Cleanses

I read an interesting post about ‘cleanses’ this morning. The truly interesting bit is itself a quotation from a medical article, published in (the respected publication) The Lancet. As background information, be aware that many such ‘cleansing’ treatments involve fasting, then drinking things like lemon juice and olive oil. On to the meat:

Experimentation revealed that mixing equal volumes of oleic acid (the major component of olive oil) and lemon juice produced several semi solid white balls after the addition of a small volume of a potassium hydroxide solution. On air drying at room temperature, these balls became quite solid and hard.

We conclude, therefore, that these green "stones" resulted from the action of gastric lipases on the simple and mixed triacylglycerols that make up olive oil, yielding long chain carboxylic acids (mainly oleic acid). This process was followed by saponification into large insoluble micelles of potassium carboxylates (lemon juice contains a high concentration of potassium) or "soap stones".

In other words, as the blogger points out, these things appear to work—in that at least there are noticeable effects—because they create their own ‘evidence’: Olive oil plus lemon juice forms the ‘stones’ that the cleansers proudly announce they expelled! The problem is, of course, that what they don't do is solve anything that was there in the first place.