Detox Diet
It's certainly not new and we all heard about it. Dietary regimens that claims such as improving significantly the state of our organism by effectively lowering the toxins in our bodies. The term "Detox" worked out great in the marketing of this concept and all these different albeit similar diets were now reunited under the same sensationalistic banner.
Detoxing our bodies with the promise of reaching a great psychophysical state, but how much is this all supported by Science?
This type of diet pushes the idea that certain foods & drinks such as meat, dairy, coffee, gluten and alcohol are plainly bad and we ought to avoid them if we care about our health. While things like alcohol seem very obvious choices when one thinks of dietary "contaminants", truth to be told, alcohol—like everything else—is actually healthy and can support our organism in and of itself, without counting the minerals and phytoelements that each alcoholic drink carries within.
"All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison."—Paracelsus
Also known as "The dose makes the poison", a well-known principle of toxicology that talks about how every thing we ingest, in the right or wrong amounts can be either beneficial or harmful (or even "useless"). Meat, dairy, coffee, bread, alcohol, vegetables and even water can be cause of tremendous, even acutely speaking, effects. But that does not happen when one brings their diet variety; eating a little bit of everything, in moderation. There will ALWAYS be some "toxins" introduced in our organisms because those are also the very things our bodies need to function. And we have a liver that will always help us metabolizing and processing certain molecules, good or bad that they are, whatever that means.
A Detox diet often implies a large consumption of juices, centrifugates, and water, as if peeing a lot equals getting rid of toxins. It's actually is more successful in getting rid of electrolytes you need for your body to function properly. Severe losses in sodium can be fatal and this condition carries the name of Hyponatremia.
Why do so many people swear by it then?
Different people, different answers. The most common one is that people who embark in such journeys didn't really have an healthy lifestyle to begin with and cutting out excesses in alcohol, soft drinks obviously have great outcomes. This kind of diet seems to be great from a weightloss standpoint because, let's face it, it's a bit tiring to ingest the needed amount of daily calories just with veggies, fruits, legumes, nuts. It's mostly an hypocaloric diet.
Some people just fall victim into the fallacious idea that any sort of weightloss is positive weightloss while there's a nasty truth to uncover: dietary restriction will cause you to lose lean mass as well. Even more so if your diet doesn't get many proteins to begin with.
And no, you didn't lose weight because you purged yourself of your toxins.
Image CC0 Creative Commons Photo Credits to Stephen Leonardi on Unsplash
I realize that it's difficult to understand what to eat because it requires a bit of research which can be tedious especially when you have flashy and too good(to be true) diets swarming the ether, but it's an effort that will pay you back with the very psychophysical improvement you have been seeking this whole time. Blood works to unveil eventual vitaminic or mineral deficiency should be the praxis. And on that base you know, more or less, what things your body craves the most and you can research the best sources for these.
Variety and moderation. The poison was, is and will always be in the dosage.
References:
The dubious practice of detox;
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-dubious-practice-of-detox'Detox': science or sales pitch?;
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marc_Cohen/publication/5772161_'Detox'_Science_or_sales_pitch/links/0fcfd507746b690047000000.pdfLight-to-moderate alcohol consumption and mortality in the Physicians' Health Study enrollment cohort.;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10636266"Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence." Journal of human nutrition and dietetics 28.6 (2015): 675-686 ;
Direct download link for the .pdf
Yours,
— Destrudo