The Healthy Living Space: 70 Practical Ways to Detoxify the Body and Home by Richard Leviton

Book Description Richard Leviton, health journalist and author of Physician and Brain Builders!, provides 70 essential tools for achieving optimal health by cleaning the poisons out of your body and home, and not just the chemicals you keep under your sink!

Review
By Mary Guthrie, Generation Green

The Healthy Living Space is a primer for those who know that we’re polluting our planet and fear they’re polluting their own bodies. Richard Leviton is a respected health journalist, and he brings a knowledge of medicine to his passionate environmental awareness.

Leviton begins with a very detailed, familiar, depressing litany of the environmental damage humans have caused. PCBs heavily pollute the diet of natives of Greenland, mothers’ milk contains dioxin; nowhere on Earth, we now know, is truly clean. The toxic pesticides on my lawn could wind up polluting your drinking water.

The good news though is that our actions can also have a positive impact, on both the individual and global levels. By finding the toxins in our homes and changing our behavior as consumers, we can make a powerful difference in the amount of toxic pollution generated.

By solving the mysteries of what toxic load has been borne by our bodies year after year, we can find ways to only treat it healthfully. The author argues that our bodies have been slowly building up toxins over years and years, and that this buildup creates sickness and weakens the body’s ability to defend itself.

“A great deal more evidence could be marshaled to make the case for an alarming degree of widespread toxicity among human in our time,” writes Leviton (The Healthy Living Space, page 92). “But the facts and extrapolations reviewed here should be enough to motivate us to think about detoxification, that is, voluntarily assisting our internal detoxification system to catch up on processing its toxic burden and ridding our bodies of a lifetime accumulation of toxins. Getting yourself involved in a carefully planned and responsibly staged detoxification program could be one of the smartest things you ever do for your health and well being.”

The process can be mysterious, but Leviton’s goal is to break it down for us. The first step is to assess your toxic load, in part by completing a short questionnaire. An amazing amount of time is spent with this point because there are so many factors to consider – nutrition, food allergies, food additives, pesticide exposure, heavy metal exposure, chlorine and other drinking water contaminants, smoke, substance abuse, processed foods, synthetic carpets. And on and on.

This book’s strength lies in its ability to guide us through this dizzying array of lethal elements, to help us to face them and assess their presence, and their danger, but then to move onto a different place, where we can just as methodically figure out how to take those poisons out of our bodies and homes.

Most readers will take some of the advice (drink more water than coffee; better yet, give up the coffee); and let other parts go by (“bounce on a trampoline to improve your lymphatic drainage”). But even the more unusual ideas are supported by plenty of research and very good explanations. The book addresses emotional and spiritual issues, and takes the Eastern art of feng shui very seriously indeed.

More and more people are finding that traditional medicine doesn’t have answers for their specific health needs. Others know that medical treatment after the fact isn’t the best approach, but rather living a healthful life and preventing problems before they start. As with environmental pollution, prevention is a very important concept for health. The Healthy Living Space will help to prevent the pollution of both body and home, and ultimately our planet.

To view a more complete list of Generation Green's recommended adult reading, click here.