A guest during New York Fashion Week, on 12 September 2025 in New York, New York (Photo: Edward Berthelot/Getty Images) In this 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?
Katie Edwards, a health and medicine editor at The Conversation and Dan Baumgardt, a GP and lecturer in health and life sciences at the University of Bristol share a longstanding fascination with the body’s improbabilities and limits, plus a healthy scepticism for claims that sound too good to be true.
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.
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. DM
Strange Health is hosted by Katie Edwards and Dan Baumgardt. The executive producer is Gemma Ware, with video and sound editing by Sikander Khan. Artwork by Alice Mason. Dan and Katie talk about two social media clips in this episode, one from 30.forever on TikTok and one from velvelle_store on Instagram.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.