The Guardian calls out celebrities who made scientifically illiterate statements in 2008:
Kate Moss, Oprah Winfrey and Demi Moore all espoused the idea that you can detoxify your body with either diet (scientifically unsupportable) or, in the case of Moore, products such as "highly trained medical leeches" which make you bleed. Scientists point out that diet alone cannot remove toxins and that blood itself is not a toxin, and even if it did contain toxins, removing a little bit of it is not going to help.
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As PalMD has pointed out, millions of Americans use detoxification to improve their optimal health and well being.
There
was an outbreak of botulism in the past several days in the
United States. The problem was traced to contaminated canned
chili sauce intended for use on hotdogs. Product from
Puffer fish are notorious. Considerable delicacy in Japan (a taste adopted by some non-Japanese Foodies), they come with a side of risk: some puffer fish have the potent lethal toxins tetrodotoxin and/or saxitoxin, neurotoxins more than 1000 times the lethal potency of cyanide:
Some of the reader comments are even dumber than those of the celebrities:
And what the heck are "highly trained medical leeches", and how do you train them?
I'm looking forward to seeing "Highly trained medical leeches" develop as an internet meme.
Any day now we're going to see leeches blogging about how exhausted they are by the end of the semester, and where they should do their postdocs, etc. . .