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WillowOne's Positions

Detox

My Positions

  1. Commercial "detox" (juice cleanses, teas, foot pads, foot baths, charcoal, colonic irrigation, patches, supplements) removes nothing from the body, because the people selling it have never been able to say what it removes. You already own a detox system. It is called a liver, and it comes with two kidneys.
  2. The word borrows its legitimacy from medical detoxification, the management of withdrawal from alcohol or drugs, which is real, dangerous, and has nothing in common with a £60 bottle of green juice.
  3. As a January ritual it is harmless and faintly religious. As a treatment it is a delay, and as a habit it is the on-ramp to the rest of the wellness aisle.

Notes

  1. Name the toxin. In 2009 the charity Sense About Science asked the makers of fifteen detox products, from smoothies to shampoos, two questions: what do you mean by detox, and which toxins does your product remove? None could name a toxin, and no two gave the same definition of detox. That is the whole case. A claim to remove something unspecified by an unspecified mechanism is not a health claim; it is an unfalsifiable one, and the vagueness is the product.
  2. The props. Ben Goldacre opened Bad Science with the Aqua Detox foot bath, in which the water turns brown as the "toxins" are drawn out through the soles. The water turns brown because an electric current is rusting the iron electrodes; it turns the same brown with no feet in it, and Goldacre demonstrated as much with a Barbie doll. Detox foot pads turn dark overnight because they contain wood vinegar that reacts with sweat; the US Federal Trade Commission obtained a fourteen-million-dollar judgment against the makers of Kinoki pads for claiming otherwise. Ear candles deposit candle wax in the ear. Detox teas are senna, which is a laxative, and the weight lost on a juice cleanse is water and glycogen, which return at the first meal. Activated charcoal does bind substances in the gut, which is why emergency departments use it for overdoses; taken as a wellness drink it binds your medication, including the contraceptive pill. Colonic irrigation washes out the one part of the body that was handling the job already, and occasionally perforates it.
  3. The evidence. A 2015 systematic review looked for clinical trials of commercial detox diets and found none worth the name: a handful of small, unblinded, uncontrolled studies with no follow-up. Nobody has shown that any of these products lowers the body's burden of anything, because nobody has measured it. The industry's answer is that you "feel better" afterwards, and a person who has spent a week not drinking and eating vegetables usually does, for the reasons on the label of the vegetables.
  4. Why it sells. Because it is a purity ritual. Fasting, ablution and the periodic purging of sin are among the oldest religious technologies (The human need for religion), and the detox cleanse rebuilds them for people who no longer have a Lent: an indulgence (Christmas), a guilt, a mortification (the juice), and an absolution. The language gives it away, as it does for the whole New Age: toxins are the new impurity, "clean eating" is the new virtue, and the body is imagined as contaminated by modernity and "chemicals", a word that in this usage means "anything with a name I cannot pronounce", as though water were not one. The Appeal to Nature does the rest.
  5. The harm. Small in most cases, which is why I would not legislate against it. The real harms are at the edges: the juice cleanse that becomes an eating disorder, the "liver detox" that a hepatitis patient tries instead of the clinic, the colonic that perforates, and the fact that a customer who has been taught to buy on the word "toxin" is a customer who will buy the next thing too. The underlying advice, eat more plants and drink less, is sound, free, and does not require the bottle.

Sources

  • Sense About Science, The Detox Dossier (January 2009)
  • Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (2008), chapter 1, "Matter"
  • Klein, A. V. and Kiat, H., "Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence", Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 28 (2015)
  • Federal Trade Commission, FTC v. Xacta 3000 Inc. (Kinoki foot pads), final judgment 2010

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