Reminder: You Don’t Need to ‘Detox’!
Reading Time: 3 minutesWhat to Actually Do for Your Health if You Indulged a Little Too Much Over the Holidays, Indulging during the holidays doesn’t do some kind of dramatic harm to your body., Holiday Detox and Cleanse: You don’t need to! Here’s why
The idea of a detox is as simple as it is alluring. We spend most of the holiday season being as unhealthy as possible, piling on the booze and calories while trying desperately not to start a fight with our family over politics, and then go back to real life feeling, if not terrible, then at least a bit guilty about ourselves.
Maybe you’re worried about how all of the things you just ingested might impact your health, maybe you’re just feeling a little bit bloated from baking and consuming all of the seasonal cookies offered on the New York Times Cooking app. Time for a reset, you might think. A week or two of apple cider vinegar and supplements, and all of that unhealthy stuff you’ve ingested will be flushed away, never to return (until you do it all again next year).
The problem with this, of course, is that it’s complete nonsense. Your body generally doesn’t need help getting rid of toxins, and if you do find yourself in a situation where it does, you probably will feel more than simply bloated.
You are, in fact, technically exposed to innumerable toxic substances each day. That’s because most things can be toxic in high doses. A great example of this is caffeine: Most people don’t realize that they’re chugging down a serious neurotoxin with their pumpkin spice lattes and oat milk cappuccinos, but it’s true. At low doses, caffeine is one of the safest things you can consume regularly, with few if any negative health effects. At higher doses it can kill you quite quickly. That’s why Panera is now displaying warning signs about its caffeinated lemonade, and it’s how some scientists once seriously injured their research participants by giving them too much caffeine in an experiment.
You are unlikely to encounter lethal doses of caffeine in your day-to-day life (even the two deaths that lawsuits link to the Panera lemonade appear to have been due, at least in part, to other health issues). Medical textbooks tend to define a toxin as a biological poison, generally produced by plants, animals, and bacteria as a defense mechanism or byproduct, things like snake venom and botulin, which can easily kill you even in relatively small amounts; if you come into contact with them you need immediate medical attention, not a diet-like regimen to follow for five to 10 days.
If you look at some popular detox juices, supplements, and dietary regimens online, it’s not that they are aiming to get rid of a specific bad thing that people are ingesting—it’s more that there’s a general malaise that you can attempt to improve by following oddly specific rules and restrictions. You have to drink lemon juice in the morning, take these five pills, and remember to only drink your coffee black. Many detox diets or ‘cleanses’ are almost religious in the ceremony and pomp that they recommend.
The problem with all of this is that there’s not a shred of evidence that most of these kinds of recommendations will help your health. Your liver and kidneys already do a great job of filtering harmful substances, like the alcohol, out of your body. Following a woefully specific set of instructions around food in the first weeks of the new year might help you feel less guilty about all that spiked eggnog, but that’s all it’s really doing—giving you a feeling (and maybe lightening your wallet).
The sad fact is that the best health advice anyone can give you is boring, simple, and just plain hard to follow. Don’t smoke, it’s extremely bad for you. Drink as little alcohol as possible—ideally, none at all. Eat a varied diet, try to limit calories. Exercise, ideally every day for at least 20 minutes, if not more. If you’re feeling really under the weather, see a licensed professional who is legally obligated to care about your health.
It’s pretty natural to feel a bit exhausted and out-of-sorts when you spend weeks out of your routine eating and drinking more than usual. Chances are if you give it a week, you’ll feel back to normal anyway. And if you spend most of the year trying to look after your health, the few days a year that you spend refilling your plate and your wine glass are probably not going to have much of a negative impact on your life. Just avoid drinking and driving, and don’t get into any fistfights over politics. In the new year, instead of doing anything dramatic, novel, and complex to change your health, just do the things you already know you should be doing. You can’t overhaul your body with a quick fix. But you can make changes, big and small, that will help keep it in good condition.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/holiday-detox-you-dont-need-to-heres-why.html
Ref: slate
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