Maintenance Phase - The Master Cleanse

Episode Date: March 2, 2021

Are your moods too stable? Is your face free of cold sores? Get your lemon juice, maple syrup and cayenne pepper ready, because this week we're talking about celebrity favorite THE MASTER CLEANSE!Along the way we roast New Atheism, praise Gwyneth Paltrow (!) and endorse garbanzo bean salads. Mike wishes to clarify that he adores Kate Bush and quips with the utmost affection.Support us: Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PayPal Get Maintenance Phase shirts, stickers and moreLinks!:The Master Cleanser by Stanley BurroughsI Heard It Through the Diet Grapevine (New York Times)Improving Ourselves to Death (The New Yorker)Cleansing's Dirty Secret (Marie Claire)Mr. Clean: Jeffrey Steingarten Puts the Master Cleanse to the Test (Vogue)The Dubious Practice of Detox (Harvard Health)Thanks to Ashley Smith for editing assistance and Doctor Dreamchip for our lovely theme song!Support the show

Hello and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that detoxifies your brainstem, your ear, ear buds, ear holes. It was such a strong start, right? Confidence, the key is confidence, all of this. It's such a strong start like confidence. The key is confidence. It's such a strong start. There's no exactly what you're gonna say before you say it every time. Every once in a while you come on and you're like, I've been working on this tagline in every single time. It is a surprise to me. I started working on that tagline when I started speaking the sentence. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Having a Post. I'm Aubrey Gordon. I am a writer, a columnist, an author, a lot of things. And now a podcaster.

Look at that. And both of us are on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or maintenance phase.com or lots of other places where we have t-shirts and all kinds of other cute stuff in the description. Yeah. And if you want to design a t-shirt, you can design a t-shirt, and you get paid for it, and it gets to be a meat and space t-shirt. Look how cute it is. Yay! Mike. Aubrey.

Can I tell you what we're talking about today? Uh, I don't know if I'm going to be able to follow along because for the last two days, I've only been eating cayenne pepper and water, and I'm a little light-headed. Just spicy water. It's frankly not far off. We're talking about the master cleanse. There's a thing, I have no idea what an actual master cleanse is. I know what a cleanse is.

Yeah, but the whole master cleanse thing is new to me. It's just the name that this dude gave it. Oh, it's like SRAN rap. His kind of plastic rap is SRAN rap, right? Oh, it's like band aids for adhesive bandages. Yes. Okay. I thought it was something that people came up with after a long peer reviewed literature process.

Oh my. I feel like I'm about to disappoint you in some very predictable ways. I'm going to keep attending. I've never done this show before. Oh, it's good. Really interesting. So had you heard of the master cleanse at all before I was like, we're doing it! Maple syrup, lemon juice! I am like deeply familiar with cleanses as a thing that I feel like did not exist when I was a child. And then all of a sudden it existed and it was everywhere and everyone that I follow on Facebook was doing one. Yeah, a couple trips to New York ago.

I ended up at an Airbnb in the Upper West side or the Upper East Side, whatever the side is that's like super duper posh. And the grocery store near my Airbnb, I went there once and I saw that they were selling a detoxified cleanse kit and it was like a little lunchbox full of sort of everything you needed for a week long cleanse And it was fucking $85. Yeah, I was for a week long cleanse, and it was fucking $85. Yeah. I was livid. I was like, isn't the whole point of a cleanse that you're not eating?

Why would it cost $85 to not eat for a week? Because someone can make money off of that $85, Mike. Because people have bills to pay. I mean, it's a fucking great scam if you can get it. I mean, if what we're talking about is like, cayenne pepper and lemon juice and syrup and shit, these are not expensive ingredients. No, they're certainly not.

And I'm curious, do you have a sense of when everyone in your life started talking on Facebook about their cleanses and detoxes and everything? Like, was it the last five years, the last 20 years? It was like 2009 to 2012. We're on there. It's like Obama won and we're like, okay, everything last 20 years. It was like 2009 to 2012. We're on there. It's like Obama won and we're like, okay, everything's fine now.

We can focus on detoxifying our bodies, but I could be wrong. No, you nailed it to the wall, man. Oh, yeah. So here is what you need to know about the master cleanses that sort of rise in popularity. The master cleanses has been around since the 40s. Oh!

But I did the like Google Trends, I think it's called, Search, where you can like see when words get mentioned. And there is this humongous spike in 2007. There's like a little bump in 76, which is when the creator of the Master Clems published his book, The Master Cleanser. His name is Stanley Burrows. He died in 1991, so he's he's long gone. He originally created The Master Cleans and called it the lemonade diet in the 1940s, which like doesn't that sound very for you?

Right. Yes. So The Master Cleans basically like enjoys a little bit of popularity in the 70s, but it's not until the mid 2000s that it really takes off that we see that huge like 2006 2007 spike and that is around the movie Dreamgirls. Oh was there I've never seen that was there cleanse stuff in there. There's no content about cleanses and in dreamgirls but Beyonce goes on Oprah to promote it Oprah asks her what she did to prepare for the role.

And Beyonce said, oh, I did the master cleanse for two weeks. Oh, see, now we're back to being like, Oprah, why? Oprah. So from there, from Beyonce mentioning it on Oprah, a bunch of people, a bunch of celebrities start doing it and it starts showing up in like, in touch and us weekly.

Madonna's doing the master cleanse. Jared Leto does it. Gwyneth Paltrow takes this as an opportunity to announce that she already did it. Famous health and wellness voice of reason. Gwyneth Paltrow. She was just like, it was too artistic to, I don't recommend it. She says it made her hallucinate. She's like, guys, you know, I've read the peer-reviewed studies. I just don't see the evidence.

It's like, wow, Gwyneth, thank you. Totally. So when we talked about Halo top, I was like, really clear. That was not a Ruin or Episode. If you like your Halo top, you can keep your Halo top. This is for sure a Ruin or Episode. So just like, be prepared. The Master Clems is a pile of a hot garbage. So this is you rolling into stolen grad, like tanks blazing, just like fuck your cleanse. It's all bullshit. Yeah.

So I feel like we should start out with what the Master Clems is. I feel like I was gonna ask you what you think it is, but I feel like I just got that answer and it's spicy water. Is it, yeah, isn't it just literally water and maybe orange juice or kind pepper lemon juice or something? It's just like lightly flavored water, right?

Yeah, basically the master cleanse is a diet in which the people who take part in it forgo food for 10 days. You're not eating, you're only drinking. Okay. And you are subsisting on this homemade mixture of water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and some kind of sweetener, usually maple syrup, but he also says it's okay to use

molasses or sorghum or sort of like any of those kind of like liquid sweeteners. Ooh, the flexibility. Lose weight eating whatever you want as long as it's molasses, organs, far maple syrup. So on top of that, there are also these sort of ease-in and ease-out periods of like three or four days on either end, right? So you're sort of like tapering down on solid foods

and then tapering back up. Right. I love the idea of tapering because it's like, look, if you didn't tap her, this might be bad for you and unsustainable. Yeah, totally. So there didn't taper, this might be bad for you and unsustainable. Yeah, totally. So there are some specifications about this. He says you can't use honey as your sweetener,

but his explanation for that in this book, in the Master Cleanser, the book, is that it's just be vomit. So you're basically drinking like very tart, very spicy sugar water. So does it follow the structure of like three meals a day? Is there like a breakfast, spicy water, a lunch, spicy water dinner?

Or are you just drinking it throughout the day? Or how does it work? He doesn't necessarily say how many times you can have it. I think he recommends like six glasses or eight glasses a day. Wait, what? He wrote a whole book and he doesn't say how many of these are supposed to drink in a day.

Nope, sure doesn't. Most of the research that I found on this was basically like, if you follow the cleanse and drink basically every time you're hungry, for most people, that will account for about 650 calories a day. Oh! And those calories are 100% from carbohydrates. They're 100% from sugar, right. Which is really fascinating for a cleanse because many cleanses and detoxes define sugar as a toxin. Right.

So the only, there are like three other things that you're permitted to drink. You can drink mint tea, which you're only supposed to drink sparingly, and you're supposed to drink it because, as he said in the book, during the cleanse, you will have, have I quote, many mouth and body odors that are released. So get ready to stink. And cover up for it with mint tea, which doesn't even seem like it would be all that effective. I love mint tea.

It doesn't make anything smell better. Yeah, no, it doesn't go to your armpits. So you can and should on the master cleanse drink a laxative tea according to the author. Okay. So part of this is like many cleanses, there's sort of a colon cleansing aspect to this. They recommend that you drink laxative teas or that you do a saltwater flush, where you like wake up in the morning and drink a ton of saltwater. What?

And then just shit your brains out for the rest of the day. Do they think toxins means like poo in your butt? Is that what toxins means? So like many cleanses, there is no point at which Stanley Burrows defines what toxins are. He only wrote a whole book, I agree. There's no room.

He ran out of space. It's also, I feel like I should say, it is a book, it's a very short book. It was like 50 pages. So the idea behind the master cleanse is that cayenne pepper dilates your blood vessels. The combination, the sort of abrasive combination of cayenne and lemon juice helps cut through mucus

and other quote unquote, sort of waste materials. You're also doing a saltwater flush or drinking laxative tea and that quote unquote cleans your digestive tract. And that the lemon juice is your source of vitamins and minerals. Okay. And he actually says repeatedly throughout the book that lemon juice has all the vitamins and minerals you need. So you won't feel hungry on this cleanse, which is such a bold lie. Yeah. The idea that you will never feel hungry while you're just drinking lemon juice.

Coyon pepper and maple syrup is truly bananas to me, but okay. Turns out the secret was lemon juice all along. No diets necessary. There are a ton of reported side effects, as I'm sure you can imagine. Not just that people get super hangry, they also get muscle aches and pains,

they get these intense cravings for food, they get headaches, they're fatigues, many people report nausea and vomiting, many folks end up dehydrated from the laxatives and the saltwater flush. People also get cold sores and yeast infections. It's basically just like a laundry list of things. So what you're saying is that the human body needs food and water to survive?

It's really tricky. Yes. And then if you've got a yeast infection in a cold sore, you're on the right track. Many, many, many healthcare providers have warned that these are a gateway into disorder eating and or full on eating disorders. And for people who already have eating disorders, which is sort of a shocking number of people in the US, these often are sort of the first step to a relapse or they just are the relapse, right? Marie Claire did a whole piece on what they call juicerxics.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. Which is sort of like the folks who start doing these detoxes and cleanses and juice fasts and become what they say as quote, an epidemic of malnourished, rundown young women, some of whom have stumbled into full-fledged anorexia or valetia. Yeah. It's sort of this idea that you're doing all of this clean eating,

you're doing all of this sort of like clean living kind of stuff. And it's also just a sort of socially sanctioned eating disorder. I mean, it is sort of palatable to talk about juice cleanses in quote unquote polite company in a way that it is not to talk about like eating disorders. Yeah, absolutely. So they talk to someone who talks about like having had needing disorder and covering that up with juice fasts.

She's a blogger named Carrie Adams. She had been engaged in like binge purge sort of eating for years when she first started doing a juice cleanse. And this is their sort of story about that from Marie Claire. Quote, I was like an addict who'd found a new drug, says Adams, who got positive reactions from friends during her juice fast. Quote, people said, oh, good for you, that's so healthy. It's society's most accepted form of eating disorder. Right. It's also of a short duration too. So you can always tell yourself that like this isn't an on ramp to an eating disorder

Because I'm only gonna do it for 10 days But I can see that 10 days kind of getting prolonged if that's something that you're pretty supposed to well And I will say Stanley Burrows recommended doing the master cleanse anytime you were sick any time you gained weight Oh, and three to four times a year as me. Isn't that a real bummer, like over a month a year? So the idea is not to stay on this for all time. The idea is that your body is dirty, you do this, you poo out a bunch of toxins, and then it's clean, but then after like three more months you do it again

because the body needs to sort of re-up this detoxification process. Is that the idea? Yes. So he also says that in severe cases, and I don't know how he defines severe cases, right? And he doesn't really say, in severe cases, he says you should do the master cleanse for up to 40 days at a time. Oh, don't do that. I mean, I would argue if he's saying like you should do it every time you've gained weight, I would imagine he would recommend to me 40 days of time

four times a year. But think of all your Mugus membranes, Aubrey, you'd have no more Mugus than your body. You're always complaining. Filled with Mugus today, Mike, can't record. Constantly, just like, you know, logi with the Mugus. Yes. Ah, ah, ah, ah.

At the beginning of the pandemic, this year I read a bunch of books on the black plague. And this whole thing does seem like what medicine was before science where, you know, it's like, well, you know, your cousin died of plague and you're starting to show these symptoms. So light a fire in your home and then eat a frog and then go upside down.

It's just this like total like black magic. No, totally. I mean, like, so the idea of sort of rating your body of quote unquote toxic materials is absolutely not new. That's where we get enemas. It's where we get bloodletting. Oh, right, yeah.

It is also linked to fasting, which has been practiced by a lot of people for lots of reasons and lots of places and times. But overwhelmingly, you're exactly right, right? Like, this is where we get leeches, right? Like, as a treatment method, it's like balancing the humors, right? I don't know if you ever read up on that stuff. Up, down, Charm's strange.

Yeah. It seems like from that perspective, it seems worth talking about like, do detoxes work at all? Yes. This is my next question. What did they do, Aubrey? So, contemporary, cleanses and detoxes sort of define the idea of toxins really differently. work at all. Yes, this is my next question. What did they do, Aubrey? So contemporary cleanses and detoxes sort of define the idea of toxins really differently. Some of them

talk about heavy metals in your bloodstream. Others again say that sugar is a toxin. Most of them like the master cleanse don't define toxins at all. It's also interesting because the kinds of people that are the most likely to pay $85 for a cleanse kit or whatever are also the kind of people that are already eating organic Yeah already eating lots of fruits and vegetables already with a sort of quote unquote good diet It just seems like the underlying principle here is that eating at all builds up toxins in your system It's not even that like oh, I've been eating fast foods. They're now I need to do a detox

Right, and it's like food is toxic and your body stores toxic materials, all of that kind of stuff. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of detoxes and cleanses sort of marry the idea of detoxing with weight loss. Mm hmm. Because they argue that toxins are stored in fatty tissue. So losing weight is essential to removing toxins. There is actually some evidence that adipose tissue, which is just like fat tissue in your body, does store remnants of like industrial chemicals more than other kinds of tissue in the human body. But there is no evidence that like what you eat

changes how your body stores those toxins. Interesting. Most of those toxins. Interesting. Most of the toxins are things like BPA and radon and asbestos, things that actually have upstream solutions that are probably policy based, not based on what you eat. But again, we're not gonna pursue those because they're way more tricky to figure out.

And because they don't actually like give us any juice for like I'm the kind of person who's on a flim. Right. This is my problem with all of these kinds of toxification, diet, kind of rhetoric. Is it like, we absolutely are being fucking poisoned all the time. Yeah. In the United States, we are subject to all kinds of weird,

fucking hormones and chemicals with measurable effects. There is actual evidence for a lot of these theories, and yet we're crawling through the desert toward these solutions that are weirdly individual and have nothing to do with the fucking pipes in Flint, which is the actual way that toxins get into our bodies is through political corruption, and yet it's like, no, no, no, no, no, I want the one

that only has to do with what I eat and has nothing to do with any broader systemic issue at all. Like, it's about me and my toxins. Absolutely. And again, like, it's also hard to talk about cleanses and detoxes without talking about sure if the performance of it all, right? Even if you believe to your core

that this is the right thing for you, that it's making you healthier, all this sort of stuff, there is also a social element of differentiating yourself from people who don't know enough or who aren't disciplined enough or whatever. Again, like regardless of intentions, making these cleanses and detoxes into events that happen on social media or into things that you talk to your friends and family about and all of that kind of stuff. All of that sort of pulls it into the realm of performance. I am 100% okay with admitting that I would not be able to do this.

I don't have a whole ton of willpower around food because my body needs it to survive. And I would not make it 10 days of not eating. Look, man, I also wouldn't make it if there was like a breathing detox. Yeah. So on this question of like due cleanses or detoxes work, from every source that I could find,

every sort of credible source that I could find, a full-throated, absolutely not, there's a great meta-research review in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics where they say, quote, to the best of our knowledge, no randomized controlled trials have been conducted to assess

the effectiveness of commercial detox diets in humans. Nice. There's one study from the Seoul Women's University in Korea that studied the master cleanse in women with overweight BMI's and they found that those women lost weight. university in Korea that studied the master cleanse in women with overweight BMI's and they found that those women lost weight. Surprise, surprise, you don't eat solids for 10 days and you weigh less at the end of those 10 days.

And those results were the same as the placebo. It reminds me of earlier this year, the New York Times were in an advice column where somebody wrote in and said, if I get an email on a list that I'm not supposed to be a part of, should I reply all and say, please remove me from this list? And the New York Times published an entire column that just said, no, and then all this blank space. I feel like it's the same thing with this, that all of this Harvard peer-viewed literature, it should just be a full page that just says, don't.

Yeah, that seems like the obvious conclusion. Like, don't do this. Absolutely. There is one thing in this meta-research review. They did find one cleanse that has been studied. It was a detox diet called the Hubbard Purification Rundown. When there's a Hubbard involved, it's science facts. It's good.

You caught on to that quicker than I do do because I had to read forward to figure out that the research that was conducted was conducted by the foundation for advancements in science and education of the Church of Scientology because it's El Ron Hubbard's detox! You're way I was joking! That's right! El Ron Hubbard has a detox and Scientology studied it and they were like, that's right. El Ron, Huttburg, has a detox. And Scientology studied it, and they were like, it's good. What? This thing from our leader who we never question

is also good. I thought I was just interrupting you and bugging you with my dumb joke. That's actually true. I absolutely thought you had caught on because I was like, nope, it's truly El Ron Huttburg. They have folks do the Huttburg purification rundown for 31 days. And they said in that time that participants IQs had increased by 6.7 points.

Sounds super scientific. It makes you smarter and thinner. I found this one. I was like, oh, this is like one of those restaurants where they bring you a check and they also bring you like a little cookie. Like what a little treat. Like, oh, he's studying the master cleanse and you're like little reward as El Ron Hubbard as if he talks on his carbon. So there is one case that I was able to find where there was sort of this anecdotal example of a number of folks sort of foregoing tested treatments

for their chronic illnesses in favor of detoxes. No. So there was an example of a man in Australia who gave up on dialysis in favor of a detox and super unsurprisingly, still totally tragically, he died, right? Very predictably. Oh.

So that's the really tricky sort of underbelly of all of this, is that it is sort of like fun and wacky, but it's also really sinister to tell people with chronic illnesses, which Stanley Burrows does throughout his book on the Master Cleanse. He's repeatedly like, this is strongly recommended for diabetics. It's strongly recommended for people with dropsy, which is edema, which is sort of like fluid retention in your body. He's like, not only should you do it, you should do it for a month and a half. Right? Like it's just tying a woman to the train tracks. You know what I mean? Like just straight up fill. I mean, he seems like an egregious case. But even if you're just a sort of artisanal, small cleanse company,

you're still contributing to the sort of overall understanding that cleanses are good for you and toxins are bad for you. Yes, absolutely. And even when you say, like, I feel like they're a handful of sort of like cleanse and detox companies out there now that have gotten wise and will do the like, check with your doctor if you have any of these conditions, right? Right.

But for the most part, that is a pretty cynical legal liability. Totally. The CYA move, cover your ass move, right? Yeah. To engage with that as if everyone has a doctor, as if everyone has access to the stuff, is pretty disingenuous, right? Certainly in the US.

Look, in Denmark, help people with whatever the fuck you want. If you want to stand in the name and be in Cleansers, fuck it. Just aggressive lie in your ass. Those motherfuckers of socialized medicine tell them whatever you want to stand in the doing cleanses, fuck it. Just aggressive lie here. Those motherfuckers of socialized medicine tell them whatever you want. Lie to day.

So here's where I think it's like really extra super fun. Can we dive in to the master cleanser by Stanley Rose? Yes, I want you to read me bad things and then we shout at them. I'm gonna read you so many bad things. That's this show in its purist form. That's a really great, I'm really excited to make fun of all of those absolute voices. So I feel like normally you and I have to do

at least a little bit of digging for the wacky side of the story. Yes. You do not have to do any digging. What the master cleanse, it is wacky from jump. So there is an opening quote on the title page that I assumed was from the Bible or like from some intellectual powerhouse, some something. The quote is this, let no man refuse to listen and be healed, lest he brings suffering to those who look

to him for guidance. Oh, does it turn out to be like a Tracy Chapman lyric or something? No, so I looked this up. There was one citation of this quote, and it was the master cleanse book. So he just made it up. Stanley Burrows quoting Stanley Burrows. That's a move, dude. That's great.

Come up with something wise and then put it in the book. He's Eddie Murphy in the Nutty Professor. Like he's the clumps, right? He's playing every role in his book. So throughout the book, he uses this kind of language. It's like really sciencey, but also sort of biblical. He uses some concepts from the declaration of independence a bunch. Are we sure that he is not Kate Bush?

That's not the Kate Bush concept album. It totally does. It totally does. So here is an example of that. This is the opening of the introduction. So when you open this, this is the first thing that you read in the Master Cleanser. Are you ready? Give it to me. Man's mastery of disease will only be final when ignorance and fear are overcome by proper observance of all the laws pertaining to the creation of bones, flesh, and blood. Why? Working knowingly. Oh, buddy, it gets so much better. Keep going. Working knowingly with the Master cleanser and master builder brings humanity closer to perfection of the human form. Through Eons past and on even into the present,

man has been held and still remains in bondage of misery and suffering while witchcraft and quackery have run the gamut of the healing field of misinformation. Why does it sound like it's an all-cap way? But it is really weird, right? You keep talking about a more perfect body. He talks about, he uses the phrase, these truths are self-evident. This is quite true reading Mussolini quotes.

It totally is, it also, like the other thing that jumped out to me while I was reading it, it was like, this sounds like Dionetics. Yeah, it does sound quasi-religious, doesn't it? Yeah, it sounds like sort of it's riding the line between like science, but there's no science, and like evangelism, but there's no religion. Like the religion just is the cleanse, I think. There's this idea that sort of society used to be more air you die and we've dumbed things down and you know you

you can read old excerpts from books and they're like much more sort of complex sentences and much larger vocabularies than now but there's also something interesting about the way that that air you dish in was used to cover up just patent bullshit Yeah, that's right at the sentence level it sounds intelligent But then when you zoom out like the paragraph level, it's like, this doesn't make any sense. We're talking about water with cayenne pepper in it. You're trying to sell me water, bro. It is the lemon water that they give you at like red lobster.

Congratulations, you went to IHOP. They give you lemon water and you poured your syrup into it. Master cleanse. This is also where he gets into like heavy sales pitch territory. Nice. So here's what he has to say about the cleanse. Quote, when we finally become sick of being sick, then we are ready to learn the truth and the truth shall set us free. This diet will prove that no one needs to live with his diseases. Lifetime freedom from disease has become a reality. Look, I'm not over promising here. All I'm saying is you will never get a disease again if you do

this for 10 days. All I'm saying. I'm not making any bold claims. He also says that the program, he like sort of claims repeatedly that this is like something that has been tested repeatedly, but he absolutely never says where or when. Right. He says, quote, the program has been tested and approved for over 20 years in all sections of the continent as the most successful of any other diet of its type in the entire field. All caps, nothing can compare with its positive approach toward perfection in the healing

field. Is this guy like a no-fap guy now? This kind of rhetoric only leads to like weird men's rights shit. So he also has lays out sort of the hypothesis of the book. This is where I was just like every muscle in my body clenched. This is where he's like, here's what the cleanse accomplishes and the problem that it's solving, right? Disease, old age and death are the result of accumulated poisons and congestions throughout the entire body. These toxins become crystallized and hardened

settling around the joints in the muscles and throughout the billions of cells all over the body. Sure. He goes on to say that, quote unquote, lumps and gross of all kinds form all over the body as homes for fungus. Okay. The funguses, the fungi are fed by these toxins and that they particularly form in your lymphatic glands.

He says germs and viruses, specifically explicitly. The germs and viruses are not the cause of any illness. But germ theory of disease, bullshit, not into it. Yeah. I mean, I guess this was a time before Google Scholar, but all of the things that he's saying were like easily disprovable, right? Like if what was causing poor health in the US population

was growth of crystals in our joints, you'd be able to see those on X-rays or something. Like these would not be the things being spouted in the introduction of some crank diet book. There would be like journal articles written about these things and conferences dedicated to them. Right, someone somewhere would have observed the thing that you're talking of. Seems big, yes.

He also says that because germs and viruses are not the cause of illness, that's just like a thing that we came up with as humans. He argues that there is actually only one disease. Women. Diversity. cancel culture. Where's he going with this? I just want you to keep me, what you think the one disease is.

I'm just free associating with like this low-rent Ben Shapiro, what he would say. No, he says there's one disease, and he calls it toxemia. Oh. So if we get toxins out of our bodies, we will be cured of all disease and symptoms. And he does say repeatedly, you will be cured of death.

When I read that quote, I was just like, oh my god, this is like jet fuel, doesn't melt steel beams. Yes, this is if it's a globe, why don't we fall off it? Yeah. You're just like, oh, honey, this is if it's a globe, why don't we fall off it? Right, like, you're just like, oh, honey, this is some real flat-er-thr-shit. Dude, I have a relative who's into, like, deep, into conspiracy stuff.

And the last time we actually got into an argument, he was saying that, like, the Illuminati has to exist because it's a group and other groups also exist. So he was like, look, if you believe in the Boy Scouts, you have to believe that the Illuminati is real. I was like, I don't know, man. At this point also define believe in the voice counts. Things are getting rough over there. That's a bad example, actually. So throughout the book, Stanley also claims that allergies, asthma,

colds, flu, clogged arteries, high cholesterol, heart disease, and any illness that happens in your lifetime is a result of failing to cleanse these toxins from your system. He says that if you are upset at any point, it is because you aren't following the cleanse, right? Right. He says you should be having two to three bowel movements a day, which I don't understand where those bowel movements are coming from by day 10. Yeah, what are you, what are you bowling? And he says, if you, if that's not happening, then you should double down on your saltwater flesh, which is you're supposed to drink a quart of lukewarm saltwater.

That's dangerous. That's a lot of saltwater. It's bad news. Yeah, don't do that. Anytime he talks about the physical discomfort or hesitation that you may have, he says, and I quote, remember, this can't harm you. Only toxins and unhealthy tissue will be eliminated.

Oh my God. Yeah, God, it's like dating Johnny Depp. It's just like all this like a buzor language. It's so gross. Yeah, if you weren't doing it right, it's your fault. Yeah. He also says that the master cleanse will cure addiction. Okay.

Quote, the usual cravings experienced and suffered in breaking away from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco no longer present themselves during and after this diet. It is truly a wonderful feeling to be free from slavery to these many habit forming and devitalizing articles of modern living. Coffee, tea, and the various cola drinks as habit forming beverages are also readily conquered with the marvels of the lemonade diet. Unless what you're addicted to is looking super hot. That's the thing.

It's gonna promote. The hot, but like meme. I know. On the toilet all the time. Yeah. Hot in your bathroom. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Toward the end of the book, he gives a bunch of recipes

for sort of like how you should eat outside of the master cleanse. And honestly, it's like not that bad It sounds like pretty decent vegan food, honestly, so he's uncanceled. It's like ooh Garpons will be in salad. Sounds nice Listen, it's similar to moon juice, right? Where I'm like, I'll just say it's a good recipe. Yeah Just as a little treat for you. There are a number of recipes at the end of the master cleanse book that include our old pal carob. No, in the 1930s? Kareb, Kareb, so much. Kareb. The only thing I hate more than Kareb is the germ theory of disease, which is incorrect, I'm learning. Yeah, nothing to worry about. Fake. If they're going to kill you, why are they so small? If they're gonna kill you, why are they so small? As part of sort of looking into this cleanse, I found a ton of examples.

There's actually a whole book that is a collection of people's experiences on the master cleanse where they just do like a diary, a daily diary of their experiences on the master cleanse. I was like, oh, this will be fun. It was not fun. It was mostly release sad. What would they like? They're all these sort of glowing reviews,

but they all also talk about like, I had a lot of nausea in diarrhea. I broke out a ton. I feel hungry all the time, but that's just the toxins leaving my body. Oh. So it's just like a bunch of people constantly talking themselves into restriction that their body is like very rightfully resisting.

The biggest one of these which we'll talk about in a minute was written by Jeffrey Steingarton for Vogue. Okay. He's often a judge on Iron Chef America. He's I think a well-regarded writer and food critic and all kinds of stuff. He does this sort of diary of him and his wife doing the master cleanse. He writes about trying to write, which is his job, but finding when he writes that 90% of the words he types has errors in them. He talks about feeling woozy and weak and not standing or walking particularly well. He talks about finally sort of breaking his fast and eating a piece of melon and a bite of smoked salmon

and then promptly vomiting. Yeah. Quote, the master cleanse is not truly difficult, but for 10 days it will deprive you, if you're like me, of a powerful source of happiness. And it's really this tier social life, at least the fraction of it conducted over dinner, which for me is most of it. Yeah. On the other end, I lost 12 pounds, which I gained back within another week, because I went back to normal eating, and that's how the body works.

Quote, most have reappeared over the past three days, so let's call it four pounds. What? And then he goes on to say he's gonna do it again. And that's like most of these stories. It's like this was a horrible experience and I hate it and it was terrible and I'm gonna do it again. It's weird how resistant people are to the extremely well supported dietary advice

that are like make reasonable modifications to your diet and exercise that you enjoy and can sustain in the long term. Yes. But this weird thing, we're like, I have to do something fucking bananas for 10 days and then gain the 12 pounds back and then do something bananas again.

It's just so weird to me that people think that that's like a more reasonable option that just like, hey, maybe I'm not gonna do fried foods anymore or something. Yeah, that's right. I mean, you will get the maximum benefits that you would get from whatever detox through eating more vegetables

and drinking more water. Yes, period. Why are we doing all this shit to a woman just eating vegetables? And if you already eat vegetables, congratulations, you did it, you're done. Like, what? This like, yo-yoing, like sort of deliberately yo-yoing is just very strange.

Considering the evidence that yo-yo diets are bad for you is like pretty voluminous. Yes. And also like the facts of human behavior and sort of the soup of like capitalism plus diet culture that we're living in means that most diets are yo-yo diets. Sorry. Yeah.

Even if you call it a cleanse, even if you call it a detox, even if you call it a lifestyle change, most you call it a detox, even if you call it a lifestyle change, most of the things that we associate with fat people, things like diabetes, things like hypertension, all of heart disease, all that kind of stuff, is linked just as strongly, if not more so to weight cycling.

Yeah, so what's your relationship to cleanses? Have you ever done one? I've never done one. I mean, I will say it's a fat lady, cleanses always felt sort of beside the point, like they were something for thin people that like first order of business is like lose weight. And then once you've lost weight,

then you can cleanse your body and treat it like a temple or whatever, but until then you need to be like putting out cigarettes in your intestines or whatever. If that means you're full and you don't eat food, great. Sure, yeah. It's just like, it has always felt like sort of the provenance of thin people. And particularly like the vast majority of people who I know who have done the master cleanse

have been like other queer women. I don't know what that's about. I mean, you live in Portland. You're gonna have some cleansing lesbians. I live in Seattle. I know what it's like. Closbyans. Closbyans.

Cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans, cleans. So the last thing I wanted to talk about before we sort of close out is just to be really clear, there is a ton of criticism of the masterclamps, right? Harvard University Medical School is very clear. Like they have a whole thing on cleanses and detoxes, including a thing on the masterclans. They say it will, and I quote, disrupt the native intestinal flora microorganisms that perform useful digestive functions. A person who goes on this diet repeatedly may run the risk of developing metabolic acidosis. Severe metabolic acidosis can lead to coma and

death. Oh, not great. There are plenty of people who do it and it doesn't kill them. And also it can. So be aware of that. But then, okay, this goes back to something. I mean, we mentioned earlier, you know people in Portland to do this. I know people in Seattle that do this. Yeah. I'm pretty magnanimous about this stuff on a personal level.

Like, if I'm at a cocktail party and I'm chatting with somebody, like, how's your week been? And they're like, oh, you know, I'm a little tired, I'm doing a juice cleanse. I'm not gonna like yell at them in that moment. Or like, did you know, I try to just be like nice to people and not sort of do the well-actually thing

on an individual basis. I'm more interested in sort of the way that these things are regulated, the way that they're subsidized or not subsidized, whatever. So like, what is your approach with something like this? Like, what do you do with your Portland queer lady friends who do this? I mean, I do the same thing.

If you wanna do it, you can do it. If you wanna know what I think about it, I will tell you what I think about it. But if you don't ask me, I'm not gonna volunteer and be like the human embodiment of an internet reply guy. Right. Well, actually, like, no, nobody wants that,

nobody needs that. It's hard enough to have a body. Yeah. I mean, I will say, I think there's one case in which I might decide to say something to someone individually, and that is if we had had a conversation in the past about them having disorder and eating, if they had brought to me,

yeah, I struggle with an eating disorder or disorder eating, and then they also brought to me, I'm doing this juice cleanse. I might have a very light touch conversation with them about like, so how does this squirt with your disorder eating stuff? Like does this not feel like a trigger for that? Does this not feel like, you know what I mean? Like just have like a genuine exploring conversation if they were open to it with their consent, all of that kind of stuff. And if we had that kind of relationship, this is like an incredibly delicate conversation

that like they need to be in the driver's seat. Right. I mean, now that we're talking about it, there have been times when with close friends. I've said like, well, it sort of seems like you're doing this sort of faddish kind of diet thing. And it seems like you've done a lot of these before. And ultimately, they really haven't made you happy.

Right. But also, I would not do that with somebody that I'm not close to. That's some like, there's like three or four people in my life that I would do that with. But that's not some like, I'm next to you at a dinner party and I'm getting a fucking intervene on your behalf. Right, same here. There's like, people I can count on one hand.

Yeah. This is not an intervention style thing to your point earlier, right? Like, this is not the kind of thing where it's like, look, you need to sit somebody down and tell them the hard truth. Right. And then also comes from you having information about them, right? Because I think a lot of these sort of well-actually conversations are people waiting for an entry point for them to like play a tape about like actually the peer review literature from Harvard bang Whereas the more important thing if you're going to even consider broaching the topic or in any way bring this up

You have to first gather a lot of information about that person of like have you done this before? Is this something there for going other treatments about and like unless you're somebody's medical doctor or close friend It's not like in your wheelhouse to gather the kind of information that you would need about the person to do a kind of intervention like this. Yep. I've been doing a lot of research about the sort of the new atheist movement and the way that it basically curdled into like men's rights and white nationalism over 10 years. And I think the central problem with that movement was that it had a political

ethic, but not a personal ethic. And it was all about sort of being the smartest person in the room. And not really thinking about the way that that was going to affect other people's feelings. And I think that like, it's important to have a political ethic, but you also need to have an ethic above most other considerations of not being a dick and ruining people's day. Right. And I'll also say like, so as someone who has had not insignificant struggles with disorder eating in the past, and particularly like restrictive disorder eating, right? Like, I am a fat lady. This is what people expect of me. And at a certain point, I just started

doing it. That you just like stop eating. You don't eat when people can see you. There were a couple of people who tried to talk to me about it, where we didn't have that relationship. And it made me feel like I wasn't going hard enough on my eating disorder. Oh, really? That I was doing a bad job of having a eating disorder if people were noticing. Oh. Do you see what I'm saying?

So it pushed me further underground, like sort of made me want to disconnect from those people, because I was like, they're onto me and that's not safe. I got a thing going here and I don't want you to interrupt it. So I think like it's also worth noting, like part of the reason we're saying, don't talk about it, isn't, don't care about people. But it is like, take stock of the relationship that you have

and be aware that these conversations can also very genuinely backfire. Right. Although on the other hand, if you see a store selling these things for $85, burn it down. That's fine. Commit an act of terrorism. Mike! Totally chill.

Allegedly. What are the words that people say, so we don't see? Allegedly. So, Mike is telling you, I'm not. Listen, if he's going to do this, I'm gonna go down with this thing. I'm saying, person, don't be a dick at dinner parties. Property damage, do it. Burn it down.

I wanted to close out with a quote that felt not only sort of hopeful to me, but also feels like why I enjoy doing this podcast so much, and why it feels important to me. Because it's balancing out your mucus levels. Finally, after your lifelong journey. So this came from a great New Yorker piece called Improving Ourselves to Death. So this references and includes a quote from Will Store,

who is a British journalist and author who has sort of written about this, like almost like cult of self-improvement stuff that's happening now. Quote, is the ideal of the optimized self isn't simply a fad or even a preference, but an economic necessity, how can any of us choose to live otherwise? Store insists that there is a way. Quote, this isn't a message of hopelessness, he writes, quote, on the contrary, what it actually leads us towards is a better way of finding happiness.

Once you realize that it's all just an act of coercion, that it's your culture trying to turn you into someone you can't really be, you can begin to free yourself from your demands. Ooh, I like that. I'm sitting here in my sweatpants with my halo top ice cream and my giant cold sore. Can you get it on myself?

You know what? I'm gonna keep it. I just really, it was like really, like that is actually genuinely how I feel. That's why I collect diet books. That's all of that kind of stuff, right? Is it's a very like the emperor has no clothes. Right. Right. That you stop, like you don't have to engage in the emperor has no clothes, right? That you stop like you

don't have to engage in the same way. It's the great and powerful odds, right? Right. That's why this stuff all feels really important to me, not to make people feel bad for doing it or having done it, but just to say, look, there are very clear reasons why all this stuff is the way that it is. And in this case, it's mostly so that people can make money and mostly so that people can feel better about themselves in the short term and then feel worse about themselves in long term. And so much of the cure for this is just showing grace to yourself.

Absolutely. Your habits aren't perfect. Fucking nobody's habits are perfect. Maybe you're not as thin as fucking Gwyneth Paltrow or as athletic as I can't name an athlete. But it's okay. is like thin as fucking Gwyneth Paltrow, or is like athletic as I can't name an athlete. But like, it's okay. Like, we're all doing our best.

Instagram isn't real. Eat what you feel like eating. I don't know. It's just like, forgive yourself for not having this perfect life. That fucking nobody else has either, frankly. Absolutely. And also like, it is not your fault for falling into a trap

that was set for you. Oh, totally. Yeah. That's not actually on you. Oh, totally. Yeah. That's not actually on you. There's no reason to feel bad or guilty about having engaged in this stuff in the past. This is a real no better, do better situation, right? Now, you know, you can decide what to do with that information.

That is your call now. I think the main thing that we've taken away from this episode is listen to whatever Gwyneth Paltrow says. She was right. No, mine! Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha! Thank you.