With timing as beautiful as its conclusion is obvious, the charity Sense About Science has announced, with a triumphant calloo callay, that detox paraphernalia, which sprout up every January as reliably as overoptimistic gym memberships, are as medically effective as medieval blood-letting cures.
Of course, one should expect trustworthiness from major UK retailers. But, really, if a customer is sufficiently optimistic to buy something called a "detox brush" from Boots that promises to "brush away impurities" (impurities presumably being Boots-speak for "skin"), I say: why spoil their party?
Detox diets, though, are a different bag of organic potatoes. The idea is that one cleanses out all the food - or "toxins", in detox parlance - that you have naughtily ingested in recent weeks through a regime heavy on the diuretic quality and light on the nutritional value. But you all know this already.
Bang on New Year's Day, Gwyneth Paltrow, with admirable alacrity, was urging the detox on fans of her website, Goop.com, which offers weekly "lifestyle" suggestions even more baffling than the site's name. "I like to do fasts and cleanses a couple of times during the year," goes the promising opener, before various detox menu suggestions are proffered. The first one includes no solid food before 1:30pm, when you are allowed "salad with carrot and ginger dressing". "There can be no dairy, grains with gluten, meat, shellfish, anything processed, fatty nuts, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant, condiments, sugar and obviously no alcohol or soda," she concludes, sounding very much like the product of an apocalypse-heralding union between Gillian McKeith and Mary Poppins.
The direct translation from Latin of anorexia nervosa is "a nervous loss of appetite", a name that is extraordinarily misleading. A more appropriate term would be "fear of food". An anorexic believes that eating food of any nutritional value will do them harm, usually because it will cause them to gain weight - although some anorexics cite a more generalised terror. To read the theories behind some of the self-proclaimed detox diets is to see a similar kind of phobic attitude, such as the thesis that cheese "clogs the system" or wheat "slows the metabolism", to quote the theories of two popular detox diets.
Of course Paltrow, McKeith et al are not trying to cause eating disorder epidemics, but it's a little weird to see ideas heretofore confined to the realm of mental illness being sold as mainstream. Plus, these ideas compound the looniness around food nowadays: you're either stuffing or starving; it's the carrot or the cream cake.
This might seem odd considering we know more about nutrition than ever, but that is almost certainly the reason why. There is something of the sullen teenage conspiracist behind crackpot detox and diet theories: "Yah, those loser grown-ups say that you have to eat all major food groups in order to lose weight healthily. They're just trying to keep you fat. Instead, drink maple syrup with cayenne pepper, like Beyoncé - that's actually the way to do it, y'know."
Conversely, there is also the hint of a perfectly noble theory taken too far when it comes to detox diets. Yes, fruit and vegetables are good for us. This does not mean that everything else is, ergo, bad and needs to be flushed out. Unless you have an actual illness (coeliac disease or Crohn's, for example) - as opposed to being told that you should cut out bread by the "nutritional therapist" in your local health food shop - ruling out whole food groups, whether it be dairy or wheat, for whatever length of time, is unlikely to provide the kind of health nirvana to which the detoxer aspires.
In an interview in this paper last weekend, Tracy Anderson - physical trainer to celebrities including, by cosmic coincidence, Paltrow - claimed that she is "not a fan of dairy, especially for women". These would presumably be the same women who risk osteoporosis in later life if they don't get enough calcium, of which dairy is a major source. Wonder how effectively carrot and ginger salad can cure that.
hadley.freeman@theguardian.com
