sharke


I'm a big fan of saunas (and also steam rooms) but I do not believe that sweating has any kind of detox effect whatsoever. Toxins are removed from the body via the liver, the kidneys and the gastrointestinal tract - not the skin. The purpose of sweat is to regulate the body's temperature. Analysis of sweat shows that it's mainly water, with trace elements of minerals that are not considered toxic (zinc, copper, iron etc). 

However that's not to ignore the health benefits of saunas, because they have been shown to encourage relaxation, decrease blood pressure, and enhance blood flow. I find them incredibly helpful after a workout. They also seem to do wonders for my skin. I would love one in my own home. 

 Not sure how valid this is. I have heard that sweating has the opposite effect with regards to chemicals in the body. For instance,if you drink a beer and then work in the yard and sweat, the beer will have more of an effect on you. Instead of diluting the chemicals you are condensing them. If you drink a beer after sweating instead of water it will really hit you....don't ask me how I know that.

Starise

 Not sure how valid this is. I have heard that sweating has the opposite effect with regards to chemicals in the body. For instance,if you drink a beer and then work in the yard and sweat, the beer will have more of an effect on you. Instead of diluting the chemicals you are condensing them. If you drink a beer after sweating instead of water it will really hit you....don't ask me how I know that.

That's as simple as how much "mixer" you have in your body. The basic rule given by doctors to, say, athletes, is that you should drink so much that your urine is clear or almost clear all day. The darker the urine, the more "stuff" there's in it and the risk of kidney stones and bladder stones rises. The days when you eat beetroot are excluded :o)

 

I was serious about saying hi to Glenn S.

If you wait to the middle of the week and just blurt out "Mike M says hi".... he'll know exactly who you are talking 'bout.


:-)

Or this, by the same chap:

---

Ben Goldacre
The Guardian,
Saturday 10 January 2009

Obviously by now you can interpolate my views on detox: meaningless, symbolic, gimmicky shortlived health gestures with a built-in expiry date, when we could be reading about the NHS’s surprisingly useful website to help you stop smoking (do it now: smokefree.nhs.uk/), or lifestyle pieces on the joys of buying a bike, and making a genuine move to integrate exercise into your daily life for the long term. I’m not trying to bore you. But after a few months of concentrating on dodgy reporting in the media, I had genuinely forgotten how far out a proper fruitcake can get.

Fate dealt me Nas Amir Ahmadi, managing director (which earns her the impressive soubriquet “MD”) of a company called Detoxinabox. I discussed detox with her on Radio 4. My interest in Nas’s work was first piqued when she began to deny actual verbatim quotes from her own website. What is the evidence that your detox regime will eradicate cadmium from my body, I asked? You must have the wrong website, doctor. Never heard of the idea, she said. But there it was, bright as day: “One of the most complex detoxification functions is against heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadminum [sic], nickel, arsenic, and aluminum [which isn't a heavy metal].” And so on.

Now, of all the strategies for wiggling out of a foolish statement, simply denying you ever made it strikes me as the least intellectually sophisticated, possibly the most irritating, and certainly the most shortsighted. I’m sure she’s not the first. Nas says she made a mistake. No problem.

In returning to the website to check, I had a look around. There were lots of exciting claims. Here are five. “Pumpkin seeds are a natural depression cure!” “Lemon helps maintain healthy teeth and bones” “Olives help delay the effects of ageing.” “½ teaspoon of cinnamon per day helps lower cholesterol!”, and “Tuna helps lower blood pressure”. I asked Nas if they had any evidence to back up these claims.

No, she agreed. They do not have any “scientific evidence”.

Then she seemed to change her mind, and offered some. The evidence she offered included: a study involving 7 people; a random webpage that says “Lemons build bones and teeth and nourish the brain and nerve cells”; a typically tenuous nutritionist chain of reasoning involving the almost-dead antioxidant hypothesis; weak observational correlations; and so on.

But some of the site, like a page titled “Which Came First – Depression or Diabetes?“, stuck out a mile. It was quite sciencey, quite plausible, and quite interesting, a write up of a proper research paper. Was this really written by Detoxinabox? No. In fact, they simply copied the entire text, verbatim, hundreds of words, from a blog post by a proper pharmacist named Jennifer Gibson, and passed it off as their own, removing only her name, and swapping in their own images. The original image in Jennifer Gibson’s blog post would have given away the actual source. Ownership of ideas is a grey area, but this seems to be a rather clear example of plagiarism, over 500 words from start to finish. The person running the Brainblogger website, where the piece was published, has described detoxinabox as “thieves”. Detoxinabox have not responded to me on this issue, but they have removed the page from their site.

And interestingly, Nas’s difficulty in recalling the claims about cadminum from her own website might also be explained by their original source. The entire sentence “One of the most complex detoxification functions is against heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadminum, nickel, arsenic, and aluminum.” appears, verbatim, on another company’s website, detox-guide.com, complete with that tell-tale mis-spelling of cadmium.

There’s nothing unique about Detoxinabox. What’s amazing is the ratio between their competence and their media penetrance which is unreplicated, I would say, in any field outside science. Let’s just re-examine the crimes. You deny what is plainly true. You make claims without evidence. You admit that, but then you change your mind. Your evidence is magnificently poor. You seem to plagiarise whole articles, verbatim, from real everyday people who’ve actually bothered to spend some time familiarising themselves with science, and write about it online because they’re passionate about it. And finally, crucially, your industry’s nonsense ideas get more – and more favourable – coverage in mainstream media than any piece of actual science, or any meaningful public health intervention.

Nas has explained to me that she is mystified why so many people from the world of science and medicine seem to be annoyed with her. Yup. It’s a mystery.

Just read Bad Science.

SteveStrummerUK

craigb


Just read Bad Science.

 
It's an excellent book Craig, I love his 'straight to the point' and 'cut through the bull' approach, and his passion certainly shines through on every page. I found the chapter on homeopathy particularly intriguing - as the title of chapter 13 alludes, why (do) clever people believe stupid things.
 
I was appalled when I found out that my kids' school had subscribed to the Brain Gym programme. I was sorely tempted to write to the Local Education Authority and ask for the scientific justification they had for adopting the plan, whether or not pupils' participation was compulsory, and how much it was costing (I would have imagined that buying every student a copy of Bad Science instead would be a much better use of resources).
 
 
 
 

I'm up to page 106 reading it in my "free" time (whatever that is!).   I just copied this and a few others to my tablet so I can take it with me and, hopefully, get more of things read.