How do I get rid of that 45 pounds of impacted fecal mater stuck to my intestines? That’s what the “Colon Cleanse” ads say!
Well, there’s always an enema. I understand the coffee ones are quite stimulating.
You can check Penn & Teller for a report on this. It’s pretty graphic. :eek:
Dihydrogen Monoxide for one.
If “alma mater” means “nourishing mother”, then that term must be its opposite.
This is what 45 lbs of fecal matter looks like. Need I say NSFW OR NEAR MEALTIMES?
You forgot that it is stuck to your intestines “like spackle,” to quote one of the most popular graphic formulations in the ads/health nut sites.
When you eat too much and sit around on the couch watching TV, you’ll often feel bloated and sluggish. The obvious answer is to get out and exercise, and switch to a lower calorie healthy diet. This feels too much like work and is hard to adhere to long-term. Much better to pop some supplements and/or do a radical “detox” diet for a few days before returning to your usual unhealthy living.
Unless they’re talking about treatment for addiction, hearing the word “detox” should be a red flag that you’re dealing with quackery.
We ingest toxins constantly, and the human body teems with them. As Bruce Ames once put it, “you get more carcinogens in one cup of coffee than you do from an entire year of exposure to environmental carcinogens.” Add to that the fact that glucose itself is genotoxic, and you can see that there is no escaping this perpetual onslaught of noxious substances. Fortunately for us though, we possess a multi-faceted means of dealing with these substances which for the most part neutralizes them and renders them innocuous.
Tip: your liver is your bestest friend. Be nice to it.
During the BioDome experiment, the people inside began to show elevated levels of various chemical toxins. If you read the story of the experiment, yuo will see the problem: we all have a decent amount of toxins in our system, absorbed over time through a process called “living”. In a modern world with exposure to all sorts of chemicals, through air, water and food, it’s inevitable.
In the Biodome experiment, the eco-nuts ignored what the scientists told them, and overloaded the dome with organic soil that decomposed to CO2 and started to react with the concrete of the base structure; eventually they had to cheat and add O2 to let the participants keep living. meanwhile the ecology crashed, to the point where, to ensure they had enough food to survive, the participants were picking bugs off plants by hand most of the time. Basically they starved.
Your colon is fine. A little fiber will scour it as clean as it needs to be. The problem is, we all have these toxins locked up in our fat, where they are causing very little problem unless you lived half your life in a toxic dump. When you lose almost all your body fat in 6 months like the Biodome personnel (the “Auschwitz Diet”) all those toxins are released as the body uses up its fat reserves.
Still, unless you live in a toxic waste dump, (a) there still is not enough toxins to seriously affect your health, (b) starvation would probably have a much more negative effect on health, and © unless you move to the middle of nowhere and farm your own organic food, you’re just going to add all those toxins back in again as soon as you resume life.
Meat, veggies or fecal matter are all basically the same weight as water, give or take. So if someone says your intestines contain X pounds, imagine that in terms of jugs of water; is there even room fo that unless you have a good-sized ber gut? Your intestines probably contain about 24 hours of used food “in process”; the amount left behind as “spackle” cannot be anywhere near the same. If you’re bored someday, do a full flush and see how much less you weigh. I suspect the answer is “not that much less”.
Health nuts are like religious nuts - they tend to subscribe to the “if it’s enjoyable, it’s bad for you, if it’s painful it must be good for you” philosophy. Generally though, it’s what is bad for you that is supposed to hurt.
[Hijack]I read something really weird once—something to the effect that Roy Walford’s ALS was somehow caused by the BioDome (or was it BioSphere) experiment. Ever heard anything to this effect?[/Hijack]
Established the bowel cleanse programs are full of that which they claim to cleanse, but there is often a grain of truth being twisted by the quacks.
Truth is that we are exposed to all sorts of compounds every day that our body excretes, some of which can fairly be called toxins. Intentionally ingested medications can serve as a model for how our bodies handle a host of other compounds from both natural and man-made sources. Drugs are excreted by their being metabolized and by both their and their metabolites being excreted either by the kidneys or by way of the liver into the gut. By way of the latter the gut is full of all sorts of toxins. Chronic slow bowel transit times associated with low fiber diets is felt to prolong gut exposure to these toxins and thereby increase rates of colon cancer, or so generally standard theory goes, asthis WebMD article explains.
It is also true that chronic slow gut transit allows excreted substances, be they intentionally ingested medications, or potentially harmful substances, to get resorbed from the gut and into the bloodstream again, prolonging the body’s exposure to the compounds. This is referred to as the enterohepatic cycle. It plays a significant role in how long drugs last in your system and is a significant issue in neonatal jaundice - the reason poorly feeding newborns often get more prolonged and severe jaundice is that the bilirubin (a toxin) excreted into the gut is getting more of a chance to be resorbed as intake is not pushing it out in stool.
Rapid cleanse programs do not accomplish anything healthwise, are a marketing scam, but that does not change the fact that the gut actually is really involved in eliminating toxins and that a diet high in foods that that regularly keep things in the gut dilute and moving along decreases the body’s exposure to those toxins.