Crap that doesn't work: Detox teas

There is a lot of stuff out there for sale in the diet, nutrition, and fitness supplement world that make some pretty outlandish claims. I think that for the average person they approach these claims with a high degree of skepticism but still, there are plenty of people that end up believing the claims, especially when someone they admire such as an actor or popular Youtube personality vouches for it. For someone with a reasonable level of intelligence, they would realize that this person you admire is promoting this product because they are paid to do so and not necessarily because they actually believe in the product or for that matter, even use it at all.

Enter yet another fad that has been promoted by a myriad of celebrities in one form or another: Detox teas.

src

Lipton isn't generally in the dietary supplement game, or at least not directly, but the fact that they got on this gravy train shows how popular this completely spurious concept has become. Lipton doesn't actually make the claims that the teas available at health or supplement stores do because they don't have to, so many other companies that are not regulated by the FDA already said it, as did a lot of paid promoters. Therefore Lipton just gets to sit back and take advantage of the misinformed masses while never really taking part in the ruse.

src

Let's look at the claims on this particular package and trust me when I say there are a ton of others that say exactly the same thing. According to this package drinking this tea will detoxify your body, improve your health (which in itself is a very vague statement), and of course, help you to lose weight.

Some of these detox teas actually will help you lose weight temporarily because they contain diuretics and laxatives. They don't tell you that the reason why you are going to lose weight is because of the fact that you are going to feel the need to rush to the toilet in order to evacuate your bowels. Any sensible person with even a little bit of knowledge of the human body is going to realize that taking a runny s**t isn't going to result in anything other than a temporary loss of a half a pound or so. I don't know for sure, let's not get into the specifics but I think you get the point.

The most egregious claim that they make is that these products are going to "detoxify" the body but they do so by either saying nothing about how that is possible or by mentioning some chemical names that if you bothered to look up you would find out that it is essentially nothing, or a diuretic.

The fact of the matter is that for a vast majority of people the detoxifying process, that is, the maximum amount of detoxifying that can possibly be done by your body, is ALREADY happening via your internal organs. If you have liver or kidney failure, a box of overpriced tea isn't going to change that and you need to probably talk to a doctor rather than the people who work for minimum wage at GNC.

If you like tea, then drink tea. There are lots of studies that show that "regular tea" has some small but still real health benefits. Leave it to the fitness industry to take this notion and then run wild with it though, that is kind of what they do.

Bottom line: There is no detox product on the market that actually does detoxify you and if these companies were subjected to FDA approval for their statements, they would all be immediately forced to take their claims off the boxes because it is all a pack of cleverly worded lies.

_{Just a guy who lost what I consider to be a huge amount of weight and kept it off by making small, manageable changes to his lifestyle and diet and I did it all without the aid of any sort of "detox" product... You can do it too but there are no shortcuts, you gotta put in the work}