We parents spend a lot of time telling our kids to “clean up”: their rooms, their toys, their backpacks. And while kids’ bodies do need dirt and microbes, they also need to clear what they don’t need. To identify what needs to be cleaned from the body’s terrain, you first need to understand the body’s natural detoxification system.
Imagine the body as a basin that fills with the good (like food and its nutrients), the “bad” (infectious illnesses like strep and flu), and the ugly (toxins and allergens from our food and environment). Every moment, our bodies take in vast amounts of exposures from food we eat, air we breathe, toiletries and materials on our skin, and water we drink and bathe in. A healthy body accepts and benefits from nourishing input, and flushes poisons and waste: from every cell, through lymphatics, to liver, spleen, kidneys, and gut, and eventually through urination, defecation, perspiration, coughing and sneezing, tears, and even vomiting if necessary.
But sometimes the basin doesn’t drain as well or as quickly as it should. By that, I’m not referring to how frequently your kid pees or poops (though that is an important component). I’m talking about how effectively your child flushes toxins that interfere with normal function. Here, cleaning things up and moving out makes all the difference between staying healthy and getting sick.
THE DRAIN: HOW WE CLEAN UP
Our basins should process everything that comes into contact with our bodies, expelling what we don’t want. But if the drain stops working well, the basin fills. Eventually, what happens in the basin doesn’t stay in the basin. Instead of excreting damaging compounds through normal physiological mechanisms like urination and defecation, a full basin overflows with toxins. And that is when we start to see symptoms.
Initially, overflow can present with mild symptoms like hives, headaches, or constipation. If we disregard the symptoms that reflect minimal overflow, however, the problems can amplify into something more severe. These symptoms might look different in different children, depending on their genetic vulnerabilities: a “skin” kid might get eczema; a “brain” kid might express symptoms of ADHD, migraines, or seizures; a “gut” kid might have constipation, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), or reflux; and a “lung” kid might have asthma, croup, or chronic pneumonia. And so on. Many times, a child’s seemingly unrelated symptoms may share the same underlying problem: an overfull basin and inefficient drain.
What Is a Toxin?
A toxin is a compound that damages our bodies either alone or cumulatively. Just as our health is a dynamic relationship with the world around us, toxicity, too, is a relationship between all of the potentially damaging compounds we see each day and how well our bodies can process them. Dose matters, number of exposures matter, and the genetics and previous exposures of the person matters. Minuscule levels of many potentially damaging compounds can accumulate in the body and act synergistically to be exponentially more toxic than any one exposure by itself. Ultimately, exposure is not one-size-fits-all. One thing is for certain: Children are more vulnerable.1 Science is still catching up to the complex ways that different compounds accumulate in the body to disrupt children’s bodies during periods of rapid development.
The Body’s Detoxification System
In reality, our bodies are far more complex than a simple basin and drain. Our basin is our physical, emotional, and spiritual landscape, and the drain is our ability to cleanse ourselves of substances on all of these levels. Our physical stressors come from outside the body—medications, pesticides, herbicides, plastics—and from inside the body—hormones, metabolic by-products, and stress.
Many environmental toxins are fat-soluble, rendering them easily absorbed and stored in the body’s fatty tissues (including the brain), but simultaneously difficult to excrete. The body works constantly to clear toxins. Detoxification occurs in two phases, with the overall aim of making toxins water-soluble so they can be excreted through urine or perspiration (why not to use antiperspirants!). Others remain fat-soluble and are bound by bile (by way of the gallbladder and liver) and ultimately are excreted in stool (which is why bowel movements must happen regularly!).
Phase 1 of detoxification mainly uses oxygen and liver enzymes to prepare toxins for excretion. Phase 2 involves binding—or “conjugating”—the toxins that have completed phase 1 to an array of nutrient compounds, allowing the body to expel them. The good news is that our bodies are designed to process and excrete compounds that can be damaging to us. Every cell in the body works constantly to clear toxins, which creates demand for an ongoing supply of both nutritional and energetic resources. This high demand is why nutritional depletion is dangerous. All of the elements necessary for detoxification come from our food and water. What we eat can either promote rapid and efficient detoxification, or slow it down.
Not All Basins Are Created Equal
Often I hear people say, “If food X or toxin Y is so bad, then why doesn’t everyone get sick from it?” The simplest answer is that our basins, drains, and cumulative exposures vary. Everyone has a unique set of strengths and vulnerabilities. You may have read interviews with centenarians who credit their longevity to cigars and whiskey, and you think, I never smoked a day in my life. I buy organic food and clean with baking soda and vinegar instead of the toxic stuff. And my kid is still sick! Why is one person’s cigar another person’s throat cancer? Or one kid’s peanut another kid’s anaphylaxis?
To some extent, this comes down to our individual genetics. Some people are fantastic detoxifiers all around; they have no problem producing all the liver and metabolic enzymes necessary to clear toxicants effectively. They benefit from what I call “cigar and whiskey genes” (or “Coke and Twinkie genes”). They have big basins, nice open drains, and their genes can take insult after toxic insult in stride. The body’s ability to detoxify partly depends on our DNA. Small differences in our genes, called “polymorphisms,” can affect our detoxification system’s liver enzymes (CYP), methylation enzymes (including MTHFR and COMT), and many others. These mini-mutations are not severe enough to cause disease directly, but can create particular vulnerabilities that are unmasked by our diet and environmental exposures.
In a state of abundant nutrition from nutrient-dense food grown in rich soil and diverse microbial exposure, these polymorphisms may be nonissues. But your vulnerabilities become problems when you are poorly nourished and exposed to toxins. In one study, for example, pesticide exposure doubled risk for Parkinson’s disease . . . but only in those with a particular liver enzyme polymorphism. Having the polymorphism or the pesticide exposure alone didn’t increase the risk.
(Depending on a child’s polymorphisms, phase 1 may be slow, so toxins build up. Or phase 1 may be very fast, but phase 2 can’t keep up, creating a pileup of partially metabolized—but still damaging—toxic metabolites. You may already know whether you are a fast or slow phase 1 metabolizer by way of the “caffeine test”: If you’re one of those people who drinks caffeine at lunch and experiences heart palpitations or stays up until 2 a.m., then phase 1 is probably slow. If you drink coffee right before bed and fall asleep with no problem, then phase 1 is on the faster side. Either extreme means your system needs extra support.)
What you eat plays a critical role in your detox capacity. Consumption of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, charbroiled meats, Tylenol, pesticide residues, and certain food preservatives like BHT (commonly found in chips, cookies, cereals, and vegetable oil) are just some exposures that muck up detoxification. On the other hand, adequate ingestion and digestion of protein from quality meats, eggs, seeds, nuts, and legumes enhance detoxification capacity, as do phytochemicals found in cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts; teas; spices like turmeric, rosemary, thyme, peppermint, or black cumin; as well as berries, citrus, onions, garlic, and even olive oil. A healthy microbiome facilitates detoxification.2 We’ll talk more specifically about all the building blocks of a healthy terrain—and in turn, efficient detoxification—throughout this book.
While individual polymorphisms can dictate risk for developing diseases, metabolic and epigenetic interactions with nature confer potential for healing. Even children who can’t be “cured” of their condition have potential to improve their health or even quality of life in measurable ways.
Recognizing Symptoms of Toxicity
A child with rashes or chronic hives or eczema or ear infections or constipation or gassiness or even cavities is a child at risk. No, these “benign” conditions won’t kill your child, but they sound an alarm that you should heed: “Total load is building. Demand outweighs resources. Alert!” You do not necessarily need to panic when a new symptom appears, but you do need to pay attention. Even mild symptoms tell us that the body is out of balance, which means the body is vulnerable. Vulnerability means decreased resilience. Decreased resilience means that the next inevitable insult or stressor that comes your child’s way—an illness, toxic exposure, stressful event—may trigger a chronic condition. That’s what you want to avoid.
Symptoms of initial toxicity can include:
Headache
Coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath
Eye, ear, nose, or throat irritation
Chills or fever
Dizziness, vertigo, unsteady gait
Nausea
Hair loss
Rashes
Weakness or fatigue
Chronic pain
Depression
Infertility in women and men (or frequent miscarriage)
Neurological dysfunction, including poor memory, concentration, low tone, learning disorders, sensory dysfunction, ADD, and others (when toxicity is advanced)
Cancer (when toxicity is advanced)
MEET THE MITOCHONDRIA
What is happening in the body when the basin is filling with toxins? Much of the damage happens at the level of the cell. Cells make up the organs like the heart, brain, lungs, gut, and so on. Mitochondria are the energy makers of each cell, producing fuel for all cellular functions, among many other critical tasks.3 When all is well, mitochondria produce energy, the cell runs optimally, and we feel great. When mitochondrial function is disrupted, however, one of three things happens:4 cells die that shouldn’t (which can lead to degenerative conditions like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s), cells don’t die that should (which can lead to proliferative conditions like cancer), or cells simply function suboptimally (which has been implicated in autism, epilepsy, ADHD, allergies, asthma, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and other chronic conditions). Mitochondria also act as sentinels that sample various compounds—good, bad, and ugly—that make their way into the cell. And depending on the level of stress these compounds impose upon the cell, mitochondria decide whether the cell will live or die. In this way, these amazing organelles are arbiters of cell life, cell death, and resilience.
When the cell is under stress—let’s say during infection with the flu—it issues emergency defense orders called the cell danger response (CDR) that enable cell survival.5 CDR is why you’d likely feel extremely fatigued and ill as your body fights the flu effectively. Luckily, CDR usually serves its purpose within days to weeks—as with a successful recovery from the flu—and everything goes back to normal.
Under certain circumstances, mitochondria can get stuck in a permanent danger mode, especially when bombarded by exposures like allergenic foods, food additives, drugs, pesticides, heavy metals like lead, mercury, arsenic, or aluminum; volatile organic compounds (VOCs); or air pollutants. Even inoculations require temporary activation of the cell danger response to produce durable, persistent immunity.6 But if an exposure triggers a siege state from which cells can’t easily recover, clinical symptoms morph from acute to chronic. A chronic siege state increases our nutritional demands and renders our cells even more vulnerable to toxic exposures.
Chronic symptoms related to damaging exposure can manifest in any organ(s)—lungs, gut, immune, endocrine (for instance, thyroid or reproductive systems). Children, however, are particularly vulnerable to neurologic effects—mood, cognition, behavior, focus—due to rapid brain development and the very high density of mitochondria in the brain. For instance, children who are exposed to pesticides have a higher risk of ADHD, learning disabilities, and cancer.7,8 Children exposed to lead are more likely to have aggressive behavior as well as myriad learning issues. Children who live close to coal plants, highways, and other sources of pollution in early life are more likely to be diagnosed with autism.9,10 Pollution of all kinds, especially combined with particular genetic vulnerabilities, can literally poison children.
The good news is that most people with mitochondrial dysfunction do not have inherently broken mitochondria. As sentinels, mito-chondria continually respond to exposures—both good and bad. This means that under improved circumstances, chronic symptoms of all kinds—asthma, eczema, ADHD, and on—can quiet for good. Even seemingly permanent conditions like autism can improve when the cell danger response quiets.11 Mitochondria, cells, and organ systems can recover, with the help of plants, nature, and dense nutrition from food. This is how children improve, move beyond this siege state, and regain their resilience.
HOW FULL IS YOUR BASIN?
My 15-year-old patient Sarah came to me with intractable menstrual migraines so severe that no medication helped. She missed school frequently. “I know why I get them,” she said, reciting what other doctors had told her. “They’re hormonal.”
“Okay,” I said. “But most women have the same monthly hormonal surges and don’t get migraines. Why are you different?” One reason was that Sarah’s basin was overfull from daily exposures—largely from her diet—allowing her monthly hormonal surge to overwhelm her detoxification mechanisms, leading to migraines.
To treat, we reduced problematic exposures while increasing her intake of nutrient-dense foods and herbs—which emptied her basin and expanded her drain. Our first stop was her diet, composed largely of Diet Coke and processed foods. When I explained the damning science behind the chemicals she was consuming—which we’ll explore here shortly—she reluctantly agreed to change her diet. One month later, she was no longer reluctant. Her migraines had decreased by 75 percent. After another month, Sarah was headache-free and medication-free for the first time since she turned 12.
For already vulnerable children, all it can take is one more stressor for a basin to overflow, which depletes, burdens, or damages innate healing mechanisms, and ultimately triggers illness. Some risks include:
• Processed foods containing preservatives, dyes, and other additives, as well as sugar and synthetic fats
• Conventionally grown foods treated or packaged with chemicals that stress the body: GMO, glyphosate, antibiotics, pesticides, plastics, and more
• Food grown in depleted, sick soil instead of nutrient-dense soil
• Repeated treatment with antibiotics, steroids, acetaminophen (Tylenol), or reflux medications
• Receiving vaccines while ill or on antibiotics
Foods and medications that cause the basin to overflow give rise to symptoms. By heeding these alerts when they’re mild, you may be able to prevent an illness from ever developing at all.
TAKE HOME
1. Healthy, nourished cells flush most nasty exposures. This also depends partly on our individual genetics, or polymorphisms, as well as on previous exposures.
2. Symptoms arise when cells become overwhelmed in this process.
3. You can help your child’s systems by minimizing exposures to toxins: pesticides and herbicides, heavy metals, air and water pollutants, fluoride, food additives, plastics, synthetic fragrances, and highly processed sugars and foods.
4. Don’t spend all of your time feeling fearful of encountering inevitable toxic residues. Avoid what you reasonably can, but the key to healthy minds and bodies is to enhance resilience by nourishing the body with good things—food, plants, germs, dirt—so that our bodies are well prepared when faced with challenges.
ACTION STEP: Cleaning Out the Basin (and Keeping It Clean)
To move toward optimal wellness . . .
1. Remove from the body what hinders mitochondrial and cellular health, and
2. Add what supports it, beginning with the food you eat.
Unfortunately, eating nourishing food isn’t as straightforward as you may think. That’s because not everything you eat is actually food, which loves and nourishes your body. It’s time to forget everything you think you know about food—all the health claims and dos and don’ts. It’s time to regard your food with new eyes.