Painful truth of detox regime

It’s detox time. All over the Western world, dedicated men and women are today beginning the New Year with a diet designed to clear out all the toxins of the past 12 months and bring their bodies back to crystal-pure perfection.

Out go alcohol, red meat, sugar, salt and coffee. In come fruits, roots, spinach and nuts and gallons of bottled water.

If you ever doubted that this sort of shock to the system was beneficial, there is any number of celebrity dieters selling you their detox diet.

And guess what? It’s all a load of baloney. A study by the BBC reveals today that detox diets are a waste of time and money.

One group of volunteers went on a detox regime, another ate normally. At the end of a week, toxicology experts could find no difference in antioxidant levels between the groups.

This makes perfect sense. Detox diets have been with us for only a few years. The human body, on the other hand, has been evolving for about 4,000 million years.

It has had plenty of time to evolve into something astonishingly robust and forgiving.

Assuming we do not grossly overload it with vast quantities of fat, sugar, salt or tobacco, it will give most of us 70 or more years of reliable service.

Depending on where we live, this remarkable machine will thrive on a diet based on wheat, rice, pasta, seal blubber, camel fat or mares’ milk.

One thing is certain. The human body knows far more about what it needs or does not need than the average celebrity.

It has been detoxing perfectly well, day in day out, since the moment you were born.

It will cheerfully adapt to even the wackiest detox regime. But the latest findings suggest your body will be just as happy with a normal, sensible diet.

We do not expect the BBC report to kill off the vast detox industry overnight. For behind every diet is the promise of a younger more beautiful body. And deep in the human psyche is the belief that we can only get better by suffering.

As long as people believe there is no gain without pain, the detox diets will be with us.

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