In recent years a new kind of article has sprung up to help fill the content void of the New Year. January has always meant features on giving things up, starting a new exercise regime, taking up new hobbies, regaining your beach body and, threaded between the miserably depressing ads for holidays and improving part-works ("Do you love Badly Made China Puppies? Over 48 weeks our magazine builds into a collection of …) lots of stuff about detoxing but recently we've seen almost as many articles debunking detoxing altogether.
Yes, according to 50% of January articles, detox diets, drinks, pills, sponges and vibrating massage brushes are complete pointless - costly sops to the weak minded, at best unsupported by science, at worst actually dangerous to health. We'd be really confused… if any of us actually cared.
Surely there can't be anyone left in the world who expects diets to work. Our bodies are designed to self regulate. Sooner or later we all return to whatever comedy morphism Dame Nature has chosen to to lumber us with - it's fact and any attempt to believe otherwise is the triumph of vanity, arrogance or stupidity over experience. Your body detoxes without the need for milk-thistle enemas or a wholesome oatmeal scalp rub - that's why a night of absinthe and curry invariably results in a day of death sweats and bowel disorder.
But all this debunking misses one very important aspect of the detox. Though detoxes have no more medical or physical effects than a feather and bone fetish, they serve a fantastically important moral, emotional and metaphysical purpose.
As highly practiced sybarites, you and I have no problems indulging ourselves. We can dine like Gargantua, drink like longshoremen, fornicate like crazed weasels and wake in the morning with consciences a clear as particularly naiive nuns, but the rest of society isn't like us. Poor benighted souls that they are, they needs must 'purge' themselves. Detoxes get the bad stuff out of your body alright, but it's guilt not fictitious toxins that's driven out.
Let's not be too hard on the detoxers. On the face of it, they're superstitious idiots who'd wear a dead rat round their neck on a string if a TV ad said it would "reduce the nine signs of ageing (results tested on a sample of three readers of 'Gullible Magazine')" but in truth they're just cursed with an unnaturally enlarged sense of guilt. If we take away their pitiful bags of sticks and herbs they'll have to find other ways to relieve their self loathing - scourging themselves with whips in the aisles of Boots, celices at Whistles, head-shaving by Daniel Galvin.
For me the best part of this time of the year is the realisation that, though my body feels like a sack of tripe, it will return to normal in due course. More importantly, rather than worrying about getting the toxins out, I can spend time in pleasurable recollection of the pleasure I took in putting them in.
