Diet change is a rite of passage in spring, when cultural
values implore us to purge our lives and bodies of flotsam
that weighs us down. While affirmative descriptions of
cleansing and detox incite the notion of weight loss,
neither term explicitly means you’ll be lighter. In fact,
neither term actually means anything at all, which makes
a mockery of the earnestness with which many people
practise them.
One woman’s clean diet is another’s junkyard. So how
do you know whether that sense of pollutedness is in your
body or your head?
According to naturopathic theories, toxins build up
when the balance of good and bad bacteria in our bowel
is disrupted. The usual suspects are antibiotics, the Pill,
alcohol, caffeine and stress, which can kill off good
bacteria. As bad bacteria multiply, they damage our gut,
allowing things like bacteria and food particles to enter
our bloodstream, where they act as toxins. The results
are common maladies such as fatigue, headaches, food
intolerances and poor health.
The idea of toxins is still controversial in the medical
world. According to GP Dr Fran Bruce, detoxes are a
pseudo faith.
“There is little medicinal evidence that detox diets
remove toxins from the body,” she says. “Your body’s
kidneys and liver are designed to effectively do this job by
filtering and eliminating most ingested toxins – your body
doesn’t need added help to complete this process.”
In a poll among hundreds of Australian nutrition
experts, detox diets topped a list of the nation’s worst diet
protocols. Lemon Detox Diet took its third consecutive
cup ahead of SkinnyMe tea. Accredited practising dietitian
and Dietitians Association of Australia spokesperson
Melanie McGrice says the evidence is damning.
“What you lose on these detox diets, like the Lemon
Detox Diet and SkinnyMe tea, is usually fluid, healthy
gut bacteria, electrolytes; all the things to keep your body
healthy rather than fat,” she says.
Lemon detoxes and liver cleansing rank among
Australian consumers’ favourite diets according to a
Newspoll survey commissioned by DAA.
Dietitian Lyndi Polivnick agrees that detoxes are wolves
in sheep’s clothing. “Detox diets promise enticing benefits,
but most are medically meaningless. The belief that your
body needs help ridding itself of toxins is not based on
science,” she says. Juice fasts and cleanses do provide
hydration, nutrients and minerals, but they don’t contain
any protein, meaning they heighten risk of catabolism
and metabolic slowdown. Juicing also eschews one of the
greatest tools in weight loss: fibre.
Dr Bruce says detoxes ignore the principles that inform
the goals people often seek through cleansing.
DAA spokesperson Professor Clare Collins says the
greatest threat of toxicity is not a food or food type but
quantity. “If people consume an excess of food, then that
becomes toxic to the body, it raises your blood sugar and
puts you at risk of type 2 diabetes,” she says. Exceeding
your energy needs stresses the entire system. Reducing
portion sizes quickly restores blood sugar levels, resulting
in significant physical improvements. Collins doesn’t
support the idea of detox per se.
“The body has an amazing ability to cleanse itself,
particularly the liver,” Collins says. She does, however,
recognise the potential for programmatic detoxes to
kick-start new behaviours, which may benefit from being
replaced by a strict regimen until the urge to repeat the
pattern subsides.
Dr Bruce says the detox phenomenon is fundamentally
a belief- rather than an evidence-based practice while
McGrice warns that detoxes can undermine health.
“If a ‘clean’ eating approach is too rigid or narrow, it can
put people at risk of nutritional deficits in their diet,” warns
McGrice. “The more you narrow your choice of foods, the
less range of vitamins and minerals you enjoy. And if you
cut out whole food groups like wheat or dairy, you may be
putting yourself at risk of developing depression, brittle
bones, constipation and thyroid issues.”
A detox can also reinforce unhelpful beliefs about food
according to psychologist Sarah McMahon, a body image
expert at Sydney’s BodyMatters. “People then mistakenly
credit ‘clean’ eating with almost superhuman powers.
When popular culture reinforces the severe dietary
restrictions of ‘clean’ eating, it normalises this behaviour
and disordered eating may then slip under the radar,”
McMahon says.
According to the Dietitians Association of Australia,
orthorexia involves strict and inflexible eating behaviours,
where a person has rules about how much food should
be eaten and the timing of meals, or avoidant-based
eating practices based on misguided beliefs about what
is healthy. It starts out as a true intention to eat healthy
foods but it is taken to the extreme, restricting lifestyle and
jeopardising health.
“A typical warning sign is that the focus on clean eating
gets bigger and bigger, while the focus on the rest of the
world gets smaller,” says McMahon. The pseudo ecstasy of