Ah, the new year. After the last month and a half of indulgent food and drink, disrupted schedules, and laying around the house, who doesn’t feel like they’re in need of a whole-body cleanse? There are plenty of companies who are more than happy to provide that product or service that promises to flush away toxins from your skin, gut, blood, brain, you name it. But what exactly are they selling you? In this episode, we explore the deep roots of the ever-expanding detox industry and the concept behind its billions of dollars in revenue: detoxification. What does detoxification even mean? Is there any truth to the claims that a certain diet or superfood or supplement or colonic or drink or enema or chelation therapy can “detoxify” you? Tune in to find out how many synonyms for scam we can come up with.
| History | Biology |
| Agnew, Jeremy. “Man’s purgative passion.” American journal of psychotherapy 39.2 (1985): 236-246. | Hodges, R.E. and Minich, D.M., 2015. Modulation of metabolic detoxification pathways using foods and food‐derived components: a scientific review with clinical application. Journal of nutrition and metabolism, 2015(1), p.760689. |
| Alvarez, Walter C. “Origin of the so-called auto-intoxication symptoms.” Journal of the American Medical Association 72.1 (1919): 8-13. | Klein, A.V. and Kiat, H., 2015. Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence. Journal of human nutrition and dietetics, 28(6), pp.675-686. |
| Bacchi, André Demambre. “The Eternal Allure of the Panacea: How Narratives and Biases Sustain Pseudocures.” Journal of Medical Humanities (2025): 1-23. | Grant, D.M., 1991. Detoxification pathways in the liver. Journal of inherited metabolic disease, 14(4), pp.421-430. |
| Chambers, Chloe. “150 years of detox: How inadequate dietary supplement regulation undermines consumer safety in the weight loss industry.” Minn. L. Rev. 109 (2024): 1453. | Blondet, N.M., Messner, D.J., Kowdley, K.V. and Murray, K.F., 2018. Mechanisms of hepatocyte detoxification. In Physiology of the Gastrointestinal Tract (pp. 981-1001). Academic Press. |
| Chen, Thomas SN, and Peter SY Chen. “Intestinal autointoxication: a medical leitmotif.” Journal of clinical gastroenterology 11.4 (1989): 434-441. | Cline, J.C., 2015. Nutritional aspects of detoxification in clinical practice. Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine, 21(3). |
| Suzuki, Nanami. “Popular health movements and diet reform in nineteenth-century America.” The Japanese journal of American studies 21 (2010): 111-137. | Obert, J., Pearlman, M., Obert, L. and Chapin, S., 2017. Popular weight loss strategies: a review of four weight loss techniques. Current gastroenterology reports, 19(12), p.61. |
| De Regt, Anouk, Matteo Montecchi, and Sarah Lord Ferguson. “A false image of health: how fake news and pseudo-facts spread in the health and beauty industry.” Journal of Product & Brand Management 29.2 (2020): 168-179. | Dearing, M.D. and Weinstein, S.B., 2022. Metabolic enabling and detoxification by mammalian gut microbes. Annual Review of Microbiology, 76, pp.579-596. |
| Doyle, Derek. “Per rectum: a history of enemata.” Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 35.4 (2005): 367-370. | Schlosser, P., Li, Y., Sekula, P., Raffler, J., Grundner-Culemann, F., Pietzner, M., Cheng, Y., Wuttke, M., Steinbrenner, I., Schultheiss, U.T. and Kotsis, F., 2020. Genetic studies of urinary metabolites illuminate mechanisms of detoxification and excretion in humans. Nature genetics, 52(2), pp.167-176. |
| Eberhardt, Maeve. “‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry.” Language in Society 53.1 (2024): 47-69. | Aronica, L., Ordovas, J.M., Volkov, A., Lamb, J.J., Stone, P.M., Minich, D., Leary, M., Class, M., Metti, D., Larson, I.A. and Contractor, N., 2022. Genetic biomarkers of metabolic detoxification for personalized lifestyle medicine. Nutrients, 14(4), p.768. |
| Friedenwald, Julius, and Samuel Morrison. “The history of the enema with some notes on related procedures (Part I).” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 8.1 (1940): 68-114. | Wexler, P., Fonger, G.C., White, J. and Weinstein, S., 2015. Toxinology: taxonomy, interpretation, and information resources. Science & Technology Libraries, 34(1), pp.67-90. |
| Friedenwald, Julius, and Samuel Morrison. “The history of the enema with some notes on related procedures (part II).” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 8.2 (1940): 239-276. | Cámara, M., Giner, R.M., González-Fandos, E., López-García, E., Mañes, J., Portillo, M.P., Rafecas, M., Domínguez, L. and Martínez, J.A., 2021. Food-based dietary guidelines around the world: a comparative analysis to update AESAN scientific committee dietary recommendations. Nutrients, 13(9), p.3131. |
| Kellogg, John Harvey. “Should the colon be sacrificed or may it be reformed?.” Journal of the American Medical Association 68.26 (1917): 1957-1959. | |
| Mathias, Manon. “Autointoxication and historical precursors of the microbiome–gut–brain axis.” Microbial ecology in health and disease 29.2 (2018): 1548249. | |
| Shryock, Richard H. “Sylvester Graham and the popular health movement, 1830-1870.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18.2 (1931): 172-183. | |
| Spadine, Mandy, and Megan S. Patterson. “Social influence on fad diet use: a systematic literature review.” Nutrition and Health 28.3 (2022): 369-388. | |
| Sullivan-Fowler, Micaela. “Doubtful theories, drastic therapies: autointoxication and faddism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” Journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 50.3 (1995): 364-390. | |
| Tahreem, Aaiza, et al. “Fad diets: facts and fiction.” Frontiers in nutrition 9 (2022): 960922. | |
| The Master Cleanser by Stanley Burroughs | |
| https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/detox-product-market |
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