My husband—the lucky guy—has a colonoscopy scheduled for this week. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, prepping for a colonoscopy involves several days of a very low fiber diet (delightful vegan meals like white rice with tofu, canned carrots and white bread) followed by industrial strength laxatives. The idea is to empty the colon and get it squeaky clean so that the little camera can see everything.
It’s the ultimate cleansing regimen and no one in their right mind would want to do it. But it’s the only way to thoroughly clean out your intestines. As far as cleansing or “detoxifying” the rest of your body—well, you already have a highly sophisticated system for that, which includes the liver, lungs, and kidneys.
There is no diet or regimen that will detoxify your body. You can eat all the raw foods and juices you want and your body will still produce toxins (because that’s the nature of normal metabolism) and will still do its usual work to neutralize or eliminate those toxins.
Eating a healthful diet that is rich in whole plant foods will certainly go a long way toward supporting those systems and promoting health. But that’s different from expecting that a week or two of some special diet will actually cleanse your body of harmful substances.
Adopting a vegan diet doesn’t cause your body to detox, either. Which is a good thing, since the last thing we want to tell people is that they are going to feel unwell when they first go vegan. Some new vegans might experience discomfort if their diet is suddenly higher in fiber or beans. But that can be handled pretty easily by consuming some refined grains, more cooked foods, and more lentils (they’re less gas-y than other beans), and transitioning gradually to a higher fiber intake.
Going vegan should feel good. For many, there is a distinct sense of psychological relief when diet and lifestyle choices start to reflect actual feelings and beliefs about animals. Let’s not ruin that with made-up claims about some transition period of "detoxification" and discomfort.
Interesting perspective - thanks! I don't remember any discomfort when I went vegan, but that may be because I had gone vegetarian and then cut out dairy (as a check on some intestinal discomfort) over the course of about a month. Certainly nothing compared to the prep for a colonoscopy, which is a pretty violent experience!!!
ReplyDeletei recently tried to reduce my fat intake on a specialized vegan weight loss diet called the mcdougall plan and within a couple of weeks noticed some very horrible side effects of leaving essential fats out of my diet. i smartened up and reintroduced the good stuff and was back to normal in no time only to be lectured by a friend who told me i was just doing it wrong and that i needed to detox for a month or so first. i thought that sounded wacky...so, thank you for the confirmation.
ReplyDeletegood luck to your husband and his colon.
I've had people tell me, after eating one of my vegan meals, that they felt sick and were "in the bathroom all night." My response: that is what happens when you never eat veggies and then suddenly eat a bunch of them without the colon-clogging meat.
ReplyDeleteBeing vegan has made me feel healthier but it certainly isn't a detox - still depends which vegan foods you eat, as you wrote.
It is discouraging when people see a vegan diet as a fad or a short-term way to lose weight or detox rather than see it for the long-term healthy goals, for them, the animals and the planet.
Best to the hubby :)
I think the words "detox" and "cleanse" may be the points of disconnect, then, between what you're saying and what the spectrum of food-for-life approaches are about. I do feel like, when I switched to a raw vegan diet, that I began noticing obvious changes in my body that could loosely be described as detoxification: for one, my lifelong problem skin cleared up significantly. And for that matter, when I first went vegan 12 years ago, I noticed different improvements then, too. "Detoxification" may be overstating the case -- and I certainly don't mean to downplay what your husband is going through in preparation for his colonoscopy because that sounds hideous and he certainly has my sympathy -- but the sloppiness of language makes it difficult to convey the physiological phenomena we do actually experience when we make sustained step changes in our diet for the better.
ReplyDeleteI think your post gives too much credence to the pseudo-scientific nonsense floating around out there. Until proponents of so-called "detoxification" actually define what this mean, what exactly are you arguing against?
ReplyDelete@Kate O': As to whether a vegan diet helps with skin problems (or any other specific problem). Maybe it does. If skin problems are linked to specific components of one's diet, it's no surprise that switching diets might improve your skin quality.
But rather than using ridiculously broad, ill-defined terms like "toxins" or "detofixication", it's best to describe specific results.
Also, just because you noticed a specific (possibly entirely unrelated-to-diet change) doesn't mean anyone else will. I've been vegan a long time, and during that time I've developed patchy eczema around my body. Should I ascribe that to my diet too?
Thanks all, for your comments. I agree that the whole idea of a "detox diet" is not very well defined. Generally, I think people refer to a detox plan as something that will produce immediate (that is, over a period of a few weeks) cleansing of all toxins from the body. My point was that there is no such thing as a diet that will do that. If people note specific improvements or problems when they go vegan, it's likely to be due to some specific food. For some people, removing dairy might eliminate acne (there is some evidence that dairy makes acne worse.) Other people who suddenly go on a very low fat vegan might actually notice some problems associated with that. Or sometimes, the changes are merely coincidental.
ReplyDeleteBut to answer Dave's question, what I am arguing against is the idea that there is a specific diet that will neutralize toxins in the body.
Having done numerous cleanses (always using the "Master Cleanse" protocol developed by Stanley Burroughs), I can testify that there is no magical diet that will "detoxify" one's body. However, I think there is definitely value in giving your digestive system a break, which is where "cleansing" comes in. Ever since I started doing cleanses, I have (1) never suffered from allergies again (2) never suffer from arthritis, at least during the cleanse, and (3) feel great! There may be no scientific basis for it, but that doesn't mean it doesn't work.
ReplyDeleteExcellent post, thanks. Like Dave (we're different people, promise!), I'm not a fan of the "vague toxins" gambit. Since going vegan, I feel "cleaner," but I'm pretty sure that has more to do with psychological factors rather than digestive ones.
ReplyDeletePerhaps one of the reasons people think a vegan diet cleanses the body is how terrible vegans feel after eating meat. I ate some soup that had ground beef in it after being vegan for 4 months (it was the only thing to eat and not the venue for activism), and I felt awful. Headache, nausea, the works.
Great thoughts. I appreciate your insight on being a vegan and how you stress that it is all about health and not just about "dieting" as a vegan.
ReplyDeleteLove your website as well. Great info!
-marn
A lot of the detoxification memes running around in rawfood (and other) scenes, can be attributed to magical thinking.
ReplyDeleteThere seems to be some self-organization-selection of people who are gluten intolerant to do very well on raw food, duh, because it usually leaves out all grains and therefore contains no gluten.
People who "just feel great" after "detoxifying" with raw food, then, would achieve the same result with a gluten free diet, and exchanging the grains which do contain gluten with others that don't. Like Amaranth, Quninoa, Rice, Maize and so on.