Aaargh. In an article about an organic food store, I get lots of buttons pushed: food fads, weird notions about nutrition, Gwyneth-Paltrow-style airy BS about purging oneself of toxins, all that kind of crap:
As a downtown crowd of artists and models balanced long nights of extreme revelry with long days of extreme diet and fitness, Organic Avenue became more of a destination, opening its first street-level shop in 2006 on Stanton Street and offering, among à la carte items, juice cleanse programs that might entail forgoing solid food for anywhere from one to five days in favor of concoctions made from blue-green algae, beets and the like.
If you’re going in for a colonoscopy, you’ll be told to go on a low-fiber liquid diet for a day or two, to clear out your colon for inspection. But this nonsense about “juice cleanses” is absurd. In fact, just run away if anyone uses the word “cleanse” in reference to your diet.
But it saves the best for last. There’s a new fad going around among the excessively wealthy right now.
Ms. Wolkoff who now runs her own agency that creates collaborative relationships and strategic partnerships, soured on Organic Avenue before it shut down, favoring Juice Press smoothies. And she has lost interest in cleanses altogether, focusing instead on learning more about the latest trends in wellness, like juices that include sooty substances said to absorb toxins in the body.
“Everyone is talking about coal and charcoal,” she said.
Oy. It’s like they hear teeny-tiny fragments of actual science and then blow it up into a food trend that justifies exorbitant prices with a pseudo-scientific justification. Carbon can be processed to create a kind of fluffy microstructure, with lots of tiny pores; it has a tremendous surface area that means it can adsorb lots of other molecules. I use it in my aquaria, because it can bind lots of bacteria and ammonia and amplifies the effect of biological and chemical filtration. If you ingest something toxic (I mean, actually toxic, not as in “containing the buzzword ‘toxin'”), a big dose of carbon can compete with your intestinal lining for adsorption of the poison, and help remove it before doing damage.
But people drinking black juice with the word “Activated” on the label isn’t going to do a thing for you, unless you happened to drink a good slug of arsenic around the same time.
I will say that there is at least one article that, while taking the generic ‘toxin’ crap for granted, seems to have a level-headed approach to the new charcoal food fad. Drink black juice for attention, and its status-seeking, conversation-starting properties, and as a symbol of pointless conspicuous consumption, but let’s back off on the untested, unlikely health effects.
Does this mean that you won’t endorse my new product ‘Newage* Wallet Cleanser’ It lightens the burden of filthy lucre.
*For some reason the autospell app keeps printing ‘sewage’ when I type ‘newage’ What’s that about?
Hmmm. I seem to recall that when coal is burned, it releases all kinds of nasty stuff. Some of the nasty stuff is created by the act of combustion (that is, if you burn hydrocarbons, you get carbon monoxide, just as an example), but some of it is simply the various gunk that’s in the coal escaping. Like arsenic, for example. I wonder how many “toxins” these people are taking in by drinking the stuff.
Living in La La Land, I’ve heard about the charcoal drinking fad, of course. I’m a little surprised that these same people aren’t asking what it does to their gut microbiome, which might be the hottest fad word around right now. I would think there might be some concern that purging their colons would disrupt their microbiome.
Well, we can easily top that with drinks containing carbon nanotubes or graphene flakes, to, oh, let’s say increase your body’s natural conductivity and tensile strength. Tensile strength is very important for youthful skin. And everyone knows high conductivity makes you smarter.
You can get arsenic slugs in packs of 10 or 20 in the ‘natural cures’ section of our humble establishment. Thank you for your custom…
If you want black poo drink Guinness.
It’s also full of vitamins and nutrients. And if you drink lots and lots of Guinness, you’ll spend the next morning actively purging yourself of all kinds of “toxins”.
Activated charcoal can also absorb some micronutritients, right? That might even have some negative effects.
If it absorbs toxins, it will absorb vitamins, nutrients etc. You know – food.
But I suppose there’s a market then for supplements to replace those. Its cleverer than we thought.
Bilberries are also good if you want to color coordinate your poo with your black clothing and they do not cause constipation or thirst like carbon or stout.
Years ago the local paper ran a “fun facts” piece on the funny page which once reported that in the 17th century people in England drank a lot more beer and ale, and presumably hard cider, than we do today but with a lot less alcoholism. The reasoning was that because of the way the beer was made it was richer in nutrients.
I mentioned this to a doctor friend of mine once who told me that the AMA had tried for years to get the alcohol beverage industry to add vitamin B to their products to reduce the damage of getting most of your calories from booze.
I have no idea if any of this is true, but it’s fun to think about and it gives me an excuse to drink Guinness or Lagunitas “Brown Sugah” which I would rather do any day than drink charcoal sludge.
Wasn’t charcoal used with stomach pumping?
That’ll get rid of toxins.
I seem to remember when I was a kid many years ago we used to feed our dog charcoal biscuits to help with flatulance, I remember thinking at the time the mechanism for this to work was never adequately explained.
Apparently you can get 2kg for £10, I think I can see a business opportunity opening up
My younger son, as a toddler, once got into the other son’s prescription bottle and ate some large quantity of Dilantin. So off to the emergency room we went, where they tried stomach pumping and emetics, and then a big dose of activated charcoal.
The emetic did absolutely nothing until I was carrying him back to the car. White dress shirts don’t recover from activated charcoal. Little boys do, though.
I have heard these generic “toxins” mentioned a lot in the last decade or more. I don’t think anyone mentioning them has ever identified a single one past the word “toxin.”
I would use it to filter some of the noxious crap out of homemade vodka, if making it was legal in Canada.
It may also be useful in making cheap brands of booze more palatable.
All of those Appalachian deep mine and longwall coal miners must have the cleanest colons on the planet. Taking in all that coal dust day after day is a great way to detoxify.
Hey, I think I just hit on a new website business! I could call it the Detoxify The Coal Miner Way. Perhaps the ultra-wealthy would pay to spend a weekend in a deep mine in West Virginia. You never know.
I had what my GI doc suspected was an imbalance of flora in my gut that created too much abdominal gas. A friend who raises horses told me that a bit of charcoal would help that tremendously. I went looking for charcoal at the drug store (my friend might be willing to eat horsey charcoal, but I want stuff labeled for human consumption) and all I could find was charcoal capsules that were labeled “homeopathic” and cost the earth.
My gut has calmed down, mostly, on its own, so I never bought the “homeopathic” charcoal. But I gather other people have also had success with this very non-homeopathic remedy.
A friend of mine has a fragile digestive system, and is always trying something or other as a magic bullet. He’s fond of charcoal in his food, by which I mean food that has been burnt to a crisp. Doesn’t that produce a shit-ton of carcinogens? Once while he was on a colloidal silver kick, he let his electrodes sit too long and turn his water opaque black, instead of the middle-grey it’s “supposed” to be. He drank it anyway, and killed off all his intestinal flora. He was sick as a dog for a couple weeks, and had to live off live yogurt until he could rebuild the population. At least he didn’t turn into a Smurf.
http://static.oprah.com/images/tows/200802/20080219/20080219_106_350x263.jpg
komarov @ 4;
I am now slightly worried that your post might inspire wealthy idiots to start downing graphene and carbon nanotube infused beverages in pursuit of the latest fad – food induced superpowers! Unbreakable bones, impenetrable skin, genius unprecedented in human history – all can be yours (hey – I only said ‘can be’ not ‘will definitely be’. Anything is possible in an infinite multiverse, because quantum or something. Ask Deepak Chopra) if you drink only three of these power tonics a day… at a mere $250.00 a dose!
And in tiny print right at the very bottom of the advert:- Disclaimer – the manufacturer is not liable for any side effects including but not limited to blindness, paralysis, tinnitus and death. Contains greater than 0% graphene and carbon nanotubes (probably). Minimum 3% reprocessed industrial waste…
Most of the gullible 1%er brigade who go in for this kind of thing already think they are innately superior to mere mortals, and will doubtless snap up anything that plays into that particular delusion.
This isn’t new. I was sharing lunch with a friend decades ago, and opened a can of black olives. She insisted that I drain all the liquid off, because it was “toxic”. She happily ate the olives, though.
But the food-benefits nonsense is older than that. Somebody made a typo on a study of spinach, and everybody decided we really needed iron, and nothing now can stop folks from thinking spinach is a superfood. Boiled, canned spinach is not health food, no matter what an animated sailor says.
I have this image of a bunch of hipster morons paying a lot of money to eat kaolin like a flock of macaws.
As a few other people have mentioned, activated charcoal will absorb vitamins & nutrients along with any supposed toxins. But what bothers me is trying to find juice that doesn’t have some sort of antioxidant/panacea claim on the label. I really like pomegranate, blueberry, cranberry & other fruit juices but it’s getting harder & harder to find a something tasty to drink that isn’t claiming to be good for what ails me.
While activated charcoal is a real thing and has some medicinal purposes in form of Carbo medicinalis, I don’t think that adding it to your juice is such a good idea. As pointed out – it would simply absorb supposedly “good” ingredients of that juice first.
According to WebMD, taking activated charcoal can reduce the efficacy of many oral medications, including pain relievers and those used to treat mental illness. Selling it as an unregulated health food supplement is a terrible idea on those grounds alone.
Meanwhile, these guys were able to get 5400$ in two weeks for all-natural, herbal healing. https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/treating-infections-without-antibiotics#/
. Which, this other story shows, doesn’t work. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/dispatches/2015/11/05/a-naturopath-tortures-her-children/
I sometimes despair at the direction where this world is going.
Re: Gregory Greenwood, #19
Apparently the toxicity of most nanoparticles is unclear. Either it hasn’t been studied or it hasn’t been studied properly or consistently so the results may not be worth much. As far as the food supplement industry is concerned that should qualify as good enough.
For further fad foods you may also want to look at those nifty nanostructures for sunscreen some people are working on (also titanium oxide-based I think). It might prove popular in sunny regions. Just claim it obviates the need for sunscreen. And thinking of the “activated” label, try “reactivated” instead. It implies recycling or reuse and might appeal more to environmentally concious customers.
Come to think of it, virtually every other article in my chemistry monthly could be used as the basis of a wonderful scam. It’s nice to know that, if all else fails, I can always move to the US, have my conscience surgically removed and peddle snake oil. Self-assembling nanoscale snake oil, that is.
Lastly, I am appalled at the number of people in this thread badmouthing poor active carbon. You’re just mad because it doesn’t discriminate! It doesn’t see “nutrients” and “toxins”, it treats all chemicals as equal.
Let a thousand cargo cults be born!
well the things I get to explore reading this blog. Never gave much thought about activated carbon production or use before. Here is a company that makes and sells it
http://envirosupply.net/shop/activated-carbon/cannabis-odor-control.html
I do not know what those drinks cost but I am pretty sure the carbon content is not extremely high nor is the idea of black juice patented. Starbucks has been selling carbonized drinks for some time now. so might we see others adding premium drinks with activated carbon to their menus?
As for drinking kaolin drinks they are readily available at any drugstore with a little added pectin to keep it in suspension
food fads, food magic cures, food fears
and no one reads the fucking label
I had some friends who insisted on eating “health food” exclusively while at the same time drinking cheap wine (Ripple) and they saw no contradiction at all
uncle frogy
@komarov#28: “have my conscience surgically removed and peddle snake oil.”
After removal, you can replace it with a nanoconscience! Very fashionable, and stands in the way of hardly anything at all!
I wonder when the universal solvent, DHMO, will make it into the quack pharmacopoeia, only $16.95 per 300ml dose.
Something interesting…..pigs love to eat coal. When I had a small herd of pigs, I converted an old coal shed to a pig house. There was a layer of coal on the floor. Instead of cleaning all the coal out, I just covered it with a lot of straw. Well, the pigs went into ecstasies gobbling the coal down. When I mentioned this to my farm type friends, they all said they remembered that their pigs were all given coal on occasion.
FIFY.
I even remember which summer. Back in 1992 my then girlfriend was into colon cleansing. Every now and then she and a few of her friends would go to this “clinic” of sorts and get a “colonic irrigation”. This clinic consisted of a very nicely converted garage in some woman’s house. The woman claimed to be a nurse but I never did see any certifications hung around anywhere.
At the time I knew less than zero about that procedure. I say less than because I was pretty misinformed about it. But I am by default skeptical about everything. My girlfriend and I would argue about it now and then. She insisted that it was healthy and even more to the point she, and I quote “Felt like a million dollars” after the cleansing. But I insisted that it was surely a placebo effect. She felt better because she expected to feel better. So the argument went on.
Then on one occasion she says “Go with us and have one if you don’t believe me”. The thought was a little disconcerting but there was an argument at stake, I can finally prove her wrong because I was not going to fall for some placebo effect. Everyone knows how important these little relationship skirmishes are, they decide much. So I had to take her up on it.
My first mistake was not investigating this woman’s practice at all. I went in there and fell for the clinical appearance and trusted her without question. Not to be crude but I have to be blunt, my second mistake was not inquiring what, exactly, she was going to be squirting up my bum. I assumed it was purified water of some kind, maybe nutrient water at most.
Well it wasn’t. It was coffee. I know what you’re going to say “Didn’t you see the off color?” No in fact I didn’t. I was on my side in a quite comfortable gown. There was a machine with tubes behind me. She had a nice bedside manner and soothed me effectively. Insertion, a bloated feeling on and off. Then mayhem.
This is a little piece of information I learned from this event. Apparently the intestine lining can absorb things like caffeine at a much greater rate than simply drinking a caffeinated drink. Also, I have always avoided caffeinated drinks of any kind. They make me feel wonky. I get jitters and shortness of breath and sometimes a little swelling in the neck. I found out some time later that is a sort of mild anaphylactic reaction. But the immediate reaction was explosive expulsion from both my ends with loads of dizziness.
So there I was puking and shitting my guts out while staggering around this woman’s clinic in distress, much to the embarrassment of my GF and her two friends. You can laugh, it’s funny now. I was taken away by ambulance. I was fine later, doctors said I should avoid coffee and caffeinated soda. Which up till that point I did.
The nurse actually had the audacity to contact me later to ask me to pay for the cleanup. I said “Sorry that’s the cost of business”. I refused to pay for the “cleansing” because I figured it was my plumbing which did most of the work of “cleansing” that day after all, not her machine. I threatened to sue and never heard from her again.
It’s no wonder why my girlfriend felt like a million bucks being supercharged on coffee like that. We broke up in 95 because she got into Dianetics, Scientology and all that happy crappy. I let some huckster blow coffee up my ass for her but I’ll be damned if I was going to get bullshit pumped into my skull. I did read the book out of curiosity. The coffee enema was a better experience, even if somewhat more cathartic, because at least I learned something from that.
I had a very sick friend of mine who was doing that but on his own. He did all the doctors were recommending but subsequently died anyway it was a very rare and never cured cancer . I like coffee and tea but I think I will just take it in the front end and not the back end thanks anyway.
uncle frogy
@30 DHMO! hah! Whadyu think homeopathy is? Them places are chock full.
yaque @35, it’s the dark influence of the “non-active” ingredient of homeopathy, ethyl alcohol, that pollutes the pure DHMO. It’s a whole new ball game, marketing the Universal Solvent as a cure for all ills.
This is basically the whole deal with bottled water.
Sounds like somebody confused “organic chemistry” with “organic food”.
More like holy waterthen.
DrewN wrote:
But are they gluten free?!?
It’s amazing how food superstitions are getting more and more prevalent. Gluten free (on products that were never made with wheat flour), organic, all natural, hormone free, probiotic, etc, etc.