Which Detox Diet
Should You Choose?
By Sandy Halliday

If you pick up 6 different detox diet books you are likely to find 6 different approaches to detox. Detox diets include the Brown Rice Detox Diet, the total Raw Food Detox, the Fish, Rice and Vegetable Diet, the Complete Cooked Food Detox, the Vegetarian Mixed Raw and Cooked Food Detox, the White Meat Detox.

Let’s have a look at all these detox diets.

Brown Rice Detox Diet

This is a traditional mono-diet where you eat only brown rice for your meals for 3 - 5 days at a time. The digestive system is given a rest with only one type of food to digest. The extra energy is used by the body for cleansing while it is free of the burden of rich or unbalancing foods. Brown rice is reputed to be a great absorber of toxins as it passes through the digestive system.

The rice is cooked with more water than usual and for longer until really well cooked to make it even easier to digest. You can flavor it with some herbs or spices like ginger, garlic, ground coriander and fresh coriander or parsley.

The Raw Food Detox

Cooking destroys vital enzymes and reduces the available nutrients in food. When you take in a high level of vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals and enzymes in raw food, the body is better able to detoxify.

Raw food is also known as living food. It has a life force that enables it to sprout and grow. A raw food detox diet is also low in toxins.

Vegetarian Cooked and Raw Food Detox

This detox diet is usually vegan but some allow live yogurt. An abundance of fresh vegetables and fruit supply the nutrients that the body needs to detoxify. Animal products, especially meat, are excluded as they take more energy to digest. Protein is supplied by the combination of rice and beans or lentils.

The Vegetarian Cooked Food Detox Diet

In some cases practitioners of Ayurveda, traditional Indian Medicine, recommend eating only cooked food. Certain doshas or body types benefit from excluding raw foods which they claim are too cooling to the body and hard to digest. The detox diets usually consist of rice and lentils cooked with spices that aid digestion and detoxification.

Fish, Brown Rice and Vegetable Detox Diet

This is a diet that is often recommended by naturopathic doctors. Fish is lighter to digest than meat and many practitioners believe that the body needs the amino acids supplied by the protein in the fish for detox. The liver uses certain amino acids in the process of detoxification.

Vegetables contain the nutrients that are essential for detox and the rice is a good intestinal cleanser. Fish oil helps one of the liver’s detox pathways.

The White Meat Detox Diet

Some detox diets include poultry and fish. Some practitioners maintain that the amino acids supplied by animal protein are better than vegetable protein for detox. White meat and fish is easier to digest than red meat so some energy is saved.

This type of diet is often combined with a powdered rice based nutritional detox supplement that supports liver detox.

How Do All These Diets Work?

The common theme running through these different detox diets, with the exception of the rice diet, is that they contain an abundance of fruit and vegetables which contain the nutrients and beneficial plant chemicals that are involved in the detox process. They also exclude foods and other substances that are detrimental to our bodies and rob it of nutrients.

Fresh fruit and vegetables have traditionally been used by healers for hundreds of years for cleansing. Modern research has been able to work out the substances that are involved in the detox process and many of them come from fresh fruit and vegetables.

Many people start off with the less restrictive diets and gradually work up to the more demanding diets as experience increases. Some do well on the less restrictive ones, but others may only improve with the more intensive regimes while being supervised by a practitioner experienced in detox.

Sandy Halliday is a nutritionist and health researcher and author of “The Definitive Detox Diet”. She has over 20 years experience of detox and offers a free report at The Detox Specialist; www.TheDetoxSpecialist.com