…are best described by this part from a spoof of Whole Foods:
I pass the table where the guy invites me to join a group cleanse he’s leading. For $179.99 I can not-eat not-alone… not-gonna-happen. They’re doing the cleanse where you consume nothing but lemon juice, cayenne pepper and fiber pills for 10 days, what’s that one called again? Oh, yeah…anorexia. I went on a cleanse once; it was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I detoxified, I purified, I lost weight. On the other hand, I fell asleep on the highway, fantasized about eating a pigeon, and crapped my pants. I think I’ll stick with the whole eating thing.
For serious critiques of cleanses and ‘detoxing’, see here, here, and here.
mikethemadbiologist
I worked briefly at a spa that sold “cleanse” products from a company called M’lis. They recommended you do their 3 or howevermany day cleanse of taking fiber pills and drinking lemon water, and then get a “cleasing wrap” of having a cassia and niacin-containing creme rubbed into your skin, before they wrapped you in fancily-packaged saran wrap and stuck you under a heat lamp. Small wonder people lost 10 pounds- you didn’t eat for three days, then you sweated for an hour and a half.
Snake oil. That’s all a cleanse is.
As the grandchild of Finnish emigrants, I love sauna. And something you always hear in sauna is that it “cleanses.” I gently inform the speaker that your kidneys and liver cleanse, sauna increases body temperature and that’s about it. There is an increase in lactic acid metabolism, which is why sauna after exercise is good, but most take sauna after very little work at all. (At grampa’s farm was part of the weekly bath, ah the smells of rural living.) Who would intuit that sweating and starving are the keys to good health.