Various media have recently declared that detox treatments are a waste of time, because all you need is a liver and kidney. Well, yes and no. Yes, it’s clear that there are all sorts of products sold over-the-counter that are worthless, and that most detox diets amount simply to stopping taking toxins in for a while, not to actually removing them. But no, we do all have liver and kidneys, but they are not all the same because of variations (“polymorphisms”) in the genes, and thus in the enzymes. The detox system is amazing, but not perfect. Nowadays we are all exposed to far more toxins than the system developed to handle, and it is possible to overload our detox capacity - particularly if we have genetic polymorphisms.

A very quick introduction to genomics

Remember that we each have, in every cell, 2 copies of each of the 23,000+ genes that determine our heredity, one from each parent. The old genetics was about being able to say, for example, “Your child has a 25% chance of having Down’s Syndrome”; the new genomics enables us to say “Untreated, you have 3 times the population-average risk of developing Alzheimer’s, but there are things you can do about it”. We can do this because since the Human Genome Project we have been learning to identify the SNiPs ( Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) on our genes. These small changes in our DNA can have large effects on our chemistry.