Actually, natch's trick does just the opposite. It strips out any formatting information that may accompany the text on the clipboard.

I've used the same trick on occasion when copying text from web pages into Gmail. When you paste such text into a Gmail draft, Gmail tries to duplicate the format of the original, which is often not what you want. pbpaste | pbcopy solves the problem nicely.

Edit: But Shift-Option-Cmd-V is easier. Thanks, Janteh!