The Safe, Doctor-Recommended Cleanse You Should Actually Try

With a dizzying array of detox options on the market (juices! powders! elixirs!), Joseph Hooper unearths the one cleanse that's really worth it

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In writing The Detox Prescription (Rodale), Woodson Merrell, MD, has assumed the role of the sheriff who wants to run magical thinking and hucksters out of alternative-health town. As chairman of the department of integrative medicine at Manhattan’s Beth Israel Medical Center (“We’ve got a staff of 80 seeing 60,000 patients a year—it’s not like a bunch of people running around doing new age stuff”), he is on a mission to salvage the much-loved alt-med concept of “detoxification” from what he describes in his new book as “shoot-from-the-hip healers and modern snake-oil salesmen.”

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Which is an excellent idea. The problems that Merrell sees in his (mostly female) patients are real—epidemic levels of fatigue, digestive problems, joint pain, headaches, rashes—but they’re not going to be solved by the unaccountably popular lemon-juice-maple-syrup-cayenne-pepper Master Cleanse or water diets that, he says, “put the body in an incredibly unbalanced state.” Detox, he explains, is not some condition of metabolic grace attained via extreme penance; it’s a process that unfolds in our cells every second of our lives, most obviously in the liver. The big takeaway? Forget the colonics and the Kombucha—the best way to support that process, he says, is by eating good food: “That’s all most people need.” The more radical cleanses can actually be counter-productive, he notes, by failing to provide the nutrients the body needs to neutralize toxins we absorb from food, air, and water, and send them packing.

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In Merrell’s view, food cuts both ways. We detoxify by eating nutritious whole foods and by avoiding those laden with pesticides, preservatives, excess sugar, or saturated fats. His “prescription” is an initial three-day liquid diet of fruit, nut, and veggie smoothies (your blender will get the workout of a lifetime). The rationale is that you’ll be getting a respite from digesting solid food while flooding your system with phytonutrients, vitamins, and minerals—a philosophy that has yet to be embraced by mainstream medicine but has launched the now ubiquitous wave of juice bars and boutiques. After that comes four days on a vegan diet—a mix of the liquid and the easy to digest—and then an optional two more weeks with a limited quantity of lean, clean animal protein (mostly eggs, skinless poultry, fish, and nonfat dairy). Merrell’s hope is that this program—21 days in all—will form the food template for the rest of your life, a prospect made less terrifying by the delicious accompanying recipes by his longtime nutritionist colleague Mary Beth Augustine.

But do we really have to be that good? It depends on what part of the Prescription we’re talking about. Regarding the value of a mostly plant-based diet in cutting the risk of chronic diseases and managing weight, the medical mainstream has pretty much endorsed Merrell’s way of thinking. “Food is medicine” is the new rallying cry, and it’s an excellent alternative to the “pill for every ill” mentality that still defines much of American health care. Dean Ornish, MD, for one, has shown that a vegetarian diet combined with mind-body work and exercise can reverse heart disease: Coronary blockages shrank in a majority of patients in a study he undertook—an outcome previously presumed to be impossible.

The evils of the chemicals in our food and household products are harder to pin down. Merrell believes that “subclinical” levels of the approximately 150 industrial chemicals commonly found in our bodies may, in many of us, add up to a “toxic load” that must be related to the rising rates of modern syndromes such as chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, as well as some of the more routine complaints described above. This is speculation, and it will probably remain so because no one is undertaking the kinds of complicated studies that might clarify the issue. And not every critic of the mainstream shares Merrell’s degree of concern. UC Berkeley biochemist emeritus Bruce Ames, PhD, a world authority on nutrition and disease, regards the worry over parts-per-billion pesticide residues as a distraction from more obvious bad actors, such as carb-rich, nutrient-lite processed foods. “It’s romanticism,” Ames says. “I’m convinced that pesticide residues are not even in the same league as nutrition.”

So buying into Merrell’s “prescription” in toto involves a leap of faith. There’s no guarantee it will help you fend off life-threatening disease any more successfully than your neighbor who might be somewhat less scrupulous about her diet. (“My aunt lived to be 93, and she smoked two packs of Camels a day,” Merrell says.) But will you feel and look better? Now, that’s a bet worth taking.

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