Why a Spring Cleanse?

When we consider how people used to live, a spring cleanse made a lot of sense. Imagine a time not so long ago when people lived more of a traditional lifestyle, perhaps on a family farm. The availability of fresh food during the wintertime was limited. People lived off sundries, preserves, canned and dehydrated food, smoked food, and often a lot of meat—especially in colder northern regions where growing fresh produce was challenging. 

In the winter, leafy greens were scarce, while root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, beets, and celeriac kept well in cold storage. As spring arrived, and fresh green leaves emerged, these plants offered nutrients and medicinal properties people’s bodies were lacking after months of heavier, preserved foods.

All of that said, not too many modern people live like this anymore. Industrial agriculture has made fresh(ish) food available to a lot more people during the winter months. One can walk down the aisles of most grocery stores and find all sorts of greenery in the middle of snowy January! But if we take a step back and  think of living this way, it helps us to examine the qualities of traditional winter foods, their effects on the body, and why a gentle spring cleanse makes sense and might even be necessary.

The Qualities that Predominate in Winter

Overall, the foods we eat in winter are heavy. Root vegetables are starchy and meat is a heavier food, especially red meat. Depending on how they’re prepared, these foods are more difficult to digest and tend to cause stagnation in the body. Root veggies and meat are not as light as foods from plants’ aerial parts—leaves, flowers, fruits, etc. And this is for good reason, after all if it’s supremely cold outside, eating heavier, dense, fatty foods provides insulation and protection from the cold. 

The winter season has two primary patterns that we can observe: dampness and cold.

Cold is not just a numerical value on a thermometer; it is an overarching quality of a slower metabolism, and things don’t move as efficiently in the body as they should. The winter season can produce a cold/depression tissue state—one where the constitution as a whole, and specific organs, become understimulated, existing in a state of hypofunctioning, slowed in their responses and sluggish in their physiological functioning. This sluggishness can produce an environment much more prone to the stagnation of fluids as well, leading to a damp/stagnation tissue state. We can see this stagnation in the digestive and circulatory systems. Cold diverts blood flow, so you appear paler when cold: the blood isn’t reaching up to the surface or out to the periphery. Hence, you get cold hands and feet. 

Cold can also cause digestive sluggishness—you might notice that you feel heavy after meals or that bowel movements are slower and heavier. As we emerge from the winter season, there will probably be dampness and stagnation in the body. Of course this will differ from person to person based on their unique constitution, as well as the environment of where one lives and what the winter season is like there. But in general, the tendency during winter is to accumulate an excess of cold and dampness. 

In Āyurvedic terminology, this is seen as an excess of kapha dosha. According to Āyurveda, kapha dosha predominantly accumulates through the winter, especially late winter and early spring. The premise of doing a spring cleanse is that as we shift out of winter and into spring, we do some transitional protocols to clear that excess dosha accumulation. Along with the accumulation we can clear damp, heavy, cold, and stagnant qualities, to make room for other qualities to enter with the new season, and avoid the longer term effects of dampness and stagnation in the body. This is a general premise of many traditional systems of medicine for how we can stay in harmony with the changing of the seasons and nature as a whole, because the state of nature outside affects our own ecosystem on the inside. 

As Above, so Below, as Without so Within:

How Patterns in Nature Affect Health

When you look outside, the qualitative differences between the seasons are apparent both in terms of weather and in how you feel within yourself. You tend to be a little more lively and energetic in the summer and more mellow, possibly sleeping more in wintertime.

Seasonal patterns affect your health, and it’s a good idea to orient your lifestyle, daily routine, diet, and herbal protocols to support those seasonal transitions. 

Think about it this way: a particular quality accumulates during a season, and then it begins to decrease as that season ends. Meanwhile, the next seasonal quality is rising. The predominant qualities will differ from place to place, so it depends on where you live. Āyurveda has its own distinct pattern of the seasons and which doshas govern them. However, we must understand that it’s a system that arose in a particular environment (South Asia). Living in Norway is very different from South Asia or Mexico, which is very different from Arizona or Washington state.

It’s important to observe the energetic qualities and characteristics of the ecosystem where you live. By energetic, I mean the temperature, moisture, and tonal qualities of your environment and how that affects you as an individual, your constitution. When you become observant of these patterns in nature and how those qualities change through the seasons, you can learn how to adjust your lifestyle accordingly.

Grand Polarities: The Equinox Transitions

Equinox transitions are significant because they’re a grand polarity of creation and of the cosmos. From the Chinese perspective, this is yin and yang. In alchemy, it’s celestial niter and celestial salt. Spring and summer tend to have more yang, celestial niter-type qualities. The energy is moving upwards and outwards. It’s warmer, more active, and more dynamic. The plants are growing, the birds are flying, we’re gardening, it’s summer, we’re more active, and there’s more sunlight.

Fall and winter tend to be more yin. The qualities are moving down and in, and the plants are dying back to the roots. The trees are dropping their leaves. We have increasingly longer nights and shorter days as we approach the winter solstice. So, it’s necessary to observe the qualities unique to where you live. The equinoctial points are the most important to consider, because that’s where you generally have a shift from a yin season to a yang season at the spring transition and then from yang to yin at the autumn transition.

In Āyurveda, they say that kapha dosha has cold, damp, and heavy qualities and tends towards stagnation. Those qualities begin to accumulate predominantly in the stomach, as this is the primary site of kapha in the digestive system.

The accumulation from the stomach tends to reflex into the lungs, which is why if you have an intolerance to dairy, when you eat it, you might get a phlegmy cough or a phlegmy feeling in your throat. Dairy is a very kapha-genic food. It has the same qualities as kapha, so it tends to aggravate kapha in people with that predisposition. This gives us a hint about where those qualities will build up within the system—in the stomach and then reflexing into the lungs. These are the tissues or organs that we want to focus on in the spring transition, to ensure that kapha gets cleared out of the system with our remedies, lifestyle, and food.

If kapha is not cleared, it is common for people to get sick during seasonal transitions. If you start paying attention to this, you’ll notice that people get sick more often at those transitional points between winter and spring, summer and autumn, and autumn and winter. This is when people get coughs, colds, flu, RSV, COVID, etc. So, in the winter-to-spring transition, especially because of the nature of kapha dosha and its correlation to the lungs, it’s not uncommon for people to get respiratory tract infections. Again, this is because kapha builds up in winter and needs to be moved out. You are more sensitive during those transitions because as the vital qualities are shifting seasonally externally, they’re shifting within us too. 

Generally, if we want to live a “natural lifestyle” or “holistic lifestyle,” it means more than simply buying natural products instead of unnatural products or eating organic instead of nonorganic. It literally has to do with how you live. Attending to these major seasonal transitions marked by the equinoxes is very important, and one of the primary ways we do this moving from winter to spring is with “the spring cleanse.” 

What to Focus on in a Spring Cleanse

So what types of herbs should we consider during the spring transition?

With cleansing, we should think about which organs, systems, and tissues of the body might be affected by the traditional lifestyle that people used to live. If we eat a predominance of sundries, preserves, and meat, it’s more likely that the digestive system will begin to show signs of stagnation.

Naturally, digestive fire tends to be at its lowest during winter compared to other seasons, so stagnation in the GI is typical. Bowel movements might be slower or less robust. We often see stagnation in the liver, which can then radiate outwards and cause toxin accumulation or what the old texts refer to as “bad blood syndrome.” This is essentially a state of poor clearance of metabolic waste products, which when they linger around for too long are considered “toxins.” 

I think it’s worth clarifying that when the term blood is used in this context, from my understanding, it’s not just the blood flowing through your veins and arteries. Rather, it’s the “greater blood,” which encompasses the fluidic element of the extracellular matrix. This fluidic matrix that bathes the cells is where the nutrients get squeezed out of the capillary beds and enter the extracellular fluid. The cells are bathed in that fluid mix and take in what they need. Then, the cells expel waste products back into the extracellular fluid. Those waste products need to be delivered to our organs of elimination so we can get rid of them. Water-soluble waste goes to the kidneys for excretion in the urine, and other waste products go to the liver to be further metabolized by being made water-soluble and sent to the kidneys or excreted with the bile into the digestive system to be eliminated through the stool.

So when we consider the concepts of stagnation, toxicity, or “bad blood,” this is often what we’re talking about. The body is generally unable to keep up with the excretion of basic metabolic waste products and they can have a tendency to accumulate within the system. This can predominantly be in the liver, lymphatics, blood (extracellular fluid), digestive system, and other channels of elimination. In Western herbalism, the general approach to this pattern is through the use of alteratives. 

Herbs for the Spring Cleanse: Alteratives and Nutritives

Alteratives

Alteratives are herbs that work on the metabolic processes in general, but more specifically, they open and move the channels of elimination: the bowels, skin, liver, kidney, urinary tract, blood, and lymphatics are all part of the process of eliminating toxins and waste products.

Alteratives are a broad category of herbal medicine, thus to simply categorize an herb as an alterative is a bit vague. We know it’s working somewhere in that process of elimination through the channels. But a lot is going on here; we’re talking about multiple organ systems: the digestive system, liver, the gallbladder to an extent, the greater blood, lymphatics, the skin through the elimination of sweat, and the kidneys and the urinary tract.

That’s a large portion of our organs. This is why, when I’m classifying herbs, I like to know what type of alterative we’re talking about. It could be a digestive alterative, which might be a laxative bitter tonic, which will help drain things down and out and trigger bile secretions, our body’s natural laxative.

Bitters tend to have their own innate laxative effect to a degree. When we think about the word laxative, we usually think of stimulant laxatives, where if you take too much, you might have griping, spasmodic pain, and have to run to the bathroom in the hope something embarrassing doesn’t happen. Digestive alteratives tend to be bitter, tonic or laxative. 

Hepatic alteratives are typically bitter in nature as well, because bitters have an affinity for the liver and the gallbladder. Bitter alteratives work more on the liver detoxification side of things. It’s worth noting here that these bitter alteratives that operate on the liver, gallbladder and digestion are generally drying humorally and tend to reduce an excess of kapha dosha. 

Then, we have lymphatic alteratives, which are often referred to as lymphagogues. These herbs will help move the lymphatic tissue and fluids to relieve lymphatic swelling and stagnation. Some herbs can even be specific to certain areas: some will work on the throat region, some on the inguinal region, etc.

The antidyscratics are another category. This older term refers to blood dyscrasias, an impurity of the blood. The antidyscratics are loosely categorized as blood purifiers. Again, this is the greater blood we’re talking about. These are herbs that are commonly used for skin conditions—inflammatory skin conditions, chronic skin problems, acne, eczema, boils etc.

Kidney urinary tract alteratives are diuretic or aquaretic remedies, which drain dampness from the tissues and increase urination, thereby increasing elimination of wastes through that route. 

This subclassification of the alterative category is important to get more specificity in regards to what type of alterative is being used. As you can see, they’re all quite different in their organ affinities and other associated actions. In general, this category tends to be drying and cooling energetically, thus if someone has an excess of cold in their system, it’s a good idea to combine them with warming stimulant herbs, such as Angelica (Angelica archangelica), Black Pepper (Piper nigrum), or Ginger (Zingiber officinale). But considering their primary function in the body, the category of alteratives is fitting for the spring cleanse: the channels of elimination can get a bit clogged up in the wintertime, and these herbs will help correct those issues.  

Nutritives

The other side of a spring cleanse is to nourish with nutritives. If you have a very limited diet during the winter season, you’ll probably develop nutrient deficiencies to some degree. This is especially true if you’re eating a lot of canned food. I’m not saying canned food is completely devoid of nutrition, but canning does affect the food’s nutritional value. If you’re not eating a diverse range of foods, you’ll end up lacking a diversity of nutrients. It’s also worth noting that when the pattern described previously is present, not only is the system stagnant with metabolic waste products congesting the channels of elimination, but it also congests the body’s ability to receive nutrients. So not only is it hard to get wastes out, but also to get nutrients in.

The nutritive tonic category of herbs is an important aspect of the spring cleanse (spring tonics are another way these herbs are referred to). These remedies are nutrient dense, giving you a broad spectrum of vitamins, minerals, and micronutrients. You only need tiny amounts of certain nutrients (such as trace elements), but if you don’t get the amounts you need, certain biochemical pathways in the body may not run as smoothly or optimally as they should.

One interesting aspect of the concept of the spring cleanse, is that there are actually herbs that are both mildly alterative and nutritive tonic. This relatively small category of herbs have gentle properties for opening up the channels of elimination (usually the lymphatics, liver and kidneys) while at the same time contain ample amounts of vitamins, minerals and trace elements. A few good examples of remedies that fit into this category include:

• Red Clover (Trifolium pratense)
• Nettle leaf (Urtica dioica)
• Burdock root (Arctium lappa)
• Bladderwrack (Fucus vesciculosis)
• Kelp (Laminaria spp.)
• Dandelion leaf and root (Taraxacum officinale)

So to wrap up, there are two parts to the spring cleanse: The first part is to cleanse the excess with mild alteratives. The goal is to drain damp accumulation, warm up and disperse cold, and stimulate stagnation. This is a strategy I find important for aiding in the transition from winter season into spring season as it has the power to strengthen your immune system, and, hopefully, avoid those coughs, colds, flu, etc., that tend to hit at the seasonal transition points. From there you want to nourish deficiencies with nutritive tonics. Consider these two aspects of the spring cleanse can be done at the same time!

I want to emphasize that the alteratives you use should be mild. I don’t want you to go out there and look up alteratives and see something like Poke root or Stillingia and think “I’m going to use those for my spring cleanse.” It’s important to use mild alteratives. The herbs that would be growing up out of the ground in the early springtime are the most preferable to use, as after all, those would be the ones our ancestors would use as the winter snow melts and those first leaf buds start to emerge from the Earth. 

Is a Spring Cleanse Appropriate?

Here’s an important question to consider: Is it necessary or appropriate for the modern human to do this? Most people have access to food at grocery stores that probably isn’t seasonally available in that local environment, but because food is shipped all over the world, we can get fresh apples in the spring and lush greens grown in heated greenhouses or in California where they’ve got more sunshine. We can get avocados from Mexico. We can get many types of foods year-round because of the global food system that is in place in many parts of the world. So it begs the question: is the traditional spring cleanse an appropriate thing to do? For me this is an individual question.

In our household, we have gradually moved to a more traditional lifestyle. We don’t go to the grocery store very often. We grow and raise most of our own food. We trade with other local farmers for food they grow and get most of our food locally and seasonally. We raise all of our own meat, so we tend to consume a lot more meat in winter than we used to. There just isn’t as much fresh food coming out of the garden in the middle of winter here in northwest Washington. So as I’ve been living this way, I’ve had a bit of an “Aha” about the spring cleanse. It’s very clear to me why this was a part of some traditional cultures and lifestyles, and I find the spring cleanse a useful tool.

But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily for everyone. We should consider the context in which certain therapeutic models or medical practices emerged and whether those same principles would apply to a modern human that tends to live quite differently. That being said, sometimes a little mild round of alteratives and nutritives can do certain people some good as they emerge out of the cold stagnancy of winter. So whether it’s right for you is up to you ultimately, but these are some of the factors worth considering.