That’s not what these people say. They are very obsessive about gunk in your colon, and convinced that you can and must remove [insert 5/10/up to 25] pounds of this “spackle” (they actually do use this word). Unless someone’s chronically constipated/impacted, and if they eat the amount of fiber they ought to, I have the feeling no one has a real issue with accumulation of colonic sludge. But obsession with the bowel has a long and (to me somewhat creepy) history – think of all the cereal fortunes (well, I guess I can only think of two or three) founded on food/health cultists obsessed with finding the perfect Colon Blast formula (which they in turn thought would even out the humours, reduce masturbation, and usher in a utopian society).
“Toxins” is another one that annoys me. As all here have noted, we have an excellent excretory system. I have indulged in the odd sauna after a rough night in the possibly-sound notion that it would hasten departure of acetaldehyde. But I never thought that absent the sauna, that ow-inducing substance wouldn’t eventually seep out.
The only thing missing from this narrative is delusional parasitosis – I’ve noted that many of the colon-obsessed people are also CONVINCED that we are all, because of our “modern unhealthy diet,” crawling with worms that need to be expelled by whatever magic nostrum.
These are largely the whimsies of an over-developed culture with too much time and money on its hands. Some friends have been doing some idiotic “cleanse” that requires buying $65 (yes) worth of juice a day. It’s probably about two quarts worth of juice in total. While I can understand the visceral (if erroneous) belief that blowing out your system with a bunch of fiber or a dose of senna or some other chemical that induces expulsion of “stuff,” this latest program I don’t even see having any visceral value of taking something really “potent” – their juices are pretty mundane combinations of watercress, apple, lemon, spinach. I thought I could buy a $39 juicer and whip up some of that at home with $3 worth of produce. It wouldn’t hurt me. But it also wouldn’t have me expecting to be “cleansed” by something that is not too different from a V-8. $65 for V-8?
I agree. Not super scientific, but people who compete professionally in eating contests spend time beforehand “stretching out” their stomachs by eating/drinking huge quantities. I, too, have noticed that if I’ve been dieting or ill, I get fuller faster. Not saying that an ordinary sized stomach will shrink, but if you normally eat past the point of being full and then restrict yourself, your stomach will return to its “normal” size. And I follow all of this with…I think…
Why? It’s a useful thing. If someone uses the word “toxins” without a specifier, just as a general class of vaguely described Bad Things, it lets the rest of us know that that person has no idea what they are talking about. We then know that we can safely ignore or laugh at whatever nonsense they spout. We know not to buy anything they are trying to sell. Letting them use the word “toxins” is almost as good as a warning label saying “this theory is bunk” or “this product doesn’t actually do anything”.
I fantasize about calling people out on a lot of things in real life, but this is something I really do call people out on. Anytime someone starts talking about toxins I will stop them and say “Wait. What toxins, specifically, are you referring to?”
Sometimes they’ll say lead or mercury; usually they’ll just say “you know . . . toxins.”
You want to end up like John Wayne? What the heck is wrong with you?
I was once a member of a listserv about health fraud. Hulda Clark was one of my favorite frauds discussed there. People used to take her cure and then post pictures of their bowel movements on the Internet for others to admire.
I don’t have to worry about toxins as long as I drink my eight glasses of water a day!!!
If I drink the magic number of glasses, I can feel like I’m doing something healthy, and that way I don’t have to feel guilty about my crappy diet, right?
I’m not defending this ‘toxin’ nonsense, because it’s more than just semantically wrong, but the language and terms people use to describe things in everyday life is not necessarily bound by the same definitions as science.
How long ago was this? I wonder if it’s what I was referring to above. That was very recent, maybe a year ago. Two years max.
The way my college biology professor described it to us was, basically;
Sometime in the '50s or '60s, Madison Avenue ad execs figured out through focus groups that people liked the word ‘organic’. They didn’t know what it meant but they almost universally thought it was a good thing. So food companies and grocers started slapping “Organic” labels on everything. Some smaller producers thought the label should only be applied to naturally grown foods, but since it was all technically organic, the labels went all over the place. Bannas would be 29 cents a pound, and the “organic” bananas right next to them would be $1.19 a pound, and meanwhile they came off the same tree. Guess what a lot of people bought? Eventually the USDA came along and said there should be some guidelines regarding what is and isn’t organic, so they made them up.
It was a 90 minute lecture so that is a gross oversimplification, but I have no problem thinking the definition of organic, as applied to foods, is generally kinda dumb.
I didn’t see anything in that article that contradicted what our professor told us. The only overlap at all seems to be this paragraph, corroborating part of his story:
Saying it was the USDA who initiated it was likely my mistake, not his.
Hulda’s still a big name in the world of the parasite-obsessed, but there are many others working to alert us of the hidden dangers lurking in our bowels, like Dr. Natura:
"If this is the first time you’ve been exposed to this life-changing information, you’ve probably never considered this simple question: Are you clean inside? Of course you take care of the outside: You shower, brush your teeth and wash your hair on a regular basis, but do you clean yourself inside? In this modern, toxic world it’s becoming a simple fact of life that our colon (the ‘sewer system’ of the body), liver and other organs also require regular cleaning. Just like a car requires an oil change periodically.
Yep, gotta put the old bod up on the rack once in awhile, drain out the fluids, put in fresh ones, maybe a whole rebuilt colon and a new set of parathyroids while you’re at it.
The other day I had to explain to my roommate why she shouldn’t waste her money on those pads that are designed to suck the toxins out of the soles of your feet. I explained how they work (or don’t work, actually) but she just kept saying, “But on TV when they show the pads after they take them off people’s feet they are black! How could that be if there are no toxins?” After about 20 minutes I finally went online and dug up some research done that shows when they put distilled water on the pads they turned black and that was what convinced her not to buy them. She wanted to believe that these things worked as advertised so much that she fought my logic and reasoning for almost half an hour! Ignorance is powerful stuff.
Wow, so someone can perpetrate a fraud, get sued for it, and the exact same fraud can be ran again on a large scale within a few years. This was a big website, with hundreds (maybe thousands?) of pictures of people’s clay poop that they had proudly sent it. I found it from a banner ad on some huge website, Myspace maybe.
