Extreme cleanses and detox diets: Do they work?

Tim Caulfield, research chair at the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, discusses different cleanses and debunks the science behind them.

We’re exploring the science of personal health pursuits when it comes to detox diets. Tim Caulfield, research director of health law at the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, joined CTV Morning Live Edmonton to discuss different cleanses.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: Let’s start with the detox diet. Is there any science to back that up?

Tim Caulfield: No, there’s no evidence to back it up at all. There are so many cleanses, so many detoxes and extreme diets out there. Extreme diets are one of the best examples. I’ve tried a lot of these things for my research. I tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s extreme cleanse, detox diet and it was 21 days of nothing. Did I lose weight? Yes, I did. Did I put it all back on immediately? Yes, I did. So there’s big, big promises for these kinds of detoxes and no evidence to support them. There have been systematic reviews that have looked at the available evidence for these diets, but there’s really nothing to support them. They can also be harmful. They’re very restrictive diets. Often, they can be very nutritionally vacant and they can invite disordered eating too. Let’s be honest, they promise to remove the toxins from your body, but they never explain how that’s going to work. What toxins? What’s the biological mechanism at play? A lot of it is about dieting, and they’re just not sustainable. So lots of potential harm, no evidence of benefit.

Kent: There’s also offers of supplements that can help with the cleanse as well. What’s your take there?

Tim: Guess what the answer is? Once again, there’s no evidence to support this at all. The whole supplement industry is often a very big red flag for bunk. If someone’s selling a supplement, that should make you almost immediately suspicious. I want to be clear here, if you have a clinically identified need for clinical supplements, that’s very different. If you go to your primary care physician or a dietician and they give you some advice, that’s different from this massive supplement industry that’s making all these false claims. There hasn’t been any evidence to support the idea that if you get an IV vitamin drip, for example, it’s going to detox anything at all. These are false promises and they’re often marketed by saying it’s going to improve your energy, or asking if you feel like you have fatigue. They play to these vague issues and they offer vague promises that aren’t supported by the evidence.

Kent: There’s a lot of talk, especially online, of a colon cleanse. Does that help anyone?

Tim: No. This is sort of an extreme version of the cleanse trend. By the way, some people do it themselves, like by taking lots of laxatives for example. It’s just a terrible idea. We’ve interviewed people who have done this, and we’ve actually filmed someone getting a colon cleanse and I think it has this immediate impact on how you feel. There’s a big placebo effect and it has this intuitive appeal there like removing plaque from your intestine or something. The reality is, none of these things work. Colon cleanses can also be really dangerous. You could perforate your bowel. There’s also been situations where the clinics offering these services have been associated with infectious disease. (ie: They weren’t cleaning the instruments properly.) So there is real potential for harm. The bottom line is if you see the word Detox or Cleanse, be very, very skeptical.