‘Detox’ treatments promoted online after holidays ineffective: McGill expert

Many people want to undergo a detox treatment to eliminate the excess alcohol or food consumed during the holidays. However, beware of charlatans who try to sell you products to detoxify your liver or eliminate toxins from your body. Instead, focus on healthy lifestyle habits. However, people are becoming tired of hearing this message.

Detox is not a medical term, says Christopher Labos, a cardiologist and associate at McGill University’s Science and Society organization, whose mission is to present science to the public. There is no such thing as detoxifying the body, he emphasizes.

“Everything we drink and eat is digested and eliminated in the normal way through our gastrointestinal system. Everything you see on the internet that talks about detox in one form or another has no scientific value whatsoever,” he says.

The doctor clarifies that these types of detoxification products, which are sometimes sold in pharmacies and sometimes online, are not dangerous, but they have no beneficial effect. “For consumers, it’s better not to spend money on products that don’t do much,” he says.

Labos explains that the key is to take preventive measures, i.e., eat well, without overeating, and not drink too much alcohol. But even if you serve yourself a large slice of Christmas cake, none of this is “dangerous in the acute sense,” except for alcohol, of course.

“If you want to eliminate the harmful effects of alcohol, you just have to not drink alcohol and realize that a little moderation is good all year round, not just for Dry January (the month of January during which people don’t drink alcohol),” says Labos.

He points out that people often give themselves free passes. “The effects of not eating well are really consequences that accumulate over time. They include obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and cardiovascular disease. All of this happens over time. Of course, there are the effects of age, genetics, and so on. But our lifestyle habits play a very big role. We need to realize that if we make exceptions for Christmas, Easter, New Year’s Day, and summer [vacations], we start to see that the exceptions become quite numerous,” the doctor points out.

Healthy lifestyle habits not interesting enough

Labos notes that it is difficult to get the message across about adopting healthy habits. “The problem for the general population is that as a recommendation, it’s not interesting, it’s not sexy. It’s hard to say the same thing over and over again because at some point, people say, ‘But what can we really do to improve our medical health? These are recommendations where we don’t see the benefits because they are long-term benefits,” Labos points out.

For example, it is recommended that you get at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week to maintain good cardiovascular health. But Labos believes that people are often aware of this type of recommendation.

In short, don’t be too sedentary, sleep well, and eat a balanced diet. “All these things are important. But they’re so common and repeated so often that people start to tune them out because they hear them over and over again and they’re no longer interesting. And that’s the difficulty with popular science. We have to find a way to communicate important, but not necessarily interesting, things to the public,” he comments.

Labos also sees a certain competitiveness with social media influencers, who manage to attract a large following without necessarily being factual. “The disadvantage we have compared to influencers on the internet—because they can say a lot of things to try to generate interest among the population—is that they say things that are not based on scientific facts,” he laments.

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–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews