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The name sounds reassuring - everyone knows that anything toxic is bad for you. Plus these diets encourage you to eat natural foods and involve lots of water and veggies - all stuff you know is good for you. You hear about celebrities going on detox diets, and people who go into drug or alcohol rehabs are said to be detoxing. So shouldn't a detox diet be a good bet? Not really. Like many other fad diets, detox diets can have harmful side effects, especially for teens. First, let's look at the lingo. A toxin is a chemical or poison that is known to have harmful effects on the body. Toxins can come from food or water, from chemicals used to grow or prepare food, and even from the air that we breathe. Our bodies bring in toxins and then process those toxins through organs like the liver and kidneys and eliminate them in the form of sweat, urine, and feces. What Is a Detox Diet? The people who support detox diets say that because of emotional stress or dehydration, toxins don't leave our bodies properly during the elimination of waste. Instead, they believe toxins hang around in our digestive, lymph, and gastrointestinal systems as well as in our skin and hair. According to proponents of detox diets, these toxins can cause all kinds of problems, like tiredness, headaches, nausea, and acne. So the basic idea behind detox diets is to temporarily give up certain kinds of foods that are thought to contain toxins. The idea is to purify and purge your body of all the "bad" stuff. Although the diets vary, most of them involve some version of a fast, that is, giving up food for a couple of days, and then gradually reintroducing certain foods into your diet. Many of these diets also encourage you to undergo colonic irrigation, otherwise known as an enema (an enema flushes out your rectum and colon using water), which is designed to "clean out" your colon. Still others recommend that you take herbal supplements to help the "purification" process. There are tons of detox diets out there. Typically they involve 1 or 2 days on a completely liquid diet and another 4 or 5 days adding brown rice, fruit, and steamed vegetables (all organic) to the diet. After a week of eating only these foods, you gradually reintroduce other foods - except for red meat, wheat, sugar, eggs, and all prepackaged or junk foods - into your diet. People on detox diets are also encouraged to chew their food thoroughly, to drink very little while eating, and to relax prior to each meal (although it seems a stretch to call a glass of lemon water a meal!). Lots of claims are made about what a detox diet can do for you, from preventing and curing disease to giving you more energy to making you more focused and clear-headed. Of course, anyone who goes on a low-fat, high-fiber diet is probably going to feel more healthy, but proponents of detox diets claim that this is because of the elimination of toxins, as opposed to carrying around less excess weight or having a healthier heart. However, there's no scientific proof that these diets help rid the body of toxins faster or that the elimination of toxins will make you a healthier, more energetic person.
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