Modern Myths: Detoxing

As long as money has existed there have been charlatans finding clever ways to separate people from that money in exchange for little more than hot air and false hope. For all of our advancement in science and understand from the days of old, people today are no less likely than they once were to by snake oil and magic elixirs, in fact I dare say snake oil and magic elixirs are more profitable now than ever!

That is not to say that the people who by these products are dumb, ignorant, fools, or sheep. No, not at all. They are just people, regular people like you and I, who were duped by masters manipulators and craftsmen of deception.

Today's Myth is the notion of Detoxifying. We've all heard it right? Eat this one weird food to detoxify your blood. Suburban Mom discovers unexpected drink that will cleanse 95% of toxins in 3 days. Take this pill, use this lotion, drink this powder, wear this bracelet, hold these crystals, so on so forth. Detoxifying is everywhere.

Here's the problem: There's no such thing.

Well, there is such a thing, but you don't get it from a pill or a juice or kelp tape or a special weird diet. You get it naturally, from the organs in your body that are evolutionarily adapted for that specific purpose. Your have various organs, most notably the liver and kidneys, that do the job of filtering out toxins in your blood. If those organs are not working properly, and you get a build up of those toxins in your blood, you will get sick and eventually die.

And here is an important public service announcement: If your liver and/or kidneys are not doing their job, there is no amount of detoxifying food/drink/powder/lotion that will do the job. These products literally do nothing. If your filtering organs are working properly, you'l be fine without these products. If your filtering organs aren't working properly, you will die not matter how many of these products you consume, and you need to see a doctor right away, not take detoxifying products.

But it is true that there are some toxins that occur in our modern world that our organs do not do a good job of filtering out. Most prominent among them are heavy metals, which are not as common in the natural world, but can be all too common in a post industrial world. Iron, Lead, Mercury, and others can get into our food, into our bodies, and cause innumerable health problems.

But none, and I mean 100% absolutely none of these detoxifying products on the market can, or even claim, to address those toxins that our organs can't filter out. A person exposed to high levels of Mercury in their environment will absolutely not be ok as long as they are using plenty of detoxifying products. But if detoxifying products actually did anything, you'd think they should have an effect against environmental toxins like Mercury, right? Try asking a Detox guru if they'd be willing to start taking small amounts of Lead every day and trust their detox product to keep them clensed. I doubt they would take your bet.

And the real reason these detox products can't work is because they operate on a fundamentally flawed, but intuitively appealing, notion of how our digestive system works. Toxins in your digestive system don't hurt you. If you eat something toxic, and pass it, without it being absorbed into the blood, you are fine, no harm done. The toxins that hurt you are toxins that get into your blood supply and circulate around the body and damage your cells. There is no product you can consume that can, so to speak, go into your blood and somehow remove those toxins. The only way for those toxins to get out of your blood is for your filtering organs to catch them. These detox products do not somehow magically make your kidneys and liver work better. Notably detox products never explain in chemical or biological terms exactly how they are supposed to work, they just show some simplistic graphic of little green orbs in a blood vein attracting little grey orbs, as if that is supposed to actually represent how anything in the body actually works.

Save your money. There is nothing you can possibly consume that can cause your liver and kidney to start filtering out new toxins they were previously missing. If you actually do have issues with toxic blood due to either poor liver and kidney health or high levels of exposure to toxins, then do not rely on Detox products, see a doctor.

Do you have any solid, verifiable, reliable evidence that any detox product you've ever taken has actually done anything? If so I'd love to hear it in the comments below. If you'd like to see me address the occasional Modern Myth, please follow, there will be more to come.