According to Randall Fitzgerald, author of "The Hundred Year Lie", we must all detoxify ourselves regulary to help stave off disease due to our toxic environment. This can best be done through a steady alkaline-based water and food diet and a detoxification program. Here is a review of how we become "intoxicated" in our bodies:

• The soil in which foods are grown is depleted (on average 85% of the micronutrients present a century ago are gone) and exhausted from erosion and overuse.
• Chemicals sprayed on soil and crops kill good as well as bad, and are ingested when we eat the crops.
• Water used to irrigate the crops is contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, hormone disruptors, industrial chemicals and other toxins.
• Genetically-manufactured crops homogenize and reduce the diversity of these 'products' and contaminate and overrun more diverse food strains.
• Farmed animals (and our pets!) are fed nutritionally poor feed, contaminated and soaked with waste products and toxins, and injected with dangerous hormones, all of which we ingest when we eat them.
• Harvested crops are then further soaked in preservatives and other poisons to make them last longer or look better.
• They are then processed by freezing, canning, irradiation, spraying of further toxins etc. all of which kill much or most of their nutritional value. Water used in processing is also contaminated.
• Additives are then thrown in, many of them synthetic, untested and arguably dangerous to our health, mostly for flavouring, preservation, aesthetic or cosmetic purposes, which further pollute and deplete the nutritional value of the foods.
• To try to compensate for the damage done, synthetic vitamins and nutrients are then added, many of which are not properly absorbed by the body as the natural ones stripped out from them would have been. Nevertheless, these additives allow food processors to legally sell these products as 'enriched'.
• The food, pharmaceutical and chemical lobbies aggressively interfere with, disrupt and disable the few weak government programs that are meant to try to minimize the dangers to human health created by these industries (e.g. the aspartame lobby's blocking of bans on its dangerous products and blocking the introduction of safe natural alternatives like stevia).
• Endemic, pervasive and persistent toxins, like flame retardants in furniture and benzene persisting in carpet fibres, and including many that are so dangerous they have been illegal for decades, continue to show up in all our foods, in the soil, air and water -- there's simply no filtering them out or getting rid of them.
• We wash or mix these products with water contaminated with other toxins.
• Plastics and other materials used to package, heat and store these products leach toxins into the foods over time and with exposure to heat.
• Finally, we eat the resultant, utterly-depleted, toxic stew. And we're surprised to be both malnourished and poisoned as a result.
• The vast amounts of antibiotics in which our foods are soaked also cause havoc to good bacteria in our bodies, and enable antibiotic-resistant strains of bad bacteria to evolve which make us ill.
• Both in utero and through our DNA, we pass along these toxins and the genetic weaknesses they cause to future generations, making them even less resistant to the toxins they will ingest as they eat our modern food products.
• These chemicals are not only destructive and often dangerous in their own right, but in combination and interaction with other chemicals have been found to be many times (sometimes hundreds of times) as toxic as they are by themselves. There is essentially no testing of such interactions, and to do so now would cost trillions of dollars and take generations because of the sheer number of combinations).