Health Trends to Avoid: Detox Diets

In this Insider article, registered dietitians and other healthcare professionals discuss the top health trends to avoid like the plague!

My topic of choice was bashing different "detox" diets. Your body is packed with different organs designed to remove compounds from your body that are not meant to be there.

There is no need to detox and try juice cleanses to "purify" your body. These dietary changes are unsustainable and will leave you back at square one when you're through with them.

Focus on making sustainable changes to your diet or lifestyle to improve your health. Focus on evidence based strategies, like increasing physical activity, including more fruits and vegetables in your diet, or focusing on getting >20 gm of fiber every day.

There are not enough high quality randomized controlled clinical trials to suggest the efficacy of any detox diet. (1, 2) In some studies, detox diets led to weight loss, but this was because the participants were in a calorie deficit and this result was not attributed to the detox itself.

Here is a link to the full article with more information: https://www.insider.com/health-trends-you-should-skip

Resources

1. Klein AV, Kiat H. Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence. J Hum Nutr Diet. 2015 Dec;28(6):675-86. doi: 10.1111/jhn.12286. Epub 2014 Dec 18. PMID: 25522674. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25522674/

2. News in health (NIH). Do Detox Diets and Cleanses Work. Dec 2021. https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2021/12/do-detox-diets-cleanses-work

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