In my last post, I talked about alkaline water and concluded that it does not benefit our health.

Now, let’s look at ionized foot bath for detox. Have you seen them before?

You put your foot into a bath of water through which an electric current is passed through. The negative ion produced is supposed to pass through your body and draws out the “toxins” from the body. After 20 mins or so, you see the water turning brown, green, blue with flecks of solids and bubbles of gas.

You may feel good after soaking your tired feet in a bath of warm water and feeling a slight tingling sensation caused by the low voltage electric current.

Let’s look at the physiology of the body and see how it works:

1) Toxins produced in our body are electrically neutral. The most common waste product is creatinine that is produced from metabolic process in muscle.  Electric current passing through the body cannot distinguish between the bad molecule toxins and other good molecules in the body. Therefore, it is impossible to “draw” out toxin from the body by electric current.

2) The skin has many layers and is impermeable to most but very small molecule. Even if the negative ionic water molecule is small enough to penetrate into the skin, there is no evidence that it can go right into the blood vessel and travel round the body and come out the same way.

3) Most toxins are produced as by products of metabolic processes. The main pathways for the elimination of toxins are through the liver, kidney, lungs and the  skin through sweating.

4) Toxins are colorless. They do not give the myriads of color you see in the footpath.

What really happened in the foot bath?

When a small electric current is passed through the water, the color of the water turns brownish because of the corrosion of the metal electrodes, which are mainly made up of iron, nickel or copper. These metal decomposes into colored ions of brown, green and blue respectively.

The variation in the color of the water at the end of the procedure is a result of the salt present on the skin reacting with the water. In preparation for the foot bath, the feet may have been washed with soap, which can react with the water giving the different colors.

The bubbling of gases are hydrogen and chlorine gases produced as a result of the electrolysis reaction with the electrode. It can be hazardous when done in a confined space as chlorine gas is toxic and hydrogen gas is explosive.

Sometime sodium hydroxide is produced and it softens the skin, causing the dead skin to flake off. These flakes of dead skin can react with the metal solution to cause the variation in color as well.

Analysis of the brown stuffs that appear in the bath water is found to be iron based proving that it is a result of corrosion of the electrode. There is no sign of creatinine meaning detox did not happen.

Don’t waste your money. You are better off taking the right nutrition and drinking plenty of water to detox your body than doing this.

Have you done such foot bath detox? Share your experience in the comment box below.

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