Whether it’s cucumbers splashing into water or models sitting smugly next to a pile of vegetables, it’s tough not to be sucked in by the detox industry. The idea that you can wash away your calorific sins is the perfect antidote to our fast-food lifestyles and alcohol-lubricated social lives. But before you dust off that juicer or take the first tentative steps towards a colonic irrigation clinic, there’s something you should know: detoxing – the idea that you can flush your system of impurities and leave your organs squeaky clean and raring to go – is a scam. It’s a pseudo-medical concept designed to sell you things.
“Let’s be clear,” says Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University, “there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t.” The respectable one, he says, is the medical treatment of people with life-threatening drug addictions. “The other is the word being hijacked by entrepreneurs, quacks and charlatans to sell a bogus treatment that allegedly detoxifies your body of toxins you’re supposed to have accumulated.”
If toxins did build up in a way your body couldn’t excrete, he says, you’d likely be dead or in need of serious medical intervention. “The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak,” he says. “There is no known way – certainly not through detox treatments – to make something that works perfectly well in a healthy body work better.”
This “detox” thing is also intrinsically connected to ugly social prejudices: associating certain types of food consumption that are only available to privileged individuals with “cleanliness” and morality (and these two things have gone hand-in-hand forever in Western culture - I’m a medievalist, so the first thing that pops into my head is “holy anorexia,” which is an interesting topic if you’re ever interested in reading up on the history of this association) encourages people to see white, thin, economically privileged people as “cleaner” than people of color, fat people, and economically disadvantaged people. Good old racism, classism, sizeism, (and misogyny and ableism, too, when you look at who’s expected to diet and who might not be able to adhere to a particular diet without compromising their health) with a shiny “green” 21st-century label.