I actually have witnessed water poisoning once. It was really stupid. I used to be a raver, and one of my friends took the “stay hydrated when you’re on Ecstasy” adage beyond the limits of common sense. After he ended up hospitalized we worked out that he managed to drink over two gallons of water in about an hour, and that was just what we could account for.
Needless to say, it was very scary.
‘food’ as in not not reprocessed vomitus. Food that you can recognise where it came from, and preferably food that you cooked yourself from basic ingredients.
So what you’re saying is, donuts are out? I don’t think I can handle that…
The author seems to be westernizing the remedy to kill it; there are very good reasons to pick particular fixes for bodily problems and not run them through prescriptive pipelines. And for this reason, the companies of course cannot say what they’re cleansing (even if it does;) they’d have to switch -horses- agency compliance and of course any filings in history that might have pertained. Not sure what kind of congratulations to give, but it’s the congratulations for going into a Thai-style restaurant and arguing against each ginger.
On the other hand there’s some squeeable writing from the Natural Grocers people on how fantastic the top line of peanut butter’s going to be when it comes in. Just over the fat line of things life’s too short to skim at top speed. But then, top speed, eh?
I have never once (I mean NEVER ONCE) heard from a detox peddler what their organo-food-infused-panacea-detoxifier is supposed to detoxify. If there was actually anything specific they were trying to remove from your body, every now and then somebody would slip up and say exactly what.
The truth is, they have no idea what they’re trying to detox people of other than “synthetic chemicals” or “toxins” in a broad sense, and they’re wrong for trying to without doing actual research and submitting their findings to the FDA in order to become a real medicine that’s safe and effective and has clinically relevant efficacy. Otherwise they should just be selling their snakeoil as food, and stop making structure-function claims like “boosts the immune system” because NOTHING boosts the immune system. You can modulate it in various ways, but that requires real drugs and specific antigens. And usually, in an otherwise healthy person, immune system modulation only can end in bad outcomes. It’s not like a car engine. Using “E93” won’t make your immune system work more efficiently. The best thing you can do for every system in your body is eat food and exercise regularly. Beyond that, see a real medical doctor who practices science based medicine that works with actual facts and statistics and data, who can prescribe you the appropriate lifestyle choices like a good diet rich in nutrients, and exercise. If those don’t work as well as expected with good compliance, they will prescribe you the right drugs to get your numbers in line with what’s healthy.
Herbal medicine is literally dangerous. Why take an herb (for instance St. Johns Wort) for your condition when there are already effective drugs. Choosing herbal medicine is choosing a completely unregulated, mostly untested industry, and it’s choosing to not care about the purity and dosage of the effective chemicals your taking in. Most often it’s either ineffective because of impurities in your herbs combined with low doses. Surprisingly often it’s also because your herb pill doesn’t actually contain any of the ingredients on the bottle, and sometimes contains things like arsenic and other contaminants in alarming amounts. And rarely the concentration of the active ingredient is so high that you’ll get sick from it as well.
Herbal medicine and “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” isn’t worth the risk of being completely unregulated and largely untested. It’s a bad deal. The most obvious reason why it’s so popular is because it has so many unaccredited practitioners that each practitioner is able to sit with and speak to the patient at length. They’re popular because of the bedside manner built into magical thinking, combined with a glut of availability reducing the pressure on practitioners.
I’d rather have a curt doctor who actually spent their time in med school and understands the scientific method, than any crunchy feelgood naturopath who has no idea how science actually works but a lot of time on their hands to talk out their ass to make me feel like they’re really focusing on me.
I spend a lot of time researching the conditions I’ve been properly diagnosed with by real doctors who went to med school and practice science based medicine every day. I look at the studies and meta analyses and ask them questions about the data and issue at hand. And I get very good, well-evidenced, mostly effective treatment that works better than a placebo.
Actually, there are exceptions. Echinacea has been double-blind tested and shown to shorten the duration of the common cold if taken early; and the hypothesis is that it somehow alerts the immune system. It’s not much, but it’s not zero.
It shortens the duration of a cold by an average of six hours. That’s comfortably within reporting bias and other noise. The P-Values on those studies are set way too small for the number of participants.
My favourite cold cure is this (allegedly) Texan one: ‘You need a bottle of whiskey and a hat. Place the hat on the table, and drink the whiskey until you can see two hats, then go to bed and stay there’.
And one of them is one of my kids, who for some bizarre reason has decided to follow her friends into this breach. Asked for two different celebrity detox teas/potions/fairy dust products on her wish list for the holidays.
How did she make it to young adulthood and only then fall prey to this sort of thing? Friends…bah, humbug!
What I’m entirely missing is the point behind pointing it out in the first place. Yes there’s a difference between drug detox and detox/cleanse myth, but as far as I know noone was arguing otherwise.
Detoxing might be bullshait. But the name is stuck now.
It can also mean things that are good and good for you; like the pictured green smoothie drink, and various recipes for ‘detox’ salads etc. For the ‘day after’ a night of celebrating or for people on chemo. Now, the term is used for any high anti-oxidant type thing give you a boost and replace vitamins loss by things like stress, chemo, or too much booze the night before.
Which kind, ring donuts, or proper doughnuts? Those … things … with the hole in the middle and covered in sugar and/or lurid icing and/or even more lurid sprinkles can stay on the shelf. But you’ll only be taking my Berliner out of my cold, dead and slightly sticky hands.
Learn to cook, then. Problem solved.
What’s wrong with processed food? Cooking food is processing it. Cutting food is processing it. Chewing food is processing it. As long as you keep a proper balance of macro nutrients, make sure to get minimum vitamins and minerals (avoid the scurvy!), and keep your calorie intake down to a reasonable level, you will be perfectly fine. It doesn’t matter if your food is whole or recognizable, or soylent green. there’s nothing wrong with vomitus. birds do that all the time with their young.
I’m not a bird. High salt, high sugar, high fructose ‘food’ isn’t great for you. Eat ham, not baloney. Eat bagettes from a local bakery, not Wonder Bread™. Make your own soup, rather than adding boiling water to powder. Make your own popcorn with some oil and a bit of salt, rather than nuking a bag of corn covered in god-knows-what.
But you’re missing the point but at least a mile or three. “Eat food, not so much, mostly plants” has got to be the gentlest yet most useful ‘diet’ ever. It’s advice and a general guide, not a stern directive. If you want to have a steak - go for it! But try and balance that with a bunch of fruit and veges. You want a big bag of lollies? Go for it! But try and cut down a bit on consumption generally for a while before and/or afterwards.
This semantic ‘it’s all the same so nothing matters’ argument has always been a weak one.
Yeah, but just, y’know, eat well, don’t overdo the grog. I’m kind of a low-tox person. I’m still here.
My biggest problem is finding the balance, I’d love to be better about eating food, not too much mostly plants. But all too often I fall prey to non-food food because it’s easier, and highly appealing.
Our bodies crave salt, sugar, and fat because evolutionaryily they were scarce and necessary for important life processes.
So what I’m up against is an entire system designed by corporations to get me to eat salt, sugar and fat.
I keep trying though.
One trick you might want to try: keep some nuts on your counter in a see-through container of some sort. Any time you get the sense of “I want to eat something quick and easy”, grab a handful and eat them. You can even keep a couple different types and vary them as you like. Sunflower seeds and pepitas work well here too, but watch the salt: for some reason with seeds the usual choice will be either totally raw or else roasted with gobs of salt, no in-between.
Watch the calories too. 
Nuts are really densely packed full of stuff and It’s surprisingly easy to snack on a jar of nuts over the course of a day only to find out you’ve eaten the calorific equivalent of a couple of Big Macs.
