Detox Dilemna
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009
I was in the health food store the other day. I only ever go there to buy petroleum-free shampoo. I used to buy this great home-made olive oil soap there made by an old Greek lady in the neighbourhood in a copper boiler in her back yard but they don’t stock it any more.
I never buy any edible products or supplements or any of the myriad wacky cures they sell because I gave all that up years ago. It’s very liberating - and easier on the wallet - not to walk around in a state of angst that disease and decay might be developing as I neglect to consume the latest potion our billion-dollar alternative health industry decrees I should.
One young guy in the queue ahead of me was not so angst-free. As he wrestled a gigantic plastic tub of protein powder onto the counter he asked furtively: “Got anything for detox?”
The shop owner’s eyes brightened as she realised she had a bite on the line. “Oh yes, you can have a herbal detox or buy a complete kit.”
I looked the guy over and wondered why he felt he needed detoxing. He clearly worked out at the gym and looked great: modishly dressed in sporty casual clothes, and fashionably tattooed on his dumbbell-pumped biceps. Maybe he just stayed up too late on the internet at night reading about the toxins that riddled his liver. Or maybe he just partied too hard with his friends on the weekends and drank too much and hadn’t eaten properly since he left home.
It did occur to me that maybe his kidneys were struggling to excrete the overload of protein he was putting into himself. We have gone protein-mad as a society and seem to think that pumping extra into ourselves will give us better muscles and less bodyfat but don’t let me get started on that.
The very nice and earnest lady behind the counter was listing the herbs and their effects on organ function - how this or that bark or berry extract would help the liver expel toxins, and so on. Was I in a fluro-lit, air-conditioned modern shop in a shopping centre or in some back-alley bazaar in medieval Baghdad? I almost expected her to drag a live snake out from under the counter and slit its throat or drain its gall bladder into a goblet for him to drink.
By the recitation of the magical properties of the fifth ingredient the young guy’s eyes were glazing over and I was getting a bit antsy.
He finally cut the snake-oil pitch short with: “How much is the kit?” In other words, I don’t really want the spiel, I’m already converted, I just need to know how much.
“149 dollars.”
“Oh. Well I’ll just take this and maybe I’ll get the other later.”
He handed over a couple of 50-dollar bills and I didn’t see him get much change for his huge keg of milk powder.
Part of me wanted to argue with the lady about why he needed to spend so much money to detoxify his body when a bit more water, sleep and less night-clubbing would probably work just as well. Another part of me saw a nice person who really believed in the benefit of what she sold and had no compunction about parroting the sales pitch on the product without ever verifying its truth.
I’ve been wandering around ever since, thinking about our fear of our toxic bodies and talking to people about their experiences with cleaning them up with fasting, or this or that product.
We just love the idea that our digestive tract, major organs and blood are accumulating toxic waste products faster than our beleagured kidneys and liver can get rid of them, or that environmental pollutants are slowly building up in us from the food we eat, the air we breathe, or the water we drink.
No amount of scientific discussion about how our bodies work can allay this almost religious conviction. What we need is a really good purge and our energy, digestion, skin, and circulation will improve. If we could just rid ourselves of the undigested matter clinging to the walls of our bowel, the invisible poisons infusing our tissues, and the harmful minerals and parasites weighing us down we’d be smarter, slimmer and happier.
Wouldn’t we?
Hey, if it were true then that simple cure to so many of life’s complex and interdependent issues costing only $149 would be very good value.
Where we anti-agers get involved is with some of our declining body functions that tempt us towards a quick-fix epiphany. Sometimes digestion slows with age, but this is usually a natural part of ageing and can usually be improved with more fibre, diet and exercise. Gall stones are more common as we age but resorting to colonic enemas, herbal “flushes” and special teas are not the answer.
“Oh, but I went on a juice fast and felt great afterwards,” people say. They usually fess up that they felt like rubbish after one day and refuse to believe that their body’s famine-survival mechanisms kick in and scrounge around the body for fuel and eventually feed the brain, kidneys and red blood cells with alternate, self-cannabalistic sources.
Religious mystics and holy men fast to create light-headedness from low blood sugar and an out-of-body sensation that they attribute to connection with a higher force.
Ironically, on a fast our bodies’ superbly efficient detoxification systems - the liver and kidneys -are less able to function without adequate fuel and are more likely to let waste products accumulate. In the absence of carbohydrate, as any victim of the Atkins Diet can attest, the body converts fat to ketone bodies to fuel the brain. Carbohydrate is its only fuel under normal circumstances but it will burn these eventually toxic substitutes for a short time. Oh, and not in sufficient quantities to cause significant weight loss. Then it goes back to converting muscle to sugar to keep ketone bodies from producing acidosis which is very unpleasant and not at all good for you.
So fasting actually causes the build up of waste products you are trying to expel and robs you of lean muscle mass in the process. Nice!
By the way, this is not just me making this up. This is basic nutrition biochemistry. I wish more of us would actually find out how our bodies work and marvel at the fine-tuning of the astonishing processes that go on inside us. That would make us less vulnerable to the charlatanism of detox merchants.
But then life wouldn’t be black-and-white would it? No matter how much you bash someone around the head with scientific evidence, a creeping intuition inside them forces them to ignore it and look for a miracle cure for fatigue, pimples, or bout after bout of colds. After all, the doctor hasn’t helped, and Mary at work reckons brindleberry extract helped her lose stacks of weight and feel fabulous.
Never mind that natural chemicals in food are thousands of times more potent than many of the additives that go in them. Never mind that we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history and gorge at a cornucopia that has no precedent for safety, reliability and variety.
No, modern life is evil and is slowly infecting us with pernicious toxins and parasites. Our bowels are clogged with hardened faecal matter that clings to its walls and prevents absorption of nutrients. What we need is a few days off wheat and dairy to “rest” the system and a high-priced regimen of herbal tablets and potions to flush out nasties. It all sounds so good I wish it really worked like that.
Hey, you want parasites? Like the ones so many alternative therapies say we are riddled with and can only be expunged with their product? Go back to Saxon society in medieval England where communal latrines led to human infestation with giant worms that would protrude from softer body parts like the eye at the most inopportune moments before zipping back inside their host. Toxic minerals? Anyone that lived anywhere near primitive smelting operations in the Bronze Age was sure to have elevated levels of arsenic and other nasties.
As for vitamin deficiencies from sluggish, clogged digestions, forget going back in time. Just visit Guatamala or many other Third World countries where children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency because they live on a cup of white rice a day and eat no yellow vegetables. At all.
Any suspicions of problems with digestion, gall stones or organ malfunction should be properly investigated by a qualified doctor, especially as we get older. It’s tempting to believe the hype and go for a plausible-sounding herbal detox but the reality is that you are not toxic and a trip to the doctor should identify something amiss.
I know you know someone who has shelled out lots of money and plunged their feet into a detoxifying footbath with amazing results, but that rusty-looking water was not toxins leaching out but…rust. An old conjuror’s trick.
Yes that liver “flush” of vegetable oil and citrus juice did produce blobs of green and yellow blobs in the stool but that’s just bile-stained “soap”.
No autopsy or surgical procedure has ever found hardened faecal matter clinging to colon walls and the strange lumps you produce in toilet water after detox “cures” are just fibre “casts” .
Eat more fibre, drink more water and exercise more often to feel better. Your body is an amazing machine that works very well to process waste and doesn’t benefit by a tempting but illusory detoxification.
