The Root of the Matter

Toxins, Emotions, and Resilience: A Real Look at Detoxification

• Dr. Rachaele Carver, D.M.D. Board-Certified, Biologic, Naturopathic Dentist • Season 3 • Episode 18

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Forget everything you thought you knew about detox. In this eye-opening solo episode of The Root of the Matter, Dr. Rachaele Carver cuts through the hype and misconceptions to reveal what truly supports your body’s natural cleansing systems.

Quoting Harvard physician Dr. Peter Cohen, “A true detox isn’t a starvation or restriction diet, it’s biochemistry.” With over 80,000 chemicals in today’s environment, Dr. Carver explains why quick fixes and fad cleanses fall short, and why a science-based approach to detoxification is more important than ever.

You’ll discover how your liver, kidneys, skin, intestines, and lungs each play unique roles in elimination, and why they need targeted nutritional and lifestyle support. Dr. Carver also explores the surprising links between gut bacteria, amino acids, and detox capacity, while uncovering the overlooked role of the nervous system. Could stress management be the missing piece in your detox journey?

This episode kicks off a powerful mini-series featuring leading experts on topics like functional nutrition and home toxin reduction. Whether you’re facing stubborn health issues or simply want to strengthen your body’s resilience, you’ll come away with the science, clarity, and strategies you need for true, sustainable detoxification—far beyond juice cleanses and quick fixes.

Thank you for helping us reach the top 5% of podcasts in the oral health space! Because of your support, we’re now offering one-on-one consultations for those ready to take their oral health to the next level. Check the link in the show notes to book your personalized session and begin your journey to a healthier, brighter smile today.

Here is the link to schedule: https://calendly.com/drcarver-1/health-coaching-consult?month=2025-09



Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. Information discussed is not intended for diagnosis, curing, or prevention of any disease and is not intended to replace advice given by a licensed healthcare practitioner. Before using any products mentioned or attempting methods discussed, please speak with a licensed healthcare provider. This podcast disclaims responsibility from any possible adverse reactions associated with products or methods discussed. Opinions from guests are their own, and this podcast does not condone or endorse opinions made by guests. We do not provide guarantees about the guests' qualifications or credibility. This podcast and its guests may have direct or indirect financial interests associated with products mentioned.

Dr. Carver:

Hey everybody, welcome back to a solo episode of the Root of the Matter. I am your host, dr Rachel Carver, and today I want to talk a little bit about detox. I've been kind of planning this podcast for a while and I decided that there's so much depth to detox, there's so many fads out there, there's so many misconceptions, that I thought I would do a kind of a mini series of podcasts with some experts in the field of detoxification. I want to really unravel all the intricacies to detoxification. If you really think that you can clean your body of decades worth of toxins with a 21 day cleanse, you've got another thing coming right. There's it's so much more complex and as I was researching this, I typed into AI. This is my new favorite tool to really help me find things and be able to clarify things so quickly now, and so I asked it what are the top detox trends online today? Detox trends online today. And the number one thing and I was really excited because a lot of it was getting like more of a holistic tilt to it. So that was great. So the number one fad was a whole food, nutrient dense diet that increases liver support by detoxifying with a lot of cruciferous vegetables which are high in sulforaphane, which is really important to make glutathione one of our major antioxidants, and a diet rich in minerals and antioxidants. I was like that's pretty amazing. That's the number one trend, because that is how we really want to be healthy. Right, we've all heard of the 21-day juice cleanse or the water fast or all these different things. The second most rated one, or most looked up, is a digital detox. So I think it's really important.

Dr. Carver:

When we're talking about detoxification, there's a couple of different categories. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that my take is that all chronic disease, minus a very small amount that is purely genetic, comes down to toxins right, toxins and infections, which you could say infections create toxins. So at the end of the day, it's toxins. That's why we have to detoxify our body. You've heard me say a million times there's over 80,000 chemicals in our environment today. So if we're not doing some kind of consistent daily detoxification or daily support of those elimination organs, right. So we're talking kidney, liver, skin, large intestine, lungs right, the way we breathe out all that carbon dioxide, too, we got to remember the lungs. So if we're wearing masks all the time, you're still seeing people walking around with masks. They're breathing in their toxins over and over, and not a great idea. That isn't the best way to stay healthy and prevent. You can't prevent all the toxins in the world. So how do we create resilience in our body and how do we create a super detoxifying system? So when we think about toxins right, we obviously have the physical toxins right, the environmental toxins we're breathing, the physical toxins that may be in our food, but also we talk a lot about the show, also the emotional toxins right. The way we think, the way we filter everything through.

Dr. Carver:

It's been a really interesting journey over the last decade for myself. I grew up. I had a pretty great life. Anybody looking from the outside would. I've been blessed and I truly have. And yet things that have happened to me have created certain ways that I look at things. I get more stressed out and feel like I must have the most stressful job in the world. But you can be stressed no matter what job you have. It's all about how we filter the world, and so part of this detox series we're going to talk about the best way to detox those negative emotions that we filter our whole life view through. Because, again, the more that I study this, the more that I feel that that nervous system is at the top of the tier. And if we cannot balance our nervous system, it doesn't really matter what we're eating or how much we're exercising right, we have to be in that proper, balanced, parasympathetic and able to detox. So that's going to be an important piece of the detox.

Dr. Carver:

There was an interesting quote that I found. Dr Peter Cohen from Harvard Medical School said that a true detox isn't our starvation or restriction diet, it's biochemistry, and I love this and I think more and more people are trying to understand this, and that may be why the number one trend is a whole food diet. We're all understanding that. Yes, sometimes when we change our diet whether it's going vegan, vegetarian, carnivore, keto, low carb, whatever it may be we often feel better initially because we're changing that environment in our body from what was making us sick. So almost every single diet you change to can make a difference initially.

Dr. Carver:

But again, we are just getting rid of something. Maybe that was irritating us and the goal is not to restrict a complete food group. Right, that's not the way our bodies were designed. And again, why do we go low carb. Because we know when we talk about carbs most people are thinking the sugary snacks and the cracks, crackers and the breads and the bagels. And yes, that can really shoot our insulin too high.

Dr. Carver:

But a lot of it is because those kinds of grains often have so many toxins. They get stored for long periods of times in these silos, right. And so mold overgrows, right. And mold toxin mold toxicity is one of the most difficult toxins to get rid of. It suppresses our immune system dramatically. Unfortunately, in conventional medicine nobody's really looking for those kinds of toxins. We get all these weird ailments, we have all these autoimmune conditions, other immune issues, because we're not looking at what's the toxin that's affecting that immune system, right?

Dr. Carver:

So again, we really need to think about our body's organs. How can we support the liver? Some of us, like myself, have methylation issues. Methylation is one way we bind onto a toxin to make it less toxic and have our body recognize it and get it out of the body. Somebody like me I need a little more support, maybe a little more B vitamins. I need to support my liver to make more glutathione. But then also you got to think do I have the proper gut bacteria also to make the glutathione. Do I have the right gut bacteria to absorb my B vitamins? So maybe I'm taking B vitamins or eating food, but that's the other piece. Can I absorb those nutrients properly? So we're going to dive into these nuances a little bit.

Dr. Carver:

Right, we have to think about the skin sweating. So exercise is important because it gets our blood flowing right. It builds energy and, like our energy, gets stored in our muscles. That's why, the older we get, as our energy over the whole body starts to decline a little bit, you need those strong muscles. You need to eat more protein to make more muscles, because those are your rechargeable batteries, so that people with more muscle mass, the older you get, have more energy reserve. So that's why it becomes more and more important. It's not just about the circulation, but building those batteries right and then learning how to breathe properly right. When we're exercising we're breathing, we're getting rid of some excess carbon dioxide. Breathing, also sweating that is one of the best ways to get rid of heavy metals. So people talk about sauna all the time. It's a fantastic way to sweat out certain things like heavy metals.

Dr. Carver:

Every toxin kind of has a different pathway, so it's nice number one to talk about. What are the toxins our body have? We'll talk about that in another podcast. What are the tests that I like to do? We've talked about it in previous ones, but we'll dive in a little bit deeper there.

Dr. Carver:

It's really important that we're creating enough bile. How do we make sure we're secreting enough bile? We have to have enough stomach acid. We've talked about this in the past too. As we get older, we make less and less stomach acid and that stomach acid is like the ignition in a car right. That is what drives all of our digestion. So it's so important to have that very acidic stomach so that we start that process of breaking everything down. With the acidic stomach then we get into the ideally more alkaline small intestine where we start absorbing things, and that stomach acid helps kick off the bile production. The insulin, all the pancreatic enzymes everything has to work. So we have to think about what are good ways to have that robust stomach acid.

Dr. Carver:

I'm going to have Mackenzie come back on. We talked to her a while back about functional nutrition. She's going to talk to us a little bit about the stomach acid Helps me. She's taught me a little bit about. I was always saying just everybody take apple cider vinegar, but maybe that's not the proper step for everybody. So, again, she's going to help us clarify how do we get that digestion kickstarted so that we have the right amount of detoxifying elements and we have the right balance of microbiome to help us absorb the nutrients we need. So really important Other nutrients that are absolutely vital for detoxification amino acids.

Dr. Carver:

Again, amino acids are the breakdown of the protein. We have to be able to eat enough protein to have these and, unfortunately, plant proteins are not the same as animal proteins. They don't have the same kind of amino acids that we really need for proper detoxification. If you are vegan or vegetarian there's absolutely no judgment here that's your lifestyle, wonderful. Just want to make sure you are getting the proper balance of amino acids in order to detoxify properly. Going to make sure we're making enough glutathione, and there's certain amino acids that create glutathione. So, again, if we are plant-based, are we getting the proper amount of the amino acids to create the glutathione?

Dr. Carver:

Fiber can be important too. We need to bulk up that stool and help get it out of the body, and there's controversy over that right. How much fiber do we really need? And again, that's going to depend on you as an individual and there's controversy over that right. How much fiber do we really need? And again, that's going to depend on you as an individual and you'll know from what is your stool, how are your bowels. So that's a good gauge to know and we'll talk with Mackenzie a little bit about that too.

Dr. Carver:

And then we need obviously really good hydration. We've talked before it's not just about water. Do you have enough minerals and electrolytes to absorb that water? The type of water that creates proper hydration is the structured water. Okay, we talked about that way back in the first season. Dr Tom Kellman talked us a little bit about the water. And it's not H2O in our cells, it's H2O3. And that is a almost like jello right and that is the proper water that keeps that inside the cells, that allows all of the cellular machinery to work properly. So we need proper minerals that creates the proper charge in our cells in order to keep hydrating.

Dr. Carver:

And this a lot of people can get bogged down with detoxification because they're not hydrating enough. They may be flushing out toxins galore, but without enough hydration things can get stuck and redistributed. That's a big issue with detoxification, that redistribution. You try to push things out. Oftentimes we try to test for heavy metals and we use certain supplements that push it out of the organ. But again, if we're not able to capture it and bring it out of the body, it'll just get redistributed to another part of the body, which obviously we don't want.

Dr. Carver:

And obviously sleep right when we get into deep sleep. That is when the body is moving everything through right. We have to make sure the lymph system is flowing. That is our big kind of sewer system, basically. And if that is stagnant, which is often seen as cellulite, right, people think I'm just getting older, I'm fat, but no, even heavier people, they might not have any cellulite, right, because their lymph may be flowing okay. So if you're noticing that sometimes I was noticing that in my thighs as a thin person I'll be like, oh, I've got some lymph stagnation, I've got. I've got to start moving more, I've got to use my flow presso lymph suit more, because I'm just getting that stagnation which is leading to overgrowth of all sorts of things.

Dr. Carver:

Um, sleep is one really important time and 30% of our sleep should be in that deep sleep in order to detoxify. So if we're not sleeping well for a variety of reasons, we're going to have a harder time detoxing. So before we jump into these programs, we really have to nail down our hydration and our sleep patterns, at least trying to get them better, right? We can't try to detox and then go to bed at 1 am, get up at 6 am right. Try to detox and then go to bed at 1 am, get up at 6 am right. It's really important to create the good habits first, and then detox is going to be so much easier and it will go more quickly. So again, we're going to dive into all these little nuances. Right, Some of the things that I was also looking at online. They talk about all these scams and detoxification.

Dr. Carver:

So if you see a detox that severely restricts your calories, it's a bad idea. This is old knowledge, right. That calories in, calories out. If I just eat less, I'm going to lose weight. Not necessarily, right. It's the quality of calories. I used to do a lecture all the time and I would show okay, if you have 100 calories of broccoli versus 100 calorie snack pack, right. Do you think your body is going to absorb those calories the same way? Of course not. You get so much more nutrition from that broccoli. There's zero nutrition in that snack pack, but the calorie count is the same. So it's all about quality of calories, right?

Dr. Carver:

Any detox that cuts out major food groups like carbs? Right? We know a lot of people if you go on a low carb diet, you will lose weight. It's pretty common and that happens. However, we're also losing a lot of water weight and it's not a good long term strategy. But, again, a lot of those carbs are loaded with toxins, most of those carbs that we think we're not talking about fruits and veggie carbs. Most people think of carbs as all the grains, the processed snacky foods and those are so full of toxins. So if you cut that out, yes, that's going to be great, but we want to change what we're eating for carbs, right. So that's important.

Dr. Carver:

Any detox that promises to flush toxins but doesn't specify which one? You got to be wary of that, right. Anyone that suggests you can pull metals overnight. So there's lots of suppositories and green drinks that say we're going to pull it right out Again, if your kidneys and liver and bowels are not working properly, if your lymph is stagnant, you do not want to start pulling things out of the fat stores or you're going to make yourself really sick and we get what's called a Herxheimer reaction. So if you pull toxins too quickly, you'll get headaches, you'll get flu-like symptoms. That's what we call the Herxheimer reaction, which isn't necessarily dangerous or long-term damaging, but it feels terrible. And that's not the right way to do it because, like I said, you're just redistributing things, so you're not being effective. So we really need to do detoxification in the right order.

Dr. Carver:

Another one that doesn't talk about any fiber, protein, fat or hydration, because again, I really like what the Harvard doctor said it's not about restriction or starvation, it's biochemistry. We have to go back to the basics and understand the way the body metabolizes food. Right, and again, that also goes back to the thought process. Right. If we are stressed out and in the sympathetic nervous system at all times, you could have the perfect diet and you may not absorb anything. When we're stressed out, we really tax our immune system because the digestive system shuts down. And if we're not creating enough stomach acid, right, this is how, in my opinion, this is how we get that overgrowth, the small intestinal bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth, because the pH balance in the digestive tract gets totally out of whack and then nothing can happen. Right?

Dr. Carver:

We don't realize more and more. It's becoming really common knowledge that the bacteria we need good bacteria. This is why we have to be careful with too much antibiotic use, because the bacteria are the ones that are absorbing those nutrients and assimilating them and helping Like we don't realize a lot of times. Thyroid you know how common hypothyroidism is and we're always just looking at the thyroid. Oh, let's just support the thyroid, let's give more T4 and T3, but the problem may just be we don't have the right bacteria in the gut to convert that, or the liver is inflamed and damaged and we can't convert the T4 to the active T3. So we have to really look a little bit deeper before we're jumping to medications until we really understand the whole process there. So a couple other trends in detox right is using mindfulness and meditation. I love that. We'll talk a little bit more of that. I'll tell you some of the things I love to use. And then fasting right, fasting had this huge wave and I thought fasting was great.

Dr. Carver:

When I first got rid of my eczema using the cell cores para one and para two, I was also fasting in the morning. So I basically didn't eat breakfast and I think one right, I changed my eating habits, right, so I wasn't putting as many of the toxic stuff that my body didn't like and so that helped then and I was clearing stuff out and I was moisturizing my intestines with a pair of two and that really helped me clear a lot of things. But I overdid it. I'm I am five foot to 115 pounds. I ended up being not eating. I wasn't getting enough calories, so my hormones, my cycle was all out of whack and then after a couple of years I was, my eczema was great, and then it started to creep back a little bit here and there and what I realized now is like that for me that eczema was really deficiency and so I've talked about it before.

Dr. Carver:

In the last this year I have been really high dosing my minerals, like just at the basic level, those nutrients that are so crucial minerals, fat soluble vitamins and B vitamins absolutely vital for cellular machinery to work. So there's a gazillion supplements and I have a pharmacy in my house, right, but at the end of the day, the basic elements of minerals, fat soluble vitamins, b vitamins are what is crucial to the cell working properly and I feel so confident now that I have restored those levels that I never fear that if I eat a little bit of wheat here and there if I eat, god forbid. I don't really eat a lot of fast food, but I wouldn't. I'm not as paranoid if I ate something like that nowadays. Where it used to mess up with my nervous system, I'd be concerned that something was going to happen. So again, those are something super, super important.

Dr. Carver:

So we have to be careful, especially women, the way we fast. Fasting during your period great, that is a good time to fast the week before we actually need to eat more carbs. It's a reason why we crave chocolate and sugary things. We need more carbs to create the progesterone and that's really important. With women. We want a cycle. Men, the fasting can work in certain ways, but if you have dysregulated blood sugar, fasting may not work for you. So again, you got to tweak in there like little individual stuff for all these kind of things.

Dr. Carver:

That's kind of a brief overview. Like I said, we're going to have a few episodes that talk a little bit more about detoxification. I have a couple of great people coming on. We're going to talk about how to detoxify your home. Like I said, mackenzie's going to come on. Tell us a little about nutrition. How do we get that stomach acid and all that kind of working. I have a wonderful Spencer Feldman is coming on for RemedyLink. He's going to tell us he has some amazing products and really good protocols for just about every toxin there is. So I'm excited for you guys to learn a little bit about that and yeah, so I think it's going to be exciting and a good series and again, I encourage you all to listen to all of them before you start anything crazy. Listen to what we're saying and then see what resonates with you. So I'm excited for this series.

Dr. Carver:

Thank you all so much for listening to the podcast. This has been such a joy and I love seeing that. I just got the statistics. We're all over the world now. So thank you so much. This is such a passion project for me to create this awareness, because I really we all have to be our own best doctor and we do that by educating ourselves, sharing this with other people. Thank you so much for making my passion a reality and I can't wait for you guys to enjoy this series. See you on the next one. Huge thanks to you, our amazing listeners, for helping us climb into the top 5% of podcasts in the oral health space With all the love and support. We've been getting many requests for one-on-one consultations, so we made it happen. Are you ready to take your oral health to the next level? Click the link in the show notes to book your personalized consultation and let's kickstart your journey to a healthier, brighter smile, starting today. We'll see you then.