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New Year's resolutions normally involve a renunciation of pleasure. You may give up smoking, as I have done with an iron will every year since 1986, or boozing or fatty food. However righteous you feel, you will be unable to suppress a yearning for the lost enjoyment of bad habits.
No longer. The best news of the New Year, quite probably the only cheering news we will hear in 2009, is that you can renounce "good" habits as well. To be specific, you can renounce detox.
As the admirably hard-headed researchers for Sense about Science have shown, it is worthless. You might as well invest in the property market as spend £36.95 for detox bath accessories when soap and water work just as well.
What applies for alleged detox cleansers applies equally to alleged detox foods - I say "alleged" because when scientists contacted the snake-oil salesmen marketing the miracle cures, no two companies agreed on a definition of what detox was, and not one company could offer medically reputable evidence that its products helped customers lose weight and feel marvellous.
So rather than take up a typical offer to have "natural and balanced" meals delivered to your door for a mere £16.50 a day, you could eat ordinary fruit and veg and take regular exercise and let your liver and kidneys do the rest free of charge.
This is not a message the big business of retailing quackery wants you to hear. Look at the shelf space in any chemist's devoted to purveyors of voodoo treatments. Not only detox but homeopathy, aromatherapy and herbal and flower remedies prey on the gullible and frightened.
If you think I am exaggerating, buy Trick or Treatment? for less than half the price of a detox bath accessories set. Simon Singh, the best science writer in the business, and Professor Edzard Ernst go through the claims of alternative therapists with devastating rigour. They warn that while the health benefits are negligible, alternative treatments can be positively dangerous if sick customers take them rather than effective conventional medicines.
With the recession settling on London like smog, many of us will have to make painful decisions to renounce more than booze and fags. Giving up on detox should not be painful, however. On the contrary, it should be a life-enhancing pleasure.
Reader views (6)
Poor Nick Cohen looks very glum, as well he might after twenty annual failed attempts to stop smoking. A few tired and cliche'd cracks at homeopathy will help pay for a few Woodies, but the money would be better spent on educating himself about homeopathy. Homeopaths are tolerant, non judgemental souls. Many GPs treat glummer more intransigent folk than Nick, with homeopathy, for free !! Be happier and still have money for fags !
- Noel Thomas, Maesteg, Wales., 07/01/2009 20:19
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And what are you spending your every working moment thinking about, Caitlin? Or are you at this very moment detoxing your brain?
- James Hennessy, london england, 07/01/2009 19:39
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I find it odd that detox and homeopathy appear in the same article. I agree that illness can be very frightening. The practice of homeopathy by qualified statutorily registered practitioners is proven to be effective and they would never take advantage of vulnerable patients, rather they would respect, understand and gently help them improve their health.
- Roger Neville-Smith, Saltburn, Cleveland, 07/01/2009 18:16
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In that case James.Are you spending every single waking moment thinking about it?.. You better be James
- Caitlin, London, 07/01/2009 16:06
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Amen.
Now tell us why the media have been so keen to publicise this kind of nonsense in the first place. One can't look at a magazine or tabloid without seeing headlines about one or other vacuous celebrity 'detoxing'. Along with its promotion of various kinds of quackery and myths about vaccines, the media have a lot to answer for.
- Maria Maclachlan, London, England, 07/01/2009 11:58
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Nothing to say about the slaughter of the palestinians, Nick
- James Hennessy, london england, 06/01/2009 19:42
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