Are detox diets bad for you?

Are detox diets bad for you? The Republic defined them in this article as “a dangerous and ineffective fashion”, reporting the same news that I also spoke about here : an English woman ended up in the hospital after a diet for rapid weight loss made of detoxifying drinks with natural ingredients.
So is it true that detox diets are bad for health?

Let’s make a distinction: there is detox and detox.
In fact, some detox diets are so called partly for marketing, partly because they are simply elimination diets of certain foods which we often linger too much by will or because of the abuse of industrial products that contain them in large quantities: for example we often abuse glucose-fructose syrup for sweets and snacks; gluten present in reinforced flours and thickeners; of lactose, which in many triggers episodes of intolerance.

The exact name of these diets is clean diets, but they are also often referred to as detoxes. They are very banal and harmless diets, low-calorie but not too much, like the case of Whole 30, a paleodiet that has been very successful, and included the exclusion of cereals, dairy products, legumes and sweets.

In this case we just have to make sure that the diet is not too restrictive, that is, it forces us to make too many sacrifices. Even diets based on a greater consumption of soups, fruit and vegetables, herbal teas, are now called detoxes. If these diets are two or three days long, and still involve the consumption of some protein food in the form of legumes or fish, don’t worry.
So when are detox diets dangerous? Here are some examples to stay away from.