If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed walking through a drugstore aisle filled with cleaning supplies you don’t trust, shampoo you don’t understand, and unhealthy snacks you crave — but still buy — Dr. Aly Cohen understands. A triple board-certified physician in internal medicine, rheumatology and integrative medicine, Cohen has seen firsthand what happens when our modern lifestyle quietly overwhelms the immune system. In her new book, “Detoxify: The Everyday Toxins Harming Your Immune System and How to Defend Against Them” (Simon Element), Cohen takes on a problem that feels both invisible and too big to solve and offers practical steps that readers can start right away. She also explains some of the more intimidating esoteric jargon that gets thrown around by health gurus too often.
“I’m a rheumatologist, this is what I’ve done for 22 years,” Cohen told The Journal. “And understanding that these chemicals have a whole host of effects from the immune system perspective — it just became clear to me we needed a different framework.”
“Detoxify” reframes these stressors and gets readers to take a productive look at how chemical exposure affects the immune system. The term she coined for these agents is “IDCs” — immune disrupting chemicals. The book is structured by what Cohen calls the “Four A’s”: Assess, Avoid, Add and Allow.
Assessing your exposure — whether through water, air, food, or skin — is the first step Cohen breaks down. She guides readers to make realistic substitutions, rethink how they approach sleep and nutrition, yet still give themselves permission to make small, imperfect changes over time.
Cohen’s approach is grounded in a combination of her clinical practice, medical literature and the real-life frustrations she faced trying to help patients with symptoms that didn’t respond to conventional treatments.
“You need the why to do the what,” Cohen said. “That is what I’ve learned in teaching and I love teaching, but you need to give people a reason without scaring them too much to understand where the problem is, so that you can give them a million solutions, and that’s where people slowly start to see change and make those changes over time.”
Cohen points out that only 91 chemicals are regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act — which hasn’t been updated since 1974. Meanwhile, newer contaminants like PFAS, known as “forever chemicals,” remain widespread and underregulated. California and Maryland residents can take solace — regulators in those states have already banned PFAs from personal-care products containing some of these chemicals.
Cohen describes how bottled water is often “stored on a hot truck from Texas with Colgate and Listerine” before it reaches store shelves. Instead, she advocates for reverse osmosis filtration systems and points readers to studies showing how water contaminants affect everything from gut health to inflammation levels.
Cohen also offers specific, doable advice when it comes to rethinking food choices. She explains that while organic food is often more expensive or inaccessible, even small swaps — like switching to frozen organic produce or washing fruits and vegetables in a mix of baking soda and white vinegar — can reduce ingestion of surface pesticide residue. She also explains the danger of the FDA’s “GRAS” loophole — the “Generally Recognized As Safe” label — that allows over 12,000 food additives into circulation without independent review.
She makes the case for reducing food packaging exposure as well: how we cook, store, and reheat food can affect what we end up eating not just nutritionally, but chemically.
Throughout the book, Cohen returns to a recurring theme: detoxification isn’t about perfection. “The goal of this book isn’t to be perfect,” Cohen writes, “it’s to be as healthy as possible without losing your mind, your money, or your sense of well-being.”
My message is really, you want to layer in these changes as a lifestyle,” Cohen said. “You don’t want to layer them in as a diet, as a cleanse, as a short in and out. You have to be really realistic about what your goals are, where to start and where to carry it on once you’ve sort of gotten your legs going.”
Cohen knows the word “detox” can be off-putting. “It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, and it can be harmful,” Cohen said. “People do detox cleanses that I think are harmful. People do starvation diets. People do extreme things.”
“Detoxify” closes with a 21-day plan that reads less like a boot camp and more like a friendly curriculum. The final chapters offer lab test codes readers can use with their doctors, recipes built on low-exposure ingredients, and sample swaps for everything from dental floss to frying pans.
What’s most compelling about Cohen’s voice — both in print and in conversation — is that Cohen resists the tone of a wellness guru or fearmonger. Cohen is interested in solutions that are within reach, backed by research, and guided by experience.
“I still color my hair with a chemical dye,” Cohen writes in the book’s introduction. “And I occasionally use or consume items that contain known toxins.” But Cohen also made measurable changes after her dog, Truxtun, got sick in 2008. She saw the ripple effect in her own and her children’s health what examining environmental toxins can do. “I’m living proof that you can improve your body’s ability to detoxify with minor lifestyle changes,” Cohen writes.
Cohen laments that humans have been on Earth way too long — 4.5 million years — but in only the last 80 years, humans have created 95,000-plus chemicals. “Since World War II, Naugahyde (vinyl fabric), Rayon, Formica (laminate), Plexiglass,” Cohen said. “Have saved us on resources, it’s saved on wood, and all of these other natural resources. It made things convenient. We can drop plates and a ‘50s housewife doesn’t have to clean it up. But the problem is, when we put these into our lives and make them part of our existence, we don’t think about where they go in the body and what they do to the environment.”
Cohen wants readers to see their lives as connected to those 95,000 inputs — and to understand that every little swap counts. “Detoxify” encourages readers to ask better questions — and make changes without driving themselves crazy.
FIVE ACTIONABLE TAKEAWAYS FROM “DETOXIFY”
Water Filtration (Reverse Osmosis): “I use reverse osmosis for my water systems at work and at home,” Cohen said. “It’s such a great way to clean water and one of the most effective ways to get rid of chemicals. There’s a whole chapter on water just so people understand the variety of filtration systems.”
Replacing Plastic Containers: “Use stainless steel cups, I use that for my kids,” Cohen said. There’s actual levels of food-grade stainless steel, and they have nickel and they have some other metals, but they’re typically not lead and mercury.”
Eat More Cruciferous Vegetables and Alliums: “Aim to eat two to five cups (raw or cooked) of cruciferous vegetables daily, such as broccoli, arugula, cauliflower, and kale, as well as alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, chives) daily or as often as possible, all which help activate the liver’s most effective phase of detoxification.”
Practice Intermittent Fasting: “Identify which two days per week are best for you to practice intermittent fasting (if approved by your healthcare provider) to help slow cellular aging, activate cellular cleaning, and speed up the detoxifying enzymes and processes.”
Daily Exercise and Sauna Use: “If approved by your healthcare provider, find a local gym or fitness center with a sauna and go as often as possible, for up to twenty minutes per session, being sure to hydrate adequately with filtered water afterward.”
