Deadly Nightshades

5 March 2007

You've probably heard of 'Deadly Nightshades' - they sound sinister, but they are actually a group of plants belonging to the belladonna family. Incredibly to me, they produce an array of lovely vegetables including potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines (egg plants) and capsicum peppers (also known as bell peppers, the sweet ones). Those are some of the foods that need to be excluded from a 6-week liver cleansing programme because, healthy and delicious as they are - we tend to eat too much of them. The toxin belladonna can have an irritating effect on our liver over time, so it makes sense to have a break from eating them once a year and to experiment with other lovely vegetables, getting out of the roast Mediterranean vegetable, tomato sauces and spuds-with-everything habit that we can suddenly realise we've got! Coffee, chocolate, alcohol (other than moderate amounts of good quality wine!) and wheat are the other main liver-irritants. More on wheat next time

Roberta Stimson, m.b.r.c.p., mach.rt

Practitioner of Holistic and Preventative Medicine