January arrives with a familiar hangover. Too much food. Too much drink. Too much screen time.
And suddenly social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches, and seven-day "liver resets", all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state.
In the first episode of Strange Health, a new visualised podcast from The Conversation, hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt put detox culture under the microscope and ask a simple question: Do we actually need to detox at all?
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Strange Health explores the weird, surprising, and sometimes alarming things our bodies do.
Each episode takes a popular health or wellness trend, viral claim, or bodily mystery and examines what the evidence really says, with help from researchers who study this stuff for a living.
Katie Edwards, a health and medicine editor at The Conversation, and Dan Baumgardt, a GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol, share a longstanding fascination with the body's improbabilities and limits, plus a healthy scepticism for claims that sound too good to be true.
This opening episode dives straight into detoxing. From juice cleanses and detox teas to charcoal pills, foot pads, and coffee enemas, Katie and Dan watch, wince, and occasionally laugh their way through some of the internet's most popular detox trends.
Along the way, they ask what these products claim to remove, how they supposedly work, and why feeling worse is often reframed online as a sign that a detox is "working".
The episode also features an interview with Trish Lalor, a liver expert from the University of Birmingham, whose message is refreshingly blunt.
"Your body is really set up to do it by itself," she explains.
The liver, working alongside the kidneys and gut, already detoxifies the body around the clock. For most healthy people, Lalor says, there is no need for extreme interventions or pricey supplements.
That does not mean everything labelled "detox" is harmless. Lalor explains where certain ingredients can help, where they make little difference, and where they can cause real damage if misused.
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Real detoxing looks less like a sachet or a foot patch and more like hydration, fibre, rest, moderation, and giving your liver time to do the job it already does remarkably well.
If you're buying detox patches and supplements, then it's probably your wallet that is about to be cleansed, not your liver.
Katie Edwards, Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine and Host of Strange Health podcast, The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Bristol
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.