Link: Experts warn of detox diet dangers - Chew On This - MSNBC.com.
I hope it goes without saying that I, too, think crash-fasting for any reason, including to lose weight, is not a very smart or healthy idea. In the short term, all you're doing is pushing water weight around; in the long term, you're doing damage to the body by depriving it of substances it needs to keep running and rebuilding itself.
I do, however, sympathize with the desire to cleanse one's system of accumulated toxins and other chemical crap--and I chide the author of this article, and the sources she quotes, for not exploring that further than she does. Yes, as the pundit she quotes says, we do already have built-in systems for purging toxins--the kidneys, liver, lungs, and skin--but we could do a lot better job of helping those systems out than we do.
And that better job does in fact involve a kind of fast--but not a fast from all foods whether nutritive or no, especially not one accelerated by laxatives. Rather, what we really need (and I'm stll far from achieving this yet, though I'm closer to the goal than I used to be) is a long-term fast from as many artificial-chemical-laced foods as possible, gently aided by lots of fluids to help the kidneys do their work, and lots of fresh natural foods--including plenty of roughage--to help our GI tract and the rest of our metabolism do their work. If we could just consume like that, we'd be well along to cleaning out all sorts of crap from our system.
Obviously that kind of "fast" is going to be a harder sell for a lot of people, because we're an immediate-gratification society and the only-eat-real-food "fast" takes a lot longer than the short-term miracles promised by the flush-fast literature. But ironically, even the dieting industry is ambivalent about how long it takes to do things the old-fashioned, slow way--otherwise, why the hell would Optifast exist??
As a matter of fact--hey, while these experts are so busy fulminating about fasting schemes put forth by "alternative" health pundits, how come they don't even breathe word one about the hazards of medically sanctioned fasting programs like Optifast? Hmmmmm ... a little blind spot with regard to their colleagues in the applied-science biz, you think?
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