"Fasting to Detox"
Most persistent industrial pollutants, like organochlorine pesticides
such as DDT and PCBs, were banned several decades ago,
and dioxin emission is strictly regulated.
However, we’re still exposed to these chemicals through several routes,
the major source of which is contaminated food,
especially fatty animal products such as fish, meat, and milk.
When we eat these chemicals, they get primarily stored
in our own fatty tissue where they slowly leach out
into our bloodstream, but better in our fat
than in our brain or other vital organs.
Having more body fat may actually play a protective role
by sequestering the toxins away,
but they can come spilling out when we lose weight.
Body weight loss increases the concentrations
of potentially toxic pollutants in obese individuals.
Of the 19 pollutants studied, they all went up,
15 significantly so.
Every study that has looked at it found increased blood levels
of toxic pollutants accompanying weight loss
whether induced by diet or bariatric surgery:
increases between 14 and 388 percent with a large enough loss.
The more weight that’s lost, the higher the pollutant levels
climb because all those chemicals stored in your fat
over all those years come spilling out.
The theoretical concern is that if released into the blood
at a faster rate than they are cleared,
the levels of these compounds could become toxic,
causing side effects, such as sweating, headache, and nausea,
but the opposite happened when PCB-poisoned patients were fasted.
In 1979, about 2000 people in Taiwan were exposed
via an industrial accident that contaminated rice oil,
leading them to have a higher body toxicity burden
than even long-time consumers of seafood.
But after a modified fasting regimen,
all 16 patients they tried it on showed improvements,
with some enjoying dramatic relief of their sufferings,
but this was after just a few days of fasting;
so, they couldn’t have really lost that much body fat.
And, they didn’t measure PCBs before and after;
so, it’s not clear they were experiencing some sort of detox,
nor what relevance this has for people
who haven’t been acutely poisoned.
The initial rise in pollutant levels in the first year
of weight loss may eventually stabilize or fall.
Check out what happened in Biosphere 2,
a remarkable experiment designed to be a completely closed ecosystem,
the longest sustained period of humans isolated
in a confined environment on record.
But due to crop failures, it turned
into a 2-year experiment of calorie restriction.
They all lost about 25 pounds in the first 6 months
and stabilized there, and while the levels of PCBs
and a DDT metabolite known as DDE initially went up,
they appeared to start coming back down,
but that initial spike is quite a jump.
That’s one of the reasons health authorities recommend women
don’t try to slim down during breast-feeding.
For example, here’s a woman whose breast milk levels
jumped up after she had fasted and lost about 20 pounds.
Because fat is mobilized into breast milk,
the secretion of human milk is a major way
these pollutants are eliminated from the mother’s body.
Breast is still best regardless, but you can keep your levels lower
by not going out of your way to lose weight
until after breastfeeding is finished.
What can one do to help flush the contaminants during weight loss?
One of the reasons the pollutant levels in the biosphere subjects
eventually dropped is because they were eating a high fiber diet
centered around fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts, and vegetables,
and we know that fiber can bind to these pollutants
and potentially flush them out of the body.
So, when losing weight, eating lots of whole grains
may be important to increase the elimination of pollutants
while, of course, cutting down on animal fat, including fish,
so you don’t pile on extra at the same time.
What about just eating some Pringles?
What was the dietary intervention in this randomized trial
to decrease the body burden of pollutants?
Subjects were randomized to 24 fat-free Pringles
a day or regular Pringles. What?! Why?
It all started with this crazy case report of a guy
heavily contaminated by PCBs who managed to rid himself
of 90 percent by losing weight eating potato chips
made out of the fake fat olestra, which doesn’t get absorbed,
and so appears to pull pollutants out of the bloodstream
into the stool for elimination.
It works in mice, increasing the excretion of hexachlorobenzene
30-fold and cutting the levels in their brains in half,
but in people, the drop in PCB blood levels with the olestra Pringles
was not statistically significantly greater, and for some reason,
LDL bad cholesterol levels shot up 28 points in the olestra group.
And, while olestra and drugs like cholestyramine may absorb
pollutants and remove them from your system,
they also may cause you to dump fat-soluble vitamins.
So, to get the best of both worlds,
losing pollution without losing vitamins,
fiber-rich foods maybe our best choice.
Instead of olestra supplementation to detox,
why not try to not tox so much in the first place.