There are no short-cuts to health: no quick-fixes, no magical potions consisting of kale juice with activated charcoal which will instantly strengthen your bones, shed the pounds and make you look as you did when you were a fresh-faced 19 year old. But that doesn’t stop plenty of misguided “gurus” and money-hungry marketers from pushing a series of juices, teas, or any other so-called ‘detox’ products in consumers’ faces.
These promoted detox diets and cleanses promise to ‘eliminate harmful toxins’ and basically cure whatever it is which ails you.
The prison sentence
Presumably, the goal of a detox is to cleanse the body of harmful substances — often termed as toxins — through some type of highly restrictive diet. If the marketers are especially desperate for a payday, they’d also advise you to enhance your diet with supplements which (surprise) they happen to carry and are able to sell at a discounted price. Some cleanses are targeted at specific organs, while others aim to purge you from head to toe.
Detox diets tend to be very restrictive in nature — dieters are generally only allowed to consume fruit, vegetable juices or other approved drinks. It is impossible to mention cleanses without bringing up the Master Cleanse. It was first developed by Stanley Burroughs in the 1940s and it later made a grand re-appearance in 1976 in the book The Master Cleanser.
The Master Cleanse prescribes 6–12 glasses of lemonade with maple syrup and cayenne pepper as your only sustenance and supposedly removes all the toxins from your body, eliminating every kind of disease possible.
The Master Cleanse is only one single variant of a detox diet, and is brought up as an example. There are many other examples and protocols of “cleanses” but no specific protocol…
