues and force them out through the kidneys.

Drainage is simply supporting normal physiological action that may have diminished over time in the gland or organ or tissue or cell may just need to be nourished.  So typically drainage would something that would be done first because you're restoring your normal physiological action, and that will help some degree get rid of these endogenous and exogenous toxins.  As far as detoxification goes, far infrared saunas, IV therapy like glutathione pushes IV Chelation.  All of those things were things that would be considered under the detox category because even though they're good for us, they are really putting much pressure on the body.  So you can have someone who's very sensitive to supplement that reacts to a lot of things or they're just extremely toxic.  Maybe they grew up near a power plant or something or have a lot of toxic exposures to pesticides and herbicides, then you would want to start them with brain infirmities.  So drainage is a much gentler form of detox.

Ben:  So what would be an example if somebody didn't want to start with one of the more advanced detoxification strategies which just to clarify 'cause I'm a little bit confused myself in terms of the difference between detoxification and what you're calling drainage.  Detoxification would be one of these detox diets.  Would that be the cayenne pepper-water diet?  Is detoxification like enemas?  Is detoxification taking a high fiber supplement?  What would be, I guess, a really, really clear example of things that would be considered traditional detoxification and not fall under the category of something like drainage or some of these other methods of getting toxins out of the body that you're going to talk about?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so detoxification can be anything from dietary changes like you mentioned to avoiding tobacco, caffeine, etcetera, avoiding drugs to help lower the toxin load, drinking more water, increasing your fiber intake.  That's part of detoxification because even though we do need a certain amount of fiber, if you're going above and beyond that to try and increase bowel movement frequency, then that would be considered going above a physiological limit, and so you only do them typically for short periods of time.

So another classic example was IV Chelation.  That's something that certainly puts a huge stressor on the body, and you have to do it at the correct time.  If you do it in someone whose detox pathways are really messed up, you may only redistribute metals to other areas of the body, and that can just stir up symptoms, reactivate viruses and pathogens.  It can even drive metals like mercury and aluminum into the brain.  So IV Chelation is a classic example because you can only do so many in a certain period of time, and on your off days, you replenish the good minerals.  So detoxification typically takes out a lot of the good stuff along with the bad stuff.

Drainage on the other hand simply supports physiological action, and it only helps to get rid of the bad stuff.  It may provide some nutritional support to the organ or tissue, but it's not going completely change things.  It's just going to provide some genial support, and so that's what you would typically start with prior to using things like IV Chelation.  Just to give you a quick example, I had a client who was very sensitive to supplements, and her MD wanted to do a provocation heavy metal test where if your listeners aren't familiar, you take a Chelation agent or lay like DMSA, and then they collect your urine a few hours later.  Well she did the test, and she reacted extremely poorly to it, and she was basically bed ridden for about a month to a month and a half because if you're not moving your bowels daily and you're not staying hydrated with electrolytes and things of that nature, taken a chelation agent especially if you've had 40 or 50 or 60 years of your life to accumulate metals, then that's a huge stressor to the kidneys.

Ben:  Okay, so basically the takeaway message from this part of what you're saying is if you're going to detox, look into one of these methods of drainage first that you remove some of these toxic compounds that might accumulate or overwhelm you during a detox.

Dr. Tim:  Right, exactly, and so we can go back and forth, but in general, there's several different drainage remedies out there, but the most famous are the Unda Compounds, spelled U-N-D-A, and those compounds, there's 76 different ones, and they're made from plants, and they all have different functions, and typically they're used in combinations of three.

Ben:  Would these be considered homeopathic remedies, Undas?

Dr. Tim:  Yes, you can consider them homeopathic because there is, in some of them, metals that have a 12 times or 12 x dilution, etcetera.  So you can consider the Undas homeopathic.

Ben:  Okay.  Can you go into, and we're all nerds, all the listeners.  Every single one is a propeller hat wearing geek, of course, and we just lost all listeners that aren't.  Can you go into how these things actually work, and I know this could be a little bit detailed, but what they are?  What an Unda number signifies and what a homeopath actually is?  I realize that' a multi-year long medical course I just asked you, but give us the overview.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so a general homeopathy, it comes in different concentrations.  You'll see a number and then a letter after it.  So 10M, for example, would be the strongest, and the homeopathic remedy, in general, is a diluted form of whatever pathogen or whatever toxin that you're attempting to get rid of.  So a lot of people say oh, homeopathy or homeopathy is quackery, but it really depends on the company you're using and how it was formulated.  I use a lot of Desiree biologicals which they have an MD.  They had over their company who formulates their compounds, and they're very potent.  So as far as homeopathy goes, it's just a diluted form of whatever you're attempting to eradicate.

The Unda number specifically, they were invented in the 1920s when people were looking for a cure for TB.  They're considered a single remedy, but they contain generally a few different things.  They have an alcohol that helps to deliver the plant cells to the site which you're wishing to enhance the drainage of, and some of them contain metals.  That scares a lot of people because they'll see aluminum, and it'll have say 12X after it, but this is not aluminum, as in toxic aluminum that you measure on the heavy metal test.  This is one or two particles of aluminum that's in there for a specific reason.  The course that I took didn't really go into a huge roll, but they give you an example of one is that gold is used in a lot of the Unda remedies because it's very important for RNA and DNA synthesis, and optimizing the terrain of the body.

Ben:  What do you mean when you say the terrain of the body?  What does that mean?

Dr. Tim:  So the terrain, it could be the gastrointestinal terrain.  It could just be the terrain in the blood itself, the pH, could be the extracellular matrix which we skipped over a little bit, but a lot of toxins are stored in the extracellular matrix which are basically how your cells suspend themselves from extracellular matrix and how they connect with one another.  And so the extracellular matrix is important for storage and nutrient transport and intercellular communication, so when you dissect a body or if you ever dissected a cadaver, you'll see all this connective tissue, and really beneath that is the extracellular matrix which organizes these groups of cells ultimately into an organ.

So that extracellular matrix is where a lot of toxins are stored, and so depending on the Unda remedies you use, a lot of them will target this extracellular matrix to help to try and slowly drain out gently the toxins that have accumulated.

Ben:  Interesting, gotcha.  So these homeopaths, these Undas, they're made up of primarily it sounds like some plant-based remedies along with some type of ions derived from minerals like aluminum and gold and things like that?

Dr. Tim:  Exactly, and a little bit of alcohol to act as a carrier.  That's it, just a small amount of alcohol.

Ben:  Like a martini?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, exactly.  Like a martini detox or drainage.

Ben:  Okay, so how long would someone use something like these drainage remedies prior to doing a detox like a traditional food detox or water detox or using a traditional detox supplement.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, I think it would probably depend on their symptoms and their age and level of toxicity.  The drainage remedies a lot of times, you use them in combinations of threes, and you may use a certain three for the first four weeks, then you may switch to another grouping of three for the next four to six weeks and continue doing that depending on the health of the person.  If they have cancer and they've been dealing with that for a while, then obviously supporting these drainage remedies or supporting their organs with the drainage remedies is incredibly important.  So the Unda remedies aren't used in replace of something else.  They're just used in addition to it, to help facilitate it, so you can continue your normal supplementation, but the Unda remedies will generally work by opening what's called the emunctories of the body which are basically how toxins exit the body.

Ben:  An emunctory?  What is an emunctory?

Dr. Tim:  An emunctory is any organ or part of the body that can give off waste products such as the kidney, the lungs or the skin.  The primary emunctories would be the lungs, the kidneys, the liver, the GI tract and the skin.  The secondary emunctories would be the muscular skeletal system, mucus membranes and mental and emotional changes to give off emotional stress charges.

Ben:  You said the lungs, so the lungs are something that actually secretes waste products?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, so you know if you think about it, we breathe 12 to 16 times a minute.  Mud flying that out throughout the day.  We're breathing out carbon dioxide and the other toxins that we breathed in, and that it had been delivered to the capillary beds, but they're incredibly important because a lot of people, especially if you're exposed to mold or something of that nature, this may be one route of excretion for microtoxins.  But in general, the primary emunctories are going to be the lungs, kidneys, GI tract and skin, and the secondary will be the muscular skeletal system, mucus membranes and mental and emotional changes.

Ben:  Interesting, so the idea behind drainage is that you are stimulating these emunctories, lungs, kidney, digestive tract, liver, skin, etcetera to basically accelerate the detoxification process or, I guess detoxification would be the wrong word, the discharge of some of these waste products?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah exactly, so you're attempting to reestablish what should be happening on its own, but over time, toxicity, stress, etcetera, has slowed down the function of this tissue or this organ, so we're attempting to bring it not to super physiological levels, but just to a normal physiological level that will allow you to gently begin excreting some of these toxins.

Ben:  Now another thing that you mentioned to me prior to our podcast was that in addition to before doing a detoxification protocol, doing drainage, you should also do something you called depuration.  I'm not even sure if I'm pronouncing that properly, but what is depuration, what would be examples of that?

Dr. Tim:  Depuration, you can think of that as being grouped in with detoxification, but basically the definition is the glands are purified, usually refers to endocrine disrupting chemicals like xenobiotics.  So different methods or mechanisms of depuration include a massage, blood and fat level monitoring, vitamin and mineral replacement, infrared sauna, deep heat dry sauna, chelation, and these often exceed the physiological limits of the body much like detoxification does.  So depuration is basically a term that just more specifically refers to xenobiotics.

Ben:  Okay, gotcha.  So these would be things like doing an infrared sauna or doing a massage or, I guess, foam rolling and things of that nature fall into this category as well?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, exactly.

Ben:  And what you're saying, should you do these type of things just as a daily or weekly habit, or should you have this intense period of time each year where you're just matching out some of these depuration strategies that you're talking about like a deep heat and the dry sauna and the infrared and the massage and things like that?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, I think the infrared sauna, those types of things can be done year round so long as you're maintaining your electrolyte level, etcetera, as long as you can tolerate it.  You don't have any problems like in that where you can't control your body temperature.  But depending on if you're dealing with a very serious illness like cancer or a Lyme disease, that'll determine how aggressive and how long you need to be using these different techniques, so you may start off with drainage, and you can continue the drainage while you begin the detox phase.  So you may do say three to four months of drainage remedies, and then you may start IV Chelation, but you can still continue the drainage remedies, and it'll actually help facilitate the detox process.

So depending on the severity of your illness or issue will determine how many of these methods you need to use, how long you need to use them for and whether you need to do them a couple of times a year or most of the year.

Ben:  Okay, gotcha.  So I would imagine you're walking your patients through some of this stuff.  You're not doing a January 1^st, 20-day-detox type of thing.  It sounds to me like when somebody comes to you and you do some of this functional testing that we talked about like, for example, the energetic testing, the functional testing, the blood testing, etcetera, it is a process of drainage, of depuration and then detoxification that might last.  It sounds like several months or up to a year of time to really clean somebody out or to push the reboot button on their body.

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, and even after that, I tell the people especially if they have certain genetic polymorphisms which we've talked about before like NTHFR or GSTM which is a polymorphism that affects glutathione levels.  If you have those polymorphisms, it's probably more important that you take your round preventative, some extra glutathione because every time you're exposed to pollution or car exhaust, you're using up your molecules of glutathione.  And if you have a polymorphism where the body doesn't make as much as it should, that leaves you with very low levels of glutathione which basically increases your risk of every disease out there.

Ben:  Okay, gotcha.  Stuff can get really complex, but these are some good resources that you go on over so far, and I've been taking notes. For people who want to read up more on a ZYTO scan and Asyra scan, the AV screening, autonomic nervous system, this Unda homeopathic remedy type of system, the Seroyal website that you talked about 'cause I know some docs are listening that may be interested in containing medical education that they provide.  I'll put a link to all this stuff in the show notes, and the thing you can type there for today's show notes, you just go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/drain, and I'll have all of that over there at that URL.  Anything else that you wanted to highlight as important here, Tim, as we wrap up?

Dr. Tim:  Outside of the Unda remedies, there's different other types of drainage remedies.  One is called Gemmotherapies, G-E-M-M-O therapies, and those are plant stem cells from the butt of the plant which is the most potent part, and those can be incredibly important because they not only provide nutrition to the organ, but they can also help to support drainage and detoxification, and there's different ones.  For adrenals, ribes, nigrum would be one, but those are something to consider.  Typically you would start with the Undas and then progress the gemmotherapies, but those are something that people can look into as well as I've seen some pretty good results with those.

Ben:  Gotcha, interesting.  Those are called gemmotherapies?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, exactly.  GEMMOtherapies.

Ben:  Okay, cool.  Interesting, so similar to stem cell therapy except this is from plant stem cells?

Dr. Tim:  Right, exactly.

Ben:  Cool, so that type of thing like stem cells.  A lot of times, you'll hear those being injected or used to speed up recovery rather than being used for drainage and detox.  Can you use those same type of things for enhancing recovery, or is that a use that would be contraindicated for something like a gemmotherapy?

Dr. Tim:  So you're asking, can you use traditional human stem cells to facilitate drainage and detox?

Ben:  No, I'm saying can you use plant stem cells after workouts to enhance your recovery from the workout since the stem cell can intentionally be used for recovery?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, absolutely.

Ben:  Where do you get stuff like that?

Dr. Tim:  Actually, Seroyal also sells that, and actually the remedy I just mentioned, it’s ribes, R-I-B-E-S, nigrum, N-I-G-R-U-M.  It supports the adrenals and the HPA access, and that's one that's very good for recovering from exercise.

Ben:  Yeah, that's an exercise of current.  Isn't it current of the plant or the fruit?

Dr. Tim:  Yeah, exactly.

Ben:  It's interesting.  Well we could probably go on all day about all these different types of therapies 'cause I know this is a huge, huge area, and you've done a ton of continuing medical education on this, Dr. Tim.  I will, of course, link to your website, healyourbody.org in the show notes, but for me, the big take away message is here seems to be that you got to do this stuff in a step wise fashion.  You test, you do the drainage and the depuration, preferably in an intelligent manner.  Not just throwing homeopaths at your body necessarily, and then as you're transitioning from that, you get into a detox if you really want to properly heal your body or fix your body from a toxic overload if you've been living an unhealthy and over trained lifestyle for a long time, and you just need some TLC that this would be a way to do it properly versus just say wondering into Walgreens and buying a bunch of Metamucil.

Dr. Tim:  Right, exactly.  That's the very takeaway.

Ben:  Aright, well cool.  So again if you're listening in, go to bengreenfieldfitness.com/drain.  You can read some of Tim's other articles that have been published at bengreenfieldfitness.com.  Visit his website, knock yourself out taking the deep dive down the rabbit hole with a lot of these other resources that I've noted as we've been having our discussion today, and Dr. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the call and sharing this stuff with us.

Dr. Tim:  Thanks so much for having me, it's always a pleasure.

Ben:  Alright folks, well this is Ben Greenfield and Tim Jackson signing out from bengreenfieldfitness.com.  Have a great week.

 

 

Dr. Tim Jackson – a medical ninja when it comes to nutritional biochemistry, digestive health, methylation and genetic testing and functional endocrinology – is no stranger to BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

He penned the article that first appeared here entitled “Blame the Bugs: How Stealth Pathogens Are Making You Fat, Tired, and Brain Dead.“, and also “Broken Gut to Big Butt: How A Busted Digestive System Can Make You Hormonally Fat.”

And now Dr. Tim is back with a vengeance. Just when I thought I knew everything there was to know about detoxification and detox diets, Tim began dropping knowledge bombs like xenobiotics, depuration, miasm, emunctory, and even drainage (yuk!). I had to get him on the podcast to open your eyes about what's really happening inside your body when you detox…or when you don't.

So when it comes to detox, what you're about to hear is like no other podcast I've ever done on the topic, so strap on your earphones and prepare to learn:

-Why the pH of your blood is just ONE part of proper acid/alkaline balance…

-Why detoxification can destroy you if you don't do a few other important things first…

-The three different ways to truly test your body and see if you even need to detox…

-Which organs detox your body (it's not just your liver and kidney!)…

-Where homeopathic medicine fits in…

-And much more!

Resources from this episode:

–Dr. Tim's Website

-Dr. Tim's Professional Facebook Page

–ZytoScan

–Asyra Testing

–EAV Screening

-Autonomic Response Testing

–Seroyal's “UNDA” homeopathic remedies and supplements