Many North Americans live day to day with symptoms of toxicity, which they regard as being normal feelings for their bodies. Saifer and Zellerback illustrate this point in their book Detox (1984): “These individuals think that everyone is drowsy after meals, wakes up with a slight headache, or feels claustrophobic around smokers.” (3) Today, many U.S. citizens grow up taking in moderate to high levels of toxins and have thus never experienced life without them. A toxin has been defined by Elson Hass in The Detox Diet (1996) as, “any substance that creates irritating and/or harmful effects in the body, undermining our health and stressing our biochemical or organ functions.” (22) Toxins come from both what we consciously put into our bodies and from the environment we live in. David Wolfe and Gabriel Cousens, two of the foremost leaders of the raw food diet, claim that they experience bountiful energy and never get sick. Cases such as theirs suggest that feelings of sluggishness, constipation, headaches, and other symptoms of toxicity do not have to be a part of our daily lives.

So when did symptoms of toxicity become normal for North Americans? To understand some of the history of the U.S. public’s health, Richard Anderson gives findings from a survey done by the Public Health Service, quoted in Cleanse & Purify Thyself (1988). This survey focused on human health levels for people in the United States and in 99 other participating countries during the last century. Findings showed the United States was the healthiest country in 1900, but then dropped to second place in 1920. It was during World War II that U.S. citizens raised their health level to the healthiest country once again. According to Dr. Richard Anderson, this can be attributed to the shortage of meat and sugar and the increase of family gardens during this time. The United States dropped to 79th place in 1978 and then in 1987 the U.S. was number 100 out of the 100 participating countries. In his book Cleanse & Purify Thyself (1988), Richard Anderson questions, “In 1987 we hit rock-bottom—that’s number 100 on the list. Yet we are said to be the wealthiest nation in the world. Are we also the most gullible?” (19) Anderson urges us to question the health paradigm in the United States. The standard American diet (often abbreviated as S.A.D.) is generally composed of meat, dairy, refined sugar, refined flour, fried foods, and alcohol.

People living on the standard American diet often experience illnesses during their lives and receive pharmaceutical drugs to alleviate the symptoms. According to Richard Anderson, medical drugs caused 162,556 deaths in the U.S. in 1996. He attributes many of the current health problems that are so prevalent in the United States as coming from the practices of the medical industry. Anderson urges us to reclaim our health by stepping outside of the mainstream health paradigm for the United States and instead, to turn to natural means of preventing illnesses, such as healthy diets and detoxification processes. “If we sincerely want to bring the American people back to health, or if we personally wish to reclaim our own perfect health, we must stop using drugs and chemicals that pollute, suppress, and weaken our bodies. We must return to the natural methods that our Creator designed and created; and that obviously means using herbs and other natural methods that cleanse, purify, and strengthen the body,” states Richard Anderson in Cleanse & Purify Thyself (1988).