OFFICIAL DEFINITION
A detox diet refers to a period of fasting or heavily restricted eating. The program may include supplements and is typically short. It is undertaken to eliminate unhealthy matter from the body and/or to eliminate unhealthy long-term eating habits.
RAZER DEFINITION
It’s obvious tosh, this detox business. Claims that a half pint of apple cider vinegar or a fistful of milk thistle can cleanse the human body better than it cleanses itself have no foundation. They serve no one so well as the naturopaths, authors and “wellness” firms who rebrand laxatives as health and very rarely identify the “toxins” these will remove.
No reasonable adult can have faith in this for-profit purification ritual. Perhaps it is possible to be scared straight by salad, but not one scholar in seven academic databases searched has been bothered to test this upbeat outcome. Many science communicators suggests poor mental health outcomes from a restricted eating program, particularly for those susceptible to anorexia and bulimia nervosas.
WHY IT MATTERS
Detox and its sickly new child “clean eating” — basically detox, but forever — are not much chop, and sometimes worse than that. That it is lawful to promote and publish unproven, potentially unhealthy health claims is rotten. That such claims can be lawfully made in the language of science is putrefaction — toxic, perhaps.
It is not Nanny Statist to criminalise herb peddlers and Instagram influencers for their use of terms like “lymphatic” or “alkaline” but in the liberal tradition of property defence. Such language is the property of science, not the creators of the Valerian Root and Urine Retention Miracle Ten Week Cleanse.
The overwhelming majority of us don’t know our science from Shinola, but we do recognise and respond to its grammar. If a few seconds of a pop song can be claimed as property, then science can claim market ownership of its distinct expression.
WHO CARES?
With one notable exception, our legislators do not appear to care for the regulation of Blood and Soil dietary mysticism at all. Jane Garrett is the politician who cunningly made raw milk, a product to which infant deaths have been attributed, indigestible. She also gave a book company a dose of regulatory ipecac. Penguin, publishers of Belle Gibson’s dodgy recipe book, no longer sell natural health advice without advice on the jacket that this stuff ain’t science.
Our health providers care. I’m sure they’d like to regulate the seductive claims of post-truth green juice soldiers, just as they’d enjoy slapping an injunction on Pete Evans. Food is not medicine and the persistent claim that it is endangers health.
Emergency ward staff have quite enough to do without cleansing the stomachs of January’s cleansers. Our legislators have so little to do, they fill their parliamentary time banging on about who called who a mean name. As such, you’d think criminalising the hazardous misuse of scientific language would make sense.
RELEVANT FACTS
- The term “detox’ is not borrowed from the true detoxification to which the patient of drug recovery submits, but from yoghurt enthusiasts of 1908 whose work on “auto-intoxication” was of limited interest to science at the time but very popular with ladies displeased by their stools.
- “Auto-intoxication” and the original medical text that describes it remains in favour with the clean-eating and detox set. People are still very keen to improve their poo
- Detox is not a thing
- Detox is a sham. No, not just some detox programs, all of ‘em
- There is no estimate of the money made by purity’s purveyors. Forbes calculates that the “juice cleanse” fad, one sector of the Western detox market, profits at $US3.4 billion annually in the US alone
- The most persistent detox ruse is The Master Cleanse. Originally devised by some bloke called Stanley, who also went by the name Aaron, in the 1940s is a diet of “lemonade”, AKA a thin drink made of cayenne pepper. Although Stanley was convicted of murder, later revised to voluntary manslaughter, for the deep abdominal massage he administered to a critically ill man, Lee Swatsenbarg, Beyonce still enjoys her Lemonade.
THE LAST WORD
Detox is done like a dinner here in The Lancet. The author is an agreeably cranky GP struck far less by the naivety of non-doctors than he is by his peers’ unconcern. Having attended a meeting at the Royal Society, he notes “that its catering department offers a ‘Detox Break’ (herbal teas, fruit, and decaffeinated coffee)”.
When scientists agree to eat the negation of their discipline for morning tea without complaint, we may despair, and not only at the veneer of legitimacy that can be bought with big marketing budgets, but the cultish belief in the pure self. “Leave our food as natural as possible” was the slogan of a Nazi physician in use as “pure” food was promoted by the Instagram Aryans of the Reich.
Our GP asks, “What on earth is the world’s premier academy of science doing, perpetuating such nonsense?”
Let us join his crucial tantrum. Permit the Magic Happens vendors their redemptive crypto-racist chakra lingo, but not the words of medical science.
READING
Stanley Burroughs (1976). The Master Cleanser
Anthony Warner (2017). The Angry Chef: Bad Science and the Truth About Healthy Eating
David Rakoff (2004). Life in the Fastlane (Audio)
Harvard Women’s Health Watch (2008). The dubious practice of detox
Michael Pollan (2008). In Defence of Food
Michael Pollan (2007). Unhappy Meals
Edzard Ernst (2013). The Holocaust and Nazi alternative medicine
Eugenics Archive. John Kellogg and the racial hygiene diet
George Davey Smith, (2004). Lifestyle, health, and health promotion in Nazi Germany
Obviously it would be naive to believe all the claims made by the detox diet industry, but I find it equally hard to accept that certain foods or nutrients might not be better for liver or kidney health than others.
Yes, half_. Your claim is not at odds with the claim that the “detox” sector sells palaver.
Scientific method has identified some foods more likely to affect the good function of some organs. To say that some foods are worse for some function is also to say that some are better.
I like Michael Pollan on the subject of nutrition. He, a person very sympathetic to improving over all health AND a Californian, reminds us that nutrition is in its scientific infancy. To say that some foods are actually beneficial for some human biological function (which is different from saying that some foods are better than others) is, in Pollan’s view, not yet possible. It may be possible. Not yet.
So to suspect that some foods may be beneficial (as opposed to “not so bad” or better) makes some sense. It feels right, and probably *is* right, perhaps. But, we just don’t know.
There’s a bit of stuff known, like eat a banana for a little hit of potassium and such. But really not much at all. Again from Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This is just about the sum of what science has found.
We await more findings. In the meantime, the detox stuff is nonsense.
Helen – thanks for your reply.
I confess that I signed up with an American-based program for a ’30 day cleansing diet’ last November which consisted of a month’s supply of protein shakes and various supplements. In addition I was allowed one low-calorie meal a day (of my choosing, but with tips about what best to avoid). Also, there were to be two fast days – supplements only – for each of the first two weeks.
The upshot is that by the end of the 30 days I had lost an unwanted 5 kg, and since then, although I declined to sign up for further installments of the program, I have continued with the ‘healthier’ eating habits applied during those first 30 days and lost a further 2 kg.
I know it’s slightly at a tangent to what you were arguing, but I wanted to make the point that a few hundred dollars – saved over time on the reduced amount of food I’m buying – kick-started me on a path of self-discipline and awareness with regard to what I put inside me. I hope and expect this relatively small outlay to have lasting benefits. I certainly feel (and look!) the better for it, although I accept it’s highly likely that this is attributable less to the ingredients of the supplements I was taking during those first 30 days than to my ‘improved’ eating habits. Either way, no regrets, and I needed that framework initially, although as always I would advise that the buyer beware.
Now I just need to work on the caffeine habit!
Half-hippie, the first part of the problem is that the ‘awareness’ is only as good as the facts underpinning education you’re being indoctrinated with. The second part is that the nutriceuticals industry isn’t really educating anyone: it’s indoctrinating anxiety and then treating it with its own overpriced placebos.
Here’s a simple reality check:
We’re a species that eats to satiety (i.e. full bellies) but now has access to vast amounts of high-calorie produce, which means we can easily eat to satiety on more calories than are healthy for us, and we’re constantly encouraged and seduced to do so.
So if you want to lose weight reliably, a steady and healthy way to do so is to shop, cook and eat your own mostly low-calorie veggies, add just enough protein, carbs and fats to suit whatever it is you do and…
Well, that’s it.
For $200 you could join a 12 week CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet which does exactly that, educates you factually while you go, festoons you in delicious and flexible recipes — and requires no special ‘supplements’ because you’re already privileged enough to have access to nutritious food in more varieties than most historical humans ever dreamed EXISTED, and unless you have a diagnosable medical condition you DON’T ACTUALLY NEED SUPPLEMENTS.
And if you stick to the program, CSIRO will refund your money at the end, and even if you don’t claim the refund, your money will stay in Australian science.
We don’t need nutriceutical mysticsm to confront the obesity epidemic, Halfie. Publicly funded science is doing a magnificent job: it just needs the media support otherwise being thrown at liars, charlatans, quacks and overpriced placebos.
Hey, half_.
Between you and me, I too have undertaken a “detox”, which was, as you described, more of a “reboot”.
For some of us, perhaps those inclined to impulsivity or excess, a period of dietary restriction can make us more mindful about the chips we (okay, me) routinely cram in our face holes.
If I should ever start to chub up again, I’ll almost certainly subject myself to a few days of vile tea and salad prison.
I did (as in article) look to find evidence of improved eating habits following a “detox”, but turned up none.
I would guess (do not know) that there are those of us who respond well to the penance of detox. I am one such person. My sister, who ALWAYS had eggs left weeks after Easter, is not. I find it hard to believe, but there are many people, perhaps a majority, who can control themselves without some sort of hairshirt eating program.
Please excuse me if you are not such an immoderate person. I really am.
My dear late wife was a self-confessed emotional eater. She also indulged detox diets from time to time, and I don’t think that was a coincidence: she used the ceremony to remind herself not to think in certain ways.
But I think that might have been conflating ‘toxic food’ with ‘toxic relationships’. Rather than sucking down the dandelion tea, she could have done better flinging it in the face of anyone whose disrespect had turned her to gorging on chips in the first place. 🙂
Happy new year, Razling!
No arguments from me on any of your substance: detox is poxnoxious pseudoscience. If you look at the history of religious thought, the idea of ‘impurity’ predates Judaic mikvehs: you can trace it back to the antecedents of Zoroastrianism, back before animal herding entered the Bronze Age, and herders’ fires would cleanse us of both bad feelings and bad metaphysical status — and thus bad luck and whatever we understood disease and anxiety to be back then.
So the idea of ritual impurity has been around since our earliest civilisations. It got transmogrified into sin, repentance, indulgence and simony among the Christians, but it’s way older than that, so of course it resurfaces in the nutriceuticals industries.
But that’s also why you didn’t need to Godwin it at the end! It’s not fascistic, except in the way that all anxiety can be exploited by cynical and malignant institutions.
Great article though! (If you keep writing them like that, I’ll have to just shut up and read them.)
RD
Ruv, happy new year to you. I’m not sure whether I enjoy HR’s essays or your comments more, but both are always thought provoking regardless of where I agree.
I’m going to lean more to Helen on this one though – when you are creating new reasons to be anxious the taint of the fascism thereby enabled should be on you. Especially when it’s an issue of purity.
Hi Kfix, thank you for your kind comment and a happy new calendar to you back!
Not to pick on Helen’s article — it’s a good one — but I think the conflation of digestive purity with ethnic purity is strained enough to be a non-sequitur for the purposes of her argument. Here’s why, in summary…
1. Human obsession with dietary and ritual purity predates even Roman fasces by millennia — it’s not in every culture but is deeply buried in our collective psychology;
2. Two peoples who were victims of Nazism — the Jews and the Roma — both have purity traditions. I already mentioned the Judaic mikvah or bath, but the Roma also have marime’ — purity beliefs likely to have derived from pre-Hindu ideas whose offshoots can also be found in Zoroastrianism.
3. Many people who buy and believe this advice have nothing in common with right-wing politics and its various flavours of supporting metaphysics, and would strongly oppose them; and finally
4. Surely, the worst risk of buying the pseudoscience isn’t jackboots on the cobblestones but obesity-farming by an industry that profits from creating fat, passive consumers seduced into buying high-calorie ‘convenience’ foods that are incredibly cheap to make; shamed for having done so; then sold patent nostrums to compensate that don’t do nearly as much as knowing how to squeeze a lemon onto a zucchini, feta and basil salad.
I think Helen’s answer below is better than anything I’ll write, so I’ll settle for saying thanks for increasing my knowledge with your point 2, that I agree with 3 and the broad thrust of 4, but there’s perhaps a difference between a purity tradition that’s soaked into a culture over generations and one that is manipulated and ‘imposed’ by a mix of commercial and political forces, and it’s a difference of which we should be wary.
Also, why can’t I make myself split an infinitive despite knowing that there is no good reason to avoid it? Linguistic purism in action, in my head 🙁
Kfix wrote: there’s perhaps a difference between a purity tradition that’s soaked into a culture over generations and one that is manipulated and ‘imposed’ by a mix of commercial and political forces
Language is always manipulated by in-groups for their own advantage, Kfix. For example, the Norman Invasion is why our words for ‘prison’ and ‘jail’ are all French in origin. 🙂
But regardless, whether any purity tradition is innocent of harm (whether intended or not) depends on who gets to tell whom what’s pure. Among my father’s people menstruating women are traditionally not allowed to cross running water. That might be fine when nobody wants PMS on a fishing afternoon, but isn’t terribly kind or fair at other times.
Among the English, pumpkin was once considered a vegetable fit only for pigs and the Irish. And let’s not talk start on how clericalism has fortified its own grotesque privileges with assertions of purity and vice-versa.
It’s amazing how privilege gets to define purity to sustain itself. And you don’t need fascism for that — any self-satisfied privilege will do.
Hey, RD.
I understand that the idea of the raw and the cooked or the impure and impure is, in the view of some, a cross cultural one. However—and I’m actually glad for your challenge as I spent a ruddy long time thinking this through—the “toxin” of the Western twentieth century is constituted differently. And is mutating still so that its presumed ancient origins aren’t so useful in our understanding.
(I’m sure you will agree that state-of-nature reasoning can tend to be a bit thick.)
As you may know, the Oxford word of 2018 was “toxic”, and this decision received a shower of uncritical praise in press. (Their choice for 2017, “youthquake”, went by largely unnoticed. Merriam Webster’s 2018 choice of “justice” was not a big promotional hit.)
I had myself thought about the word “toxic” throughout the year, wondering how it could be applied to debate, politics and masculinity so freely. It seems to me to be an emerging framework for the sort of “thinker” in contemporary press who diagnoses the age in the simplest terms.
What is the problem? It’s “toxicity”. A term and a belief once largely applied to matter (toxic waste) now describes historical phenomena. Why a leader like Trump? The answer is “toxic masculinity”. Why are our systems starting to fail? “Toxic thought” or “toxic conversations”.
Leaving aside the influential role of fascist eugenics types in Western nations, including Australia, and Nazi Germany in “natural health” (there’s plenty written about this historical link; part of the reason “natural cures” were so popular is that qualified GPs were in short supply, having been incarcerated or murdered if Jewish or dispatched to the fronts, so “natural healers” were propagandized and qualified quickly to appease civilians) this purity thing changed when it is instrumentalised in mass societies. (Again, state-of-nature is just not often a great argument. Which is why “natural healers” use it.)
“Toxic” really is a word and a conviction of the era and it is does have fascist genealogy.
I’m not Godwin-ing.
Helen, on top of a great article, please accept my double thanks for a thoughtful and thought-provoking response.
I’ll confess that I’m no happier about the word ‘toxic’ than you, though the sense I make of it is different.
In a scientific sense, a toxin is a substance in a sufficient dose to disturb some necessary organic function. To validate the use of the term scientifically we have to name the substance, nominate the minimum toxic dose and say how to recognise which organic function has been disturbed. In sufficiently small doses, most substances aren’t toxic — for example, we eat small amounts of cyanide whenever we accidentally swallow apple seeds, and oxalic acid when we eat brussels sprouts. In large enough doses, the first causes hypoxia, while the second causes kidney stones.
In the social sense, that’s not how it’s being used, you’re damn right to be critical of it and at the moment you’re the only social commentor I’ve read who has been, so Bless You, SS Helen Razer and All who Sail in You!
On the sociological side, as I tracked it, ‘toxicity’ turned up in popular psychosociology as a word meaning a person whose habitual behaviours do profound social and psychological harm in even small doses. That’s fine because certain narcissistic, psychopathic and bullying behaviours unquestionably do harm trust, respect, co-operation, dignity and conflict resolution. It’s nearly self-evident that they do and doesn’t require a lot of explaining.
However, next minute I noticed ‘toxicity’ being used by entitled in-groups to demonise people whose behaviours they found challenging and disagreeable. While I understand that fascists have used this sort of approach too, the groups that I’ve seen use it the most in the work-place are actually cliques of passive-aggressive liberals (often, though not exclusively female.) As soon as someone can hide their aggression while singling out any behaviour of yours that could be construed as aggressive (even if it’s merely blunt), yours is called ‘toxic’. So ‘toxic’ has now become a scalp-hunter’s word: as problematic as the word ‘problematic’.
(If you were male and used in the average corporate workplace the sort of tone and thought I so much enjoy in your columns, you’d surely have been accused of toxicity yourself by now. :))
But that’s a pain really, because whatever word we choose to describe their egregious behaviours, there’s no doubt that narcissists like Trump or sociopaths like Zuckerberg have a profoundly damaging impact on the organisations and societies they influence — as I’d argue that merely being critical, disagreeable, colourful and sometimes confrontational does not.
Regarding ‘toxifying’ diets, you’ve already covered that beautifully but I think it’s a separate issue. Once a term gets market credibility in one sector of course it can be co-opted into another (look how much baseball is used in corporate jargon despite most English-speaking people never playing or watching the sport.)
So the usage might be serendipitous, but the historicity of ‘pure’ vs ‘impure’ foods goes back much further than fascism. We can find it in Judaism, Islam, among Nepalese, Hindu and Zoroastrian beliefs.
The usage might be modern, but the concept definitely isn’t — it predates the Imperial Roman antecedents of fascism by millennia.
So the word is being traded about — in what order, a linguist might tell us; but there are at least three meanings: a precise scientific one; a figurative psychosociological one that has now been politically corrupted; and a totally pseudoscientific one exploited by the usual assemblage of nutriceutical and self-help quacks.
The fact that the one word has three different meanings needn’t surprise us, but I believe it isn’t sufficient cause to impute an underpinning fascist political thrust in our zeitgeist.
Nevertheless, I never doubted your sincerity, Helen. I didn’t believe you were Godwinning for rhetorical purposes, and am sorry to have so imputed, however inadvertantly.
More “Detox Your Wallet – We’ll Help You Rid It of That Green Stuff Bloating It”.
🙂
The detox drivel is undeniable but the corollary is not that it doesn’t matter what one eats.
Considering that the obese, esp Westerners, are usually also nutritionally deprived is, as Ruv pointed out, because the food flood is overwhelmingly crap stuff.
Pollan’s best point was – “if Granny wouldn’t recognise something as food, don’t eat it.”.
Good to see we’re starting off the year with the big issues.
Systematic, complicitous, multisectoral, multigenerational deception and population-farming over nutrition?
I guess we could call that a small thing.
But if so, it’s also a fundamental epistemological problem: what is truth and how do we curate, verify and assure it in society?
If we can’t get the small things right, I suppose we’re doing fine on climate change, executive accountability and financial sector transparency then.