It’s hard to avoid health fads. It took Google just ten minutes since I read this study in Cancer Research Prevention to begin bombarding me with adverts. ‘7lbs in 7 days Juice Diets’ and ‘Coreflush colon cleanses’ are just some of the regimes proclaiming salvation from ill health, but nothing gets pushed as much as the detox. According to The Internet, the detox diet might as well have descended from Heaven as it’s so effective at solving everything from bad breath to erectile dysfunction.
This latest obsession with internal body cleansing has flourished over the last couple of decades. The diet industry, of which detox plays an important role, is rapidly expanding. It’s already worth tens of billions of dollars, despite coming under severe criticism from leading scientists. Author and blogger Dr. Ben Goldacre – famous for calling out examples of ‘bad science’ – once described detox as “meaningless, symbolic, gimmicky short-lived health gestures with a built-in expiry date”. Yet this doesn’t stop the media touting every new superfood or miracle-diet as a panacea for all our ills. News outlets pounce at the first sign of a study purporting to have identified a medical breakthrough, often misrepresenting the author’s original findings in order to grab flashy headlines. (Take a quick look at the A-Z of things the Daily Mail thinks will cause and cure cancer – broccoli has 14 entries).
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