Diet and Exercise Myth #13: You should detox regularly

Detoxification is a seductive idea, I will admit.

The media is constantly bombarding us with genuinely frightening stories of industrial pollutants, pesticides, heavy metals, preservatives, PCB’s, and even nano-particles being rampant in our environment.

And we all grasped enough in our high school biology classes to appreciate that a couple of our internal organs have the critical task of filtering toxins from our systems. It’s easy for us to imagine pools of toxic sludge building up inside of us, and our poor livers and kidneys struggling more and more to deal with those ever-increasing stockpiles of nastiness.

It’s no surprise that the idea of flushing out those poisons is so compelling. Surely our internal organs could use some external assistance from time to time?

Now I’m not suggesting that those media stories are untrue, or that they’re not concerning. They are very concerning.  But that juice cleanse, detox diet, colon cleanse, or green tea fast?  That is simply not going to remove those unwanted toxins from your body.

Those practices are not likely to do you any harm either, but the detox is a medical myth.

The key to our misunderstanding here is our conceptualisation that our livers and kidneys filter toxins from our systems and then store them. Framing it like this is how we come unstuck.

The reality is that our kidneys, livers, and intestines don’t store the toxins that they’ve filtered. What they actually do is to chemically alter the toxins to turn them into harmless substances. Those toxins that can’t be chemically converted are prepared for excretion and shuttled into our lungs, bladder, or colon. From there they are expelled on a regular basis.

So if doing a detox makes you feel better, go for it. Just do some research and ensure that you don’t end up nutritionally compromised.

And do realise that you’re not flushing out toxins.