CLEAN The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself Alejandro Junger M.D. I dedicate this book to my daughter Grace, my greatest teacher and doctor. She provided the most profound experience of my life, which is also the most powerful healing medicine: unconditional love. Contents ONE Why Clean? TWO A Doctor’s Journey THREE Global Toxicity: Another Inconvenient Truth FOUR Modern Food Exposed: We Are What We Eat FIVE How Toxins Affect Your Health SIX The Common Root of Dysfunction: Digging for Answers SEVEN The Clean Program Getting Started The Clean Program Your Instructions Quantum Detoxification: Cleaning the Mind The Clean Planner EIGHT After the Cleanse NINE Cardiovascular Disease and Toxicity TEN A Vision of the Future ELEVEN The Clean Recipes APPENDIX Unexpected Common Sources of Heavy-Metal Exposure Prescription Drugs and Nutritional Depletion Detoxification Nutrients Clean Resources Acknowledgments Index Copyright About the Publisher CHAPTER ONE Why Clean? ou are sitting on a familiar box, begging for pennies to survive, Y unaware that inside the box is a treasure that will not only fund this survival, but will also give you wealth beyond your wildest dreams. You are not alone. Millions of Americans, like millions of others worldwide, are doing the same thing. Maybe you’re begging for help to solve a small but troubling health problem, like extra weight, ongoing fatigue, allergies, depression, or a digestive disorder. Maybe you need help to avoid developing a bigger problem, like one of the so-called diseases of civilization—cardiovascular disease, cancer, obesity, and autoimmune disorders. Or maybe you want very much to look and feel younger and more radiant, and to slow down the onset of aging. The pennies you are asking for are the prescription medications and surgeries that you have been taught are essential to remedy your problems. So you leave your hand out and collect what you can, waiting for the help promised to you by doctors, drug companies, and advertising. But the truth is different. The power to heal lies somewhere much closer. You already have it, and you don’t need prescriptions, treatments, or expensive experts to get it. In fact, you’re sitting right on top of it. That familiar box that’s supporting you, almost unnoticed, is your own body, run by its incredible natural intelligence. The wealth beyond belief is the vibrant well-being and longevity that are your birthright. And the treasure inside that will deliver this state of vitality, beauty, and vigor? It’s something you probably haven’t been taught to value. It’s a system that is designed by nature to keep you healthy, youthful, and happy, if you only help it carry out its functions. It is the missing part of the health puzzle—an untapped source of healing, regeneration, restoration, and even rejuvenation. It is the on-board system that makes you and keeps you Clean, your system of detoxification. This system, which comprises many organs and physiological processes working together throughout the body, is a wellspring of health. But its value has been forgotten. Modern medicine’s fascination with molecules and micro-technology has targeted attention obsessively on smaller and smaller aspects of our biology while losing interest in looking at the big- picture systems in the body that keep us surviving and thriving. This is a mistake. Many of the health problems that trouble so many modern humans and cost society so much money can be alleviated when— instead of getting more detail-oriented in your approach, recruiting more superspecialists, inventing more technology, and adding in more medication—you take a broader perspective and do something simpler: turn your attention to the treasure that is already there, the detoxification system, and reactivate its potential. A focused period of detoxifying is a reset for the whole physical and mental body. It delivers an all-access pass to boundless reserves of energy you didn’t know you had. You find that every part of your body works better, imbalances are rectified, and irritating symptoms get a chance to melt away on their own—all by your simply “switching on” a system that you were born with and that has been patiently waiting to serve you. Imagine your right arm has been taped to the side of your body since birth. You grow up using only your left arm, thinking this is normal, because everyone else was exactly the same. As an adult you take on carpentry, and your business starts doubling each year. Just when you are about to collapse from the intense workload, a stranger rings your doorbell. He untapes your right arm, and to your surprise, without ever having dreamed of it as a possibility, you accelerate from a state of overload, unable to fulfill your orders, to operating up to your unbounded true potential and doing more than ever before. The stranger arriving at the door is the Clean program contained in this book. Untaping that arm is the act of uncovering and accelerating the detoxification system’s full potential. The flourishing productivity that results is your body’s natural ability to maintain steady energy, avoid colds and the flu, heal allergies, age gracefully, and avoid disease. Who is a candidate for using this program? Everyone who lives a modern life, eats a modern diet, and inhabits the modern world. For thousands of years, humanity has recognized the existence of toxic influences that cause dysfunction, damage, disease, premature aging, and death. These toxins have the potential to irritate and stress us and ultimately cause the body to suffer in many ways, small and large, from the unmeasurable realm of thought and emotion to the material chemicals generated as the waste by-products of our cells’ daily life. Ancient cultures also knew that we are equipped with a grand system of detoxification, which is the result of the harmonious collaboration of several smaller systems. This system is continuously working; in fact, it keeps us alive every second of every minute of every day. If the body didn’t constantly coordinate its complex symphony of activities, these waste products would build up, we would become sick, and we would eventually die. The “baseline” detox mode that is occurring at every moment of our lives is part of the basic formula of life. It makes our very existence possible. What the older traditions of healing understood very well was the crucial importance of harnessing the detoxification system and using it to our advantage in order to achieve our maximum mental, emotional, and physical potential. The sages and healers of many cultures, across borders and eras, all possessed the knowledge that this grand system must periodically be allowed to enter a deeper detox mode than its ordinary day-to-day function in order to handle the accumulation of toxins that can build up so easily in times of excess eating, activity, and stress. Practitioners of these early healing traditions understood that resting some of the major body systems, especially the digestive system, was integral to life. Fasting, silent retreats, and contemplative times were considered essential to a peaceful, healthy, and fulfilling experience of life. It wasn’t just an esoteric concept. Human beings’ genetic evolution —the way our bodies work best—has been shaped by the fasting that was imposed on us by the hunter-gatherer way of life. For millennia, humans experienced periods of feasting followed by periods of imposed famine. Long periods of having an empty belly were inescapable, but this proved to be a key to health. The detoxification system could switch on and stay on with plenty of time and energy to do its essential cleanup work, liberating the body of a whole backload of waste products trapped inside, because it wasn’t competing with the digestive system for fuel. Today, life has changed. We are newly waking up to something of an evolutionary paradox. The more the toxicity of modern life increases, bombarding us with unnatural toxins from our diet and the environment, the more the demands to detoxify have increased. Yet our body’s ability to handle the load hasn’t accelerated at the same rapid pace. How could it? The world might have changed dramatically in one century, but our bodies take many generations to make one genetic change. The more dangerously toxic life has become, and the more depleted of vital nutrients our diets have become, and the more rushed life has become, the more our grand detoxification system has gotten overwhelmed. It is almost hibernating: it is still there, doing the daily “baseline” work that allows us to live, but it is faltering under the additional twenty-first- century burden of poor diet, environmental toxins, and stress. We are all dealing with the effects of this to different degrees. Commonplace complaints such as headaches, bowel irregularities, allergies, weight problems, depression, anxiety, and pain are largely caused by failing detox systems. Looking older, feeling more tired, and losing the radiant luster of health are also directly related to this overburdened state. Yet all of this can be reversed and, frequently, healed when we pay attention to detoxification. Tragically, most premature deaths today are a direct result of failing detox systems. One of the most common consequences of poor detoxification functioning is inflammation, the body’s necessary, but now dangerously overused, survival strategy. Modern medicine has only recently awakened to the fact that chronic inflammation is a common condition underlying the diseases that have become epidemics today, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders. Yet it is still blind to the root of the problem, the toxicity of modern life, and our bodies’ weakness in dealing with it. Only when we start the treatment there, targeting the seed of the problem, can we truly begin to ward off disease. When I first consulted with Ellen at the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in downtown Manhattan where I see patients several days a week, she was frustrated. After her yearly physical exam her doctor had told her she needed to take medication to lower her blood pressure. She was extremely reluctant to do so, because she believed there had to be a more natural way to lower it, but her physician offered no alternative, instead presenting her with what she described as a “case closed, God has spoken” diagnosis and a prescribed course of drug treatment. It didn’t suit her; she was someone who wanted a partner in building her own health, not a dependency on expensive medication. She also sensed that taking chemical drugs daily would have a taxing effect on her body, though she couldn’t explain exactly why. To start her on the path to lowering her blood pressure, I asked Ellen to do the Clean program. She hesitated for just a moment, concerned that it would disrupt her performance at work too much, but told me she was so eager to avoid blood pressure medications that some inconvenience didn’t matter to her. She followed the program to the letter, maintaining her usual five-day-a-week exercise routine but toning down its intensity slightly. After completing Clean, Ellen’s results were impressive: her blood pressure decreased by 25 percent, she lost 21 pounds, her body-fat percentage dropped by 7 percent and her cholesterol levels fell by 40 percent. She was never hungry, had plenty of energy, and slept soundly. Even her physician congratulated her on her results. By putting some of her regular eating habits on hold and resting her digestive system, Ellen had initiated a way for her body to find its way back to health. By taking early action, she had lowered the high blood pressure and high cholesterol that, untreated, could have landed her in a cardiologist’s office. Detoxification has become a primary area of concern; I created the Clean program to boost this essential function, and it is a tool I use frequently in my practice. Although as a physician I specialize in diseases of the heart, I am constantly amazed by the ability of a detoxification program to transform all aspects of my patients’ well- being in such a simple, commonsense manner. Many of those trained in Western medicine still view “cleansing” as an activity done on the fringes of alternative healing. But the integrative model of medicine combines the wisdom of old and new, and today my understanding of detoxification is in complete resonance with what I learned during years of medical school training and practice. Detoxification as a complete and essential wellspring of health was never presented to us Western-trained doctors in the complete way that I understand it today, yet its power to heal was always there, right under our noses. This book and the cleansing-detoxifying program it presents have grown out of the experience of helping many people jump-start their way back to the higher levels of health they deserve—becoming slimmer, brighter, happier, more resilient, and less burdened by poor health conditions that once slowed down their lives. It will clearly distinguish for you the connection between toxicity and most diseases. In fact, I think “disease” should be written “disease,” to highlight the loss of a sense of well-being and ease, in addition to outright illness, that result from toxicity. Clean will show you how toxins, far from being invisible agents floating somewhere “out there” in the environment, actually enter your body and corrode it from the inside. As toxicity accumulates, your body systems are damaged one by one, starting with your intestines. You will discover how the early signs and symptoms of toxicity are confused and ignored in our culture, often written off as the “normal” wear and tear on our body parts, as if nothing can be done. This failure to catch the early symptoms means that more serious signs and symptoms appear later on. Typically they are suppressed by means of drugs and surgery, and once more the underlying primary cause remains unexamined and unaddressed. Finally, overburdened with toxicity, one or more systems in the body collapse and the chronic diseases that take so much effort to manage and mediate set in. Modern medicine is still blind to this toxicity-disease connection. Instead, doctors generally wait until a “crash” happens in the form of an acute, emergency problem, and then they desperately call in the big guns (harsh drugs and surgery) to save the day. This medical artillery only adds to the toxic burden; instead of healing the problem at the root, the treatment results in more toxic residue for the body to eliminate. Clean will reveal to you the connections that—like that familiar box you didn’t think to open but have been sitting on for years—have been ignored by most of society and most of modern medicine. It explains how intestinal irritation caused by dietary and environmental toxicity can present as a range of symptoms you might never have thought could be connected to toxicity, such as seasonal allergies, skin rashes, depression, or simply a lack of enthusiasm for life. Clean provides clarity among the hundreds of different cleansing-detox programs that have flooded our market and explains the science that ties them all together.