De-tox or Re-tox?
For the past few years there have been an increasing number of diets that promise to ‘detox’ your body, usually in 3 to 9 days. They are often touted as helping you become healthier and lose fat. These diets usually come ‘bundled’ with, or purely are, a set of products to aid you in flushing out the toxins; trouble is they usually do the opposite.
Many of these products are based on juicing (mostly fruit, then a smaller amount of vegetables, and sometimes finally a few herbs and spices, all of which have been blended and sometimes mechanically separated into fluid and pulp). Looking at the ingredient list of some of these products, you’d be hard pressed to say anything bad against them; ‘if’ they were in context. The problem is they’re so far from context that it’s not even funny.
I’m looking at one particular product right now that on the surface looks amazing; 7 different fruits, 9 different vegetables and an assortment of herbs and spices. Problem is in biochemistry it’s the dosage often separates the cure from the poison. Just analysing the fruit content of this product, in one day you’ll be ingesting 225g of sugar, of which 135g is fructose. That is A LOT.
I’m not so worried about the glucose element of the equation (acutely, chronic intakes are a different story), as a generally healthy body is pretty adept at handling that form of sugar even in large amounts. But the fructose component is a completely different animal.
To put it in context, our ancestors living on a diet of mostly vegetables and in-season fruit would’ve had a daily intake of roughly 15g of fructose; this is the amount we evolved to consume. This amount of fructose is fairly easily dealt with by the body, even double this would be too. However, just one day on one of these juice de-tox’s loads your body with 9 times that amount of fructose, and that’s just from the fruit part, there’s more if you factor in the vegetables.
So what does this fructose load do? Well, only the liver can metabolise fructose, so by ingesting huge amounts of ‘juice’ you’re placing a massive burden on this vital organ. And as you’ll see, instead of helping you de-tox, these types of juicing products actually end up doing the opposite.
When fructose is metabolised by the liver it goes through a number of steps, of which we’ll only cover a few briefly, just to demonstrate the problem with these diets and their products. The first step is for fructose to be converted into fructose-1-phosphate by the enzyme fructokinase. A by-product of this step is the production of uric acid, you may have heard of uric acid, it’s a crystalline compound that when elevated invades joints contributing to arthritis and it’s most common manifestation gout. This is a problem in itself, but high uric acid levels also inhibit the production of nitric oxide (NO), which is involved in regulating your blood pressure, so hypertension (high blood pressure) is the result. Nitric oxide is also involved in thermogenesis, so, far from helping you lose fat, it actually reduces your ability to burn it.
The next step in fructose metabolism via 3 different pathways all increase de novo lipogenesis (the formation of fat). This in excess contributes to non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), which I’ve written about previously; you can find that article here (http://humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/timing-is-everything.html)
In addition to the development of NASH, excess de novo lipogenesis also contributes towards the pre-diabetic condition of insulin resistance due to the increased blood levels of Triglycerides and Free Fatty Acids, plus the inflammation caused as a result of the JNK-1 pathway.
Another common claim for these products is that they contain high amounts of antioxidants; possibly, but that’s not always a good thing. Oxidation is a vital component of life, without it, well you wouldn’t be alive. It’s the precise balance of controlled oxidation that is needed, this will become big in the next few years as the knowledge of re-dox reactions and signalling becomes more widespread. When oxidation is uncontrolled, that’s when problems arise.
These products claim to help this situation by providing the antioxidants to quench the reactive oxygen species (ROS or free radicals). Alas, again, in general they usually do the opposite. The metabolism of fructose generates large amounts of free radicals that need to be stabilised by a particular antioxidant, in this case glutathione, which we’ll come back to in a moment.
So I think you can see that already these products put you in real bad shape. But here’s the kicker, they actually reduce your ability to detoxify.
Metabolic detoxification is a specific metabolic pathway, active throughout the human body, that processes unwanted chemicals for elimination. This pathway involves a series of enzymatic reactions that neutralise and solubilise toxins, then assist in transporting them to secretory organs (like the liver or kidneys), so that they can be excreted from the body. It happens via three main steps called phase I, II and III, ending with elimination.
Generally, phase I enzymes begin the detoxification process by chemically transforming lipid soluble compounds into easier to remove water soluble compounds in preparation for phase II detoxification. However, this intermediate product is in many cases more reactive then the original toxin, which makes them potentially more destructive than they once were. Luckily for us, we have phase II; ummm…or we did…
Phase II enzymes modify phase I products to both increase their solubility and also
reduce their toxicity. One of the key chemicals your body uses to perform this trick is glutathione; oops. If you recall, glutathione is being tied up combating the free radicals generated by the metabolism of fructose in the liver.
So in effect by using these products high in fructose to ‘detox’ yourself you’re actually increasing the toxic burden on your body, by increasing one phase of the pathway while simultaneously reducing the activity of another.
Your body is continually detoxifying itself, and if our meddling simian fingers stopped prying for a moment, it would generally achieve this with the exquisite precision that the body has developed over millennia. If you try to push the body, I guarantee, it’ll push back, often in unpleasant ways.
Here’s a simple way to support your body in detoxification and all it takes is to trust Nature, it’s been here a lot longer than we have, and knows what it’s doing. This simple method of detoxification can be summed up in an easy to remember acronym:
JERF (Just Eat Real Food).
Darren Jackson – Human Performance Consulting-UK
Website: hpc-uk.net
Facebook: Human-Performance-Consulting-UK
Twitter: @HPCUK
Blog: humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.com
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