Introduction
- Detoxification or ‘detox’ diets are short-term interventions designed to eliminate toxins from the body, promote health and assist with weight
loss.
- Detox diets range from total starvation fasts to juice
fasts to food modification approaches and often involve the use of laxatives, diuretics,
vitamins, minerals and/or ‘cleansing foods’
- The most common reasons
cited by naturopathic doctors for prescribing detox therapy are environmental
exposure to toxins, general cleansing/preventative medicine, gastrointestinal
disorders, autoimmune disease, inflammation, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue
syndrome and weight loss
- A selection of popular commercial detox diets is shown in
Table 1.
What is the definition
of ‘toxin’?
- Despite the widespread popularity of detox diet the term ‘toxin’ remains ill-defined.
- Approaches to detoxification generally exploit pathways
that promote the excretion of chemicals and their metabolites in urine and
faeces or extrarenal excretion in sweat or sebum
- In the context of commercial detox diets, the term ‘toxin’
has adopted a much hazier meaning; encompassing pollutants, synthetic chemicals,
heavy metals, processed food and other potentially harmful products of modern
life
- Commercial detox diets rarely identify the specific toxins they aim to remove or the
mechanisms by which they eliminate them, making it difficult to investigate
their claims.
- The detox industry founds itself on the notion that
chemicals can be neatly divided into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories; in reality,
for the vast majority of chemicals, it is the ‘dose that makes the poison’.
What are the
evidences of detox diets?
- No rigorous clinical investigations of detox diets have
been conducted. The handful of studies that have been published suffer from significant methodological limitations
including small sample sizes, sampling bias, lack of control groups, reliance
on self-report and qualitative rather than quantitative measurements.
Exposure to chemicals:
should we be concerned?
- In both the European Union (EU) and the USA, approximately
80 000 chemicals are currently in use
- It is well-established that some synthetic chemicals
accumulate in the human body and that high doses can be toxic
- The detox industry operates on the principle that any level of a foreign chemical in the
body should be a cause for concern, although this notion is unsubstantiated.
- A panel of experts from the United Nations Environment Programme
and the World Health Organisation (WHO) concluded in 2012 that, ‘although it is
clear that certain environmental chemicals can interfere with normal hormonal processes,
there is weak evidence that human health
has been adversely affected by exposure to endocrine-active chemicals’.
- Our body is consistently exposed to many ‘toxic’
substances, such as: Persistent organic pollutants (POPs), Phthalates, Biphenol
A (BPA), metals (Hg, Pb, Cd, Ar, Al) and even moulds. Their source ranging
from food that we eat, cosmetics products, household products, food packaging,
and even the capsule coatings of nutritional supplements! They are virtually
everywhere! (ZYL)
- The human body has evolved highly sophisticated mechanisms
for eliminating toxins. The liver, kidneys, gastrointestinal system, skin and
lungs all play a role in the excretion of unwanted substances.
Is there a role for
nutrition in detoxification?
There are some preliminary
studies suggesting that certain nutritional components possess detoxification
properties. As shown in Table 2 (note that mostly are animal studies and the
humans studies are of low quality).
- Currently, no
scientific studies have investigated the effectiveness of commercial detox
diets for losing weight.
- Because one of the principal claims of the detox industry is
that these diets are useful for shedding weight, this is an area that requires
attention.
Possible health risk
of detox diets
- The main health risks of detox diets relate to severe energy restriction and nutritional
inadequacy. Extreme fasting can lead to protein and vitamin deficiencies,
electrolyte imbalance, lactic acidosis and even death
- Detox dieters are also at risk of overdosing on supplements, laxatives, diuretics or even
water
- The lack of regulation
in the detox diet industry is a major concern. (There
are reports that companies are replacing the words ‘detox’ and ‘cleansing’ with
alternatives such as ‘reinvention’ and ‘revamp’, making it increasingly
difficult to regulate the detox industry)
- In some cases, the components
of detox products may not match
their labels
Conclusion
- At present, there is no
compelling evidence to support the use of detox diets for weight management
or toxin elimination.
- Considering the financial
costs to consumers, unsubstantiated
claims and potential health risks
of detox products, they should be discouraged by health professionals
and subject to independent regulatory review and monitoring.
- There is no doubt that sustained healthy habits are of
greater long-term value than the quick fixes offered by commercial detox diets.
(This is an open access article. Click here!)
great blog!!! we need this! keep it up
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