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Transcript
- 05:52 About Dr. Deanna Minich
- 07:13 The Detox Summit
- 10:41 Detox Symptoms
- 14:39 Blocked Detox Pathways
- 17:29 Methylation
- 19:33 Techniques for healing the Detox Pathways
- 22:32 Favorite Detox Methods or Protocols
- 26:17 Supporting the Liver
- 31:42 More About the Detox Summit
- 37:18 Lessons about Detox
- 49:20 More About Dr. Deanna Minich
- 51:01 Dr. Deanna’s Books
Wendy Myers: Welcome to the Live to 110 Podcast. My name is Wendy Myers. You can find me on myersdetox.com. I want to thank all you listeners that have stuck with me. We’re almost episode 100. I’ve been doing this for about two years and it’s been incredibly rewarding and I really loved sharing with you all the knowledge of all these guest and all the people that are coming on this show and sharing their knowledge. It’s really just a joy for me to be able to share all these information with you and learn myself. It’s just incredibly rewarding and I want to thank all of you guys for listening and making this possible.
And I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday, whether you’re celebrating Christmas or Hannukah or Kwanzaa or whatever your proclivity is. I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday with your family. Try to avoid the sugar and gluten bombs that are going to be heading your way from Auntie’s rolls or from the pumpkin pie, et cetera. I’ll be here for you, ready to help you detox and get healthy in the new year. So if any of you guys are looking to get ready getting healthy, definitely come visit myersdetox.com and I will tell you how.
And today, we have an amazing guest. Her name is Deanna Minich. She hosted the wildly popular Detox Summit. Many of you guys that are regular listeners or readers of myersdetox.com heard me mention it. I’m definitely right down my alley at the Detox Summit because myersdetox.com is all about detoxing and surviving in our toxic, modern world. So I really encourage you guys if you haven’t listened to it yet, go check it out at FoodandSpirit.com. You can purchase the summit.
Deanna and I are going to be talking about my favorite subject, detox! You’re going to learn the grave importance of detox and Deanna’s favorite tips and tricks to maximize detoxification. We cover a lot of ground here, it’s really, really interesting. You can learn how to detox with food, supplementation and many other tips and tricks.
But before we get started, we have to do the disclaimer. Please keep in mind that this program is not intended to diagnose or treat any disease or health condition and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before engaging on any treatment that we may suggest on the show today.
And like I said, my favorite method of detox is my Mineral Power Program. You can check it out at MineralPower.com. It’s a program I’ve developed over a few years all about using a Modern Paleo diet that’s definitely individualized to your food sensitivities, using tailored supplementation or custom supplementation to your body chemistry, definitely using lifestyle tips, sleeping a lot more and detoxification protocols. Obviously, my favorite ones are coffee enemas and infrared saunas.
So definitely check that out especially in the New Year. I’m hoping a lot of you guys sign up and get ready to get healthy starting January 1st. I think it’s really, really important to use that time and motivation to get started on a health regime that’s very, very effective like Mineral Power.
And for those of you who have been thinking about infrared saunas, I’ve done many, many podcasts on infrared saunas. I’m offering a Christmas special, a holiday special of $50 off the infrared saunas that I sell on the site. There are little, portable, typically $350 infrared saunas. They are near infrared saunas. So if you want to check those out, they’re going to be on sale $50 throughout the rest of the year until January 1st. I think they make great gifts for the holidays and also, I think you should give one to yourself as a gift because we need to detox the hundred thousand chemicals that are in our environment, the plastics, the PCB’s, the dioxins and heavy metals. The infrared saunas are such a great way to give a gift to yourself of health.
And our guest today, Dr. Deanna Minich is an internationally recognized lifestyle medicine expert and author of five books. Her 20 years of experience in the nutrition and the functional medicine fields led her to develop and integrated whole self approach to nutrition called Food & Spirit, which you can find at FoodandSpirit.com.
Dr. Minich received her nutrition education during her doctoral PhD study at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands where she researched essential fatty acid absorption and metabolism. She got her master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she focused on carotenoids and oxidative stress.
In 2014, she launched the Certified Food & Spirit Practitioner Program. I’ve got my little eyeballs on that to provide health professionals with a practical way to apply the Food & Spirit principles in clinical medicine.
She is the author of five books on Health & Wellness, one is called Quantum Healing and she has also published 15 scientific publications. Her passion is teaching a whole self approach to nourishment and bridging the gaps between science, spirituality and art and medicine.
Deanna, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Deanna Minich: Thank you for having me, Wendy. This is such a pleasure.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and why you wanted to do the detox summit? It was very ambitious.
Deanne: Well, if I look at my nutritional background and where I have been in terms of my research and what I have studied, a lot has really focused on detox. So for ten years of my life, I was working on product formulations, working in a clinic on functional medicine approaches to detox.
I was part of a clinical trial looking at women with fibromyalgia and detox regiments. I’ve worked with Dr. Jeffrey Bland who is really, I would say, the father of detox in many ways especially nutritional detox. I had the pleasure of working with him and really getting steeped in that information. And just even now, I’m faculty for the Institute for Functional Medicine teaching on detox.
So I feel like I’ve always been in the detox arena, but maybe I haven’t always called it that. But it this piece with really coming to terms with our environment, what we’re eating, making sure it’s clean. I’m starting to see detox in layers now where it’s really going beyond food because I’ve just seen that clinically that that happens. When we change our food, so many things change around us. So I think that the way that I’ve started to approach detox has changed over the years, so it’s exciting.
Wendy Myers: So you hosted the Detox Summit this year. You had over 30 different experts and so much expertise and knowledge. I really enjoyed many of the sessions. So are you planning to do another summit next year on a similar vein?
Deanna Minich: I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking about it. I was noodling on what kind of summit to put on. I had a lot of different ideas. But what I kept coming back to was that nobody had really focused on detox on a broad brush way. I had even talked with Dr. Bland and some of my colleagues and they said this information needs to get out there. It may not be very popular in certain circles, but it’s gaining in popularity and we need to bring forth good, credible information.
And I think, Wendy that you know even with your own detox program and your focus on detox that there’s a lot of credibility issues around the word ‘detox’. What does that mean exactly? Let’s set the record straight.
So in the detox summit, I had people talking about nutritional biochemistry, really opening up with Dr. Hyman, Dr. Bland, Dr. Junger and Dr. Perlmutter – so having this grounded, scientific basis of detoxification. We even talked about labs. I had Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, Dr. Aristo Vojdani who was great in terms of detailing us on labs for toxicity as well as autoimmunity.
So it was good to have that basis because many people don’t know what it means to be toxic. And then from there, we went into talking about emotional toxins, talking about spiritual toxins. Who’s ever heard of ‘spiritual toxins’? Can that exist? What is that, right?
Wendy Myers: Yeah, that’s something I don’t get into much, but it’s important. It’s important.
Deanna Minich: I think it does come up in some ways. And what is spirituality anyway, but a sense of being connected. I’m not talking about religion. I’m talking about what is our sense of purpose. What is our sense of being connected to the greater whole? And when people feel cut off, they feel depressed. They feel anxious. They feel like, “What do I do with my life?”
And I think that detox programs, what they do bring out in people besides just feeling better in their body is it’s almost like an internal reset in a body/mind way of looking at their lives differently.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I completely agree with you. Including myself, but so many of my clients, they start a detox program – my program is called Mineral Power – they have this kind of spiritual awakening. People, they change jobs, they leave their husbands. They are not putting up with any crap anymore. They are taking hold of our lives and making it what they want because their brain works better, they think more clearly, the brain fog goes away and they make better decisions for themselves.
Deanna Minich: Well, I like what you said about getting rid of the crap because in a detox, traditional detox, that’s what we think of – good elimination, working on the gut, making sure you have good bowel movements. But it’s about the other crap too.
It is about the relationships that are toxic that we’re in that don’t serve us. We stay attached to them because we’re co-dependent or we feel like we need certain things. But yeah, I totally agree with you. You kind of see that. It’s like a breaking open. People just kind of crack open to really liberate their potential when they go through detox.
And it doesn’t have to take very long. Sometimes, people are just ready for it. They start it. There’s that sense of community and support and they feel safe and it’s like, “I can do this!” and then they just really blossom. And then for other people, it’s going to take a little bit longer, but they’ve already started in that direction, which is exciting.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. And there’s definitely pretty significant detox symptoms that a lot of people don’t like. Can we talk a little bit about that, about some of the symptoms that people would have?
Deanna Minich: Sure!
Wendy Myers: A lot of people would start a detox and think, “Oh, it made me sick. It doesn’t work.” I call it you have to walk through the fire to feel better and achieve health on the other side.
Deanna Minich: Yeah. And I think that there’s a balance of that. There is this traditional idea of having to go through a healing crisis and I think that there is a part of that, but it shouldn’t really be such a debilitating crisis where people are laid up in bed, then I think that there’s something wrong, that the detox is not being done properly or proper nutrition aren’t being given for the pathways to really optimize detox in the body.
So I do think that there’s a happy medium. Yes, we withdraw from sugar, we start feeling low energy. It’s like, “What’s my quick fix now?” There is no quick fix. Now, it’s like we have to confront those addictions.
So I think based on the detoxes that I’ve done – and I did do one called The Detox Challenge right after the Detox Summit. We had 3000 people be part of that, so we gathered a lot of data. What we found out –
Now, this is interesting to me. I’m going to publish a paper on this. Essentially, we found that it wasn’t so much the physical things that people improved on. They did improve on those things and they came into the detox thinking that they wanted to improve their energy. That was the number one thing.
What they exited with after 21 days was better emotional health, which completely – like if you look at all of the ratings and we have them do surveys before and after, the surveys on emotions were off the charts. The biggest improvement that we had was learning how to not eat emotionally.
Emotional eating is a huge one especially because people are letting go of caffeine or letting go of sugar, letting go of wheat and gluten…
Wendy Myers: And stress eating.
Deanna Minich: And stress eating! It changes your neurochemistry. So when we pull those things back, then it’s like, “Oh, my gosh! There were a lot of emotions connected to those things and now I have to figure out what those emotions are about.”
I think after 21 days, people get a good idea of where they stood. And I did address emotions in the Detox Challenge. I gave them an emotional log so they’re tracking. Where are you? I dedicate just three days solid to emotions where we’re talking about them because if we’re not talking, we’re not transmuting. So it’s experience.
Wendy Myers: Not enough!
Deanna Minich: You have to be comfortable with it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I know. And definitely there’s a big emotional aspect to detox as well because I, myself had periods of depression and I feel like it’s from detoxification, a certain heavy metal or a chemical or what-not. It just may be a couple of days – max, a week. I have many of my clients also experience anxiety and depression when they’re detoxing as well. Can you explain that a little bit?
Deanna Minich: Yeah. No, it’s true. I think that can happen on two levels. I think it can be physiological and I think it could be psychological. There is a psychological detox that can also happen when we start letting go of things whether it’s food or relationships or jobs or just a certain way of living.
So yeah, I think that there is this depression and anxiety because there’s change. Any time that there’s change (and there’s always going to be change), we have to get used to something else. So that makes us a little bit anxious. “Okay, I don’t know what to anticipate. This is new. I haven’t experienced this before. I don’t know what the outcome will be. It’s not predictable because I haven’t seen the end of the tunnel” whereas I knew what was happening for me every day.
And I think that that’s what happens. I call these things ‘food rots’. Like a rot that we get stuck in with a car, it’s like a life rot. A detox is really about moving out of those rots. It’s getting to see things fresh. It’s not always taking things away. Sometimes, it’s about bringing things in to allow us to see things in a very renewed way. I think people do need renewal.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: And so let’s talk a little bit about when people have detox reactions and they’re laid up in bed or they get really, really sick. Can you talk about why some people’s detox pathways can be blocked and what can be done about that?
Deanna Minich: Yeah. Well, gosh, I just put together a whole presentation on nutrigenomics. Nutrigenomics is the fusion between nutrients and genes. What we know about the human genome is that we cracked the genome. We cracked the code in 2003. We have sequenced the human genome. And that was just what? Like 11 years ago, almost 12 years ago. That’s not very long ago. And so what we’re starting to put together is how do nutrients and the things that we’re eating (even the things that don’t have nutritive value), how does it change cell signaling, how does it change our pathways?
Now, I think one of the things that happens for people is that they do have genetic variability. So there are these things called SNIPS, single nucleotide polymorphisms. And because detox as a body process is very enzyme-based – enzymes are proteins and proteins come from the DNA…
Wendy Myers: And they need minerals to work.
Deanna Minich: Yeah, they need co-factor galore, yeah, a lot of different things especially minerals. I’m all about minerals.
So for some people, these systems are not very efficient. They might be revved up or they might be slowed down. And as a result of that, they don’t have the full efficiency and the optimum amount of detox. And in fact, this happens more than not quite honestly.
There are genetic tests where people can go and they can figure out, “How are my liver enzymes? There’s the phase 1 enzymes, there are the phase 2 enzymes. How do I measure up?”
For me, personally, I started looking into this because I have a history of cancer in our family, very strong. And in fact, I had my genes done and I saw that I did have an increased risk for certain cancers. So then that caused me to start looking at my detox pathways.
Well, what toxic pathways – because maybe that’s why I have history of cancer in the family because we all carry those same genes for not letting go of things that we’re toxic. And indeed, I had changes in methylation. I’m sure that on your show and throughout your podcast, you’ve talked about methylation because it’s a big part of detoxification. Sixty-six percent of people, two in three people had some kind of defect in one of the biggest processes that is connected to detox. So no wonder we get cancer, no wonder we get heart disease. That’s not the only reason, but it’s part of the picture, genetic variability.
So when you ask me why is it that some people get laid up in bed or others just aren’t detoxing well, number one, maybe they don’t have the right nutrients to fuel those enzymes in the body and they might already be falling short.
Wendy Myers: There’s a concept floating around the genetic industry of over-methylation and under-methylation and there’s some camps that says, “Oh, it’s in its infancy and other people that put a tremendous amount of stock in that and base a practice on it,” what is your opinion about the concept of over- and under-methylation?
Deanna Minich: Well, it’s the principle of nature. It’s yin and yang. I think it’s very typical in the United States at least that when there’s something good, then having a lot more is better and that’s not necessarily the case. I think we did that a little bit with vitamin D where many people got really into vitamin D and they started taking all these super high levels and there are side effects of having too much in the way of certain nutrients.
So in a similar way, methylation is a very well-orchestrated process in the body. It’s the Goldilock’s principle, we don’t want too little, we don’t want too much. Too much can be connected to cancer and it’s been thought that maybe that’s what’s going on. Two is having a disregulation or an imbalance of methylation. Some parts are under-methylated and some parts are over-methylated. And we can’t always control that.
So what I would say here for anybody listening is to definitely work with somebody, a functional medicine practitioner. Go to the Institute for Functional Medicine website, find a practitioner in your area, get a sense of where you stand because it’s not just a one-size-fits-all approach. And you know that, Wendy. I think that even with detox, we have to personalize that because everybody is very different.
And that’s not being talked about. People don’t know how to personalize. We just get these diets that are out there without really thinking about the individual. We’re human beings and we have 99% of the same genome perhaps, but still that 1% can make us very different.
Wendy Myers: Yes. Yeah, absolutely. I’m a big fan of individualizing nutrients. People need very, very different nutrients based on whether they have a fast metabolism or slow metabolism or their genetic SNIPS, et cetera, et cetera.
Wendy Myers: So what are your tips for trying to heal the detox pathways? What are your best techniques for optimizing detox pathways?
Deanna Minich: I focus on – well, you’re asking me three tips, right?
Wendy Myers: Or fewer or just whatever, your top tips.
Deanna Minich: I’ll try to limit it to three. Three is a good number. So number one, I think about the bowels. If your gut is not working, you’re not eliminating and believe it or not, nobody wants to talk about this, but it’s like one of the biggest issues with detox. It’s one of the easiest, cheapest ways to detoxify – simply just get rid of these things.
So in that, we of course can talk about many different strategies, but that’s the biggest one. And you have to get that going before you start working on other systems.
Number two, to focus on the liver. The liver is the hub of many of these enzymes. Although they are within the body, they’re in the gut, they’re in the skin, they’re all over the place, but they’re concentrated in the liver. So the liver is the hub. So taking good care of your liver will make you a happy person.
In traditional Chinese medicine, they even talk about the liver being connected to if it’s stagnant or if it’s not working well, a lot of anger, just a lot of rage. It’s like, “Where’s all these anger coming from?” Well, maybe you’re toxic. Maybe there’s a lot of stuff pent up. So liver is no. 2.
And then number three is I like to pay a lot of attention to the skin. When I interviewed Dr. Stephen Genuis for the Detox Summit, he’s a wizard at – you know, I really give so much credit to him because he is out there in the trenches of research to really prove and validate detoxification from a clinical standpoint.
And what he talked about was his blood, urine and sweat study. When I think of blood, urine, sweat as the different compartment – and I would also toss in poop or stool or feces, whatever we want to call it, we still have to think of all of the different compartments where these things can come out. And our skin is our largest organ, so sweating.
It was really funny. I think I was with Dr. Bob Rountree and he said, “June classes should charge extra if you’re sweating because you’re actually detoxifying. You’re getting an added perk.” So people are going out and they’re not sweating when they’re active, I don’t see – in fact, that’s kind of my gauge. What I usually tell patients is whatever you’re doing in terms of activity, just sweat. Make sure that you’re sweating. Sit in the sauna if that’s what it takes.
And a sauna, we have one because after doing all the research that I have on what helps to detox and in fact, even talking with Dr. Genuis, he said that pretty much everything comes out in the sweat except for certain perfluorinated carbons. But outside of that, heavy metals come out in sweat, different types of plasticizers come out in sweat.
They’ve done these studies where you put towels on people, they sweat and they analyze what comes off the towel.
So the skin, the skin or any kind of sweating or ways to get some action liberated there.
Wendy Myers: And so what are your favorite detox methods or protocols. I mean, obviously, I’m a fan of infrared saunas. It sounds like you are too.
Deanna Minich: Yeah, definitely.
Wendy Myers: Are there any other protocols that you like because there’s lots of detox methods. I think a lot of them are garbage.
Deanna Minich: Yes!
Wendy Myers: It does. It brings the detox legitimacy down a few notches. So what’s your favorite?
Deanna Minich: Yeah. Well, I think first starting with food. My background, my training, my academic career has been in food. I mean, we all have to eat. Every day, we have to eat and we have to interface there. So first, make sure that your food is clean.
That means a lot of different things. It doesn’t mean just buying organic. Even organic food is toxic. So it’s about cleaning and making sure that you have mechanical activity scrubbing off those resinous materials. So it’s clean in all ways. Food is number one.
Number two, looking at the home. The home is a representative of who we are, our environment symbolically and also literally. And one of the things in the home that not many people think about, but can be very, very toxic is water. We bathe in it, we shower in it, we wash in it, our vegetables, products, we drink it. It’s everywhere and we need it for so many things.
So just analyzing water and making sure that you have a clean water supply I think is important. It’s worth the investment.
Wendy Myers: That’s why when I drink bottled water, I sweat out the plastics in my sauna.
Deanna Minich: There you go!
Wendy Myers: I have the clean water and then I have to detox the container.
Deanna Minich: So water is important. People always ask me about alkalizing water and all of that. I think a lot of that is – you just have to be very leery about gimmicks. What is necessary versus what is kind of a nice to have? I don’t think that all those fancy waters out there, hyper oxygenated water, water has a certain structure, it’s H2O, anything that’s not H2O is not water. I have some pretty strong views on that just because I haven’t seen a lot of science. But making sure that you have clean water in the house I think is good.
The third thing – not everybody can buy a sauna of course. A sauna costs (a good one) anywhere between – gosh, like $2000 to upwards of like $4000. But if you think about it, I mean, I’ve had my sauna for about eight years, eight or nine years. I can use it whenever I want. I can go and do a meeting in there beyond the phone. I can read a book. I can multitask and it’s like…
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I do social media. I do social media in my sauna.
Deanna Minich: Yeah! Yeah, it’s kind of like you can just go on autopilot in there and it could be very meditative.
So I do think that some kind of cleansing or some kind of bodily thing, whether it’s dry skin brushing or doing something with the skin I think is important.
And as way of talking about the skin, I also want to mention personal care products, just doing an inventory like what do you have going on in your medicine cabinet, what are you putting on every day, are you wearing conscious make-up, are you using good hair products, if you’re dying your hair, what kind of dye are you using? There are all those questions.
And even technology. I mean, we can keep going on and on, but you asked for three. So I would say food, water and skin type of activities and things that we put on our skin, personal care products. Those are all things that people can easily control without a lot of money. The sauna aside, you’re going to buy soap, so why not make sure you buy the best soap? You’re going to buy toothpaste, why don’t you buy the best toothpaste. So there are some things that are just part of our daily life anyway.
Wendy Myers: And so what are your favorite ways to support the liver? One of my favorite ways is coffee enemas. Do you like coffee enemas?
Deanna Minich: Well, I think for some people, they can be good. It’s just a matter of amount and who’s doing it, not creating an over-reliance because there are some downsides. Not everybody can do enemas very effectively and there can be things that can happen. So you want to be completely –
I always prefer oral versus anal in terms of getting your nutrition in if at all possible, but for certain people that are chronically ill and have other issues, that might be warranted. I had a patient who had cancer who was going through a very specific type of cancer where he was doing the coffee enemas and he was having benefit. And that is one way to propel toxins out.
But I do like the idea of stimulating and getting things in from the mouth and then working through that way because I think that that’s just how we’re designed.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I agree. I don’t think coffee enemas is for everybody, but I think they’re good for some people. They work well for some.
Deanna Minich: Yeah, I think so. So for liver, liver likes to rev it to keep it moving. The liver, if we were to personify the liver, it would be the general of the army. Think of the immune system, like all of the soldiers. The liver is out there at the helm and saying, “Do this… do that…” So if we don’t have a good way of directing the liver and keeping it active, whether through physical activity –
Physical activity is great for the liver. And it doesn’t have to be this hardcore aerobic activity. Probably something even a little bit softer is better. There’s all these discussion about what type of activity, what type of exercise is best and I think that that is also a personalized discussion.
There are certain herbs that are wonderful for the liver. And even if I think of foods, pomegranate is great, green tea. Every day, I have green tea and it’s just because the studies are so incredibly compelling. We look at all the fatty liver that’s occurring now in the population. This is en epidemic.
Wendy Myers: Thirty percent of the population in the U.S.
Deanna Minich: I’m sure! And it’s tied to type II diabetes, it’s tied to metabolic syndrome. So if our liver is not working right in that way, yeah, it’s going to get stagnant and stuck and fatty.
So getting these herbs in, things like milk thistle. Milk thistle is pretty classic. Silymarin is a component of the milk thistle that seems to really rev certain pathways in the liver, which I think is good.
Also stimulating the bile. So stimulating bile, getting that out. My whole PhD was on looking at the role of bio in the absorption of fat and people that had impaired fat absorption. So I know how important bile is. So things like dandelion. That’s a great cholagogue or something to stimulate bile and to get that out into the intestine. So there are various things that just kind of trigger and get things moving in very subtle ways.
So I would say the herbs, there are certain nutrients as well, certain supplements that people can take. But again, I like to start with food first, thinking of the pomegranates, the green tea. There are a lot of different foods that straddle both phase 1 and phase 2 in the liver. So we call those ‘bifunctional modulators’. I call them ‘detox superstars’ because they’re doing everything. They’re doing everything. So those are some examples of ones that I would select.
A lot of the bitter greens are also good for the liver. Any time you do a detox, it’s also really good for bile formation and stimulation like arugula, [inaudible 00:29:59], beet greens. They’re awesome for the liver not just because of the astringency, but because the beets contain a compound called betaine, which helps with detox and actually methylation pathways too.
Wendy Myers: Ooh, and those dandelion greens are bitter. Oh, I know! When I eat those, I’m producing a lot of bile – I’d better be for what that’s worth.
Deanna Minich: Well, the fact that you know that they’re bitter is a good thing because there are some genetically variabilities in how we taste and it’s been shown that for people that are super tasters (and you might be a super taster where you’re like, “Oh, my gosh! It’s so bitter,” that can be a good thing because it might mean that your body is a bit more receptive to those compounds in terms of their activity, whereas people that don’t taste bitter, they may actually need more bitters. And there’s a way to test whether or not you’re a super taster. If you go to Amazon, you can order the bitter taster strips, it’s a simple science experiment. “Do you taste bitter? You taste the strip? Is this bitter?” They put a deliberate bitter compound on there and it’s been validated.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I need to do that. I need to do that because there’s about 25% of the population that’s super tasters.
Deanna Minich: Yes! Yes, yes, exactly.
Wendy Myers: There’s not that many of them, just a small portion. My dad used to always tell me stories about that.
And I think in the United States, we don’t have enough bitter foods in our diets. We don’t like bitter foods. There’s a price we pay in our liver health.
Deanna Minich: I agree, I absolutely agree. People wrinkle their nose at bitter foods. They like sweet foods and these are the foods that congest the liver, just the opposite. So yeah, anything that’s astringent, bitter, sour – lemon I think is great for the lemon.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, drinking lemon water. I love drinking lemon water.
Deanna Minich: Oh, there you go.
Wendy Myers: So I want talk a little bit about The Detox Summit because I think it’s really important for the listeners to learn as much as they can about detox and I think The Detox Summit is one of the best places to do that. So can you tell us about maybe some of the more popular presenters that were presenting at The Detox Summit?
Deanna Minich: Yeah, and it’s hard. I don’t want to chose any favorites – well, actually, the audience did choose their favorites and there were some that did come to the top of the list. Let me tell you what I’ve learned and who I learned it from and what was most intriguing because I was sitting here like you interviewing them and just tapping into their brain and asking all the questions I’ve ever wanted to have answered.
I did like Kara Fitzgerald’s laboratory discussion and also, Michael Stone. Michael Stone is a physician, a medical doctor who works a lot with looking at just the physical signs, “Do we need to detox?” He talked about skin, hair, nails, tongue, eyes, just the obvious things that we can see. Do we have acne? Are our eyes just lacking luster?
I mean, there are some things that we don’t need sophisticated science for. Just look in the mirror and we already know or just tune in to how we feel and we already know that we need to do something about it.
So he gave some really great guidance on what to look for in your body like your nails, looking at marks on the nails or looking at the strength of a nail, all these kinds of great things. I really enjoyed that.
Now, this is going to be a different one probably, Wendy for you. You might not expect me to say this. I also interviewed a psychotherapist. His name is Dr. Thomas Moore. He wrote many books. One of his books is called Care of the Soul.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah. I’ve read his books. Yeah, yeah.
Deanna Minich: Have you? Okay. He’s been out there for some time. I wanted to bring him in because he had just released a new book and I think it’s called The Religion of One’s Own. He really got into this whole thing about what is toxicity? Maybe toxicity serves a purpose.
I grew up Catholic and so there was always this preface of if you’re toxic, you have to go to confession and you have to tell the priest what your sins are. There’s always this ridding process. And so what he was asking, he was actually challenging spiritual beliefs or just even our notion about toxicity and saying that we created the toxicity. Maybe it’s a part of us and maybe we have to look at it as if we were looking at the mirror at ourselves as to whether or not we need a detox. We have to look at it like what is it teaching us.
I remember he really challenged me because I was saying things like, “Well, maybe we have to keep more in balance.” He said balance is a toxic word, normal is a toxic world. There is no such thing! He liked this term called “wabi-sabi” and wabi-sabi in Japanese is essentially liking the imperfect and seeing beauty in what we would see an imperfection and having an acceptance of that. So he wasn’t saying, “Just sit there and be toxic.” He was saying, “Let’s look at the metaphor of toxicity.” Why are we even talking about detox?
When I was going to school back in the eighties and nineties, I never had a class on detox. But now, it’s like it’s the latest buzz word and everybody is talking about detox because the environment is so incredibly toxic.
So I like that because it kind of jars the thinking and it kind of gets us to think philosophically about why is this happening.
Another talk that I liked very much (and then I’ll let you ask me a little bit more about the tox if you want) is Dr. Alejandro Junger. Dr. Junger, I actually worked with him and I’m writing a book with him right now. He’s written a lineage of books and his first one was called Clean.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah.
Deanna Minich: And essentially, it’s a detox book. And then he wrote Clean Gut and then he wrote Clean Eats. He talked about his time, he was going through medical school, he was depressed, he had food allergies, he had other allergies, he was anxious. He was in medical school and he started going to the doctor to figure out what’s wrong with him.
Wendy Myers: That’s a very common story.
Deanna Minich: It’s very common, right?
Wendy Myers: [inaudible 00:35:55] get so sick in medical school.
Deanna Minich: Yeah, medical school can be toxic.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Deanna Minich: So he was put on seven meds and he was like, “This is not working for me.” He went to India. He spent some time at a place in – I believe it was California or Florida where they took him through a detox, where he just ate very pure. He was living very simply. And that spurred him on to do what he’s doing now. His whole life and his whole mission now is about what healed himself, which was doing a detox program. It was like he needed that reset. He needed to see clearer because he wasn’t seeing clear anymore and he had all these medications.
So I think a lot of the personal stories around toxicity – I asked all of the speakers what their personal story around toxins was and each of them had a story. It’s like we’re all connected to toxicity in some way, either we’ve seen somebody in our life suffer because they’ve had some issues with a chronic disease like fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, cancers of various types, neurological conditions. I wouldn’t even say these “newer” conditions. We have these syndromes that are appearing now that we didn’t used to have.
It seemed like everybody was really in tuned with a personal connection to detox and toxicity as much as knowing what they can do about it for their patients.
Wendy Myers: So what are some of the lessons, the really valuable lessons that you took away? What were some of the things that you’ve learned even after 20+ years of experience yourself in education and doing research, et cetera? What were some of the lessons that really blew your mind about detox?
Deanna Minich: Well, one of them that I thought was great because it was very detail-oriented was Dr. Jo Pizzorno. Dr. Pizzorno is a naturopathic physicians and he’s one of the co-founders of Bastyr University. He’s up there with Jeff Bland in terms of his knowledge base on detox.
And naturopathic medicine, they get detox. It’s not like allopathic medicine where that’s a foreign non-credible concept. For naturopathic physicians, this is cornerstone to their practices.
So Dr. Pizzorno who is a naturopathic physician came on and he talked about mercury. His whole talk, his whole interview was all about mercury and a protocol to remove mercury. So that blew my mind because I stepped back. I was just listening because there are many ways to remove heavy metals.
There are many ways to get rid of toxins of various types. He had a very rigorous regimented protocol that I was – at that time, I was taking notes. I don’t have them in front with me to share with everybody. You’d have to go back and listen because it was very rich. It was very dense with, “Okay, after you’ve done this, then you do this” and very, very specific information. I thought it was incredible. So I love that. I love the detail.
I also had a lot of people emailing me after The Detox Summit because they were starting to go in for their labs. They wanted to know if they were toxic. And Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, to come back to her talk, she’s also a naturopathic physicians and she was talking about common labs that you can get…
Wendy Myers: Yeah, let’s talk about some of those.
Deanna Minich: Yes! So she was talking about red blood cell levels of various metals or just even looking at your nutrients. Do you have enough zinc? Do you have enough copper? There are some basic things. Vitamin D is even important for just acting as a hormone even and regulating various processes that are connected to detox like inflammation. There are some basic things.
We can also – you know, just getting a complete blood count. There is some discussion about high levels of white blood cells or certain types of white blood cells being connected to toxicity. There was some talk about that. You can also get a hair analysis.
She was talking about kind of the pros and cons of different tests. They’re not all created equal.
Wendy Myers: No, no.
Deanna Minich: You’re getting different information from different ones. Hair is not a very reliable one because this is dead. This is long gone based on where you’re cutting and what you’re getting. But urine is a common one. We talked about that versus blood. Yeah, we just kind of went through the labs. I think that that’s useful for people because again, detox seems squishy.
And most people do detox because they’re lacking energy, but they don’t know how that correlates to physiological parameters in their body. Maybe their immune system is all over the place. Maybe their pH is constrained or they’re having issues with that.
So I think her talk about labs was very useful. I like that one a lot.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I just want to make a little comment about the hair mineral analysis. I use hair mineral analysis. I really like it. I started using blood testing as well recently because you definitely want to compliment hair mineral analysis with blood testing as well.
The hair is not the best reliable on the first hair test because a lot of people, they aren’t detoxing so they’re not getting rid of metals on their hair test. But when they start a detox program on subsequent hair test, you do see the metal start to come out slowly, but surely.
So I think that a lot of people do have that idea that hair testing isn’t reliable, but I think it depends on how you use it. A lot of my clients don’t have any metals coming out of their first test. One would think it’s not reliable, but I think it’s just one of those things where you have to get them detoxing and then you see the metals coming out.
Deanna Minich: Yes, that’s a good point.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, yeah. But it is good to do a metals push test if you do a urine or blood push test where you’re taking the synthetic chelators and I think that does grab a lot of stuff that’s superficial, so it seems like there’s more metals coming out when it’s really just more superficial.
But it takes years, it takes years to get rid of all your heavy metals.
Deanna Minich: And then in the process of doing that, you have to prevent just retoxifying, right? You’re trying to remove it, but at the same time, you don’t want to add too. So it’s like a constant iterative process.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I think that initial test, you’re not going to see metals that are deep in your brain and deep in your liver. You can’t just do one test and like, “Oh, this is the metals that I have.” It’s a process and you have to continue monitoring for years while you’re on a comprehensive detox program.
Deanna Minich: Yeah. And the body is really smart. And what the body does with metals is it sequesters metals. It keeps them attached to things. So being that they are attached to things, they’re not readily seen in body compartments unless you give something to liberate them, like you’re talking about a chelator, something that will just attract it.
When I was working at the supplement company I was at, we did some work on what increases the body’s protein manufacture of what’s called metalothionine. So metalothionine is one of those proteins that’s floating around in our blood that our body makes that gloms on to these heavy metals. And there is a relationship between increasing metalothionine levels in the body and increasing the excretion of these metals into the urine.
And we saw that in the literature and some of the herbs and some of the things that did that were pomegranate (we’re back to pomegranate). Andrographis was another one, which was an ancient herb that’s typically used for lung issues. But like many of these plants, they have what’s called pleiotropic effects meaning they don’t just work on one system, one gene, one enzyme, they have a web-like effect just like food does. I think that we’re just acknowledging that from a science perspective.
One other thing that was really good for metalothionine and also helps with binding metals and carrying them out is turmeric. And within turmeric, you have curcuminoids and that’s the active piece that really does help to upregulate the liver, upregulate metalothionine.
If I was stranded on a desert island and I knew I had to keep clean from a food perspective, I would want turmeric with me. Some people would say broccoli. I would say, “No way, it would be turmeric” because it’s got so many different activities even beyond detox. It’s fantastic as you know.
Wendy Myers: And are you a fan of eating the whole food, the turmeric juice or more of the active extract, the curcumin? There are some people that say you need all the supporting vitamins and enzymes and the whole food as opposed to just using the extract. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Deanna Minich: Yup. And my answer is yes, yes meaning all of it, in variety. I do think it’s good to have the whole turmeric root and sometimes to just slice off a piece of that turmeric and toss it into a smoothie and blend it up, but it’s really hard to have a concentrated amount of those efficacious compounds in a live root that’s not concentrated. That’s why people take supplements because things are concentrated.
So I think for the average healthy person, doing some of the fresh turmeric root is great. But I think for the average person that’s not very healthy and that is very toxic, they’re going to need a concentrated amount.
Wendy Myers: What curcumin do you take?
Deanna Minich: Yeah, so there are many different types. Number one, let me just comment on just spices. It doesn’t always have to be a fancy, high, expensive supplement, but just looking from the whole root now into the spice. And make sure that you get really good quality spices because spices tend to be contaminated with metals because they typically grow from roots that are in the ground absorbing a lot of these things.
So I like a lot of different companies. I checked them out like Simply Organics. Frontier is okay. Tinee, Tiny Spice Company is one of my favorites. And they store the spices in a non-plastic container and even put a recipe on top. It’s beautiful! It’s all-organic and very conscious practices around spices. So that would be the next thing that I would choose.
And I put turmeric on everything. I put it in my smoothie this morning. Even though it was like a banana detox powder shake, I toss in more. I toss in the turmeric and I also toss in ginger sometimes, sometimes cardamom. I think that spices are one way to detox that people have not really acknowledge, but you’ve got a pharmacy right in your kitchen now, your spice rack.
And also, there are some tips about turmeric and how to potentiate its effects. One is to include a little bit of oil. So if you have the turmeric spice – and think of Indian cooking. Typically, they put the spice in with oil and they apply heat because it opens up the spice. It actually makes it more aromatic too and good from a culinary perspective, but medicinally, you’re doing something there too.
So oil plus turmeric is good. Oil plus turmeric plus black pepper is even better. The piperine compound in black pepper helps to keep the curcumin active in the liver for long. Not many people realize that. So adding pepper in with your curries is a very good thing.
Wendy Myers: Hmmm… that’s why I love pepper instinctually.
Deanna Minich: You do? Ah, perfect!
Wendy Myers: I put pepper on everything.
Deanna Minich: And plus it stimulates absorption of nutrients, so just in general, just like pepper is, it’s very pungent and it has that activity in the body. So it’s good that you’re drawn to that.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, and I love that you say that you have to be careful about what spices what you choose because if they’re sitting around long enough, they grow aflatoxin. Just like any plant that’s in the ground, anything that really absorbs nutrients, any herbs, they really absorb heavy metals too. So I think it’s important to go with the companies that test for metals in their products.
Deanna Minich: Absolutely. Ask them the hard questions. And spices are overlooked in people’s cabinets. They kind of forget about them. They don’t replace them. They’re not using them as often, so then they stick around longer.
The shelf life of spices range anywhere between six months to two years. If they’re ground up and they’re more exposed, they’re going to be more susceptible to decay. If they’re like a cinnamon stick or a twig in dried form or even rosemary dried versus ground up is going to be much more – it’ll have a longer shelf life. So just keep that in mind.
Wendy Myers: Well, I have some ancient saffron in my spice cabinet.
Deanna Minich: Oh! Okay.
Wendy Myers: It’s been there forever. I’m too scared to use it.
Deanna Minich: You better hurry up. You either use it or lose it.
Wendy Myers: Yeah.
Wendy Myers: Well, Deanna, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate your depth of expertise. I was so jealous that you hosted The Detox Summit. I thought it was such a brilliant idea and so timely and needed because our world is so, so toxic. I really appreciate you contributing that to the health sphere and the blogosphere.
Deanna Minich: Well, let’s get you over into whatever detox things that I’m doing next year with our team. We’ve got a number of detox events, so maybe I can interview you and have you be part of sharing your knowledge to them as well.
Wendy Myers: Oh, I would be honored to do that, thank you.
Deanna Minich: That’d be super.
Wendy Myers: Well, why don’t you tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, your website, your future plans. You have a beautiful website. It’s gorgeous.
Deanna Minich: You like it? I like color, so I always want to make sure everything is hyper real color. So my website is FoodandSpirit.com. And then I also have a program for health professionals and that is FoodandSpiritProfessional.com. So the certification that I offer, it really helps to integrate physiology and psychology for the average practitioner because many people don’t know how to integrate them in a way where it’s systematic and there’s a framework. And I do use color for that purpose.
And even within that training, there are advanced modules like doing detox in this very integrated way. I have a lot of programs just for everybody to do. We have one in January. It’s called Full Spectrum Detox and it’s one of those New Year quick 7-day power cleanse of just kind of resetting for the new year. And then I have the longer one, which is in the spring.
And then, of course, we’ll do a summit at some point and have you on it. You can connect with all these people that are really interested in detox – and there are so many of them. We had about 70,000 sign-on for The Detox Summit, so that just shows that – and that was in the summer when not many people are around. So can you imagine we have it a time where people are available, they’re active.
Spring time is such a great time to think about detox as is the fall. So maybe we’ll do it at that time.
Wendy Myers: Yes, yeah. People need to do their spring cleaning.
Deanna Minich: Yes, they do, in and out.
Wendy Myers: Can you tell us a little bit about your book? I was looking on your site and you had a few books to offer. They look really interesting.
Deanna Minich: Oh, yeah! I actually just have them right here. I would say I have four books. The one that would probably interest your listeners, I have a small food additive book, which is called An A-Z Guide to Food Additives: Never Eat What You Can’t Pronounce. It’s just a really small, little pocketbook.
But I think that the other one is this one, The Complete Handbook of Quantum Healing. I like this because I’m a very practical reference person. I’m kind of no-nonsense in that way. I don’t beat around the bush. I mean, I have like protocols for like a hundred different conditions based on nutrition, flour essences, visualizations, meditations, supplements. I just put it all within this book actually. There’s even one for toxicity, an entry for toxicity if you think you’re toxic.
And I do believe in a more well-rounded approach to addressing health. It can’t just be food and supplements. We got to go beyond that and look at a full spectrum broad brush because not everybody will respond the same way with food. They might get a bigger impact from doing a daily walking in the forest or a daily connection on the phone with a friend. We just have to find what unlocks healing for that person.
Wendy Myers: Yeah, I love that! I was really looking at the book Quantum Healing. I thought it was really, really interesting.
Deanna Minich: We’ll send you a copy.
Wendy Myers: Oh, yeah. I’d love that, thank you.
Deanna Minich: Yeah! Yeah, definitely.
Wendy Myers: Yeah. Well, Deanna, again, thank you so much for being on the show. We’d love to have you back any time you want to talk detox.
Deanna Minich: Okay, alright! And I would ask the same of you. We’ll definitely stay connected. That would be lovely.
Wendy Myers: And listeners, thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast. If you want to go on my website, it’s myersdetox.com. You can learn all about my version of Paleo, the Modern Paleo Diet. It’s a whole foods diet where you tailor to your food sensitivities. You can sign up at myersdetox.com/sign-up. You can get copies of my free books. Pretty soon, the Mineral Power e-guide will be up there. Right now, you can get the Modern Paleo Survival Guides. And you can also get the Live to 110 by Weighting Less e-guide. I spent about six months writing that little free e-guide, really a labor of love. So definitely give that a look. Thank you so much for listening to the Live to 110 Podcast.
Deanna Minich: Bye, everybody. Thanks, Wendy!
