If you’re as surprised as I am to read the above statement then join the club. For years I’ve bought teas, eaten foods, fasted, worked out, done pretty much everything that was supposed to help ‘detox’ my body so that it could function in ‘optimal’ conditions. When I went on a drink binge, I wanted nothing to do with alcohol afterwards, and it made sense that if I drank a bunch of juices it would ‘flush’ all the toxins out of my system. The same goes for all the junk food I would eat. Why not sweat, fast and flush it out of my system?

However, in medical terms, detoxing is just a load of bollocks. Yep, they’ve gone and called out the whole detoxing industry. In an article in The Guardian, Edzard Ernst, emeritus professor of complementary medicine at Exeter University says, “Let’s be clear there are two types of detox: one is respectable and the other isn’t. The respectable one 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.”

A healthy body will be able to detoxify itself through the kidneys, liver, skin and lungs; if not you’d be dead or in need of some serious medical help. You can’t make a healthy body (already doing the work) work better – certainly not through doing detoxes.

Most of detoxes are sold to people as being able to remove ‘toxins’ that you supposedly accumulate in your system through ingestion or inhalation. How it is that when scientists contacted 15 detox manufacturers, whose products are sold in pharmacies and supermarkets, none of them could define what they meant by detoxification much less name the ‘toxins’ they were supposed to eradicate?

Gasp! The horror! So manufacturers are using our vulnerability and gullibility to make money out of something that doesn’t work? That has never happened before! Detoxes fool even the brightest of us, most probably because many of us want an easy way out, sort of an easy way to ‘wash away our sins’. After an alcoholic binge it makes sense that we want to ‘detox’ all that nastiness out of our system, but what we don’t realize while we’re ingesting juices is that the body is already doing that on its own. So we think that the detox is the thing making us feel better.

Ah well, at least we’ll get a big dose of vitamins from all the juice we’re drinking… or are we? That’s a story for next time. Meanwhile, the best way to detox is to keep your body healthy by eating a balanced and healthy diet. That doesn’t mean cutting out alcohol altogether but making sure you don’t drink too much. Have a happy holiday season!