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.

It seem to me that the two of you are actually in agreement.

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 quit red bull several months ago, and I totally notice a color difference.   Red bull was, "the worst thing I drank."

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.


:-)

Some interesting stuff here:

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THE DETOX MYTH

January is the time to cleanse your body but, Ben Goldacre asks, do quick-fix kits work?

Saturday 8 January 2005
The Guardian
 
Selling detox kits and quick-fixes for our habit of indulgence has got to be the easiest PR job in the world: because nobody in their right mind wants to read about how they should eat vegetables, have a healthy balanced diet, and get regular exercise, day in, day out, for the rest of their lives; that's like a life sentence of endless drudgery and healthy living.
 
But if detox works, it's a stroke of genius: it's a health drive, but with built-in obsolescence. It's the new year's resolution you don't have to feel bad about breaking, because it's not supposed to last more than a week. It's the ultimate decadent consumer product, because it's easy, it's fun, and it's good for you.
 
There's a detox to suit every taste: for those who prefer the orthodox approach, Boots will sell you their 5-Day Detox Plan. It comes packaged in pharmaceutical glass phials and blister-packed tablets, wrapped in a cool frosted casing, and they sell it in the pharmacy just next to the tubigrip and the pills. Napier's Herbal Health Shops, on the other hand, sell their 10-day Detox pack in an old fashioned drawstring hessian sack, containing a small bag of dried dandelion, and a small, beautiful medicine bottle of "Detox Formula" that's gloriously Victorian in its styling.
 
So how are they supposed to work? There seem to be two main ideas. One is that while you go on your major exclusion diet, cutting out indulgence, or worse still, cutting out almost everything, you need the ultimate in micronutrient nutritional support. After all, if you're going to survive on cups of hot water and slices of unwaxed organic lemon for a few days, the argument goes, you're going to need a bottle full of serious vitamins to survive.
 
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, most of the micronutrients you need to survive are stored up in your system over a long period of time, so you can cheerfully live off oranges for a few weeks if you really have to. But more than that, almost all the research evidence shows that taking tablets full of things like vitamins is either worthless or, in the case of high-dose antioxidant regimes, actively bad for you. Unlike eating a healthy balanced diet for the whole of your life.
 
The second idea is more peculiar: that potions can actually help your body get rid of toxins. Like so much in the pseudoscientific alternative therapy industry, this is a bit of a moving target, because when PR people are churning stuff out as they go along, they tend not to agree even with each other.
 
First of all, you've got to wonder what a toxin is. Are they the products of everyday metabolism that your body gets rid of all the time? Or the intermediate stages of molecules being broken down in your liver? According to the Boots detox kit, "pollutants, exhaust fumes, alcohol, smoke and pesticides are all everyday parts of 21st-century life, and are all capable of contributing to the toxic buildup in our bodies."
 
They can "reduce your body's ability to digest food and eliminate waste". There's certainly no evidence I'm aware of that eating a slightly unusual diet for a few days and munching on some vitamins speeds up the degradation and expulsion of any of the things these products claim to help you get rid of. And it's not really possible to imagine what experiment you could do to measure whether they were having an effect on real people, although if you came up with one, I'd be happy to try to do it.
 
And that's part of the problem. Instead of finding real-world, in vivo evidence, from living human beings, the rationale for the detox industry relies on the same trick as the nutrition industry: taking an experimental result from a laboratory situation, and pretending that the results are somehow as meaningful as a real world study showing an improvement in health of a group of people. Or, alternatively, poring over biochemistry textbooks to find a chemical that plays a role in a metabolic pathway that seems to do some good, and then suggesting that if you have more of that chemical in your diet, it will help the metabolic process to run more smoothly. For example, as the Boots detox kit says: "Glutathione is one of these - a naturally occurring substance, it helps mop up toxins in your liver." In my opinion this is all dangerously close to claiming that you need to eat supplements to live healthily and avoid a state of ill-health which is, after all, forbidden in the marketing regulations for products sold as food supplements. Because after all, what is detox, if not a new clinical treatment looking for a condition? Regardless, the most credible claim is that the nutrients in detox packs will keep all of your organs working at peak performance during your detox health drive, to help them do their job properly, with one of those jobs being to get rid of "toxins". The one thing that's not entirely clear, though, just like eating healthy food on a detox regime, is why that wouldn't be a good idea all the time.
 
But the strangest claim, most often made for the herbal detox packs, is that they will promote diuresis, and make you pass more urine. The idea, presumably, is that we will then pass more toxins out in our wee. I have a beautifully complex and finely tuned system in my body to regulate fluid balance, and I have absolutely no intention of stopping it from working properly. If I wanted to pass more urine, I'd drink more water.

Even so, the detox diet is certainly a lucrative market. Even Carol Vorderman has knocked out a perfectly sensible healthy cookbook - filled with nice glossy pictures and recipes - and called it Carol Vorderman's Detox For Life. In it, the famous media science boffin makes sweeping authoritative statements such as "after all, it takes three months to fully detox, regenerate new blood cells, body tissues and new skin cells". Which sounds good, until you stop to wonder: where did she pluck three months from, and what did she measure to know it was three months, rather than one, or five?

But the real craziness starts with the theatrical detox processes. Aqua Detox, for example, is in almost every gym in London and it's been covered glowingly by some newspapers. Rory Bremner was so impressed, he bought himself one (and they're over £1,000 to buy). You put your feet in a bath containing warm water and a solution of organic salts, and they pass a gentle electrical current that resonates with your bioenergetic field, so they say. The clear, colourless water goes first tea-coloured, then properly brown with a surface of brown sludge. This brown, we're told, is caused by the toxins coming out of your body through the pores in the soles of your feet. The method was discovered by ancient Chinese scientists.
 
And if we really want to turn up the science, then let's imagine that an iron electrode in a saltwater bath with a current passing across it will break down to create brown rust in water. Which is, in fact, exactly what happens, because I went along with another scientist and took brown Aqua Detox water samples, sent them to a lab, and found they were full of huge amounts of iron; and when we set up an identical salt bath, with electrodes but no feet in it, that water went brown in just the same way. This is being published shortly in a peer-reviewed academic journal: which is more than you can say for most of the detox science.
 
So does detox work? If it helps us realise that having a healthy lifestyle all the time is an attainable goal, then yes. But if it makes us think healthy living is like purgatory, something to be ventured into very occasionally, and with much trepidation and forward planning, then the answer is clearly no. And is it an intellectually dishonest scam? Probably. Although it might be gentler to think of it as a voluntary, self-administered tax on scientific illiteracy and decadence.
 

Or this, by the same chap:

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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.

Ben Goldacre on Detox.

Just read Bad Science.

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).