I say give it an English accent. What is this rubbish? Cut out of me. See,

the liver is a total badass. After the break, if cleanses don't help our bodies, why have they been around for so long? Why is this myth so

sticky? It is a way of helping people feel like they can return to that pure and natural state that was given to us by God before we interfered with it. And of course, you need to do it periodically because these polluting elements are ever present in the world around us.

The aesthetic was West Coast spa, California chic, but in a large conference room overlooking New York City's East River. There were stations of food and people offering something they called toxic-free manicures. There was even a doctor giving injections of vitamin B12 to people who were lined up as if they were taking communion. Someone was handing out charcoal lemonade as a way to flush out the toxins. I tried some and it tasted like what I imagined the swill on the floor of a spa would taste like. This conference was hosted by a popular wellness brand founded by a celebrity. I thought of this conference as a research trip. I wanted to experience the lure of the marketing up close. When the celebrity founder arrived on the stage, she had the air of a preacher at a megachurch. They opened with healing music, and our inner self was supposed to travel to the center of the world. It felt like the opening hymn at a religious service. And all the speakers who came after her were like her apostles. We were introduced to a medium and two people who claimed to have come back from the dead. One was a doctor. They said things like, God has pure healing energy. A deep spiritual journey can cure anything. Spontaneous healing from cancer and infections can happen with love. You get sick because your life is not going in the right direction. We were told death is not real. And I looked around the room and realized I was essentially at a religious conference. Throughout the day, speakers kept talking about God and nature and spiritual forces to explain rules that we should live by to be good, pure, clean, and natural. I had to message my friend, Dr. Alan Levinowitz. He's a religious studies scholar who specializes in classical Chinese thought, and he's really interested in how religion and health overlap. A little while ago, he was studying Taoist monks. Some

of the Taoist monks that I studied had all these elaborate dietary plans. There was a diet in which you banned the five grains, which were what most people ate, and they had proprietary supplements. And I was looking at these diets and I was thinking to myself, you know, this looks a lot like modern dietary restrictions today. And in the same way, they would promise miraculous cures. After

Dr. Levinowitz first noticed this, he started to see echoes of religious practices in other wellness trends. For a long time, medicine and religion were deeply intertwined. Powerful religious institutions like the Vatican funded hospitals. Illness was viewed as a sign of sin or evil.

Part of what I want people to realize is that even though now we see religion and science or religion and medicine as very separate and institutionally, they're very separate, for individuals, that overlap never disappeared. I

see this all the time. The wellness world is full of language with religious connotations.

and health. So

why do you think people do that? Well,

my basic answer is that as human beings, we need simple rules, ways to sort the world that save us time and energy thinking. For

example, when we go to the grocery store, we don't want to examine every product we buy to figure out if it's healthy or not. We want some simple rules. This is always healthy. This is always bad. And

once we have those rules in place, we've freed up a bunch of cognitive space to think about other things. And that makes a lot of sense. We can't just constantly be analyzing and reanalyzing and reanalyzing, but it also means that we're going to end up making mistakes. That's

because the world isn't simple. But Dr. Levinowitz says if you're looking for a guiding principle, try this one. Be suspicious of

miracle cures. If something is a panacea, if it's good for everything, perhaps it is not as good for those things as you might think. And you see this frequently in alternative medicine. The interventions that they have are not specific. They apply to virtually every illness short of a broken leg. Dr.

Levinovitz has noticed that one simple rule is particularly captivating to us. Natural is always good. He has literally written an entire

book, natural, about the power of this one word. It wasn't just in the places you would expect it to crop up, natural medicine or natural food. I found people using the same word to reinforce the status quo in economic theory, for example, the idea that a natural market is the best market. And so if you interfere with the markets, artificially manipulating them, things will be bad. People are the about how they use the word natural and

what that means to them. Some people may want a natural remedy for a cold, but not a natural dental filling or tooth extraction. This really shows the problem with the word. a chameleon. You can make many things sound natural or unnatural, depending on how you frame them. The word natural has a lot of power, and it's had power for centuries across many cultures, including in classical Chinese thought.

The word that's typically translated as natural is ziran, which would mean self-so or the way it is of itself. And I actually really like that word for illustrating why natural has been important across cultures. There's an idea that natural means uninterfered with, things that are so of themselves. They were created by forces beyond and before humans. And of course, the forces that come beyond and before humans are often divinized. has a kind of inherent divine purity associated with it because human artificiality, our art, our technology hasn't messed up the natural thing yet.

Cleanses draw on other powerful religious concepts too, like purification and hidden knowledge.

Ayurvedic medicine, traditional Indian medicine, there are practices in which you sweat out toxins. And if you think about Native American rituals and the sweat lodges, this was also thought of as a way of purifying yourself. And it's not that these rituals are bad or wrong. It's that these wellness influencers try to yank the rituals out of their original religious slash philosophical context and say, oh, no, no, no, these are just, this is actually a purifier. It's a medical ritual. No, this is in essence a religious ritual. And if you want to practice it as that, I think that's absolutely fine. What you can't do is pluck it out of its original context, rebrand it as natural medicine and sell it to your Instagram followers as the cure that they don't want you to know. This

is cultural appropriation, which makes this marketing even more troubling. And just like natural and secret are great marketing ploys, so is selling something as ancient. This all-natural reishi mushroom cleanse was used by ancient... There's this idea that if something has been around for a long time, it must be good. Used by Eastern cultures for millennia. Ancient Aztec detox.

Follow the ancient wisdom of Tibetan herdsmen with this juice cleanse. As history

moves forward, you're playing a game of telephone. And the original message gets corrupted. And so that ancient fallacy is related to the desire to want to have the pure original version of something. When

you think about all these powerful concepts that cleanses draw upon, it makes sense that this myth has stuck around for so long, even after medicine moved away from using bloodletting and purging to get rid of toxins. It makes sense that so many of us find cleanses and detoxes appealing. What I want you to remember though, is that marketing buzzwords like naturalness and purity are not scientific or medical, even if they claim to be. So what would you tell someone who wants to embark on a cleanse or a detox or thinking of doing one? Would you have any thoughts you would want them to run through? I

would want them to reflect on why they're doing it, the authority on which they're doing it, and what they expect to get from it. If these rituals reinforce some kind of ideal of purity, I want people to really reflect on how that in the long term might end up making them less happy. There's no such thing as purity. And wanting to be pure is ever and always going to be a frustrating goal. I

think it's really important to point out that people are lured down these rabbit holes of misinformation. Medical problems are really complex, and often doctors don't do a good job of explaining them or people don't have access to the kind of treatment they need. And sometimes, you know what, not every medical condition has a treatment. So there are gaps in medicine and people will take advantage of that to sell us scams. My two boys were born extremely prematurely and they had a lot of health problems as babies. One son had a serious heart defect, and the other had cerebral palsy. And these were things that could be made better with treatment, but not cured. I'm a doctor, but after my sons were born, I was really just a parent with two struggling kids. And I did what a lot of parents do in that situation. I scoured the internet for answers. I found a clinic that offered stem cell transplants as a cure for both heart conditions and cerebral palsy, two completely different conditions that are in no way treated the same. That should have been my red flag, but I wanted to help my sons. I was desperate. Instead of emptying my bank account, I used my medical knowledge and connections to track down an expert. He said it was still an unproven therapy. And the way he said it made me realize that what I was seeing online was stem cell tourism with tempting anecdotes, bold claims, and a slick website. I just needed someone to hear my pain and suffering, acknowledge it, and then explain the truth in a way that I could hear. But most people don't have the connections I have to find an expert health concierge. So they're left grappling with these complex health problems and people selling products capitalize on that. They know it's hard to explain how our liver works. So it's easy for them to say that toxins are building up in your body and you need to try the cleanse they're promoting. And they know they can draw on all these powerful concepts from religion and history to entice us. Cleanses aren't going to help your liver and they might even hurt it, but there are things that you can do to keep your liver healthy. Here's our hepatologist, Dr. Hoda, again. It's

the boring stuff.