You may have heard about the detox process before. You may have read one of the dozens of books on the market about the subject. You may have followed some sort of cleanse you found on the Internet. You may have fasted, or purged, or abstained for the sake of your health. You may be sick, you may be tired, you may be wracked with problems that result from being overweight, overworked, and overstressed. You may have tried everything - and still be seeking "the" answer.

I know that much of what is out there in terms of advice is questionable, if not outright quackery. A lot of it is a thinly disguised way to sell you pricey supplements, powders, and other such fairy dust. "Detox" has become the new Wild West, full of shoot-from-the-hip healers and modern snake-oil salesmen, looking to profit from the desperate and debilitated, who are willing to embrace magical thinking in their search for a real cure.

I have seen real results in literally hundreds of patients, and I can tell you with authority that the Detox

Prescription has nothing to do with abnegation and everything to do with embracing and eating food. Real food. Healing, healthful, detoxifying food.

Pharmaceuticals are still the favored recourse among the American medical elite.

God knows that drugs can work wonders, in so many cases greatly improving and even saving lives. But just as often (dare I say more often?), they are unnecessary!

He tells us that all disease and discomfort in the body can be traced to one of only five root causes:

Infectious agents

Inherited tendencies (that is to say, what's bred into our DNA)

Psychological dysfunction

Nutritional deficiency

Toxicity

Modern medical practice is largely focused on the first three of these, all of which can sometimes respond marvelously to our pharmaceutical arsenal. Still, the psychological bases of disease (and many of our "functional" problems) are primarily practiced and reimbursed on the pharmaceutical model, rather than engaged on more fully realigning our minds with more productive thought processes.

The last two—nutritional deficiency and toxicity—are rarely addressed at all, and when they are, it is only in the most severe cases—anemia, say, or ingestion of rat poison.

That is a shame, since nutritional deficiency and toxicity, along with psychological dysfunction, offer our greatest opportunity to intervene in disease before it manifests in chronic symptoms and before our patients need to step on the treadmill of Western medical care. They are a kind of medical "sweet spot," the areas in which I believe we doctors have our greatest opportunity to do good in the world.

We can help our patients make simple changes in their lives that can not only really, truly make them feel and operate better but actually circumvent the kinds of serious diseases—heart disease, diabetes, cancer—that are eating away at their bodies and bank accounts and even our social structure.

Today we've mapped the human genome and logged the potential to treat many inherited diseases right at the source.

This exciting new field of epigenetics—meaning literally "around" the gene—allows us to see how environmental factors alter our gene expression in a specific place within each cell. As a result, we now know that when we take active control of these factors, we can literally help control our health and genetic destiny—no doctors or drugs necessary!

In fact, because some people make their living based on their looks (actors and actresses, models) or physical performance (musicians, athletes, dancers, etc.), they...