How to Detoxify Your Body (From Sugar, Toxins, & More)

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph. D. Candidate
​Reviewed by Tchiki Davis, M.A., Ph.D.
There are many ways to detoxify your body, all with the potential to powerfully impact your long-term health. Read on to learn about these methods and how they apply to your life.
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Growing up, I loved my Nalgene water bottles. They kept me hydrated through countless hot summer sailing, canoeing, and hiking trips. They were sturdy, resilient, and reliable – at my summer camp, we joked that you could run over a Nalgene and it wouldn’t break.​
My Nalgene water bottles, I eventually learned, were probably leaking bisphenol-a (BPA) into the water I drank under that searing New Hampshire sun. Suddenly, plastic water bottles were suspect and metal water bottles were the safest bet. I made the change and never looked back.

I bet you’ve had an experience similar to mine. After all, we are continually interacting with things in our environment that may introduce toxins into our bodies, from the food we eat to our pillowcases to our cooking pans. Toxins are organic and non-organic matter that, once they come into contact with our bodies, can cause all sorts of mental and physical health problems (Trasande & Liu, 2011).

When you hear the word toxins, you might initially think of heavy metals in drinking water, pesticides in crops, or lead paint on the walls of your house. And not without reason: the cost of exposure to environmental toxins, even just among children in this country, is approaching $100 billion dollars annually (Trasande & Liu, 2011).

But if we give the word “toxin” a broader definition, there are plenty of other, everyday encounters between our bodies and the world that cause us harm. I’ve written this blog article to review not just the environmental toxins we are exposed to, but also the ones we willingly ingest or imbibe. Let’s have a look at how we can detoxify our bodies to live cleaner, longer, healthier lives.
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What Does It Mean to Detoxify Your Body? (A Definition)

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, detoxification is the “the process of removing a poison or toxin or the effect of either from an area of individual” (CDC, 2010). How’s that for a mouthful? In simple terms, detoxifying your body is removing something harmful from it, or alleviating the harms it has caused.

How to Detox Your Body Naturally

There are three ways to detoxify your body and minimize the likelihood that more toxins enter your body (Genuis, 2011):

1)    Avoid exposure to toxins. In this blog post, we will discuss several ways to limit your environmental exposure to toxins.

2)    Natural processes of detoxification. Your body has natural ways of getting rid of toxins. In this article, we will look at a few of these processes and how to make sure you’re not doing things that impair these processes.
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3)    Enhancing natural processes of detoxification. There are many ways to help your body more effectively rid itself of toxins, and we’ll look at those, too.

How to Detox Your Body to Lose Weight

In recent years, “detox diets” have become very popular. However, the sheer variety of diets purporting to help you detoxify your body means that not all of them are trustworthy (Obert et al., 2017), and not all of them will help you lose weight in the long term.

It is important to consider whether a given diet has scientific evidence to support it. For example, many people attempt juicing diets – eating or drinking only foods that have been processed in a blender – as a detoxification strategy. While these diets may reduce the presence of harmful foods and increase the presence of healthful foods in your diet, they cause weight loss because they involve a reduction in overall calorie intake. After ending a juicing diet, you are likely to experience a rebound effect, where your body wants to eat more and more to make up for the missed calories (Obert et al., 2017). This can lead to weight gain in the long term, rather than weight loss.

I’m going to summarize a couple of diets that have been scientifically shown to be detoxifying and also promote weight loss. One approach involved the elimination of processed foods and increasing consumption of organic produce, whole grains, and nuts. Participants in this diet experienced weight loss and had fewer toxic trace elements in hair samples taken from their bodies after the diet (Jung et al., 2020).

Another diet for successful detoxification and weight loss focused on elimination of grains, dairy, coffee, soda, alcohol, and certain fruits, with an increase in almost all vegetables. Participants in this study who were particularly focused on losing weight were encouraged to eat more root vegetables, such as sweet potatoes, carrots, and winter squash (Morrison & Iannucci, 2012).

How to Detoxify Your Body From Sugar

I love sugary treats as much as the next person, so it pains me to say this: sugar is as much a toxin as alcohol and many other substances (Lustig et al., 2012). In fact, sugar has been implicated in so many health concerns that scientists have called for it to be regulated by the government in the same way that alcohol and recreational drugs are regulated (Lustig et al., 2012).

So there are many compelling health reasons for undertaking a sugar detox. But how do you detoxify your body from sugar when glucose or carbohydrates are in almost every food we eat?
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The simple answer is that a sugar detox involves eliminating added sugars from your diet. Sugar occurs naturally in so many foods – especially fruits, which can be quite nutritious and essential to our diets – but added sugar is pervasive in processed foods.

To detoxify yourself from sugar, commit to not eating added sugar. Read the labels of all processed foods you buy or eat. Look out for sugar in your pasta sauce, your non-dairy milk, your bread, and your nut butter. If you minimize added sugar in your diet, you may find other foods become more flavorful, your concentration and mood stabilize, and your waistline shrinks. In addition, you will be reducing the amount of food toxicity your stomach must process (Lustig, 2020).

How to Detoxify Your Body of Toxins

Sugar is just one of the many toxins that we consciously or unconsciously allow into our bodies. In addition to not consuming toxins, we can also choose to eat foods that will help our bodies process and get rid of toxins.
 
As you might have guessed from the diets I described above, eating a vegan diet can help our bodies by both reducing toxin intake and providing the fiber needed to remove toxins (Arguin et al., 2010; Petriello et al., 2014).
 
Similarly, consuming foods high in polyphenols and fiber (Petriello et al., 2014) helps with toxin removal. Polyphenols are a micronutrient, often found in fruits, vegetables, spices, and teas, that bind with harmful pollutants in our digestive systems and cause them to be excreted rather than absorbed into the body (Girard et al., 2018).
 
Eating foods that promote healthy gut microbiota may also help our digestive systems remove toxins that we have ingested (Aislabie et al., 2010; Coryell et al., 2018). Eating fish and supplementing with omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids can protect against heavy metals such as mercury that we may ingest.

How to Detoxify Your Body From Mold

Exposure to mold in the places you frequent, particularly indoor spaces such as your home, can cause a variety of health problems (Genuis, 2007). As many as half of indoor spaces in most parts of the world may have enough mold present to affect your health (World Health Organization, 2009).

Detoxifying your body from mold means getting out of moldy environments, then cleaning up the moldy environments you live in. At first, this might mean sleeping or spending most of your time in a different part of your house or a different building entirely. For areas that you know have mold, installing a dehumidifier, cleaning surfaces where mold might grow, and increasing ventilation and sunlight can all reduce environmental mold.

How to Detoxify Your Body at Home

We’ve already covered many methods of detoxification, but what else is there? One team of researchers surveyed over a hundred doctors to learn what they recommend to patients whose medical concerns may stem from exposure to toxins (Allen et al., 2011). Here are some of the most common techniques they described, all of which you can try at home, that may help you detoxify your body:
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  • Eating cleansing foods. Foods in the Brassica family, such as bok choy, cauliflower, and broccoli, may be particularly helpful (Rose et al., 2005).
  • Supplementation with vitamins or minerals.
  • Eating probiotics. Probiotics are small living organisms, most often found in dairy products such as yogurt, and fermented foods such as sauerkraut or kimchi. Eating probiotics seems to be protective against the effects of heavy metals in your body (Giri et al., 2018; Larsen et al., 2013).
  • Reducing animal products. Avoiding red meat in particular can reduce exposure to toxins (Hennig et al., 2007).
  • Avoiding environmental exposure. Many behaviors fall into this category, from not microwaving plastic containers to buying foods in glass containers to buying organic produce to increasing ventilation in your home (Lu et al., 2006; Tarozzi et al., 2006).
  • Spending time in a sauna.
  • Trying an elimination diet. In an elimination diet, one begins by eating only a very small set of foods, then gradually adds more foods into the mix. Along the way, you track closely how you feel to see if the addition of certain foods makes you feel worse. For example, you might begin by eating no meat, dairy, wheat, or processed foods, and avoiding caffeine and alcohol. Then, gradually add in the healthier and more nutritious versions of some of these foods (for example, adding back in turkey, fish, and whole grains). A process like this gives your body time to recharge and helps you identify which foods may be especially toxic for your body (MacIntosh & Ball, 2000).

Tips on Detoxifying Your Body

Toxins are everywhere in our environments and our foods, and with all the options there are for detoxifying your body, it may be overwhelming and hard to know where to start. It might help to organize the actions you take into a few different categories. You might begin by focusing on just one category at a time.
 
1)    Dietary changes: In addition to the many options we’ve already discussed, this can also include increasing how much water you drink and increasing your fiber intake.

2)    Behavioral changes: Another behavioral change that we haven’t discussed yet is the purposeful use of exercise. As you exercise more, you sweat more and stimulate more activity in your digestive system. Both of these changes stimulate your body’s natural processes of toxin elimination.
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3)    Environmental changes: Changes to your environment can include adding plants to your indoor spaces, using pesticide-free products in your garden, and buying cosmetics that have been verified not to include toxic ingredients.

How Often Should You Detoxify Your Body?

While some detoxification processes are probably not sustainable long-term – you likely don’t want to be on an elimination diet forever! – I would encourage you to think of detoxification as something you practice daily, not something you are only doing at certain times. For example, committing to a diet low in processed foods and high in leafy green vegetables will make detoxification a lifestyle choice, not a switch you flip on and off.

Articles Related to Detoxifying Your Body

Want to learn more? Here are some related articles that might be helpful.

Books Related to Detoxifying Your Body

To keep learning, here are some books to explore:​​

Final Thoughts on Detoxifying Your Body

Detoxifying your body, at its core, means returning to a more natural way of living. It means renouncing many of the modern innovations that make our lives more convenient but expose us to unnatural and harmful chemicals and substances. I suggest you watch the video below, where a nutritionist not only summarizes effective methods of detoxification but also drives this point home: detoxing is as much about what you don’t do as what you do.

Natural Remedies & Cleanses: How to Do a Full Body Detox

So, when you think about detoxifying your own body, remember that the solutions are going to be specific to your own circumstances. Maybe you could be cooking more with raw ingredients and relying less on packaged meals. Perhaps you’ve been interested in taking a break from wheat but haven’t given it a try yet. Maybe you could commute to work on a slightly longer route that helps you avoid driving or biking past a factory or power plant. Maybe your town or city has a program that helps residents reduce lead exposure in their homes. I encourage you to think big and broad about detoxification; you would be doing your long-term health a real favor.

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