By Madeline Keleher
Feb 10, 2021
I don’t know what I did to bring this upon myself, but for weeks YouTube showed me an ad declaring that the average person is carrying 5-20 pounds of poop inside. And not just any ole poop—toxic poop. The cure? A colon cleanse detox supplement for $29.95. There are loads of other products and services purported to cleanse your colon: hydrotherapy to flush a dozen gallons of water up there, an enema with low-acid, high-caffeine coffee, magic tea (because that sounds legit), and a naked bio electric lymphatic drainage massage with a light-wand. Is this a good use of money or are people just flushing it down the toilet? Let’s get to the “bottom” of this.
My first question is: where did this idea of a colon cleanse come from? “Autointoxication” is the discredited theory that putrefied poop builds up inside people and causes disease. The term was coined by Charles Bouchard in 1887 and popularized in America in 1919 by John Harvey Kellogg (eugenicist and brother of the cereal guy), but the concept originated with the ancient Egyptians and Greeks. (Now, the ancient Greeks also mistakenly thought a person’s health and personality were determined by a balance of black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood, so I wouldn’t blindly trust all of their medical theories. “Butt” I digress.) After some strange snake-oil schemes (here’s one from 1905 that is eerily familiar to modern colon cleanse ads) and many risky, unnecessary, and sometimes fatal procedures, autointoxication became widely discredited by the 1930s.
Okay, so science “pooh-poohed” the rationale for colon cleanses nearly a century ago. My next question is, are our colons really clogged with 20 pounds of poop? A man with a rare congenital disease accumulated 28 pounds of poop in his intestine throughout his life due to missing nerve cells. He appeared 9 months pregnant at the time that he had the affected portion of his colon surgically removed. His story, however, is extraordinarily unusual. What about a typical person? Let’s do the math. The average colon is 5 ft (152.4 cm) long with a 1.5 in (3.81 cm) radius. We can calculate the area of the cylinder by π * 3.81 cm^2 * 152.4 cm = 6,950 cm^3. So, let’s go to the extreme and say the entire colon was filled with poop, how much would that weigh? The density of poop is 1.06 g/cm^3, and we get mass by multiplying density by volume: so, 1.06 g/cm^3 * 6,950 cm^3 = 7,367 g, or 16.2 pounds. Alright, maybe some of us do have around 20 pounds in there. "Butt" is it toxic?
Your colon absorbs water and nutrients from your former meal and ejects the indigestible portion of it. The material it works on is not toxic, because your liver and kidneys—your body’s natural detoxifying organs—have already filtered out the toxins. The food, beverages, and medications you consume are broken down by your digestive tract, absorbed into your blood, and carried to your liver to be processed and detoxified. Your liver (which at this very moment holds 13% of your blood) converts toxins into waste, which gets eliminated through your colon in poop. Poop is 75% water, and the remaining solid portion is comprised of undigested molecules of your food and—you may be horrified to learn—up to half of the rest is bacteria (much of which is alive). Not only is your poop not toxic, it’s also not getting encrusted onto the walls of your intestine like ads claim. Uterine lining is shed once a month, which seems quite often enough, but the lining of your intestines has that beat, renewing itself every 4-5 days. Poop isn’t sticking to it for years.
So, how can you show your colon some love? You don’t need to detox—your liver and kidneys are already doing that for you. Colon cleanses can be dangerous, with risks such as dehydration, infection, vomiting, and rectal perforation. However, if you’d like to do something healthy for your colon, then exercise regularly, maintain a healthy weight, don’t smoke or over-imbibe, and make sure you are getting screened for colon cancer once you’re 45 (start younger if you know you’re at an elevated risk). These steps may not sound as quick and snazzy as a colon cleanse, but they actually work. Sorry to be a party pooper, but as far as colon cleanses go, they’re a load of…well, you know.
TL;DR. Colon cleanses are B.S.
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