who doesn’t like shortcuts and magic fixes? We all do, even though most of the quick fixes don’t

work in the long run. This three-day detox, however, is different from your usual fad diet. Instead of
burning calories and fighting hunger pangs, you will be burning bad beauty habits and cleaning up
your act—while losing a few pounds and a handful of zits in the process! The ultimate three-day
green makeover, the Green Beauty Detox, will help you start your skin-friendly and ecoconscious
living from a clean page.

Is Your Food Making You Old?

The connection between our skin’s health and the toxic burden in our bodies is so important I
cannot help but stress it again: the more toxins we accumulate in our system, the faster our skin ages.
No matter how many antiwrinkle serums you rub into your face, your body is crippling under the
weight of the industrial toxins that have entered our food, air, and personal care products in the last
fifty years—and it is these toxins, not the sun or gravity, that are aging our skin. Let’s take a look at
how this happens.

You buy a lean chicken breast and plan to prepare a healthy low-fat chicken Caesar salad. As you
eat it, you ingest the hormone-laden chicken that was fed with antibiotics and drugs to help it gain
weight unnaturally fast. If you decide to barbecue the chicken, keep in mind that carcinogenic
compounds form in char-grilled meats. Your hormones are further disrupted by pesticides and
chemical fertilizers found in lettuce leaves. Your “healthy” dessert of strawberries comes with a
spoonful of pesticides and fertilizers, and the mercury-laden fish you ate earlier adds to a lifetime
load of toxic metals accumulated in the bones and fat tissue. All of these toxins come from homemade,
“wholesome” food. What about salads prepared at a fast-food counter? The average person in North
America each year consumes up to 12 pounds of food additives and 1 gallon of pesticides and
herbicides sprayed on fruit, vegetables, and animal feed.

Add the synthetic chemicals creeping into our bodies from household cleaning products, cigarette
smoke, hair dyes, cosmetics and antiperspirants, chlorinated water, office supplies, and beauty and
personal care products—and the picture starts to look frightening, to say the least. Traces of Agent
Orange and other pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers, preservatives, antibiotics, mercury, lead,
heavy metals, and paraffin are found in everybody, no matter what their age, location, or occupation.
This body burden causes a host of diseases—and most visibly, it makes us age at a faster rate.

Environmental toxins speed up premature aging by mimicking estrogen hormones in our bodies.
The feed that nonorganic farmers give to their cows, chickens, pigs, and lambs is loaded with
hormones that make animals gain weight at an incredibly high rate, unseen in nature. When we eat
meat and dairy products from these farms, we consume these hormones, too. Even if you are
vegetarian, you are still eating your load of estrogen-mimicking chemicals. Pesticides used to protect
crops from bugs or fungus and fertilizers that speed up crop growth have an estrogenic effect on
humans.

Xenoestrogens, or man-made, artificial hormones, are different from natural estrogens present in
plants and human bodies. Xenoestrogens were introduced into the environment only seventy years
ago, and they have a cumulative effect on the human body. First of all, they damage the reproductive
system, causing problems with fertility in women and low sperm count in men. Xenoestrogens are