Goodbye, MacDonald’s. Hello, organic supermarket, local farmers market and your own garden. Goodbye, restaurants. Hello to home cooking. Goodbye, rare sirloin. Hello eggplant parmesan. If these bittersweet goodbyes seem more bitter than sweet, and if the warm welcomes don’t seem so hearty, you may not be ready for a long-term detox diet. Or, maybe you just need to reconsider. In addition to their obvious benefits for the body and mind, detox foods contribute to the health of your budget, the survival of the planet and the reduction of health care costs.

Detox Foods Build Healthy Budgets
Liberally allowing the occasional splurge on chicken and fish, you still save a great deal of money by cutting beef, pork, and lamb from your diet. Gram for gram or pound for pound, few items in the supermarket cost more than red meat; Shellfish and crustaceans may offer two prominent exceptions to the rule, but lobster and shrimp contain more contaminants than your mega-pack of burgers or steaks.

Fresh fruits and vegetables cost less than frozen or canned; And why would you consider canned vegetables after realizing that bimetals can contribute to excessive concentrations of dangerous metals in your body? Squeezing your own citrus juices and blending your own smoothies cost much less than buying canned or bottled sodas. Take a moment to figure out how many oranges you can buy for the price of a twelve-pack of “cola wars.” And consider how much you’re paying for the convenience: Two pounds of unprocessed pinto beans cost about the same as eight ounces of Precooked, Well-Preserved Brand Name Beans. Your homemade beans, rich in lima and cayenne, will taste so much better than those doughy canned things, and will keep a lot of fat from accumulating in your veins and on your hips.

Detox foods help save the planet
Even if you draw water from your own backyard well, your drinking water probably contains a lot of carcinogens: fertilizers, herbicides and herbicides, and other dangerous chemicals that seep into the groundwater from corporate farms. If you drink unfiltered urban tap water, you spew out all kinds of dangerous waste, bacteria and viruses, antibiotics, and other prescription drugs. Grown without herbicides or pesticides, harvested and packaged with careful attention to health and safety standards, detoxifying fruits and vegetables keep dangerous chemicals out of the water supply.

Even more important, when you remove red meat from your diet, you reduce air pollution and promote alternative fuels. Although the associative chain may not immediately seem crystal clear or unbreakable, the supply chain links your purchase of beef to corporate farming, which is related to excessive production of methane gases from cows and excessive consumption of products. of corn and soybeans. Every time it moves past red meat, it reduces demand, wiping out ranchers’ herds, reducing methane gas, and diverting all that corn and soybeans to use as ethanol.

Detox Foods Will Finally Lower Health Care Costs
In the United States, recent debates over radical health care reform have drawn attention to the high price Americans pay for obesity. Second only to smoking among the causes of disease in the United States, obesity costs insurance companies, the Medi-Care system and citizens nearly $20 billion each year. Although the so-called “war on drugs” has taught public health officials to stop declaring war on epidemics and start promoting positive health initiatives, the main idea remains the same. If Americans want to reduce the exorbitant cost of health care, putting it within the reach of the 47 million people who currently lack coverage and adequate care, they must cut back. All health professionals, regardless of philosophy, policy, or training, agree that prevention costs much less than therapy. Detox foods provide powerful prevention, protecting not only against obesity but also against circulatory, digestive and respiratory diseases.