Inside Health Magazine: A Better You Starts With What's Inside May. 2016 | Page 7

Enzyme
fast Facts



• Food enzymes are destroyed easily by heat or processing
• Enzymes are found in all raw foods
• Enzyme production naturally reduces with age

But the question that kept spinning through her head the whole time
was why? When she looked back at her childhood to see what could
have possibly caused this mess, she came up empty handed. “I couldn’t
understand it. It’s not like I grew up downwind of a power plant,” she says.
“I was lactose intolerant, but that was about it.” She’d always been a healthy
girl, with a healthy appetite, eating what’s considered a healthy American
diet. Raised in Sea Girt, New Jersey, a sleepy beach town about an hour
outside of New York City, Amie is the oldest of two daughters; her mother,
Joann, was a high school guidance counselor, and her father, Tony, worked
for IBM. Amie played on varsity soccer and lacrosse growing up, and was
involved in everything from student council to volunteering. She went
on to earn a bachelor’s in marketing from Boston University, and avoided
alcohol, drugs, and fast food as a way of life. “I was such a ‘good’ girl,” she
recalls. “I couldn’t imagine how this had happened.”
As part of this massive integrative effort, she went through a battery of
highly sensitive tests that picked up on things that Western docs had
missed (Lyme, PCOS, candida, heavy metal accumulation, mold toxicity,
hypothyroidism, SIBO and more). One genetic test was particularly telling, as
it revealed that Amie was missing a gene called methylenetetrahydrofolate
reductase (MTHFR), which 35 percent of people are missing. Carriers of this
gene are unable to detoxify as efficiently as everyone else, and as a result,
toxins accumulate, causing irritable bowel, arthritis, even cancer. When
you’re missing this gene, you’re also more susceptible to environmental
toxins (herbicides, pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals), which then bind to
fat receptors and compromise your methylation, the process by which your
body repairs DNA and keeps inflammation in check. You need methylation
to stay healthy, and she was not methylating, period.
In Eating Clean, Amie goes into great detail about MTHFR testing, as well as
a list of the most trusted resources for integrative and functional tests that
you and your doctor can use to chart your best next steps—something
Amie wishes she’d had handy 10 years ago. “It would have saved me a ton
of money, time, and frustration,” she says.

Detox Overhaul
Having an integrative medical team was key—but she knew that in order to
heal, and especially given her genetic disadvantage, she had to transform
the way she was living to give her body a fighting chance. So in addition to
the treatments administered by her integrative docs, she did her homework
and went to town on her diet and lifestyle.
In other words, it was time for a detox, in the truest sense of the word—not
a trendy 2-day juice cleanse. We’re talking a serious and intentional effort

to scrutinize everything you put in and on your body with an eye toward
dramatically reducing your exposure to environmental toxins. “Those toxins
come from countless places— from processed foods and pesticides, car
exhaust and other pollution, and cosmetics,” Amie explains.
While the word detox is thrown around a lot, says Amie, it’s often
misunderstood. Rather than a quick fix you use when you’re coming off a
bender, the goal of a true detox is to reset your digestion and dramatically
reduce and remove your exposure and intake of environmental toxins.
Of course, any detox effort starts with food. So Amie cut out many
ingredients that lurk in even the most benign of American meals: gluten,
dairy, soy, refined sugar, corn, eggs, as well as pretty much anything in
a can, box, or bag. No processed foods, preservatives, fillers, emulsifiers,
or dyes. She went on a 21-day food elimination diet (which she lays out
step by step in her book) to help her identify what foods were causing
inflammation in her body (and this varies from person to person, she’s quick
to add). She filled her fridge with fresh organic food—and took out almost
everything else. For a while, when her leaky gut was so bad, she subsisted
on veggies and protein powder blended in a food processor, and at one
point, baby food.
But detox didn’t stop with food—what went on her skin
mattered too. So she started drinking filtered water
only (no plastic bottles). She tossed all her “healthy”
conventional beauty products in favor of cleaner
personal care products such as coconut oil for eye
makeup remover and toothpaste (it’s been shown to
inhibit cavity-causing bacteria and is free of harsh
chemicals).
She soon s