What Your Liver Is Doing While You Drink the Tea
The organ a cleanse claims to support runs a two-stage chemical process every hour of your life. Knowing how that process works…
Aniket Zende
Contributing writer, Bad Detox
Aniket writes about detox claims and the physiology they ignore.
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16 articles
The Toxin That Never Gets Named
Detox marketing depends on a noun that is never specified, measured or defined. That vagueness is not laziness, it is the product.
Why a Juice Cleanse Makes You Feel Different
Something genuinely happens during a juice-only week, and none of it is detoxification. The effects are well understood and mostly…
Cleanses That Work by Emptying Your Bowel
Colon cleansing sells the removal of accumulated residue that has never been shown to exist. What comes out is often the product…
Sweat Is Mostly Water, and That Matters for the Claim
Sweating out toxins is one of the most repeated ideas in wellness. The composition of sweat and the job it evolved to do both argue…
The Asterisk at the Bottom of the Wellness Page
The small print contradicts the large print, and both are on the same page deliberately. That contradiction is the legal…
Natural and Clean Are Words With No Agreed Definition
Neither word has a legal meaning in most markets, which is precisely why both appear everywhere. They signal virtue while…
The Doctor in the Advertisement and What They Are Selling
A white coat and a title transfer authority instantly, and neither is a claim about the evidence. The relevant questions are which…
Why Wellness Copy Always Needs a Villain
Almost every wellness pitch opens by naming an enemy in your food, your water or your furniture. The villain is a structural…
The Vitamin Drip and the Vein as a Shortcut
Putting nutrients straight into a vein does bypass digestion, which is the one part of the sales pitch that is true. What happens…
Oil Pulling, Plaque and the Toxins Nobody Names
Swishing oil round the mouth has one plausible mechanism and one implausible one, and the marketing leads with the implausible one.…
Activated Charcoal Is Real Medicine in the Wrong Place
Charcoal is stocked in every emergency department for a specific job with a narrow time window. Almost everything sold in the…
What a Detox Retreat Removes Besides the Toxins
A week away bundles half a dozen powerful changes and then credits the one being sold. The genuine physiology in the package is…
Binders, Clay and Zeolite: The Word Doing the Work
Binding is a real chemical process, and the products sold on it do bind things in the gut. The unexamined step is what they are…
Free From, and the Ingredient That Was Never in There
A label announcing the absence of something implies its presence was a live question. Much of the time the entire product category…
The Money-Back Guarantee and the Window That Outlasts It
A generous refund period is offered as confidence in the product, and it functions as something closer to an actuarial calculation.…