What Benefits Are There To Detoxing?
By Thomas Laird

In this article, Alison Cullen, Nutritional Advisor to Crystal Spring and Bioforce, discusses the benefits of detox to health and wellbeing, and offers practical, pragmatic advice on how to help your body expel toxins effectively.
Our bodies are equipped with many organs and processes that enable us to expel toxins, but sometimes either the amount of toxins we’re exposed to swamps the system, or the system doesn’t work just as well as we might like.
You may be exposing your body to too many toxins if you:
- Smoke or come into contact with other people’s smoke regularly
- Drink more alcohol than the advised limits
- Eat junk food regularly
- Drink a great deal of coffee or tea or fizzy drinks such as coke
- Spend a lot of time driving
- Come into contact with chemicals through your work
- Come into contact with large numbers of ill people through your work
Your body may struggle to expel toxins efficiently if you:
- Have days when your bowel doesn’t move at all
- Have days when you don’t drink at least 1.5 litres of still, plain water
- Have days when you don’t eat any fresh fruit or vegetables
- Have days when you don’t get out into the fresh air for a little brisk exercise
The body has a couple of ‘emergency exits’ to use if the main exits are blocked or sluggish; it can push toxins out through the skin, the mucous membranes and, in women, the menstrual blood. Thus, people whose exits have got bottlenecked are more likely to have poor skin, persistent catarrh, bad periods, or a general selection of bloating, fatigue, cystitis, frequent colds, headaches, bad breath, and a thickly coated tongue.