Spring heralds a time of fresh clean, lighter fare. It is a welcome change from heavy winter foods higher in carbs and saturated fats. And, it’s the perfect time to give your liver a vacation, and purify your system with a detox soup that provides filling fluid to decrease appetite so you’re not tempted to overeat.

My special soup features cilantro, an herb that is known to chelate heavy metals and toxins from the body. It also includes bone broth that promotes gut and digestive health, as well as supports joint mobility, skin, hair, and nails, and better sleep. And finally, cage-free omega rich eggs, which provide an excellent source of satisfying protein and are loaded with vitamins, minerals and nutrients that the body needs for energy production.

Take your detox to the next level this weekend

Since chlorophyll-rich greens are the hallmark of the spring season, my detox soup not only acts as a perfect spring tune-up, but is sure to satisfy and nourish your body and soul. It’s one of the easiest detoxes I’ve ever created, and it works!

You can start this weekend.

How my Spring Detox Soup works

Here’s what makes this soup recipe so effective (and satiating):

• Bone Broth

  Bone broth is plentiful in minerals, collagen, and glutamine for healing the gut, plus some healthy fats to tamp down hunger. It is a very healthy source of protein, found in connective tissues, muscles, bones, tendons, blood vessels, and digestive system. Bone broth can help soothe achy bones and muscles, fight inflammation and infections, and increase energy, in addition to helping heal and seal a leaky gut.

• Eggs

  Eggs are rich in sulfur (the detox mineral) and the amino acids methionine, cysteine, glycine, glutamine, and taurine. Your liver needs sulfur and these acids to successfully complete phase 2 of its detox process. Eggs offer the lecithin your liver needs to produce the beautiful bile your body needs to break down fat and absorb fat-soluble vitamins A, E, K, and D.

• Cilantro

  Cilantro is an incredibly versatile herb. Not only is it packed with flavor and zing, it is also packed with vitamins A, C, and K, as well as calcium, potassium, magnesium, and folate. This tasty herb gives a simple and delicious way to tame the toxins and mobilize heavy metals in preparation to be carried out of the body, primarily from adipose (fat) tissue. Cilantro binds these harmful metals and loosens them from the tissue which helps to eliminate them from the body.

Your body is pretty remarkable. As part of its extraordinary plan to keep your organs safe, it isolates fat-soluble toxins, many of which in turn, stockpile in the tummy.

Belly fat and the toxins that are stored within it is extremely difficult to lose without a detox strategy that focuses on the breakdown of fat cells (lipolysis) and autophagy which is the cellular cleanup process that gets rid of the dysfunctional cells and makes way for new cells.

Some of these fat soluble toxins are called obesogens and they include synthetic compounds, chemicals, herbicides, and plastics in your fat cells. These obesogens include Bisphenol-A (BPA), atrazine, phthalates, tributyltin (TBT), and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), commonly found in household products, cosmetics, and groundwater.

So how do we help our body to increase lipolysis and autophagy so we can lose stubborn belly fat and the toxins that are stored within?

How to Release Tummy Fat

Here are some easy ways to trick your body into releasing tummy fat fast and easy.

• Count on CLA

  CLA is the fatty acid that helps your body to power off pounds all year long – without dieting!

  As I recently told Woman’s World in this week’s cover story, when I first learned about CLA years ago, I was busy writing a new book day and night. I decided to try CLA to help boost my energy and stabilize my blood sugar.

  I wasn’t even taking it for weight loss but after a few weeks I was backstage at a talk show and realized my pants were so loose, I had to pin them to keep them from falling off! I’ve been a believer ever since. I find that taking 1000 mg of CLA with each meal is incredibly effective in keeping my belly fat at bay.

  Cathy's Story

  Many of my followers have also reported amazing results by taking CLA. I’m really happy for Cathy Reiber, who is featured in our CLA cover story in the November 15th issue of Woman’s World.

  She reported losing inches right away, and was down 11 pounds in a week! And by month’s end, she was 26 pounds lighter. Best of all, she has maintained her 92 lb weight loss for nearly a year!

  Her transformation is incredibly inspiring, and you can supercharge your weight loss too by adding CLA. Like Cathy, it could be your game changer.

  Human Studies

  More than 300 studies have been reported since CLA’s (conjugated linoleic acid) initial discovery, highlighting its promise in cardiac, cancer, and diabetes therapy. However, it is the special properties for weight control that were the subject of the first human studies.

  Dr. Pariza and Ola Gudmundsen, Ph.D. of the Scandinavian Clinical Research Facility in Kjeller, Norway, were among the researchers reporting at the American Chemical Society meeting in 2000.

  Their study of 80 overweight people found that:

  • Those who took CLA when they dieted and regained the weight when the diet ended put the weight back on as 50 percent muscle and 50 percent fat.
  • Those who did not take CLA regained the weight as 75 percent fat and 25 percent muscle, the usual ratio of weight gain.

  According to Dr. Pariza, whose team carried out the study, “CLA works by reducing the body’s ability to store fat and promotes the use of stored fat for energy.” It does this by controlling the enzymes that release fat from the cells into the bloodstream. The result is a decrease in body fat and a proportional increase in lean muscle mass.

  So essentially, CLA helps “convert” fat to lean muscle tissue, and muscle is one of your best metabolism enhancers.

  The Norwegian study found that overweight people who did not diet but took CLA lost a small but significant amount of weight over a 12-week period. This study, also reported in the Journal of Nutrition in 2000, showed a stunning 20 percent decrease in body fat percentage, with an average loss of 7 pounds of fat in the group taking CLA without any diet changes.

• Practice Intermittent Fasting

  I spoke about this in my recent blog (link How I Hacked Intermittent Fasting). Eating only within a six hour window can do wonders for your health. Fasting benefits include increased autophagy and lipolysis and lowered insulin levels.

  During your short eating window, remember to reduce your net carbs. Net carbs are carbohydrate foods without the fiber. Reducing them to twenty to fifty grams per day will radically power up your lipolysis and autophagy and reduce your toxic load.

• HIIT It Up

  Kick it up a notch with some high intensity interval training (HIIT) and/or high intensity interval resistance training (HIIRT) three days per week. Adding in these types of exercises will produce very fast results in a short period of time.

• Hydrate, Hydrate, Hydrate

  And my final tip to assist your body in detoxifying cellular waste and reduce its toxic load to help you shed your weight? Hydration. Remember to drink half your body weight in ounces of water each and every day.

  You’ll be amazed with how great you’ll feel when your body releases toxins and debris and you lose those stubborn pounds once and for all.

If there is a fountain of youth in the body, I would argue a case for glutathione as that fountain.

It is one of the most powerful weapons to stop free radicals before they cause irreparable harm.

But let’s back up a bit to understand why this is so incredibly important.

What are Free Radicals?

The terms “free radical” is used frequently when writing about nutrients and natural health, but it is not always well defined. Free radicals are evil little electron thieves.

What Causes Free Radicals?

They are caused by a lot of different things—metabolic activity, radiation exposure, toxins, too many to mention.

Why are Free Radicals Bad?

They are dangerous because they are missing a part and they are absolutely compelled to steal from elsewhere in your body to replace it.

Imagine a hungry child who steals the bread of another child, who then is hungry and steals the bread of yet another child, and so on. Before you know it, you have a big group of hungry kids fighting about bread.

Free radicals set off a chain reaction that can cause lots of problems. This is called “oxidative stress.” Free radicals are the cause, and oxidative stress/damage is the result.

Diseases

Free radicals and oxidative damage are associated with all kinds of human diseases, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, atherosclerosis, Parkinson’s, stroke, cataracts, heart attacks, arthritis, and diabetes.

Aging

Oxidative stress also plays a prominent role in the aging process itself. An abundance of free radicals and oxidative stress accelerates the aging process.

How to Reduce Free Radical Activity

So how do we stop free radical activity and oxidative damage? There are two ways.

• Create Fewer Free Radicals

  The first is to create fewer free radicals.

  • Smoking Cessation

    Smoking creates a large number of free radicals and oxidative stress in the body, so smoking cessation has a very positive benefit.

  • Improved Diet

    A diet high in unnatural fats, sugar, and processed foods causes oxidative stress. You can choose to adopt a healthier diet.

  • Air Pollution

    Air pollution is a cause, and you can move to a cleaner area, use air purifiers, and vote for civic activities that reduce air pollution.

• Get More Antioxidants

  The second way to fight oxidative stress is through diet and supplements.

  Plant foods are rich in compounds called antioxidants, so it is important to eat plant foods (French fries don’t count!) every day.

  The campaign to eat from every color of the rainbow recognizes that different types of antioxidants are in different foods, and we need lots of varieties. Oranges don’t replace blueberries, and blueberries don’t replace spinach.

  Different kinds of free radicals are arrested by different antioxidants—the right tool for the right job.

The Importance of Antioxidants

Human beings developed to get nearly all their antioxidants from food. Lions and wolves did not.

These meat-eaters don’t get much, if any, plant material, so they have to make their own antioxidants.

Carnivores can make vitamin C. Humans cannot.

However, there are two antioxidants so crucially important to health that the human body makes them.

One is called superoxide dismutase (SOD), and the other is glutathione.

Importance of Glutathione

SOD is important in its own right as an antioxidant defense, but today we are talking about glutathione, which may be even more multi-faceted and is certainly an antioxidant powerhouse.

In fact, it is often called the master antioxidant or the mother of all antioxidants.

There are some kinds of free radicals that nothing will quench except glutathione. You can eat apples and kale all you want, but they won’t touch certain types of oxidative stress. However, glutathione can.

Glutathione is also a crucial part of the liver’s detoxification process. If you don’t have enough glutathione, your liver cannot successfully process and eliminate the various toxic substances in your bloodstream.

Active vs Inactive Glutathione

Glutathione comes in two forms. The active (reduced) form is full of vigor and ready to do some heavy lifting.

The inactive (oxidized) form is exhausted and can’t do anything much except burden the body with the job of either breaking it up for parts, or exerting energy and resources to rejuvenate it.

So it is not just glutathione levels in the body that are important, it is the ratio of the active to the inactive.

The vast majority of your glutathione should be in the active form—at least 94 or 95%. Only 5 or 6% should be inactive at any given time. And yet that is exactly what we see in a wide variety of diseases.

Either enough glutathione is not being made, and/or there is too much in the inactive form.

Acetaminophen and Glutathione

The ability to make glutathione reduces with age, so by 60, we are making about half as much as we did as children. And if that wasn’t challenge enough, there is a drug taken every day by millions of Americans that diminishes glutathione in the body: acetaminophen.

If glutathione is Superman, acetaminophen is Kryptonite. This drug has been shown to cause liver toxicity, and one of the mechanisms causing damage is the depletion of glutathione stores in the liver.

Studies have shown that acetaminophen-related toxicity becomes evident when more than 70% of the liver’s glutathione concentrations are depleted.

In fact, one of the primary treatments for acetaminophen overdose is to give acetylcysteine, which is a precursor to glutathione.

People are unaware that use of this over-the-counter drug could be making them more vulnerable to a whole host of diseases, as well as contributing to accelerated aging.

Glutathione Deficiency

In one 2020 study involving over 2,500 people older than 60, glutathione deficiencies were shown to be associated with having more than two illnesses, called “multimorbidity.” The people in the study averaged 3.8 chronic diseases per person.

The lower the level of glutathione, the more conditions a person was likely to develop during the six-year study period. The authors speculated that decreasing glutathione levels could be a marker for multisystem failure, which can play a significant role in the development of all kinds of chronic diseases.

The people with the lowest serum levels of glutathione at the beginning of the study had a 57% greater likelihood of all-cause mortality (dying regardless of cause) within 14 years versus the participants with the highest levels of serum glutathione (4.23-12.5 µmol/L). Even more interesting, the decreased levels of glutathione and development of more diseases was a relationship found to be independent of age, sex, education, body mass index, and smoking status.

Having more active glutathione on board is a good thing for longevity, disease prevention, and the slowing of disease progression.

Aging and Disease

Improving the body’s stores of active glutathione becomes more important as we age and in the presence of chronic illnesses.

For example, chronic infections deplete active glutathione, so Lyme’s disease might be one application.

A correlation has been found between low levels of glutathione and schizophrenia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

Glutathione synthesis is usually suboptimal in folks with type 2 diabetes.

Issues with glutathione have been identified in chronic conditions, such as:

• bipolar disorder
• Huntington’s disease
• strokes
• autism
• several types of cancer
• autoimmune diseases

It only makes sense to make efforts to get active glutathione levels higher to attempt to create a healthier ratio.

Getting Enough Glutathione

However, it is not easy to supplement with glutathione.

• Intravenous Glutathione

  The most powerful studies have been on intravenous (IV) administration, or using it in fluid, injected directly into the vein.

  In a 4-week study of Parkinson’s Disease, participants were given IV glutathione every day. At the end of the study, disability and symptoms were almost cut in half. Great results, but hard to maintain IV therapy every day.

• N-Acetylcysteine (NAC)

  Some studies have looked at supplementing with the precursor to glutathione, n-acetylcysteine (NAC).

  At very high doses, NAC can help, but it has to be turned into active glutathione, and this system is impaired in older adults and in many chronic illnesses.

  Therefore, NAC is not always a reliable way to boost systemic glutathione.

• Protecting Active Glutathione

  The problem is that glutathione flips from active to inactive very quickly. The digestive absorption of glutathione inactivates it, even if it is enteric coated.

  There are two systems that show evidence of protecting glutathione as it absorbs. One is liposomal and the other is a sublingual slow-melt system developed in France.

In recent years we have seen a drastic increase in the number of people in this country who are overweight and obese. This has led to a scary increase in many chronic health conditions ranging from diabetes and metabolic syndrome to heart disease.

We are also seeing a rise in NAFLD (nonalcoholic fatty liver disease) in humans. I’ve written many blogs on this topic.

What is NAFLD?

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease is a term used to describe the accumulation of fat in the liver of people who drink little or no alcohol. People usually don’t have symptoms, or if they do, the symptoms are mild—most commonly, episodes of fatigue.

But we now know that the increase in NAFLD is due in part to obesity. It is no secret that weight loss is an important factor in improving a fatty liver.

Detox for People

As a big proponent of supporting liver function in people by using detoxing programs, I have always suggested the use of herbs, amino acids, and nutraceuticals in a combination formula. I have seen this formula help countless people over the years as they work on improving their health and losing weight.

Detox for Pets

Pet Obesity

Veterinarians are also finding that, just like people, dogs and cats that carry extra weight place additional demands on their organs too, especially on their livers.

So the question is: how do we help our furry friends who are overweight?

We can’t exactly offer our pets suggestions like “Push away your plate before you are full,” or “Stop opening the refrigerator after 7 PM for that extra snack!” I sometimes joke about our dogs with my husband Stan, “I’ll bet they wish they had thumbs so they could open the refrigerator.” You see, I am also trying to control the weight in my dogs at this time, yet they have learned so many ways to control me and devour more food!

I often read articles that claim overweight pets habitually hang around during mealtimes and while food is being prepared. Well, where else would they be?

Fatty Liver Disease in Pets

Hepatic lipidosis (commonly known as fatty liver) is one of the most common feline liver diseases in cats. But dogs can also suffer from fatty liver, which results in a decrease in liver function and leads to myriad other health conditions.

Once again, we share the same problems with our health as our pets when it comes to both weight and liver disease.

Guess what? The answer to this problem is the same for both humans and pets: lose the extra pounds. When we—and our pets—lose weight, the liver then loses fat. And by detoxing the liver, it will naturally become healthier.

Liver Detox for Pets

Many pet owners have been detoxing their own livers for years. We now know that liver detox is important for our beloved pets as well.

A very important point to remember is to choose a gentle daily detox for our pets (just as we do for ourselves) that will not cause them to feel poorly as their livers detox.

You’ll want to find a formula that includes milk thistle, turmeric, and MSM. These gentle ingredients support and assist in liver detoxification in animals just as they do in humans.

Make sure the product is specifically formulated for pets.

Helping Your Pet to Lose Weight

Now to address the issue of helping our furry friends lose weight; the responsibility is ours. We must make sure to not overfeed them or give them too many treats. I have one important rule with my dogs: I never feed them from the table!

Admittedly, it’s not easy to refuse those pitiful eyes when they look up at me asking for a treat. But I know that their health depends on it.