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notion of eating healthily and abstaining from various risk factors for ill health like excessive alcohol use. But that is not what detox is about; these are quick-fix health drives, constructed from the outset as short term, while lifestyle risk factors for ill health have their impact over a lifetime. But I am even willing to agree that some people might try a five-day detox and remember (or even learn) what it’s like to eat vegetables, and that gets no criticism from me.
    What’s wrong is to pretend that these rituals are based in science or even that they are new. Almost every religion and culture have some form of purification or abstinence ritual, with fasting, a change in diet, bathing, or any number of other interventions, most of which are dressed up in mumbo jumbo. They’re not presented as science, because they come from an era before scientific terms entered the lexicon, but still: Yom Kippur in Judaism, Ramadan in Islam, and all manner of other similar rituals in Christianity, Hinduism, the Baha’i faith, Buddhism, and Jainism are each about abstinence and purification (among other things). Such rituals, like detox regimes, are conspicuously and—to some believers too, I’m sure—spuriously precise. Hindu fasts, for example, if strictly observed, run from the previous day’s sunset until forty-eight minutes after the next day’s sunrise.
    Purification and redemption are such recurrent themes in ritual because there is a clear and ubiquitous need for them; we all do regrettable things as a result of our own circumstances, and new rituals are frequently invented in response to new circumstances. In Angola and Mozambique, purification and cleansing rituals have arisen for children affected by war, particularly former child soldiers. These are healing rituals, in which the child is purged and purified of sin and guilt, of the “contamination” of war and death (contamination is a recurring metaphor in all cultures, for obvious reasons); the child is also protected from the consequences of his previous actions, which is to say, he is protected from retaliation by the avenging spirits of those he has killed. As a World Bank report put it in 1999:
    These cleansing and purification rituals for child soldiers have the appearance of what anthropologists call rites of transition. That is, the child undergoes a symbolic change of status from someone who has existed in a realm of sanctioned norm-violation or norm-suspension (i.e. killing, war) to someone who must now live in a realm of peaceful behavioral and social norms, and conform to these.
     
    I don’t think I’m stretching this too far. In what we call the developed Western world, we seek redemption and purification from the more extreme forms of our material indulgence: we fill our faces with drugs, drink, bad food, and other indulgences, we know it’s wrong, and we crave ritualistic protection from the consequences, a public “transitional ritual” commemorating our return to healthier behavioral norms.
    The presentation of these purification diets and rituals has always been a product of their time and place, and now that science is our dominant explanatory framework for the natural and moral world, for right or wrong, it’s natural that we should bolt a bastardized pseudoscientific justification onto our redemption. Like so much of the nonsense in bad science, “detox” pseudoscience isn’t something done to us, by venal and exploitative outsiders; it is a cultural product, a recurring theme, and we do it to ourselves.

Brain Gym
     
    Under normal circumstances this should be the part of the book where I fall into a rage over creationism, to gales of left-wing applause. But if you want an example that’s less covered in the media, there is a vast empire of pseudoscience being peddled, for hard cash, in such liberal enclaves in the United States as Boulder, Colorado, and Portland, Oregon. It’s even more successful abroad, where it has been