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Comment by Bostonian | Hacker News Reader

The "cleanse" notion is batty. A functioning urinary and excretory system is all the "cleanse" one needs.

I'm sure it makes a lot of people feel better, but almost certainly because of the cessation of whatever dietary behavior was causing them to feel bad in the first place, as opposed to eliminating some undefined "toxin."

From what I am reading, this is true for a lot of diets, what you stop eating during your diet often has a bigger impact that what the diet prescribe you to eat.

And as we can see in this case, most of the toxins that you secrete after a "cleanse" are from the "cleanse" liquid itself! Though to play debil's[0] advocate for a second, the body can retain toxins from the environment, e.g. heavy metals, chemicals from plastics, etc. So there is some basis in the idea of trying to purge toxins, but if you find a way to do that with a smoothie from store bought vegetables, you would be up for at least some kind of prize for advancing our understanding of human biology.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/debil

Words like toxin, detox, cleanse, and rejuvenation are red-flag words that almost always indicate quackery[1]. It's like this generation's "crystal healing".

1: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/dec/05/detox-m...

It's like the idea that getting a massage releases all the toxins in your body and you need to drink water after to flush them out. That's what they always tell me after I get one. I have to restrain laughter.

Even though the toxins myth is incorrect, drinking lots of water after is a good idea.

A deep tissue massage can cause mild rhabdomyolysis, which is where broken down cells (from the massage) get dumped into the blood. Water will help dilute urine while this occurs. Many massage therapists probably do think that there are harmful toxins get released, though.

I suppose the broken down blood cells would be the toxins at that point. Blinds sows and nuts... sometimes one finds the other.

are you saying that healthy cells are broken down by the massage, or that the massage eliminates already broken down cells?

Healthy cells are physically broken down from the massage.

I first learned about this when I got fairly sick a few hours after a deep tissue massage. I felt pretty horrible for a few days.

I like the idea that getting a massage releases all the toxins in your body because you need to drink water after to flush them out.

It came about as a marketing gimmick due to the scientific reality of widespread contamination of food, water and air with persistent chemicals that accumulate in human bodies, e.g. PCBs in breast milk and so on. It's also a reality that many 'natural' substance accumulate and persist in the body and are only slowly excreted particularly if they have a nonpolar oily affinity (this is why THC testing, i.e. marijuana urine tests, work).

The reason it's batty is that nobody who markets these products ever does a scientific study to see if their 'cleanse' program has any measureable effect on the rate your body excretes various pollutants and contaminants, relative to the normal background turnover. Generally, removing the source of the contamination is more important than anything else, e.g. lead poisoning from contaminated water supplies and so on.

Exactly. So when people take"essential oils" or whatever to "detox" - yeah sure, you may feel a difference.

But that's probably because that substance you ingested wasn't healthy in the first place and what you're witnessing is your body trying to get rid of it fast.

A constrained diet can be a useful tool in identifying which foods cause inflammation and other issues. I now live on a subset of the food groups based on a few dozen such N=1 cleanse experiments, with much improved health.

say more?

For my idiosyncratic combination of diabetes and gastroparesis the removal of carbs and fiber have been life savers. I fought hard against recognizing that though and had to prove it to myself with cleanses. But the difference was too dramatic for me to ignore.

Elimination diets are also common among IBD sufferers to identify which foods are making symptoms worse during a flare-up.

Diet alone is never enough to get you out of the flare-up, but it makes a big difference in how deeply you suffer.

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