Deceptive Detox Diets Debunked

If scientists talk about a toxin, they will name it, give its chemical structure, explain its origin, explain what symptoms it causes, explain how to test for it and explain what the treatment is. Ask a fan of detox diets to explain the toxins that the detox diet supposedly removes from the human body and you get a blank stare. They can't name a single one of their "toxins", they have no tests for the presence of their toxins. They just know there are toxins, some mysterious yuckiness that supposedly accumulates in their body that requires a special diet and supplements to remove. They wave their brochures at you, or post photos of feces to their blogs as proof.

The detox diet websites make claims that fall apart if you read the ingredients lists and check the properties of the ingredients. "It's common to pass pounds of waste in just 10 days on the Master Cleanse, and not the normal kind of waste. It's often black as tar. How can you live with all this sickening waste clogging up your body?" The "pounds" of "sickening waste" is nothing more than the gel produced by one of the ingredients of the cleanse - powdered Psyllium seed or a clay called bentonite.

As for the "black as tar" color: your liver continually produces bile, which has ingredients that help digest fat and also many waste products. When old red blood cells are destroyed, the iron is removed from the hemoglobin and reused. The liver turns the rest of the hemoglobin into an intense green pigment called biliverdin and excretes it in the bile. "in the mornings you also drink a salt water flush in order to get your bowels moving and eliminating more sludge. In the evening, you drink a Senna tea for the exact same purpose." Senna is an industrial-strength laxative. The results of all this purging will normally be dark, bile-stained mucus, bentonite or psyllium gel. It's not waste, it's the predictable result of the ingredients in the supposed "detoxifying" capsules.

The claims of "ancient wisdom" for detox diets are laughable. A typical claim is "The "Fathers of Western Medicine" (Hippocrates and Galen) recommended fasting and purging. So did Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras." Yes, and those ancient Greeks also routinely recommended slicing open veins and bleeding off a pint or two, applying leeches, and "fumigating the womb" (burning the fat of baby seals mixed with herbs and blowing the smoke into the vagina to cure female complaints).

Medicine moved on, and learned more about nutrition, anatomy and physiology. Slowly medicine began to discard practices that could not be shown to work. Leeches made a comeback, but fortunately for the baby seals, fumigating wombs has permanently fallen out of fashion.

For those who feel great on their detox regime, let me point out that you are on self-produced drugs. Yes, you feel "great", it's the normal euphoria of fasting. The special detox diet ingredients have nothing to do with it, the lack of calories has everything to do with it. The exact cause of the good mood has not been discovered, but it is thought to be ketones and natural opioids such as beta endorphin that are produced when your body is consuming itself for food.

And, face it, you aren't so much interested in eliminating unidentifiable toxins as you are in the possibility of losing weight, like the 20 pounds that singer Beyonce she reportedly lost in her two weeks of "detoxing".

Sources:

De medicina by Aulus Cornelius Celsus, Typographia Societatis, 1786

Fasting: The history, pathophysiology and complications (Medical Progress). West J Med 1982 Nov; 137:379-399 by Kerndt PR, Naughton JL, Driscoll CE, et al

Medical Laboratory Technology and Clinical Pathology by Matthew J. Lynch, W. B. Saunders Co., 1969