It’s Summer. And that means it’s beach season, relaxation season, and recovery-from-all-of-the-Christmas-parties season.
It’s also the season when people start to talk about wanting to start the new year in peak health — and a lot of companies make a whole lot of money selling products that claim to remove ‘harmful toxins’ from our systems.
But here’s the thing: with very few exceptions, detoxes aren’t actually a medically proven solution to health woes like tiredness and sluggishness — and indeed, embarking on a ‘detox’ or ‘cleanse’ may do more harm than good to your body.
Don’t believe us? Read on.
What even IS a toxin?
Here’s a problem with a lot of detox diets: Most detoxes don’t actually identify what a ‘toxin’ is, and therefore can’t prove the validity of their product, as Lifehacker reports.
Obviously our body does have some nasties in it — most of us have been exposed to alcohol and poisonous toxins from air pollution, for example — but assuming our bodies are healthy, we already have an inbuilt ‘detoxification system’ – it’s called our kidneys, our liver, and our lungs, as Emeritus Professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University Edzard Ernst told The Guardian last week. Detoxes are therefore totally unnecessary for most healthy people.
“It’s a scandal,” Mr Ernst added. “It’s criminal exploitation of the gullible [person] on the street and it sort of keys into something that we all would love to have – a simple remedy that frees us of our sins, so to speak.