I don't know if anybody is interested but that never stopped me from posting about a topic before. You might remember, or maybe I never mentioned, that the main subject of my study as a grad student was environmental toxicology. Also, my thesis was about the way a particular toxin, B(a)P, moves through pregnant mice. Not only did that give me a very good grounding in the anatomy of the placenta but it also gave me some knowledge of the way things move around in the body.
There are two kinds of toxins; the water soluble and the lipophylic (or fat loving). The water soluble toxins are secreted in urine, or if they are really big molecules they are broken down by the liver and then secreted in the urine. That leaves the fat loving kind to stick around for a while. The liver can usually break this kind down into water soluble chemicals but often these chemicals move into the fatty tissues before the liver gets a crack at them. Excess fat soluble vitamins may hang out there too.
So, do detox diets like the Master Cleanser work? Sure they do. Any diet that causes you to lose fat will cause the stored toxins in your body to enter your blood stream where your liver can get at them and you cat get rid of them, but this isn't always the desirable outcome.
There are a lot of reasons to lose weight but those toxins hanging out in your fat tissue are not one of them. As long as the pesticides and carcinogens are trapped in your fat they aren't causing reactions in your tissues. In fact, if you aren't dangerously overweight and you're constitution is otherwise delicate, you might be better off not losing weight. I don't know what the recommendations are now but when I was a student authorities were recommending that elderly people that weren't obese not lose weight. Letting loose all those pesticides and other nasty things that had been accumulating for decades didn't sound like a good idea.
I know that lots of people will disagree with me and I am losing weight myself right now so I do agree that most of the time excess weight is more evil that the toxins. I just wanted to share my take on this.
Friday, May 1, 2009
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4 comments:
That's very interesting. I guess this is one reason why legitimate diet and exercise programs always suggest that you check with your doctor before beginning them.
What's the benefit of losing weight if you make yourself sick doing it?
I think most of the time losing weight is a great idea but I do think that it might be one reason diets make people miserable. Some of those pesticides that might be hanging out in fat tissue are neurotoxins and I don't know but I suspect they probably make you feel rotten even at low doses.
Thanks for this perspective, Marilyn. I wondered about these things. I have seen the MasterCleanser work some magic but wondered if there were other things to consider.
Master Cleanser claims to be a detoxification system and not a weight loss system. I know it works wonders for weight loss but I'm dubious about the detoxification thing... not that it won't work but that anybody should use it for that.
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