Two Ways To Take Binders To Detox The Gut

If you’re seeking out functional medicine, you may have your own agenda but listen to the practitioner's agenda, too, because even if you’ve gone through this a thousand times, we can tell you straight up, “Hey, look, if you’ve got way too much inflammation–I know you wanna get rid of the bugs, so do we–but you may feel crap if we do it too soon.”  So we want to build everything up so we have that foundation ready to go.

Click here for a consultation with a functional medicine doctor to learn more about detoxification!

There are two ways to take a binder:

1. When you know you’re eating questionable food or drink and you want it to be in your system to bind any potential crud with that up.  That’s where you would take that with that food.
2. When you’re in the middle of a detoxification program and it’s a longer term thing.  We probably don’t want you taking that binder every single day with regular healthy food.  So we would have you do it typically an hour before meal and/or 2 to 3 hours after a meal to avoid binding up those minerals and nutrients.  So we would try to time it up on an empty stomach.  Now sometimes it’s easier to do it mid-day between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner or some people will do it when they get it and then when they go to bed, and just leave an hour before, half-hour or 45 minutes before breakfast in the morning, and then at least 2 hours after dinner at night.  Those are really good prime times and of course, a holiday weekend.

You can always take activated charcoal with any of your questionable foods and drink.  That’s super helpful. Dosing-wise, most of the time when you find activated charcoal, it’s going to be in about a 250 mg to 500 mg dose.

Detoxification and Binding

You have to mobilize a lot of your toxins but you have to detox them at the same time, so it’s kinda this seesaw where if you do too much glutathione but not enough binders, you may feel worse.  Or if you don’t do enough glutathione or enough binder, then you may still feel bad. When you feel like your best and you're not recirculating toxins, it’s the perfect dose of glutathione. As per Evan Brand's experience, it is about 200 mg of acetyl-glutathione with NAC 1 gram and then 500 mg of charcoal.

How to take it?

As an example, glutathione would come first in the morning 7 AM then wait an hour to do binders or in reverse.  So you could do binders first thing at 7 am, glutathione at 8 am, and then breakfast right after.

The hardest part is the timing and remembering to take them. Just remember to take them away from your medication, your other supplements and herbs.

Supporting the Lymph

1. Drinking enough water helps support the lymph.  The solution to pollution is dilution, right?  Say that 4 times fast.  We wanna make sure we’re providing hydration so the lymph can move.
2. Ginger tea is awesome.  I use this with a lot of my patients because ginger is anti-inflammatory.  It’s essentially an anticoagulant.  It keeps things moving.  It’s also a biofilm buster.  So the biofilm or these protective shields used by critters, it will definitely help with that and take those shields out of their hand and allow the antimicrobials to be more effective, so that’s for sure.
3. Now a couple of other gentle lymphatic supports that we’ll do is we’ll do a red root which is gonna be a powerful anticoagulant.
4. Slippery elm.
5. Dandelion.
6. Milk thistle.
7. Skullcap.
8. Rhubarb.
9. Rosehips are shown to be incredibly effective at mobilizing toxins and just kinda gently nudging it out of the body.

These are all very, very powerful strategies that we can utilize to keep things moving.

If you have gut issues and would like to use binders to detox the gut effectively, click here to schedule an appointment!