Down with detox!

[ciphergoth]

Don't bother with detox diets - they are pure superstition. You might as well turn to crystal healing.

Don't take my word for it - ask the chief scientist of the Food Standards Agency.

(of course, this might not be a bad time to eat slightly more healthily than normal in between the bouts of eating much less healthily than normal, but that's rather different...)

Comments

dieting again?

[ablueskyboy.livejournal.com]

(Oh... the sarcasm!!! LOL)

[gothbabe.livejournal.com]

He's right. Those things do a lot. I also agree about the home-cooked food. A diet without e-numbers and preservatives can make you feel a lot better.

In some cases, however, I believe that herbs/supplements can help your health as I've known people who've had really bad liver conditions that were helped by herbs like Milk Thistle. Frankly though, I think that people shouldn't experiment with herbs, vitamins, etc except under the care of a trained professional.

I'll leave my comments at this... but if you ever want to discuss diet and health, just let me know... tis a subject I like to discuss and have strong opinions about. ; )

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

If you've got a liver problem, then it makes sense that certain herbs/vitamins/medicines could help. However if you don't, expecting any supplement to create a SuperLiver sounds like a hiding to nothing except a depleted bank balance.

Telling the difference is the real art, especially when swallowing pills is easy while changing habits of a lifetime isn't.

Now if only I could get an extra hour of sleep a night prescribed on the NHS...

[gothbabe.livejournal.com]

Now if only I could get an extra hour of sleep a night prescribed on the NHS...

Hehe, that's what people dose up on melatonin for
; )

Btw, 'what's a kumquat like you doin' in a place like this'? ; )

[postmodern-minx.livejournal.com]

I went on a Dettox diet once and i can confirm it was indeed bad for my health...

[reddragdiva]

Boots like detox supplements, but Boots have a whole rack of distilled water for £3.95 a bottle marked "homeopathic".

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

Not all detox diets are created equal, though. A few days of simply eating raw fruit & veg, with plenty of fluids, will probably be very good for a person who is otherwise in reasonable health (I've had good experiences with it myself and really ought to get back into doing that from time to time). Buying lots of expensive pills and extracts will probably be more of a waste of money than anything else. But they both get called "detox diets".

Isn't this really just about common sense?

[lovelybug.livejournal.com]

I think it is about common sense, but that it's wrong to sell people the idea that their body is full of 'toxins' and eating raw food and drinking water will 'flush them out'. It's just bad biology.

(after three and a half xmas dinners, I'd probably feel a lot better for eating a lot of unadulterated fruit and veg just now though!)

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

it's wrong to sell people the idea that their body is full of 'toxins' and eating raw food and drinking water will 'flush them out'. It's just bad biology.

Oh, I definitely agree on the bad science part. But what concerns me is that it is the diet, which in itself is fine (the raw food/veg example) and has existed long before anyone gave it the name "detox", which will be the casualty, rather than the practice of making up non-scientific "science" terms to sell stuff to people. It would be a shame if what people took away from the research was not "marketing people are often underhanded and know sweet FA about biology", but "oh, bugger that raw food diet, apparently it's all nonsense anyway so I'm going to have another sausage".

[phantas.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you've heard this too...