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The Detox Book: How to Detoxify Your Body to Improve Your Health, Stop Disease, and Reverse Aging
We live in a toxic world. Environmental pollution and disease-causing germs assault us continually day after day. Our food is nutrient deficient and our water supply dangerously contaminated. People today are exposed to chemicals in far greater concentrations than were previous generations. Diseases that were rare or unheard of a century ago are now raging upon us like a plague. Millions are dying from diseases that were virtually unknown in the past. Experts tell us that by the time we reach middle age, each one of us will have already been affected by either cancer, cardiovascular disease, or some other serious degenerative condition. Conventional medicine has no sure cure. Drugs, surgery, and radiation treatments can be as dangerous and debilitating as the diseases they attempt to cure. This book outlines the steps you need to take to thoroughly detoxify and cleanse your body from these disease-causing agents. You will also learn how to reduce your toxic exposure and how to strengthen your immune system.
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2001
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160 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
May 1, 2008
Really good and gentle colon cleanse. I reference this book all the time.
November 14, 2008
Just finished this - there is a lot going on in our food that we don't know about. This motivated me to feed my family more whole foods.
January 8, 2014
This is probably outdated but totally brilliant - where else can you find such specific, useful information all in one place? Everyone should read this book!
January 16, 2014
Great book on natural detox therapies, healthy living and paths to healing. I would recommend this to anyone.
March 10, 2012
There are 3 basic principles of the type of medicine discussed by Fife and others in this same field:
A. Get the good stuff in. Give your body the fuel and tools it needs to work at an optimum level. Good food, nutrients and all the proper vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Make sure you aren't deficient in any of the major nutrients as the different nutrients all work together.
B. Get the bad stuff out. Make sure your body can detoxify out all the toxic substances and toxic by-products of bodily processes properly. Stop as many toxins from getting in in the first place, and do a detoxification program to get rid of the ones you have. Stop doing or eating the things which cause inflammation and have a pro-oxidant effect, and so on.
C. Reduce your body's total load. The total load concept is that lessening the body's overall burden/work and stress level in one area, will improve health generally and improve the body's ability to heal because the body's total load (or burden) is lessened. Fixing one problem frees up bodily resources that can be then be used to help other parts of the body function getter or to heal. In other words, you need to look at the body as a whole in order to heal, and not just the one part of the body that is generating the most symptoms.
This book discusses subjects such as environmental pollution, nutrition, fasting, juicing, oxygen therapy and sauna therapy, enemas, exercise, and kidney and liver cleansing.
This book is helpful to some extent and quite good in parts, and of course the theories it talks about have a lot of merit and are very important to read about, but I found it nowhere near as detailed and thorough as the books and websites listed below. It was good in parts but nowhere near the best book available on this topic, in my opinion. It provides a very brief and simplified overview of the topic that may be and probably is very useful for newbies, but for those serious about this topic and dealing with serious disease it lacks depth and breadth.
It also lacks documentation to some extent.
To get good information on healing reactions and detoxification for free online, check out the website of Dr Lawrence Wilson. To read books on this topic see books by Dr Lawrence Wilson (the book on hair mineral analysis and the one titled Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing) and Dr Sherry Rogers (most especially Detoxify or Die).
These books contain not just far more detailed information on detoxification programs and sauna use, but also far more cautions and information on avoiding problems - which this book very much lacks.
This book also lacks any type of serious discussion of nutritional supplements and testing and the importance of correcting serious nutritional deficiencies BEFORE putting the body under the stress of a detoxification regime. This is a very serious oversight. Just eating well is not enough, especially if you have gut issues affecting nutrient absorption as most ill people do and especially if you have had these issues for many years, as many people have. This book needs a lot more focus on 'getting the good things in' through diet and also through supplements. Supplements are necessary where illness is long-term and severe and so this information is vital. Detoxification will not be very helpful and may even be dangerous if these gut issues and nutrient deficiencies aren't dealt with first.
(I also disagreed with Fife's opinion on the superiority of vegetarian diets, the 'dangers' of saturated fat and the recommendation of a high carbohydrate and lower calorie diet and comments about how eating sugar wont make you fat, but eating fat will. For more information on these topics I highly recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) and Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol. It turns out that 'calories in, calories out' is just plain wrong!)
Highlights in this book were the section on how nutritional deficiencies during different stages of pregnancy affect different organs in the foetus, the discussion of life expectancy vs. lifespan and how we have been misled on this issue, and why we need to boost our immune systems to beat super-bugs rather than focus on developing new drugs that the bugs can become resistant to. The 'real age tests' section was also interesting, as were the comments on healing reactions and the importance of healing fevers, and why homogenisation of milk is even more harmful than the pasteurisation of milk.
Fife writes, 'True life expectancy hasn't changed for 3000 years. People didn't die of old age at 45. Sanitation and less early childhood deaths has raised our life expectancy, but not our lifespan.'
This book is an excellent beginners guide and may do very well for those that are healthy and want to stay that way but it should not be the sole source of information for someone that is seriously ill and trying to regain their health as it lacks certain elements that are vitally important.
Far better Fife books to buy are his book on coconut oil The Coconut Oil Miracle (Previously published as The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil) and his book on healing reactions titled The Healing Crisis, both of which are excellent.
BTW I'm writing all this as someone that that is slowly improving month by month from a very severe neurological disease - thanks in part to the work of Dr Rogers and Dr Wilson and others like them - that has left me housebound and almost entirely bedbound for many years. I wish so much I had had this information early on in my disease, rather than coming to it more than 10 years in. Healing is so much easier the earlier you start it.
Whether you choose this book or others on the topic what is important is that you read as much as you can about this type of medicine if you are ill as it really is the only way to really get yourself as well as you can be, and to prevent further problems arising.
Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for M.E.
A. Get the good stuff in. Give your body the fuel and tools it needs to work at an optimum level. Good food, nutrients and all the proper vitamins, minerals and antioxidants. Make sure you aren't deficient in any of the major nutrients as the different nutrients all work together.
B. Get the bad stuff out. Make sure your body can detoxify out all the toxic substances and toxic by-products of bodily processes properly. Stop as many toxins from getting in in the first place, and do a detoxification program to get rid of the ones you have. Stop doing or eating the things which cause inflammation and have a pro-oxidant effect, and so on.
C. Reduce your body's total load. The total load concept is that lessening the body's overall burden/work and stress level in one area, will improve health generally and improve the body's ability to heal because the body's total load (or burden) is lessened. Fixing one problem frees up bodily resources that can be then be used to help other parts of the body function getter or to heal. In other words, you need to look at the body as a whole in order to heal, and not just the one part of the body that is generating the most symptoms.
This book discusses subjects such as environmental pollution, nutrition, fasting, juicing, oxygen therapy and sauna therapy, enemas, exercise, and kidney and liver cleansing.
This book is helpful to some extent and quite good in parts, and of course the theories it talks about have a lot of merit and are very important to read about, but I found it nowhere near as detailed and thorough as the books and websites listed below. It was good in parts but nowhere near the best book available on this topic, in my opinion. It provides a very brief and simplified overview of the topic that may be and probably is very useful for newbies, but for those serious about this topic and dealing with serious disease it lacks depth and breadth.
It also lacks documentation to some extent.
To get good information on healing reactions and detoxification for free online, check out the website of Dr Lawrence Wilson. To read books on this topic see books by Dr Lawrence Wilson (the book on hair mineral analysis and the one titled Sauna Therapy for Detoxification and Healing) and Dr Sherry Rogers (most especially Detoxify or Die).
These books contain not just far more detailed information on detoxification programs and sauna use, but also far more cautions and information on avoiding problems - which this book very much lacks.
This book also lacks any type of serious discussion of nutritional supplements and testing and the importance of correcting serious nutritional deficiencies BEFORE putting the body under the stress of a detoxification regime. This is a very serious oversight. Just eating well is not enough, especially if you have gut issues affecting nutrient absorption as most ill people do and especially if you have had these issues for many years, as many people have. This book needs a lot more focus on 'getting the good things in' through diet and also through supplements. Supplements are necessary where illness is long-term and severe and so this information is vital. Detoxification will not be very helpful and may even be dangerous if these gut issues and nutrient deficiencies aren't dealt with first.
(I also disagreed with Fife's opinion on the superiority of vegetarian diets, the 'dangers' of saturated fat and the recommendation of a high carbohydrate and lower calorie diet and comments about how eating sugar wont make you fat, but eating fat will. For more information on these topics I highly recommend Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) and Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol. It turns out that 'calories in, calories out' is just plain wrong!)
Highlights in this book were the section on how nutritional deficiencies during different stages of pregnancy affect different organs in the foetus, the discussion of life expectancy vs. lifespan and how we have been misled on this issue, and why we need to boost our immune systems to beat super-bugs rather than focus on developing new drugs that the bugs can become resistant to. The 'real age tests' section was also interesting, as were the comments on healing reactions and the importance of healing fevers, and why homogenisation of milk is even more harmful than the pasteurisation of milk.
Fife writes, 'True life expectancy hasn't changed for 3000 years. People didn't die of old age at 45. Sanitation and less early childhood deaths has raised our life expectancy, but not our lifespan.'
This book is an excellent beginners guide and may do very well for those that are healthy and want to stay that way but it should not be the sole source of information for someone that is seriously ill and trying to regain their health as it lacks certain elements that are vitally important.
Far better Fife books to buy are his book on coconut oil The Coconut Oil Miracle (Previously published as The Healing Miracle of Coconut Oil) and his book on healing reactions titled The Healing Crisis, both of which are excellent.
BTW I'm writing all this as someone that that is slowly improving month by month from a very severe neurological disease - thanks in part to the work of Dr Rogers and Dr Wilson and others like them - that has left me housebound and almost entirely bedbound for many years. I wish so much I had had this information early on in my disease, rather than coming to it more than 10 years in. Healing is so much easier the earlier you start it.
Whether you choose this book or others on the topic what is important is that you read as much as you can about this type of medicine if you are ill as it really is the only way to really get yourself as well as you can be, and to prevent further problems arising.
Jodi Bassett, The Hummingbirds' Foundation for M.E.
January 31, 2009
Without a doubt, this was the most poorly written book I have ever read. It was maddeningly bad. As I read it, I wondered at various times whether the author had ever graduated from high school or college, and also whether the book had an editor. Just dreadful, and not just the writing itself -- the thinking was sloppy, misguided, poorly argued, poorly documented. However... the book is intriguing, and has definitely had an influence over my behavior and thinking (which is the only reason I gave it 2 stars, and not 1 or 0), and I thank my sister for urging me to read it.
June 23, 2008
Great book about how to detox, not only short term, but long term. If you can get past the author's obvious disdane for people who eat meat, as well as the fact that you're not supposed to drink or eat anything out of plastic or a can - which would be ideal, but next to impossible in the day and age - then it's a great book for learning how to become healthier.
June 16, 2009
I don't necessarily agree with and/or follow everything everything outlined in this book, but there is a lot of good information about health if one is able to sift through some of the extreme views expressed.
August 18, 2008
Great information. Clear, simple and step-by-step instructions. I tried some of the techniques, like a three-day fast, but didn't see or feel a difference (well, except for being really hungry).
February 16, 2017
The majority of the book was filled with anecdotes and recommendations easily found online. I liked the herbal detox chapter but in general didn't learn much
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews