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Detoxification

Any Health Benefits?

The Benefits of Detoxification: Food and Drink

When your body accumulates toxins over time, the consequences can be undesirable and painful.

Drug and alcohol abuse can cause a harsh mind-altering chemical build-up that results in loss of control over one’s life, and also has a serious and negative impact on one’s health.

An unhealthy diet can have a similar affect, although the health consequences are more physiological in nature, and may or may not affect lifestyle and psychological state.

Alternative medicine is a mildly popular form of detoxification that seeks more to prevent health issues. All forms of detox are shown to have benefits, though some are far more apparent than others.

Drug and Alcohol Detox

There is really no doubt about the benefits of drug and alcohol detoxification. The chemicals in drugs and alcohol have detrimental short and long term effects, which can cause dependency, physiological problems such as heart attacks, and psychological issues ranging from depression to more extreme forms of psychological and social issues.

Detox is usually the first step in dependency treatment, and works to decrease or eliminate a patient’s addiction to chemical substances in alcohol or narcotics.

The benefits are staggering. Because chemical dependency affects nearly aspect of an addict’s life, from physical to social, detox removes the primary cause of many discomforts and problems.

However, underlying issues which cause or contribute to addiction in the first place, usually require further treatment, often pursued through psychological therapy or a rehabilitation program.

Dietary Detoxification

A poor diet can result in low energy, weight gain (or loss), and imbalanced physiological health.

Processed or chemically treated foods are thought to have harsh negative effects on our bodies, so consumptions of such foods is seen as unhealthy and undesirable. Many chemicals and ingredients used in food production remain in our bodies for long periods of time, and dietary detoxification attempts to rid the body of such toxins by switching to a cleaner, more health-friendly diet.

Some such diets involve abstaining from food, or fasting, for a given period of time.

Others require an increase in water consumption combined with elimination of unhealthy or toxic foods.

There are diets that focus on fruits, vegetables, or both, and still more that use specific products such as drink mixes high in vitamins and other beneficial ingredients.

Dietary detoxification operates on the premise that for a given period of time, harmful foods are avoided, while healthful foods or ingredients are introduced in their stead. Over time, the toxins will wash out of the body, leaving us in a healthier state.

Whether any of this can be scientifically proved is another story. However, assuming that your diet remains well balanced, there should be little or no harm associated with them.

Diets that confine you to only one food item, e.g. grapefruit juice, are more problematical and should not be undertaken without a doctor's advice.

There are many products sold on TV and in magazines that promise to remove all sorts of toxins if ingested or applied to certain parts of the body. I would be very skeptical of the claims made for these products and would make sure they, at least, did no harm.

This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to be taken as medical advice.

 

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