Is The Food Hospital right to dismiss the detox?

I’ve been following The Food Hospital every week with a great deal of interest. So I was especially keen to find out what they had to say about the trend for detoxing. Now, Channel Four got their fingers badly burnt when they ran the You Are What You Eat series, fronted by (Dr) Gillian McKeith. It turned out she wasn’t a doctor at all, and the qualifications she did have were not exactly orthodox. So this time they obviously decided to do things differently. Except that they’ve done things more or less the same, but with real doctors and a real dietitian. So we might expect them to be more thoroughly grounded in science.

Off went Dr Pixie McKenna to the University of Reading to talk to a Dr George Grimble and ask him straight – do we need to detox? Dr Grimble thought not, and illustrated his point, bafflingly, with the entrails of a pig. We got to see the pancreas – “full of powerful detergents” – and not much else was said on the matter. Detox was summarily dismissed with “The body can look after itself”. Phew, that’s a relief. But hang on – as I understand it, scientific studies have shown just how chock full of toxins we actually are. The healthy body may be able to “look after” naturally occurring toxins, particles which end up in food and are excreted with waste matter, but as far as I am aware the body has not yet evolved an organ to detoxify the thousands of man-made chemicals to which we are exposed on a daily basis.

It is well established that levels of PCBs, dioxins, pesticides and other toxic chemicals are found in human tissue. They have even been found in the tissue of polar bears, because they are so widely dispersed in the environment. Human fat stores are worryingly full of hormone disrupting chemicals and other environmental pollutants which have also been found to make their way into breast milk, cross the placenta and also cross the blood brain barrier.

All this is well documented, so it would appear that it is not just complementary therapists who make unscientific declarations. Dr Grimble is right however to dismiss the detox products on the market which claim to help the body detoxify, but are no more than laxatives. I’ve scoured the literature and found absolutely nothing to support the claims made by the makers of these magic bullets.