Guidelines for Maintaining Healthy Digestion Keys to Lowering Your Toxic Burden

Guidelines for Maintaining Healthy Digestion Keys to Lowering Your Toxic Burden

Once you’ve got a clearer sense of what may be getting in the way of optimal
digestion, absorption, or assimilation, you’re ready to go to work. Remember,
keeping your inner ecosystem clean is key to preventing cancer from rearing its
head.

Keep Things Moving

As with any complex system, your body needs to get rid of its waste on a regular
basis, from one to three times a day. Less-frequent evacuation “backs up the tank,”
leaving excess toxins behind. Remember, when it comes to helping keep cancer at
bay, staying free of toxins is key.

So what does a “perfect” stool look like? Think “The Story of the Three Bears,”
featuring Goldilocks: not too soft, not too hard; not too pale, not too dark. Eating a
varied Eating for Health diet, with plenty of fiber, should keep things running
smoothly. If your bowels still move more slowly than you’d like, try adding an
additional 500 to 1,000 milligrams of magnesium, a natural laxative, to your daily
regimen.

Get to Know the Bugs in Your Belly

As adults, we all have three to four pounds of bacteria and yeast living within
our intestines. This translates to hundreds of trillions of intestinal bacteria, a number
that many experts consider to be almost ten times the number of cells in the entire
human body (see, for example, Lipski 2005). In a healthy person, more than four
hundred species of beneficial organisms flourish in the intestinal tract, aiding in
digestion and in the production of B vitamins, vitamin K, and numerous enzymes
(Guarner and Malagelada 2003). When health-eroding, pathogenic bacteria get the
upper hand, however, we experience digestive distress, impaired detoxification, and
increased risk for all diseases, including breast cancer. Your goal is to make sure
the beneficial bacteria in your gut far outnumber the pathogenic freeloaders.