How Come They're Happy and I'm Not? (13 page)

A note of caution: You may not need to add all these fibers, and do not add them all at once. It really depends on your particular system what, and how much, you need, so try them slowly. I have also noticed that many patients with irritable bowel syndrome should stay away from raw foods, for sometimes these can aggravate that condition.

Regular body movement is key. At minimum, walk every day for thirty minutes. Your lymphatic system is like the sewage system for
your body, taking in all the sludge that will eventually be dumped out. Unlike your blood vessels, your lymphatic system does not move this fluid unless you are moving your muscles. If you don't exercise, there's no way to clear out the sludge.

As we talked about in
chapter 3
, sleep is crucial for a good brain function and detoxification. Remember to go to bed by eleven p.m. at the latest and to rack up at least seven and a half hours of sleep every night. If you have trouble sleeping, please revisit
chapter 3
for methods to naturally help you sleep.

Once you've made the lifestyle change detailed in step 1 and you're having daily bowel movements, you can start working on the action plan of step 2. This plan can be carried out for up to three weeks. When you remove the toxic onslaught, then your body has a better chance to heal and clean up. Using a military analogy, a country cannot put out the fires, fix, clean up, and heal effectively if it's being bombarded. It's time to stop the shelling so your body can clean up and heal.

I usually recommend my patients do this step two or three times a year.

If you haven't noticed, in the discussion above, I didn't tell you to stop eating this or that food. I find that when we focus on what is being taken away, most people feel deprived. So for the long term, the plan in step 1 is to include healthy foods—not so much to exclude the unhealthy ones. To detox, though, this step asks you to avoid (for three quick weeks) foods that are considered the most likely to cause inflammation.

The foods you will want to avoid include:

• Dairy and cow's milk products (rice milk, almond milk, and hemp milk are good alternatives)
  
• Gluten (from wheat, rye, triticale, oat, and barley)—this includes all conventionally made pasta, bagels, cupcakes, cookies, and so on (quinoa, wild and brown rice are okay)
  
• Soy and tofu products
  
• Citrus (except grapefruit and lemons)
  
• Peanuts (other raw nuts are fine)
  
• Corn products of any kind
  

You'll also want to add anti-inflammatory foods to your diet:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil, unheated on top of your food or salad
  
• Raw nuts and seeds like walnuts, sunflower seeds, or pumpkin seeds
  
• Organic berries, especially blueberries, raspberries, or lingonberries
  
• Grass-fed beef (Try to limit red meat to once a week.)
  
• Organic, free-range chicken
  
• Cold-water, low-mercury, wild fish like wild salmon, mackerel, or cod (See
  www.drpeterbongiorno.com/happyfish
  for more cold-water fish ideas.)
  

* * *

Look into the blood type diet for advanced information about which foods are most healthy for your body and which may be inflammatory. Ask your naturopathic physicians or other practitioners if they are trained to use blood type diet or advanced genotype diet work—using blood type diet information in a more individualized context. For more information, see Dr. Peter D'Adamo's first book,
Eat Right for your Blood Type
, which introduced this concept to the world. This book is listed in the resources section at the back.

Take note of which foods in your diet are high in pesticides and switch these to organic. The foods highest in pesticides, according to the Environmental Working Group, include berries, celery, apples, peaches, nectarines, grapes, bell peppers, potatoes, kale, and collard greens. Keeping these foods organic significantly decreases the levels of pesticide in your body.

Try to replace your home cleaners, household chemicals, shampoo, lotion, and toothpaste with more natural versions that do not contain pesticides, herbicides, perfumes, dyes, and parabens. A good rule of thumb is that if you have not heard of the ingredient, or can't pronounce it, it's probably worth staying away from. Also, try to take off your shoes when you enter your house. Many of the heavy metals in our homes are tracked in on our shoes.

A number of good-quality supplement companies now offer protein shakes with detoxification factors that can help the liver clean out, help the intestines heal, lower inflammation, and help supply amino acids for good protein levels. The increased protein serves as a support to build neurotransmitters. Some of my favorites are Mediclear by Thorne Research, UltralnflamX and UltraClear Renew by Metagenics, and Metabolic Cleanse by Douglas Laboratories. You can follow the directions on the label, and you can take one serving two to three times a day with water or rice milk. Or, if you have a blender, you can make a delicious smoothie.

You can increase the detoxification benefit of exercise by adding a good sweat to your day four days a week for these three weeks. Plan on spending twenty minutes in the sauna—if you can find a
dry sauna, this will work the best, for the dry heat pulls even more junk out of your system. The best time to go is after your exercise. Make sure you drink some water before you hit the sauna, and don't bring in a magazine—through off-gassing, these emit some of the chemicals we are trying to get rid of.

The skin is a major organ of elimination. Dry skin brushing can

• Remove dead cells, which block skin pores, to allow the skin to breathe easier and increase the elimination of waste products
  
• Improve lymph and blood circulation in the skin and return fluids to the heart
  
• Transport nutrients to the skin and clear out stagnant material
  
• Decrease the body's circulation and elimination work load
  
• Warm the skin
  

You can buy this anti-inflammatory herb as a capsule, or you can cook with it as a spice. I find my patients are more consistent with the capsule version. Meriva—turmeric bound to phosphatidylcholine—is much more absorbable than regular turmeric.

You are taking in plenty of fiber now and pooping once or twice a day, so that is sufficient. You can further help your colon clear out toxins from your body by using a colonic, if you are up to it. Colonics enhance the process because the colon sends a signal to the liver to release even more. Colonics are not painful—in fact, most patients feel revitalized afterward. I recommend one colonic a week on the seventh, fourteenth, and twenty-first days of the detox. Do not have a colonic if you are pregnant, have active bowel disease, or are bleeding in the colon or rectum.

Meditate twice a day for five to twenty minutes at a time. Do yoga. Consider journaling about both what you are grateful for and the negative ideas you would like to let go. Physical detoxing can open the door to emotionally letting go. Sometimes, an effective detox also includes releasing negative messages and thoughts that do not serve us in a healthy way.

Step 3 should be performed over the same three weeks you do steps 1 and 2. But remember, if you are not having a bowel movement
every day, only perform step 1. When you have a bowel movement, then you can add steps 2 and 3 for three full weeks.

Add chlorella and spirulina to a drink once a day. These freshwater algae are mild detoxifiers. Their fibers help bind heavy metals, pesticides, and even polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). PCBs are industrial chemicals that were used in electrical equipment but then banned in the 1970s; however, they're still found in the environment, and we take these in when we eat fish and inorganic butter. Green superfoods help your body release them. These green helpers contain more chlorophyll per gram than any other plant and can trap toxic metal in the digestive tract while also speeding up the cleansing of the bowel, bloodstream, and liver. Chlorella and spirulina, like most green superfood drinks, come in powders you can add to a big glass of water. I recommend starting the day by having a nice green drink with a squeeze of lemon about thirty minutes before your breakfast.

When you use a natural substance or chemical to remove toxic metals, it is called chelation. Cilantro is a common herb with an active component called mercaptan, which can penetrate the blood-brain barrier, find mercury, bind it, and release it into general circulation, where the liver and kidneys can help move it out of the body. So mercaptan acts as a natural and gentle chelator. Cilantro's mercaptan can change the charge on the mercury inside your cells to a neutral state and allow it to diffuse out. Cilantro also has blood sugar lowering properties and is an anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antioxidant. Cilantro is available as a liquid tincture or in capsules. Dosage depends on the form you purchase, so follow label directions. I do not recommend using cilantro unless you are also using a chlorella or spirulina product to make sure any released metals are ushered out of the body.

Animal studies in which subjects took garlic and antioxidants with a chelating agent were more efficient at removing toxic metals from their systems and recovered faster. If you prefer fresh garlic, eat one to two raw cloves. You can dice them and mix them with wildflower honey for palatability. If you prefer a capsule, then you can purchase a concentrated garlic extract and take about 600 mg twice a day. Please visit my website,
www.drpeterbongiorno.com/happygarlic
, for a 2008 comprehensive journal article I co-authored on the subject of garlic.

Take a supplement that includes calcium (500 mg), magnesium (250 mg), zinc (15 mg), selenium (200 mcg), and manganese (10 mg). The presence of these can stop your body from absorbing toxic metals like lead, mercury, and aluminum.

While using the green superfoods, cilantro, and garlic is a form of gentle chelation, stronger methods for this process may be required for people who have high levels of metal toxic burden. A chelating agent is a chemical that removes metals or other chemicals from the body tissues, and you can take it in oral, intravenous, or suppository forms for a period of six weeks to a few months. Chelation requires medical supervision, including regular blood work to check for liver and kidney function. Although chelation as a treatment for depression has not been studied yet, patients report less depression, more alertness, and better memory.

Before trying chelation, please use the gentler detoxification steps outlined in this chapter, which work quite well in most cases. In instances of extreme neurologic symptoms and conditions (such as advanced multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or other neurological disorders) chelation may be the better option.

A healthy body is a key for a healthy mood. In this chapter, we have talked about what testing is helpful to check out what is going on inside your body and brain. We also discussed the importance of digestion and calming inflammation, and we described how to start to clean out the toxic chemicals that can keep mood low. While this is a lot of information, it is essential to know that there are many factors that can create an unhealthy body as well as poor mood—and that there are steps you can take to reverse the process.

Pop music is aspirin and the blues are vitamins
.

—P
ETER
T
ORK

Before I get into discussing the rest of the supplements that are helpful in treating depression, I need to share one of my pet peeves regarding the world of supplements and nutritional medicine. Of course I have a strong belief in the use of natural medicines in the forms of supplements: capsules, tablets, liquids, powders, and so on. My concern is that sometimes these supplements become the main focus in treatment, with little time spent on any other treatment methods. Some patients visit a natural or holistic practitioner and leave with $500 to $1,000 in supplements that need to be refilled once a month without ever discussing sleep, diet, spirit, or stress management.

When it comes to chronic disease conditions like depression, I want you to remember that only relying on supplements is not likely to fix the problem. Using Saint-John's-wort in place of Zoloft is not what natural medicine is about. By itself, Saint-John's-wort may work sometimes and may even be less toxic than the pharmaceuticals. But overall, expecting that Saint-John's-wort—or any
herb or supplement taken on its own without regard to lifestyle, dietary, or environmental factors—will heal a person is not practical. That approach is not what makes good natural medicine therapy; it's simply substituting an herb for a drug. Please do not allow yourself to be caught in that trap.