Juice cleanses, charcoal supplements and foot patches – is detoxing worth the hype?

January 22, 2026 – 1:30 PM

(Image by Mikhail Nilov via Pexels)

How logistics industry experts plan to ‘move forward’ after COVID-19

Reasons why Filipinos love Korean culture and products

Why Batangas is the destination for budget-friendly family holidays

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 visualized 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. Each episode takes a popular health or wellness trend, viral claim or bodily mystery and examines what the evidence really says, with help from researchers who study this stuff for a living.

This opening episode dives straight into detoxing. From juice cleanses and detox teas to charcoal pills, foot pads and coffee enemas, Katie and Dan watch, wince and occasionally laugh their way through some of the internet’s most popular detox trends. 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.

Katie Edwards

, Commissioning Editor, Health + Medicine and Host of Strange Health podcast,

The Conversation

Dan Baumgardt

, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology and Neuroscience,

University of Bristol

The Conversation

under a Creative Commons license. Read the

original article