Do You Actually Need to Detox? A Liver Expert Explains
January arrives with a familiar hangover. Too much food. Too much drink. Too much screen time.
And suddenly social media is full of green juices, charcoal supplements, foot patches, and seven-day "liver resets", all promising to purge the body of mysterious toxins and return it to a purer state.
In the first episode of Strange Health, a new visualised podcast from The Conversation, hosts Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt put detox culture under the microscope and ask a simple question: Do we actually need to detox at all?
Strange Health explores the weird, surprising, and sometimes alarming things our bodies do.
Along the way, they ask what these products claim to remove, how they supposedly work, and why feeling worse is often reframed online as a sign that a detox is "working".
The episode also features an interview with Trish Lalor, a liver expert from the University of Birmingham, whose message is refreshingly blunt.
"Your body is really set up to do it by itself," she explains.
The liver, working alongside the kidneys and gut, already detoxifies the body around the clock. For most healthy people, Lalor says, there is no need for extreme interventions or pricey supplements.
That does not mean everything labelled "detox" is harmless. Lalor explains where certain ingredients can help, where they make little difference, and where they can cause real damage if misused.
Real detoxing looks less like a sachet or a foot patch and more like hydration, fibre, rest, moderation, and giving your liver time to do the job it already does remarkably well.
If you're buying detox patches and supplements, then it's probably your wallet that is about to be cleansed, not your liver.