Forgive me for getting an Outkast song going through your head (my Clean Team is composed of super hip (they’ll love that!) music lovers so I’m getting quite an education) but your very own “so fresh and so clean” New Year begins with not only a catchy little beat but three very important R’s.

These R’s will be the tools for absolutely amazing vitality as well as an immune boost. They are: Remove, Restore and Rejuvenate, and here’s the super simple breakdown.

1. Remove toxins by avoiding processed/packaged food with additives and artificial sweeteners, beauty care products with ingredients you can’t pronounce, finding food and non-food items that are organic like fruits and vegetables, clothing, bedding, makeup, and pet supplies, buy or make your own eco-friendly cleaning products, and also look at removing common allergens from your diet such as dairy, bread, pasta, sugar, white rice/sugar and red meat.

2. Restore healthy bacteria in the gut (by using natural and often really delicious plant and herbal antimicrobials like garlic, lemon, olive oil, oregano oil, thyme and cayenne pepper) to help your body out as it tirelessly works to move all those toxins that we accumulate just by living, working and playing in this world of ours.

3. Rejuvenate by making time to rest both your body and your mind, with things like meditation, yoga, gentle walking or stretching, being outside whenever possible even if it’s just to watch some clouds float by or the snow fall through trees, taking a bath, reading, some form of creative activity, sharing space with loved ones, or simply being still for a few minutes every so often throughout your day. . .

A final tip that addresses all three of the above R’s is this:

Love those greens! Fresh green juices are one of the best ways to fill your body with incredible nutrition, easy to digest energy, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and a pleasant sensation of fullness that will help with maintaing the right weight for your own body. Greens (and especially in fresh juiced form) even help to generate feelings of comfort and being loved. Love from yourself for taking such good care of your wonderful body, but also, that feeling of being satiated and nourished creates a state of happiness and clarity in your brain (and also to your overall moods) both of which are so important in these long cold winter months. Seasonal Affective Disorder runs rampant and threatens to drive us all under the covers with a pound of chocolate, and unless it’s some sugar-free raw chocolate, you might be pleasantly surprised when silky, sexy, slightly sweet green juices become your “comfort food” of choice and the scales begin to tip in a lighter direction as a welcome side effect.

If you don’t happen to have a neighborhood juice bar don’t worry, because you can make delicious green juices without even having a juicer. With any high speed blender, you can make a thick “soup” and then using a simple nut milk bag (about $7) or even with a DIY cheesecloth one, you can strain out the pulp and be left with a glass full of yummy green nutrition to power you up through what promises to be an amazing New Year!

These simple things are the sexiest (and easiest) tools ever for reaching optimal health and vitality. You’ll have more energy and more time to fully experience the things you love and to begin actively participating in your incredibly vibrant life.

Warmth and love. . .

Dr. Alejandro Junger

Imagine you are a human being thousands of years ago, when there were no cities, no streets, no refrigerators, and no stores. None of the things we consider to be the basic aspects of modern life. Just you, naked under the sun, with a bunch of others, naked as well, wherever on the planet you were born, eating your environment, and spending most of the waking day looking for those parts of your environment that were edible. Whenever you found food, you would eat it, right then and there. Within a day and it may be spoiled.

Whatever we eat will be digested, that is, broken into little pieces, the building blocks of which everything is made of. The main building blocks: proteins, carbohydrates and fats are combined with many ’toppings’ (vitamins, minerals, herbs, tonics, phytonutrients). These are absorbed from the intestinal lumen into our blood. Food is broken down into simple nutrients that will be used by our cells to make more cells and all the hormones and other chemicals of which we are made.

These nutrients that circulate in the blood serve another purpose that is less talked about than the fact that we ARE what we eat, which means that we are made of the food we eat. The nutrients we absorb are supposed to be parts of our environment. The reason this matters is because we are discovering now that our genes are analyzing our blood constantly. Depending on the combination of nutrients, our genes respond by turning some on and others off. Nutrients are our genes periscope to ‘see’ the environment they are living in. At times perhaps the combination of nutrients was so ideal that genes governing sexual behavior and reproduction were activated and genes that would support migration were turned off. For example, a good nutrient content meant that the pregnancy would have a better chance of producing a healthy baby.

The new science of Nutrigenomics studies which nutrients affect what genes.

Our genes, for thousand of years, detected subtle changes in our environment by eating it, breaking it into little pieces and analyzing it in the most complex chemical laboratory, our body. In that way it would turn on and off the genes that would influence behavior and cellular expression to maximize chances of survival. Changes would be subtle. Fruits and vegetables varied according to the seasons. Maybe the autumn nutrients turned on genes for hair production, and winter nutrients turned on the genes for hair thickness. The sun, constantly hitting our skin, provided enough vitamin D. Nature living in nature, eating nature; the design functioning as the designer manifested it. Our cells are always, permanently, constantly, all doing whatever they are doing for one and one purpose only, to survive. This has occurred for thousands of years.

And suddenly, within a time period that has not allowed our genes to respond, we are living in very different conditions. We are no longer naked under the sun. In fact, we invented all kind of chemicals that we dissolve in creams and spread on our skin to prevent the rays of the sun to touch our skin. The boxes we live in are loaded with chemicals that we use to wax our hardwood floors or to retard fire from burning our mattresses like a match in case of a fire. The gases that are released as fumes have been pointed out to be one of the triggers of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).

Tonight, as I was writing this blog in my flatiron district apartment in Manhattan, I walked to the corner deli and got bananas from Mexico, blueberries from Argentina, a pineapple from Hawaii and kiwis from New Zealand. I wonder what my genes are thinking. I bet they are confused. Should I settle and mate or migrate south where our ancestors always found greater sources of magnesium, or should we turn off those genes and grow hair because the winter seems to have come all of a sudden. Oops, wrong, it was the summer after all. Wait a minute!

Our genes don’t see that we now live in cement buildings, and that we grab our food from fridges. Our genes still analyze chemicals, nutrients (and the lack of them) to get a reading that will reflect the environment.

The chemicals in our food and the combination of nutrients, as well as the quantity and frequency with which we eat, are turning genes on and off to maximize survival. These genes are blind to what it is that they are trying to survive. What we consider ‘disease’, mostly seen as the body being defective in some way or function, is really the result of the highest intelligence attempting to survive. What is ‘diseased’ is that which created the confusion of our genes, our modern lifestyle.

For example, coronary artery disease is the accumulation of plaque inside the coronary arteries blocking the normal passage of blood. Initially, our body, detecting irritation in the arterial wall and inflammation, patches the damage. If things work as they usually do in nature, the irritation would pass because the same chemicals that turned on the genes that directed the deposit of cholesterol also turn on genes that would make the person reject certain foods and move to another location. When the nutrients finally get better, the irritation would stop and the cholesterol patch would be reabsorbed. But modern man stays doing the same thing for years and the plaque keeps growing, until the mechanism of survival, as perfect as it was designed, turns out to be the cause of the worse problems and death.

What is diseased is not the heart. Coronary artery plaque is actually the perfect response of your arteries to try and survive the way you eat and live.

My burning question is, ‘what did humans eat when they were in their original wild habitat, only guided by instinct, geography and season’? Whatever that diet looked like, let’s call it “Instinct Diet’. Since our genes are so slow to change, they still think that the nutrient analysis when eating the Instinct Diet is the most optimal one, and it also should be the diet that contains everything needed for all the body functions to operate at their best. The more we can approximate the nutrient mixture that we expose our genes to, to what they would have been exposed to if they were still living in those times, in the original environment they were designed by nature to live in, the better chances you will have of restoring your body’s natural ability to heal itself. Food and supplements are the tools we have to make that happen. Yes, supplements may be not as you find food in nature, but fridges, boxes, jars and cans ain’t either. Supplements are a less natural tool that may eventually allow us to live in such an unnatural environment as an apartment in NYC.

Don’t ask your doctor if you have any diseases. Instead, ask your doctor “What Is My Body Trying to Survive?”. The answer is not only more likely to show you the truth but also could save your life…

Put down the Zagat Guide and pick up a good book on cleansing and detoxification. It can save your life, and the planet’s. A good book to start with is my book, CLEAN, The revolutionary Program to Restore the Body’s Natural Ability to Heal Itself.

I wrote CLEAN in an attempt to clear the general confusion on detoxification and to prevent something tragic in my opinion. We are at risk of discarding the whole thing as a fad, because celebrities are endorsing it. There is great value in examining things without jumping into them because of endorsements from people we trust. Ironically, the most catastrophic backlashes came from fads endorsed by the people we trust with our lives, doctors. I am referring to the “Low Fat” fad. In the 90’s, America declared war on fat. Fat free was the secret to good sales. The concept that eating fat made you fat was endorsed by the medical community, and the country blindly followed. The result is the fattest country in the world. Obesity has caused more deaths and disability in the last 20 years than all the wars ever fought by the US throughout its entire history, put together. Don’t believe me ? Read the National Health Statistics, if you are not at risk of a heart attack. They are scary.

Literally, the same generation of doctors that prescribed you a fat free diet are now warning you of the dangers of detox programs. Some go as far as to say the whole thing is quackery, that there is no basis to any of it. That the body has its organs of detoxification, they know how to do what they need to and if you leave things alone, everything will work as it should.

Well, that explanation is not good enough for me. It is like saying that the body has its muscular system that will take you here and there, and if you leave things alone, everything will work as it should. But look at what happens when we understand the muscles, and how they respond differently to different kinds of exercise, and how it responds to different kinds of diets. We have developed gyms, treadmills, elipticals, weights, gear, technology, services, foods, supplements and a whole culture that have yielded miraculous ways of shaping your body, gaining strength, agility, elasticity and many other benefits. Plus this industry has provided thousands of jobs.

A similar thing is happening with the understanding of detoxification. Spas, chefs, blenders, colonics machines, detox supplements and many other supporting services, activities and tools are appearing every day.

Some are excellent, some are good and some are dangerous. To give you the distinctions you need to figure these things out is my intention behind CLEAN.

And last , but not least, to give you a day by day guide to a 21-day detox program that can change your life while you live your life. Detoxing while living a busy life is not easy. Especially at the beginning. Most people need to stop everything and take a few days off, retreating into a spa and focusing on detox alone. The CLEAN Program described in the book, with Recipes by Jill Pettijohn, life food chef and detox expert, can be done while working, taking care of your family, and even working out. CLEAN will teach you what toxicity is, what and where these toxins are, how we are exposed to them, how we absorb them, what and where damage is caused and more importantly, what to do about it. It will teach you how to slow down the workload of your digestive system so that the detox systems can work at maximum intensity. But it doesn’t stop there. It teaches you what happens when detox in ON. How to support it and what to do when you encounter the most common obstacles.

It is undeniable that the earth has a fever. Global Warming is “An Inconvenient Truth”.

But a fever is just a symptom. In my opinion, the cause behind this fever is toxicity. Toxic thoughts, toxic emotions, toxic relationships, toxic governments, toxic financial institutions…..modern life in the modern world is toxic. And the biggest source of toxicity is through the chemicals we manufacture to use in our homes, our clothes, to clean our houses, to put in our cosmetics and pretty much everything else. The one thing that is mind blowing to me, that I still cannot wrap my mind around, is that the chemicals that kill us for sure over time are in what WE EAT. Yes, we don’t eat food any more, we eat chemical concoctions that look like food. 90% of what humans consume, wild animals won’t even go near if found in their natural habitats.

Global toxicity is “Another Inconvenient Truth”. Educate yourself about it. Spread the word. For more info go to www.cleanrevolution.tv.

In the meantime, don’t eat anything that you wouldn’t find in nature if you had to go look for your own food. When you walk in the supermarket, Imagine you are hunting, gathering or fishing in the wild. Nothing in the wild comes in cans, boxes, jars, bags or tubes.

With love and respect, and a CLEAN warm hug,

Alejandro

When I was a little boy, my mother always said, “Do not go swimming after a meal. Your muscles will cramp and you will drown.” For a long time I laughed it off thinking it was a scare tactic so she could take a nap after eating without having to watch me in the pool. As soon as she nodded off, I would jump in and swim even more. I was lucky…

Throughout medical school I was secretly waiting for the moment when I knew enough that I could disprove my mom. Nothing.

Many years later, reading Runner’s Magazine, I found an article about a frequent experience common to women in training for a marathon. They stop menstruating. While training intensely. A rusty bell went off in my thinking brain. Here is another case of the body shutting off a function when another function is demanding it’s attention and energy. When we wake up in the morning, we have a full battery of energy to spend. At the end of the day, we fall asleep, recharging the now almost empty tank. This full tank of energy has to be distributed among the many functions of the body.

There are functions that cannot be shut off, or we would die. The heart is the prime example. It has to keep beating. The brain is next. And in order of priority, one by one of our body functions is funded. When one function is used more intensely, other ones, less important at the moment of increased energy expense, will slow down, or shut down. This is the case of the marathon running ladies. The body wisely realizes that it will not get pregnant while training hard, so it momentarily shuts down the whole cycle of preparing the uterus for a baby and then discharging all the work every month. Once these women stop running, they resume their periods.

In the case of my mom’s theory, it wasn’t that obvious, but it was the first clue to my greatest discovery about the workings of our body systems.. If her ‘folk culture’ advice is true (to this day I have never heard of anyone drowning from muscle cramping because of swimming while digesting), it would mean that digestion is given such importance that our muscles would be shut down to protect it, with the obvious risks. My instinct tells me my mom was right all along. And I have a theory of how this came to be.

When it rains in a desert that seems dead, life sprouts as if by magic. A closer look reveals how evolution resulted in plants developing very sophisticated roots to capture every molecule of moisture.

For thousands of years, humans did not know where or when their next meal was going to be. Life basically consisted of surviving while looking for the next meal. And we developed a digestive system that absorbs everything it can, in case the next meal takes a long time to arrive. For thousands of years our genes evolved in such a way that when a meal was thrown in the processing tube (your intestine) and other than the heart, everything else was put to sleep. Just watch what happens next thanksgiving. We stuff ourselves to the point of stupor.

But suddenly, everything changed. The conditions that shaped our genes for thousands of years changed overnight, from an evolutionary perspective. In just a hundred years we have food available 24/7. The amount of time we used to spend hunting, we now spend eating.

But our genes still act as if every meal was the last meal. So our body absorbs everything it can, and it stops or slows down other functions while doing it. Digestion and absorption became so sophisticated by necessity in the past, that it requires the body to put a lot of energy into it. It will take evolution thousands of years to adapt into simplifying our digestion and absorption systems to relax a little and know that the next meal is only a few minutes away and therefore not need to take everything in.

I never go swimming after a meal any more. But I picked up a much more useful tip for life. One that would completely transform my way of thinking and my approach with patients and their sufferings.

This is what I am talking about: “When digestion is happening, the detoxification systems slow down”. They cannot completely stop because we would die in minutes. But their slowing down creates damage and disease in the long run. And this is one of the most important reasons why human health is in such a critical state. At a time when we are exposed to more toxins than ever before in the planet’s history, at a time when we need our detox systems to work extra hours, we are putting these systems practically into hibernation because we are too busy digesting. And we don’t even know it.

Part II of Detox, is it real? coming tomorrow…!