Science Vs - Detoxing & Cleanses - Do They Work?

Episode Date: September 7, 2017

Juice cleanses, fancy foods, sweat, charcoal, and colonics-- is there a scientifically proven way to ‘clean out’ your system? This week, we dig in deep to the science of detox and turn ourselves into guinea pigs for a juicing experiment. We talk to a passionate proctologist named Prof. Graham Newstead, as well as nutrition researcher Prof. Stella Volpe and toxicologist Dr. Susanne Ramm. Check out the full transcript here: http://bit.ly/2LEsSwr Our Sponsors: Cole Haan | Google Cloud, Maker of GSuite | Cotton Inc + Madewell Credits: This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, Wendy Zukerman, and Heather Rogers. Our senior producer is Kaitlyn Sawrey. Edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, with help from Rose Rimler. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. Extra thanks to Lynn Levy, the Zukerman Family, Joseph Lavelle Wilson, Torey Armul, Dr. Naveed Sattar, and Dr. David Juurlink. Selected ReferencesOn the inability of activated charcoal to absorb wind, aka the ‘poo in a blender’ study Review paper on the dangers of colonics Why liquids don't make you feel very full An investigation of capsaicin, aka the spice in spicy food, for weight loss  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. This is the show where we pit facts against fads. On today's show, detoxing and cleansing. There are a whole bunch of detox diets and cleansing regimes that are designed to remove toxins from your body and help you lose weight. The detox industry is making millions of dollars saying that you are taking toxins into your body every day, from pollution to pesticides to synthetic chemicals and processed food,

and you need to get rid of them. Detox your body, boost your energy, help you drop weight quickly. It's a kind of laxative isn't it release toxins and walk away feeling recharged and glowing sounds fab celebrities like kylie jenner can be found drinking something called a detox tea yes it's a tea tox according to the gossip mags beyonce is into colonics that's where you shove water up your butt to get rid of toxins, and one of the biggest detox trends right now is juicing. Gwyneth Paltrow, who has built an empire on wellness,

is a huge fan of juicing. So, how can you really cleanse your body and get rid of toxins? Today we're going to talk you through four big types of detoxes. One, colonics. Two, activated charcoal. Three, juice cleansers. And four, saunas. Can you sweat out your toxins? When it comes to detoxes, there are lots of teatoxes. But then there's science. Science vs Detoxing is coming up just after the break. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special.

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Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. Welcome back. Today, we are all about detoxing and cleansing. And we're asking, is there anything we can do to help our body get rid of toxins? But today we're going to do something a little unconventional and start our episode at the end. The rear end, that is. With the idea that colonics can help you cleanse and detox. A colonic is where you pump liquid up your butt. And according to one of Hollywood's favourite detox destinations,

We Care Spa, a colonic can help you, quote, flush out your toxins, which they say could help, among other things, reduce bloating, increase vitality and increase well-being. So it's no surprise that people in New York have heard all about colonics. I was feeling really weighed down and I just wanted to be free. It's a bit of a kickstart. Everything's moving smoother through the body from mouth to anus. It is a safe way to clean out the other end of your body.

So, can cleaning your bowels with a good flushing help you detox? We spoke to Professor Graham Newstead from the Prince of Wales Hospitals at the University of New South Wales, and he's a colorectal surgeon, which means... The bread and butter work is the bottom, and I have been doing this for about 100 years. So, Graham, how many butts have you seen in your career? Probably well over 100,000. That's a lot of butts. And one thing he

does with these butts is to give them a good rinse inside. Now, there are a couple of ways that you can do this. An enema is where a small amount of liquid gets shot up the butt. While for a colonic, also called a colorectal lavage, water is run into the butthole continually and sometimes many litres of water can be used. This encourages your bowels to open up and you to poo. Science Versus producer Shruti Ravindran asked Graham about a potential hazard of his job.

Has anyone ever lost their crap on you? On me? Yes. No, no, no. I'm sufficiently experienced to know the risk factors, so I make sure that I'm to one side. Graham tells us that if you want to understand whether a colonic can help you get rid of toxins,

you've got to know a couple of basic facts about your gut. So you've got the large intestine and the small intestine. The large intestine is closer to your butthole. It filters water out of your poo to keep you hydrated and it pushes out our waste. The small intestine, which is further up, is actually the place where the good stuff, like nutrients, and also the harmful stuff, like pesticides, gets absorbed and then sent to the

blood. So when it comes to detoxing, this means... Those toxins got into our blood by being absorbed in the small intestine. The colonic lavage doesn't go anywhere near the small intestine. So your colonic lavage only washes out your large intestine and any toxins in your gut would have been absorbed in your blood further up. But there's another reason, according to the internet, that you should get a good wash up your butt. And that is that if you don't, then you'll end up with encrusted fecal matter clogging up your bowels. Can that actually happen? Well, there is a pretty bad medical condition

called fecal impaction. Do not Google image this. Now, this is when you are absolutely constipated, also called obstipated. Yes, it's a word. And so fecal matter starts piling up in your large intestine. But if you don't have this condition, Graham says, you don't need a colonic. Absolutely. Absolutely. If you don't have constipation, if your bowels work normally, there is zero science, zero science in using colonic lavage. Two review papers have found that there is no good science to support the use of colonics unless you have digestive issues. So why do people keep putting liquid up their butt? Is it like the, and I don't mean to be too visceral. Yeah. Is it just like the feeling of doing like a really good big crap?

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's all. That's all. That's all. Nothing more. People who say, oh, I feel wonderful. I feel the toxins have gone. Well, you didn't have any. What you were feeling was liquid and wind and so on. And you want to get rid of that. So when you do, you feel better. Boom, boom. And you might think, well, if it makes me feel good, why not just let me put water up my butt? Boom, boom.

Well, to that, Graham says there are risks here. People can end up with bouts of vomiting, diarrhoea, kidney failure or even perforated intestines. He says it's hard to know how common these risks are, but personally, he's seen some pretty nasty stuff. We certainly have seen injuries from enemas administered by both medical staff and patients where the nozzle perforated the rectal wall, which is a soft lining, and you've got to be very careful about

that. You end up getting faecal material leaking out through the hole in the wall, so that's serious. Now, there's another less intrusive way to get you pooing more, and that's detox teas, or teatoxes. Kylie Jenner has been showing them off on Instagram recently, and they contain laxatives. Graham says that there is no need to take laxatives unless you're constipated, because they too will only clean out your large intestine. Conclusion. When it comes to getting an enema, a colonic lavage or sipping on a laxative tea to get rid of toxins,

there's no evidence that it will help. It's a load of rubbish, as simple as that. Next on our list of potential detoxifiers, activated charcoal. The trend right now is to add it to lemonade, and it's supposed to detox you by getting rid of gases and other toxins. Just ask this guy who's selling it online and who, by the way, has really good hair.

So we have pharmaceutical-grade charcoal that's sourced from coconut shells. So this is very, very high quality. The charcoal is going to absorb all of the heavy metals, different things that should not be, you know, shouldn't be in your system. Activated charcoal is actually a real thing in medicine. And just like the great hair guy says, it can be made out of burning things like coconut shells. The charcoal gets activated often by forcing steam through it, which increases

its surface area. Now, when you swallow activated charcoal, some toxins like poisons and drugs can get trapped in the charcoal so you can poo them out safely. And this is why it's sometimes used in hospitals for overdoses and acute poisonings. Here's Graeme again. It's a great sponge, all right, but only for a tiny amount of stuff. But can activated charcoal help healthy people? Well, as to the idea that it will remove heavy metals,

according to a review paper, some metals don't even bind to activated charcoal. And as for reducing bloating, while there's not a lot of studies on this, the ones that we do have show that activated charcoal doesn't bind very well to a lot of gases in our stomach, like nitrogen and methane. And for the gases that it can bind to and potentially remove, well, Graham told Shruti another problem. You imagine a little charcoal tablet, let's say, size of a tablet, and you imagine the length of the large intestine, which is just on two meters long, imagine a column of gas that big, how much of that gas do you think is going to be absorbed by one charcoal tablet or two or three? I don't know.

None. None. None. How much charcoal do I need to drink in lemonade to absorb a column of gas in my bowels? Probably you need to eat a couple of trees, I would think. Well, Graham's having a bit of fun. An activated charcoal tablet can take in a little bit of gas, but not that much. And how do scientists know this? Well, in one study, researchers literally put faeces into a blender, added activated charcoal to the mix, let it sit for a few hours, and then measured the gases that came

out. They then compared that to some faeces that wasn't activated. And voila. Both were pretty much as smelly and as gassy as each other. We did find a handful of small studies where people were asked to eat something, in some cases, baked beans. Seriously. And take activated charcoal tablets. Now, the results of these studies are pretty mixed. The European Food Safety Authority had a good look at some of them and ultimately concluded that there is no

good evidence that activated charcoal can reduce bloating. But they did say that it might reduce the number of farts that really farty people make. Well, they didn't say it exactly like that. And another thing, new evidence is coming to light suggesting that activated charcoal isn't even that effective at helping people who are poisoned. So some researchers are suggesting that it shouldn't routinely be used in hospitals. Conclusion. There's no good evidence that activated charcoal can help you detox, unless you're actually poisoned.

And even then, the research that it can help is pretty slim. So, we've been rummaging around our bowels to go detoxing. But what if we've got it all wrong? What if the answer isn't what's coming out of our butts but what we're putting in our mouths? After the break, we become human guinea pigs. I'm dying. And put juicing to the ultimate test. I'm just so hungry.

That's coming up after the break. Welcome back. So we've gone up the butt to rid our bodies of toxins. Turns out it didn't work out so well. But now let's go down the throat and talk about juice cleansers. Juice cleansers are really big right now. It's estimated that cold press juice companies, that's the fancy stuff, no added sugar, just fruits and veggies, raked in almost half a billion dollars last year. And people swear by them. Have you ever tried a juice cleanse? I'll try to do one a week for like a day. Producer Shruti Ravindran headed to a couple of very fancy juice bars in Manhattan.

What's the idea behind that? Just to kind of remove my toxins from my system and just kind of cleanse. After a month, I felt light on my feet, an abundance of energy. I was able to sleep better, actually. I wasn't able to pretty much keep fat on my body. It was just like literally falling off. Everything was just more clear in all aspects. It sounds wonderful.

So Science Versus producers Shruti Ravindran, Caitlin Sori, and myself decided to commit a day of our lives to trying out a juice cleanse. And that meant no food whatsoever, only juice. Six juices, to be precise. I'm reading from the website. If you replace your meals with six cold press juices and get a 24-hour mini cleanse with an energizing, clarifying, and brightening effect. I don't know what they mean by energizing, clarifying, and brightening. It sounds good though. Yeah. Like it sounds

like something I'd like. Okay. 24 hours, no food, no coffee, just juice. Would we last the distance? Science versus detox starts now. And so does the science. Juice cleansers promise to flush out your system of toxins, leaving a brighter, better you. Juice cleansers promise to flush out your system of toxins, leaving a brighter, better you. But the companies that sell juice cleansers are a bit vague on the details of how this would actually work.

So we went searching for evidence that drinking juice could flush toxins from your system. And we came up empty. We couldn't find any evidence to suggest that putting food in a juicer could help you get rid of toxins. But we did notice that a lot of these juicing detoxes, including the one that we're on, promise that juicing can kickstart weight loss. And people told us this too. They said that once they started juicing, they felt lighter and just couldn't keep fat on their body.

And here, there actually is some science. So let's get into it. Can juicing help you lose weight? Okay, first things first. Putting something in a juicer doesn't necessarily make it healthy. Juices can have a lot of calories and a lot of sugar. It all depends on their ingredients. Okay, so time for our first juice. Breakfast time! Whoop, whoop! That is the sound of green juice. Cheers.

Cheers. That green juice, it's full of apple and watermelon, lemon and some kale. And although it's green, that juice that we're drinking has almost half the amount of sugar that's in a can of Coke. Now, it's not added sugar. It's sugars that are naturally found in fruit. And all this sweet stuff is part of the reason

why two researchers recently wrote in The Lancet that pure, unsweetened juice should be characterised as sugary drinks, just like sodas. And there's another problem with juicing. Juicing your food actually gets rid of some of the fiber. This is Professor and Chair of Nutrition Sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Dr Stella Volpe. Full name actually means star, Stella's star,

Lucia's light, and Volpe's fox. Starlight fox? Stella is a dietician with the name of a detox diva. And Stella says that if you're trying to lose weight, you're probably better off eating whole fruits and veggies rather than focusing on juice. Because of the fiber content in them, they make people feel fuller longer. Now, our bodies don't digest fiber, but instead it creates this bulk in our intestines, which can trigger feelings of being full. Studies going as far back as the 1970s have found that people get less hungry after eating whole fruits compared to juices. And the benefits of consuming the whole fruit rather than the juice

isn't just because of the fibre. It could also be because of chewing. No, not chewy, chewing, you know, chomping on something. It's thought to affect our digestion and metabolism and fill us up. Or, as Stella puts it, But honestly, we have teeth to chew, which is good. Now, if you're just drinking juice and otherwise fasting, which is what we're doing,

then you probably won't be taking in as many calories as you normally would. But if you're eating your regular diet and drinking lots of juice, you might be taking in more calories than if you just went for the whole fruit because all those juice calories aren't filling you up. Conclusion. There's nothing special about putting food into a juicer that will help you lose weight. And even pricey juice with no added sugar probably has more sugar in it than you might think. So if you drink juice alongside your meals,

you might end up taking in more calories. But if you're only drinking juice, this is what can happen. After only three hours, it's lunchtime. I'm dying. Like, I'm really trying hard not to be a whinger, but... Oh, I'm just so hungry. Can you please help me with this? This is how weak you've become.

You need me to open your juice. All right, here we go, here we go. This is the spicy lemonade. It's got lemon, lime, cayenne pepper, raw agave and alkaline water. That's pretty good. Oh, my God, it's got sugar in it. OK, so there were a bunch of detox-y sounding foods in our lemonade, but the one we're going to focus on is cayenne pepper because it

takes us to another suggested benefit of juicing. And this is the idea that special ingredients in your juice can help you lose weight and kickstart your metabolism. And cayenne pepper is said to do this. Now, if you are looking to shed a couple of pounds, and who isn't, I hope to hear that it's this easy. Red cayenne pepper may do the trick. The cayenne pepper reduces your appetite and actually burns more calories. So, will cayenne pepper help us lose weight?

Well, Stella, our nutrition expert, says that it can affect your resting metabolic rate, which is the number of calories that your body uses when you're not doing anything. So there's been some evidence, some evidence that if you add sort of hot peppers to your diet, it's going to increase your resting metabolic rate, but not for very long. Studies have found that when you eat cayenne pepper, the thing that makes it spicy, capsaicinoids, trigger the release of the hormone noradrenaline. And this can trigger a bunch of processes in your body that could increase the amount of calories that you burn. But before you go glugging down on spicy lemonade, a recent review paper found that the amount of weight

that people actually lose from eating capsaicinoid is small. One study found that it could help people lose 2.6 kilos or almost six pounds if they added the spicy stuff to every meal for eight and a half years. But then again, the researchers also said that the benefits of all that cayenne pepper may wane over time as your body gets used to the spice. So, cayenne pepper, a bit disappointing. But wellness sites have another weight loss trick up their sleeve.

They say drinks with ginger are a good way to lose weight and get a flat stomach. Now, there's some evidence that ginger might help your body pull sugar from the blood and it might reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. But weight loss? A review paper written in 2010 says the evidence for that was, quote, still very sparse, end quote. And you might have heard of other magical weight loss ingredients on certain wellness sites.

Perhaps they were run by certain conscious uncouplers. But Stella says you've got to be cautious. Right. Everything we read in the internet is true, right, Wendy? Of course. There are people who say a lot of things and it might have been based on one study in like eight rats. And so there's where, A, it wasn't conducted in humans. It wasn't conducted over a long period of time and it was only one particular study. Conclusion. There's no strong evidence to say that special foods help you lose weight or amp up your metabolism

in any significant way. And meanwhile, by the late afternoon... I'm so sick of juice. Juice is disgusting. Ugh. So, is there anything good about having juice in your diet? Well, Stella says if you're not mainlining juice every day, there is one thing that she finds that's good about it.

It's a nice way to get a variety of fruits and vegetables in one. Then if it's a day where I haven't gotten a lot of fruits and vegetables as whole fruits and vegetables, then I at least feel a little bit good that I've done that. You know what I mean? And studies show that people who drink pure unsweetened juice, like what we're having, are more likely to have higher intakes of vitamins and minerals than those who don't drink that juice. Now, of course, that could be because people drinking these kinds of juice are just more health conscious in general. Hello. How are you doing? Good. How are you guys?

You survived. Finally, our juice detox was over. I went to bed hungry with a slight headache. I got made fun of at a bar for drinking juice. But I did it. I consumed only juice and some water for 24 hours. Shruti, Katie and I met the next morning to debrief. Did you guys all do it? No. What? What did you eat? I had a cocktail and then there were like these fava beans dripping in delicious olive oil and there was bread and I like savaged the bread.

Did you dip it in olive oil? Of course. Katie? So yes, I stuck to it, except just before I went to bed, I had a handful of kale chips. So you did not stick to it. But I looked at the ingredients and they were everything that was already in our juice diet. So how did you go, Wendy? I did it.

In fact, I did it, but I had an epiphany. Yeah. Because I did start thinking maybe there is something wrong with my diet if I'm getting headaches from, like, shaking it up. Maybe there is something wrong with me because why am I not enjoying this stupid ass juice diet? And I was like, and that's how they win because you start blaming yourself for like, why can't I do this? Why aren't I feeling great? I should try it one more time. I should

convince myself that this is great. It's a starvation diet. Exactly. And then I was like, wait a second. There's no science to this. Why am I blaming myself? And then I ate food and I'm fine. Conclusion. We already have a highly efficient juicer that doesn't strip essential fibres. It's called the mouth and the digestive system. Or as Stella says, honestly, we have teeth to chew, which is good. So we've gone up the butt, down the throat, and finally we're looking at the skin. And we're asking, could you sweat out your toxins? Because lots of detox gurus suggest saunas or body wraps to help flush out the toxins

through our sweat. We spoke to Dr. Susan Ram about this idea. Now, when we interviewed her, she was a toxicologist with Harvard Medical School. She's now working for a private pharmaceutical company. Another way that it feels like you could get rid of toxins is by sweating them out. Is that true? To a minimal amount. There are studies that have shown that if you are exposed to certain metals, you can detect traces of these metals in the sweat. There are a handful of studies that have found that traces of heavy metals come out in sweat.

But again, it's traces, and the body doesn't really need this path of getting rid of the metals. And why doesn't the body really need this path? Well, because Suzanne actually has some great news for detox fans. If people say they want to detox their body, they're already doing that on just a daily basis. And how are we detoxing on a daily basis? What is detoxing us if it's not juices or enemas or saunas? Ready for it?

It's your body! That's why we have kidneys. Which is just a big filter, basically. The kidneys are really efficiently sifting through your blood for potential toxins to pee out. Plus, we've got another heavy hitter on our side. The second big organ that detoxifies is the liver. It does a bunch of things, including taking up toxic substances

and converting them into something harmless. And then the liver decides whether we poo it out or we pee it out. Suzanne told us that we shouldn't worry so much about toxins. Many of these substances like synthetic chemicals or processed foods might sound scary, but they're actually fine if you don't get them in high doses. But still, we asked Suzanne, is there anything we can do to help our body get rid of these so-called toxins? What you actually want to do is you maintain your body so well that it just does what it already does. Like all the cellular processes are already pretty perfect. So by just eating healthy

and drinking enough, sleeping enough and exercising enough, that's all the detox that you need. When it comes to science versus detox, does it stack up? First, can colonics help us remove toxins? Cleaning your bowels with a wash can feel pretty good. And that's because it's nice to do a big crap, but it's not removing toxins. They've been absorbed further up in your small intestine. Can activated charcoal activate your detox?

Well, while it might help some people who have been poisoned, we don't have the evidence to say that it can reduce bloating or get rid of toxins in healthy people. Can juicing flush out toxins? There's nothing about putting food in a juicer that will make it healthier or more likely to get rid of toxins. In fact, juicing removes fibre, which makes it less healthy, and if you lose weight on a juice cleanse,

it's only because you're depriving yourself of food. Finally, sweating. Some heavy metals do come out in your sweat, but more heavy metals come out in your pee and your poo. And that's thanks to your kidneys and your liver. Nothing more required. The point is, a healthy body is doing a pretty good job of detoxing all on its own. But you know who else is doing a pretty good job? The people who are selling this stuff.

The marketers who are telling you that you need a juice cleanser or a colonic or charcoal lemonade. And what these people do is they just come up with some weird claim. They have no real mechanism of what their product is actually doing. They have no proof whatsoever, no studies, nothing, and they still want to make money with it. And we take it. That's science versus detox.

This episode has been produced by Shruti Ravindran, me, Wendy Zuckerman, and Heather Rogers. Our senior producer is Caitlin Sorey. We're edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with help from Rose Rimla. Sound design by Martin Peralta. Music written by Bobby Lord. An extra thanks to Lynn Levy, the Zuckerman family,

Joseph Lavelle-Wilson, Tori Amul, Dr Naveed Sattar and Dr David Jorlik. Next week we look at vaccines. With concerns rising, we're asking, how safe are they? The baby's eyes

were rolled back and they were twitching and jerking and I mean that it's such I don't know it's heartbreaking. I'm Wendy Zuckerman, back to you next time. Is there anything you wanted to add? I think you've drained me I feel as though I've had an enema.