Bad Science Read Free Page A

and make a brown mush that feels warm against your skin.
    What is the other major ingredient, impressively listed as “hydrolyzed carbohydrate”? A carbohydrate is a long string of sugar molecules all stuck together. Starch is a carbohydrate, for example, and in your body this is broken down gradually into the individual sugar molecules by your digestive enzymes, so that you can absorb it. The process of breaking down a carbohydrate molecule into its individual sugars is called hydrolysis. So “hydrolyzed carbohydrate,” as you might have worked out by now, for all that it sounds sciencey, basically means “sugar.” Obviously sugar goes sticky in sweat.
    Is there anything more to these patches than that? Yes. There is a new device, which we should call the hassle barrier, another recurring theme in the more advanced forms of foolishness that we shall be reviewing later. There are huge numbers of different brands, and many of them offer excellent and lengthy documents full of science to prove that they work: they have diagrams and graphs and the appearance of scienciness, but the key elements are missing. There are experiments, they say, which prove that detox patches do something…but they don’t tell you what these experiments consisted of, or what their “methods” were; they offer only decorous graphs of “results.”
    To focus on the methods is to miss the point of these apparent “experiments”: they aren’t about the methods; they’re about the positive result, the graph, and the appearance of science. These are superficially plausible totems to frighten off a questioning journalist, a hassle barrier , and this is another recurring theme, which we will see—in more complex forms—around many of the more advanced areas of bad science. You will come to love the details.
    If It’s not Science, What is it?
     
    But there is something important happening here, with detox, and I don’t think it’s enough just to say, “All this is nonsense.” The detox phenomenon is interesting because it represents one of the most grandiose innovations of marketers, lifestyle gurus, and alternative therapists: the invention of a whole new physiological process. In terms of basic human biochemistry, detox is a meaningless concept. It doesn’t cleave nature at the joints. There is nothing on the “detox system” in a medical textbook. That burgers and beer can have negative effects on your body is certainly true, for a number of reasons; but the notion that they leave a specific residue, which can be extruded by a specific process, a physiological system called detox, is a marketing invention.
    If you look at a metabolic flowchart, the gigantic wall-size maps of all the molecules in your body, detailing the way that food is broken down into its constituent parts, and then those components are converted between each other, and then those new building blocks are assembled into muscle, and bone, and tongue, and bile, and sweat, and booger, and hair, and skin, and sperm, and brain, and everything that makes you you, it’s hard to pick out one thing that is the “detox system.”
    Because it has no scientific meaning, detox is much better understood as a cultural product. Like the best pseudoscientific inventions, it deliberately blends useful common sense with outlandish, medicalized fantasy. In some respects, how much you buy into this reflects how self-dramatizing you want to be or, in less damning terms, how much you enjoy ritual in your daily life. When I go through busy periods of partying, drinking, sleep deprivation, and convenience eating, I usually decide—eventually—that I need a bit of a rest. So I have a few nights in, reading at home, and eating more salad than usual. Models and celebrities, meanwhile, “detox” with Master Cleanse and the Fruit Flush Diet.
    On one thing we must be absolutely clear, because this is a recurring theme throughout the world of bad science: there is nothing wrong with the