Maintenance Phase - The Master Cleanse

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that detoxifies your brainstem,

00:00:18.660 your ear buds, ear holes.

00:00:21.000 It was such a strong start, Mike.

00:00:23.340 Confidence.

00:00:23.980 The key is confidence.

00:00:25.060 It was such a strong start.

00:00:27.500 Just know exactly what you're going to say before you say it.

00:00:30.000 Every time.

00:00:30.620 Every once in a while you come on and you're like, I've been working on this tagline and

00:00:34.580 every single time it is a surprise to me.

00:00:37.600 I started working on that tagline when I started speaking the sentence.

00:00:43.460 I am Michael Hobbs.

00:00:44.540 I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

00:00:46.140 I'm Aubrey Gordon.

00:00:47.200 I am a writer, a columnist, an author, a lot of things, and now a podcaster.

00:00:51.820 Look at that.

00:00:52.240 And both of us are on Patreon at patreon.com slash maintenance phase or maintenance phase

00:00:57.900 dot com or lots of other places where we have t-shirts and all kinds of other cute stuff in the

00:01:02.920 description yeah and if you want to design a t-shirt you can design a t-shirt and you get

00:01:07.020 paid for it and it gets to be a maintenance face t-shirt look how cute yay mike aubrey can i tell

00:01:12.820 you what we're talking about today uh i don't know if i'm going to be able to follow along

00:01:15.940 because for the last two days i've only been eating cayenne pepper and water and i'm a little

00:01:20.120 lightheaded just just spicy water it's frankly not far off what we're talking about today we're

00:01:26.160 talking about the master cleanse this is the thing i i have no idea what an actual like master

00:01:31.120 cleanse is i know what a cleanse is yeah but the whole master cleanse thing is new to me it's just

00:01:36.560 the name that this dude gave it oh it's like saran wrap his kind of plastic wrap is saran wrap right

00:01:41.920 oh it's like band-aids for adhesive bandages yes okay i thought it was something that people came

00:01:47.360 up with after a long peer-reviewed literature process oh mike i feel like i'm about to

00:01:52.820 disappoint you in some very predictable ways. I'm going to keep pretending I've never done

00:01:56.700 this show before. Oh, it's a scam? Really? Interesting. So had you heard of the master

00:02:02.860 cleanse at all before? I was like, we're doing it. Maple syrup, lemon juice. I am like deeply

00:02:07.640 familiar with cleanses as a thing that I feel like did not exist when I was a child. And then

00:02:13.240 all of a sudden it existed and it was everywhere. And everyone that I follow on Facebook was doing

00:02:17.560 one yeah a couple trips to new york ago i ended up at an airbnb in the upper west side or the

00:02:24.280 upper east side whatever the side is that's like super duper posh and the grocery store near my

00:02:30.420 airbnb i went there once and i saw that they were selling a detoxify cleanse kit and it was like a 0.96

00:02:37.520 little lunchbox full of sort of everything you needed for a week-long cleanse and it was fucking 0.96

00:02:42.340 $85. Yeah. I was livid. I was like, isn't the whole point of a cleanse that you're not eating? 0.99

00:02:49.120 Why would it cost $85 to not eat for a week? Because someone can make money off of that $85,

00:02:56.260 Mike. Because people have bills to pay. I mean, it's a fucking great scam if you can get it. I

00:03:03.400 mean, if what we're talking about is like cayenne pepper and lemon juice and syrup and shit, 0.98

00:03:07.020 these are not expensive ingredients. No, they're certainly not. And I'm curious, 0.95

00:03:11.100 Do you have a sense of when everyone in your life started talking on Facebook about their

00:03:17.080 cleanses and detoxes and everything?

00:03:19.180 Like, was it the last five years, the last 20 years?

00:03:21.920 It was like 2009 to 2012, around there.

00:03:25.640 It was like Obama won and we're like, okay, everything's fine now.

00:03:28.800 We can focus on like detoxifying our bodies.

00:03:31.560 But I could be wrong.

00:03:32.260 No, you nailed it to the wall, man.

00:03:35.500 Ooh, yeah.

00:03:36.300 So, here is what you need to know about the Master Cleanse's sort of rise in popularity.

00:03:42.620 The Master Cleanse has been around since the 40s.

00:03:45.400 Oh.

00:03:45.940 But I did the, like, Google Trends, I think it's called, search, where you can, like, see when words get mentioned.

00:03:53.080 And there is this humongous spike in 2007.

00:03:56.720 Oh.

00:03:57.420 There's, like, a little bump in 76, which is when the creator of the Master Cleanse published his book, The Master Cleanser.

00:04:04.940 His name is Stanley Burroughs. He died in 1991. So he's long gone. He originally created the

00:04:12.300 Master Cleanse and called it the Lemonade Diet in the 1940s, which like, doesn't that sound very

00:04:17.600 40s? Right. Yes. So the Master Cleanse basically like enjoys a little bit of popularity in the

00:04:22.820 70s, but it's not until the mid 2000s that it really takes off that we see that huge like

00:04:27.580 2006-2007 spike. And that is around the movie Dreamgirls.

00:04:32.640 Oh, I've never seen that. Was there cleanse stuff in there?

00:04:35.340 There's no content about cleanses in Dreamgirls. But Beyonce goes on Oprah to promote it. Oprah 0.97

00:04:44.140 asks her what she did to prepare for the role. And Beyonce said, Oh, I did the master cleanse

00:04:48.820 for two weeks. Oh, see, now we're back to being like, Oprah, why? So from there, from Beyonce

00:04:57.700 mentioning it on Oprah, a bunch of people, a bunch of celebrities start doing it and it starts

00:05:02.640 showing up in like In Touch and Us Weekly. Madonna's doing the master cleanse. Jared Leto

00:05:08.300 does it. Gwyneth Paltrow takes this as an opportunity to announce that she already did it.

00:05:14.780 Famous health and wellness voice of reason, Gwyneth Paltrow.

00:05:18.480 She was just like, it was too hard to stick to. I don't recommend it. She says it made her

00:05:23.460 hallucinate. She's like, guys, you know, I've read the peer reviewed studies. I just don't

00:05:27.140 see the evidence it's like wow when if thank you totally so when we talked about halo top

00:05:31.980 i was like really clear that was not a ruiner episode if you like your halo top you can keep

00:05:37.260 your halo top this is for sure a ruiner episode so just like be prepared the master cleanse is a

00:05:44.740 pile of a hot garbage so this is you like rolling into stalingrad like tanks blazing just like 0.99

00:05:51.920 fuck your cleanse it's all bullshit yeah so i feel like we should start out with what the master 1.00

00:05:59.480 cleanse is i feel like i was gonna ask you what you think it is but i feel like i just got that 1.00

00:06:04.720 answer and it's spicy water is it yeah isn't it just literally water and like maybe orange juice

00:06:09.820 or cayenne pepper or lemon juice or something it's just like lightly flavored water right

00:06:13.480 yeah basically the master cleanse is a diet in which the people who take part in it forego food

00:06:20.500 for 10 days. You're not eating. You're only drinking. Okay. And you are subsisting on this

00:06:26.480 homemade mixture of water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and some kind of sweetener, usually

00:06:34.360 maple syrup. But he also says it's okay to use molasses or sorghum or sort of like any of those

00:06:39.640 kind of like liquid sweeteners. Ooh, the flexibility. Lose weight eating whatever you

00:06:43.780 want as long as it's molasses, sorghum, or maple syrup. So on top of that, there are also these

00:06:49.920 sort of ease in and ease out periods of like three or four days on either end, right? So you're sort

00:06:54.840 of like tapering down on solid foods and then tapering back up. Right. I love the idea of

00:06:59.540 tapering because it's like, look, if you didn't taper, this might be bad for you and unsustainable.

00:07:04.720 Yeah, totally. So there are some specifications about this. He says you can't use honey as your

00:07:11.360 sweetener. But his explanation for that in this book in the master cleanser, the book is that

00:07:16.660 it's just bee vomit. So you're basically drinking like very tart, very spicy sugar water.

00:07:24.200 So does it follow the structure of like three meals a day? Is there like a breakfast spicy

00:07:28.160 water, a lunch spicy water dinner? Or are you just drinking it throughout the day? Or how does

00:07:31.660 it work? He doesn't necessarily say how many times you can have it. I think he recommends like six

00:07:37.160 glasses or eight glasses a day. Wait, what? He wrote a whole book and he doesn't say how many

00:07:41.420 of these you're supposed to drink in a day? Nope, sure doesn't. Most of the research that I found

00:07:46.080 on this was basically like if you follow the cleanse and drink basically every time you're

00:07:51.920 hungry for most people that will account for about 650 calories a day oh and those calories are

00:07:58.320 100 from carbohydrates they are 100 from sugar right which is really fascinating for a cleanse

00:08:05.020 because many cleanses and detoxes define sugar as a toxin right so the only there are like three

00:08:12.300 other things that you're permitted to drink you can drink mint tea which you're only supposed to

00:08:18.060 drink sparingly and you're supposed to drink it because as he said in the book during the cleanse

00:08:23.480 you will have and i quote many mouth and body odors that are released so get ready to stink

00:08:31.560 and cover up for it with mint tea which doesn't even seem like it would be all that effective

00:08:35.120 i love mint tea it doesn't make anything smell better yeah no it doesn't go to your armpits

00:08:40.000 So you can and should, on the master cleanse, drink a laxative tea, according to the author.

00:08:47.340 So part of this is, like many cleanses, there's sort of a colon cleansing aspect to this.

00:08:53.060 They recommend that you drink laxative teas or that you do a saltwater flush,

00:08:57.040 where you wake up in the morning and drink a ton of saltwater.

00:09:00.420 What? 0.99

00:09:00.660 And then just shit your brains out for the rest of the day. 1.00

00:09:03.140 Do they think toxins means poo in your butt? 1.00

00:09:06.380 Is that what toxins means? 0.98

00:09:09.180 So like many cleanses, there is no point at which Stanley Burroughs defines what toxins are.

00:09:18.100 He only wrote a whole book, Aubrey. There's no room. He ran out of space.

00:09:21.480 It's also, I feel like I should say, it is a book. It's a very short book. It was like 50 pages.

00:09:27.040 Okay.

00:09:27.400 So the idea behind the master cleanse is that cayenne pepper dilates your blood vessels.

00:09:33.180 the combination the sort of abrasive combination of cayenne and lemon juice helps cut through

00:09:38.260 mucus and other quote unquote sort of waste materials okay you're also doing a salt water

00:09:43.560 flush or drinking laxative tea and that quote unquote cleans your digestive tract and that the

00:09:49.460 lemon juice is your source of vitamins and minerals okay and he actually says repeatedly

00:09:55.000 throughout the book that lemon juice has all the vitamins and minerals you need so you won't feel

00:09:59.800 hungry on this cleanse, which is such a bold lie. The idea that you will never feel hungry while

00:10:07.360 you're just drinking lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup is truly bananas to me, but okay.

00:10:14.200 Turns out the secret was lemon juice all along. No diets necessary.

00:10:17.960 There are a ton of reported side effects, as I'm sure you can imagine.

00:10:24.140 Not just that people get super hangry. They also get muscle aches and pains. They get these

00:10:29.720 intense cravings for food. They get headaches. They're fatigued. Many people report nausea and

00:10:36.240 vomiting. Many folks end up dehydrated from the laxatives and the saltwater flush. People also

00:10:42.700 get cold sores and yeast infections. It's basically just like a laundry list of things.

00:10:48.080 So what you're saying is that the human body needs food and water to survive?

00:10:51.900 It's really tricky. Yes. And then if you've got a yeast infection and a cold sore,

00:10:57.060 you're on the right track. Many, many, many healthcare providers have warned that these

00:11:03.060 are a gateway into disordered eating and or full on eating disorders. And for people who already

00:11:08.120 have eating disorders, which is sort of a shocking number of people in the US, these often are sort

00:11:13.840 of the first step to a relapse or they just are the relapse, right? Marie Claire did a whole piece

00:11:20.760 on what they call juicerexics. Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

00:11:25.880 Which is sort of like the folks who start doing these detoxes and cleanses and juice fasts, 1.00

00:11:31.300 and become what they say is, quote, an epidemic of malnourished, run down young women, 0.70

00:11:38.420 some of whom have stumbled into full fledged anorexia or bulimia.

00:11:42.740 Yeah, it's sort of this idea that you're like doing all of this clean eating,

00:11:46.140 you're doing all of this sort of like clean living kind of stuff. And it's also just a sort

00:11:51.900 of socially sanctioned eating disorder. I mean, it is sort of palatable to talk about

00:11:56.360 juice cleanses in quote unquote, polite company in a way that it is not to talk about like eating

00:12:00.900 disorders. Yeah, absolutely. So they talked to someone who talks about like having had an eating

00:12:06.800 disorder and covering that up with juice fasts. She's a blogger named Carrie Adams. She had been

00:12:14.740 engaged in like binge purge sort of eating for years, when she first started doing a juice

00:12:21.920 cleanse. And this is their sort of story about that from Marie Claire quote, I was like an

00:12:27.400 addict who'd found a new drug says Adams, who got positive reactions from friends during her

00:12:32.740 juice fast quote, people said, Oh, good for you. That's so healthy. It's society's most accepted

00:12:38.700 form of eating disorder, right? It's also of a short duration to so you can always tell yourself

00:12:44.180 that like this isn't an on-ramp to an eating disorder because I'm only going to do it for 10

00:12:47.840 days. But I can see that 10 days kind of getting prolonged if that's something that you're

00:12:52.240 predisposed to. Well, and I will say Stanley Burroughs recommended doing the master cleanse

00:12:58.360 anytime you were sick, anytime you gained weight, and three to four times a year as maintenance.

00:13:07.560 Isn't that a real bummer? Like over a month, a year?

00:13:11.040 So the idea is not to stay on this for all time. The idea is that your body is dirty. You do this, you poo out a bunch of toxins, and then it's clean. But then after like three more months, you do it again, because the body needs to sort of re-up this detoxification process. Is that the idea?

00:13:26.640 Yes. So he also says that in severe cases, and I don't know how he defines severe cases,

00:13:34.520 right? And he doesn't really say. In severe cases, he says you should do the master cleanse

00:13:39.000 for up to 40 days at a time. Oh, don't do that. I mean, I would argue if he's saying like you

00:13:44.540 should do it every time you've gained weight, I would imagine he would recommend to me 40 days

00:13:49.620 a time, four times a year. But think of all your mucus membranes, Aubrey. You'd have no more mucus

00:13:53.680 in your body. You're always complaining. Just filled with mucus today, Mike. Can't record.

00:13:57.580 Constantly. Just like logy with mucus.

00:14:01.100 At the beginning of the pandemic this year, I read a bunch of books on the Black Plague.

00:14:04.920 And this whole thing does seem like what medicine was before science, where, you know, it's like,

00:14:11.420 well, you know, your cousin died of plague and you're starting to show these symptoms. So

00:14:15.000 light a fire in your home and then eat a frog and then go upside down. It's just this like total,

00:14:22.300 like black magic. No, totally. I mean, like, so the idea of sort of ridding your body of

00:14:28.400 quote unquote toxic materials is absolutely not new. That's where we get enemas. It's where we

00:14:33.480 get bloodletting. Oh, right. Yeah. It is also sort of linked to fasting, which has been practiced

00:14:39.380 by a lot of people for lots of reasons and lots of places and times. But overwhelmingly, you're

00:14:44.940 exactly right, right? Like this is where we get leeches, right? Like as a treatment method,

00:14:49.880 it's like balancing the humors, right? I don't know if you ever read up on that stuff.

00:14:54.320 Up, down, charm, strange. Yeah.

00:14:56.020 It seems like from that perspective, it seems worth talking about like,

00:14:59.160 do detoxes work at all?

00:15:01.020 Yes. This is my next question. What did they do, Aubrey?

00:15:03.860 So contemporary cleanses and detoxes sort of define the idea of toxins really differently.

00:15:09.700 Some of them talk about heavy metals in your bloodstream. Others, again, say that sugar is

00:15:14.920 a toxin. Most of them, like the Master Cleanse, don't define toxins at all.

00:15:20.640 It's also interesting because the kinds of people that are the most likely to pay $85 for a cleanse

00:15:26.940 kit or whatever are also the kind of people that are like already eating organic, already eating

00:15:32.020 lots of fruits and vegetables, already with a sort of quote-unquote good diet. It just seems like

00:15:36.380 the underlying principle here is that eating at all builds up toxins in your system. It's not even

00:15:41.320 And they're like, oh, I've been eating fast food.

00:15:42.660 So now I need to do a detox.

00:15:44.140 Right.

00:15:44.380 And like food is toxic and your body stores toxic materials, all of that kind of stuff.

00:15:49.780 Yes, absolutely.

00:15:50.700 Yeah.

00:15:50.860 So a lot of detoxes and cleanses sort of marry the idea of detoxing with weight loss

00:15:55.240 because they argue that toxins are stored in fatty tissue.

00:16:00.020 So losing weight is essential to removing toxins.

00:16:03.980 There is actually some evidence that adipose tissue, which is just like fat tissue in your

00:16:09.440 body does store remnants of like industrial chemicals more than other kinds of tissue in

00:16:16.360 the human body. But there is no evidence that like what you eat changes how your body stores

00:16:23.580 those toxins. Interesting. Most of those toxins are things like BPA and radon and asbestos,

00:16:29.100 things that actually have upstream solutions that are probably policy based, not based on what you

00:16:34.840 eat. But again, we're not going to pursue those because they're way more tricky to figure out.

00:16:39.860 And because they don't actually like give us any juice for like, I'm the kind of person who's on

00:16:44.600 a cleanse, right? This is my problem with all of these kinds of toxification diet kind of rhetoric

00:16:50.980 is that like, we absolutely are being fucking poisoned all the time. In the United States, 0.96

00:16:56.100 we are subject to all kinds of weird fucking hormones and chemicals with measurable effects. 0.99

00:17:02.160 There is actual evidence for a lot of these theories. 0.98

00:17:06.140 And yet we're like crawling through the desert toward these solutions that are like weirdly 0.91

00:17:11.500 individual and have nothing to do with like the fucking pipes in Flint, which is the actual 0.97

00:17:16.520 way that toxins get into our bodies is through like political corruption. 0.99

00:17:21.820 And yet it's like, no, no, no, no, no.

00:17:23.240 I want the one that only has to do with what I eat and has nothing to do with any broader

00:17:28.320 systemic issue at all.

00:17:29.540 Like it's about me and my toxins.

00:17:31.480 Absolutely. And again, like, it's also hard to talk about cleanses and detoxes without talking about sort of the performance of it all, right? Even if you believe to your core, that this is the right thing for you, that it's making you healthier, all this sort of stuff, there is also a social element of differentiating yourself from people who don't know enough, or who aren't disciplined enough, or whatever.

00:17:55.400 again like regardless of intentions making these cleanses and detoxes into events that happen on

00:18:01.920 social media or into things that you talk to your friends and family about and all of that kind of

00:18:05.940 stuff like all of that sort of like pulls it into the realm of performance right i am 100 okay with

00:18:12.420 admitting that i would not be able to do this like i i don't have a whole ton of willpower around food

00:18:17.820 because like my body needs it to survive and i would not make it 10 days of not eating look man

00:18:23.580 And I also wouldn't make it if there was like a breathing detox.

00:18:28.360 So on this question of like, do cleanses or detoxes work from every source that I could

00:18:35.200 find, every sort of credible source that I could find, a full-throated, absolutely not.

00:18:41.060 There's a great meta-research review in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics

00:18:45.960 where they say, quote, to the best of our knowledge, no randomized controlled trials

00:18:51.600 have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of commercial detox diets in humans.

00:18:56.700 There's one study from the Seoul Women's University in Korea that studied the master

00:19:02.080 cleanse in women with overweight BMIs. And they found that those women lost weight.

00:19:07.320 Surprise, surprise, you don't eat solids for 10 days and you weigh less at the end of those 10 0.99

00:19:11.760 days. And those results were the same as the placebo group.

00:19:15.620 It reminds me of earlier this year, the New York Times ran an advice column

00:19:19.640 where somebody wrote in and said, if I get an email on a list that I'm not supposed to be a

00:19:24.440 part of, should I reply all and say, please remove me from this list? And the New York

00:19:29.660 Times published an entire column that just said, no. And then all this like blank space.

00:19:35.300 I feel like it's the same thing with this, that all of this like Harvard peer-reviewed literature,

00:19:40.860 it should just be like a full page that just says, don't.

00:19:43.920 Yeah.

00:19:44.160 That seems like the obvious conclusion, like don't do this.

00:19:47.360 Absolutely. There is one thing in this meta research review. They did find one cleanse

00:19:54.140 that has been studied. It was a detox diet called the Hubbard Purification Rundown.

00:20:00.340 When there's a Hubbard involved, it's science facts. It's good.

00:20:03.660 You caught on to that quicker than I do because I had to read forward to figure out that the

00:20:09.240 research that was conducted was conducted by the Foundation for Advancements in Science and

00:20:14.060 education of the Church of Scientology because it's L. Ron Hubbard's detox. No way. I was joking.

00:20:20.540 That's real. L. Ron Hubbard has a detox and Scientology studied it and they were like,

00:20:26.940 it's good. What? This thing from our leader who we never question is also good. I bet I was just

00:20:32.700 interrupting you and bugging you with my dumb joke. That's actually true. I absolutely thought 0.98

00:20:37.420 you had caught on because I was like, no, it's truly L. Ron Hubbard. They have folks do the

00:20:43.560 hubbard purification rundown for 31 days and they said in that time that participants iqs

00:20:51.400 had increased by 6.7 points sounds super scientific it makes you smarter and thinner

00:21:00.780 i found this one and i was like oh this is like one of those restaurants where they bring you

00:21:05.300 a check and they also bring you like a little cookie like what a little treat like oh look at 0.93

00:21:09.860 Yes, you study the master clones and you're like little reward as L. Ron Hubbard has a detox and it's garbage.

00:21:15.820 So there is one case that I was able to find where there was sort of this anecdotal example of a number of folks sort of foregoing tested treatments for their chronic illnesses in favor of detoxes.

00:21:30.240 No.

00:21:30.600 So there was an example of a man in Australia who gave up on dialysis in favor of a detox and super unsurprisingly, still totally tragically, he died, right?

00:21:42.240 Like very predictably.

00:21:44.460 So like that's the really tricky sort of underbelly of all of this is that it is sort of like fun and wacky, but it's also really sinister to tell people with chronic illnesses, which Stanley Burroughs does throughout his book on the master cleanse.

00:21:59.720 he's repeatedly like this is strongly recommended for diabetics it's strongly recommended for people

00:22:05.480 oh shit dropsy which is edema which is sort of like fluid retention in your body he's like not 0.82

00:22:11.080 only should you do it you should do it for a month and a half right like it's just tying a woman to 0.98

00:22:16.420 the train tracks you know what i mean like just straight up villainy i mean he seems like an

00:22:20.580 egregious case but even if you're just a sort of artisanal small cleanse company you're still

00:22:26.740 contributing to the sort of overall understanding that cleanses are good for you and toxins are bad

00:22:31.680 for you. Yes, absolutely. And even when you say like, I feel like there are a handful of sort of

00:22:36.520 like cleanse and detox companies out there now that have gotten wise and will do the like check

00:22:40.360 with your doctor if you have any of these conditions, right? Right. But for the most part,

00:22:44.660 that is a pretty cynical legal liability. Totally. The CYA move, cover your ass move,

00:22:50.020 right? Yeah. To engage with that as if everyone has a doctor, as if everyone has access to this 1.00

00:22:54.800 stuff is pretty disingenuous, right? Certainly in the U.S. Look, in Denmark, tell people whatever

00:22:59.720 the fuck you want. If you want to spam Danes into doing cleanses, fuck it. Just aggressive lying 1.00

00:23:04.940 in Europe. Those motherfuckers have socialized medicine. Tell them whatever you want. Lie to 1.00

00:23:09.560 Danes. So here's where I think it gets like really extra super fun. Can we dive in to The 1.00

00:23:18.660 Master Cleanser by Stanley Burroughs? Yes. I want you to read me bad things and then we shout at

00:23:23.660 them. I'm going to read you so many bad things. That's that's this show in its purest form.

00:23:28.200 It's a really great I'm really excited to make fun of all of this absolute bullshit. 0.97

00:23:33.400 So I feel like normally you and I have to do at least a little bit of digging for the wacky side 0.96

00:23:39.720 of the story. Yes, you do not have to do any digging with the master clans. It is wacky from

00:23:45.580 jump. So there is an opening quote on the title page that I assumed was from the Bible or like

00:23:56.040 from some intellectual powerhouse, some something. The quote is this, let no man refuse to listen

00:24:02.740 and be healed, lest he bring suffering to those who look to him for guidance.

00:24:08.000 Oh, does it turn out to be like a Tracy Chapman lyric or something?

00:24:10.180 No. So I looked this up. There was one citation of this quote, and it was the Master Clems book.

00:24:17.580 So he just made it up?

00:24:19.100 Stanley Burroughs quoting Stanley Burroughs.

00:24:24.040 That's a move, dude. That's great. Come up with something wise and then put it in the

00:24:27.920 front of your book.

00:24:28.660 He's Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. Like he's the clumps, right? He's playing every role

00:24:34.500 in his book. So throughout the book, he uses this kind of language. It's like really science-y,

00:24:41.360 but also sort of biblical. He uses some concepts from the Declaration of Independence a bunch.

00:24:47.420 Are we sure that he is not Kate Bush?

00:24:50.520 This sounds like a Kate Bush concept album.

00:24:54.340 It totally does. It totally does. So here is an example of that. This is the opening

00:25:00.680 of the introduction so when you open this this is the first thing that you read in the master

00:25:05.120 cleanse book are you ready give it to me man's mastery of disease will only be final when

00:25:09.820 ignorance and fear are overcome by proper observance of all the laws pertaining to the

00:25:14.860 creation of bones flesh and blood what working knowingly oh buddy it gets so much better you're

00:25:21.020 going working knowingly with the master cleanser and master builder brings humanity closer to

00:25:26.520 perfection of the human form through eons past and on even into the present man has been held 0.91

00:25:33.540 and still remains in bondage of misery and suffering while witchcraft and quackery have

00:25:39.380 run the gamut of the healing field of misinformation why does it sound like it's in all caps

00:25:44.880 but it is really weird right he keeps talking about like a more perfect body he talks about

00:25:52.340 he like he uses the phrase these truths are self-evident this is Dwight Schrute reading

00:25:56.860 Mussolini quotes it totally is it also like the other thing that jumped out to me while I was

00:26:03.840 reading it was I was like this sounds like Dianetics yeah it does sound quasi-religious

00:26:08.320 doesn't it yeah it sounds like sort of it's riding the line between like science but there's

00:26:14.080 no science and like evangelism but there's no religion like the religion just is the cleanse

00:26:19.180 I think. There's this idea that sort of society used to be more erudite and we've dumbed things

00:26:24.380 down. And, you know, you can read old excerpts from books and they're like much more sort of

00:26:29.620 complex sentences and much larger vocabularies than now. But there's also something interesting

00:26:33.640 about the way that that erudition was used to cover up just patent bullshit. Yeah, that's right. 0.98

00:26:39.640 At the sentence level, it sounds intelligent. But then when you zoom out to like the paragraph

00:26:44.560 level. It's like, this doesn't make any sense. We're talking about water with cayenne pepper

00:26:49.120 in it. You're trying to sell me water, bro. It is the lemon water that they give you at like

00:26:54.520 Red Lobster. Congratulations. You went to IHOP. They gave you lemon water and you poured your

00:26:59.780 syrup into it. Master cleanse. This is also where he gets into like heavy sales pitch territory.

00:27:06.520 Nice. So here's what he has to say about the cleanse. Quote,

00:27:10.300 when we finally become sick of being sick then we are ready to learn the truth and the truth

00:27:15.760 shall set us free this diet will prove that no one needs to live with his diseases lifetime

00:27:22.240 freedom from disease has become a reality look i'm not over promising here all i'm saying is

00:27:30.240 you will never get a disease again if you do this for 10 days all i'm saying i'm not making any bold

00:27:36.840 claims. He also says that the program, he like sort of claims repeatedly that this is like

00:27:41.860 something that has been tested repeatedly, but he absolutely never says where or when.

00:27:47.160 Right. He says, quote, the program has been tested and approved for over 20 years in all

00:27:52.460 sections of the continent as the most successful of any other diet of its type in the entire field.

00:27:58.760 All caps, nothing can compare with its positive approach toward perfection in the healing field.

00:28:04.980 Is this guy like a no faps guy now? This kind of rhetoric only leads to like weird men's rights 0.71

00:28:11.500 shit. So he also has lays out sort of the hypothesis of the book. This is where I was 0.98

00:28:17.460 just like, every muscle in my body clenched. This is where he's like, here's what the cleanse

00:28:24.060 accomplishes and the problem that it's solving, right? Disease, old age and death are the result

00:28:30.500 of accumulated poisons and congestions throughout the entire body. These toxins become crystallized

00:28:38.360 and hardened, settling around the joints in the muscles and throughout the billions of cells all

00:28:45.900 over the body. He goes on to say that quote unquote lumps and growths of all kinds form all

00:28:53.060 over the body as homes for fungus. Okay. The funguses, the fungi are fed by these toxins

00:28:59.700 and that they particularly form in your lymphatic glands.

00:29:03.680 He says germs and viruses, specifically, explicitly,

00:29:07.640 he says germs and viruses are not the cause of any illness. 0.98

00:29:13.660 The germ theory of disease, bullshit, not into it. 0.97

00:29:16.920 I mean, I guess this was a time before Google Scholar, 0.98

00:29:19.960 but all of the things that he's saying were easily disprovable.

00:29:25.080 If what was causing poor health in the U.S. population

00:29:27.860 was growth of crystals in our joints, you'd be able to see those on x-rays or something?

00:29:35.020 Like, these would not be the things being spouted in the introduction of some crank diet book.

00:29:40.340 There would be, like, journal articles written about these things and conferences dedicated to

00:29:44.640 them. Right. Someone somewhere would have observed the thing that you're talking about.

00:29:49.440 Seems big. Yes.

00:29:50.960 He also says that because germs and viruses are not the cause of illness, that's just,

00:29:56.660 like a thing that we came up with as humans. He argues that there is actually only one disease.

00:30:03.540 Women, diversity, cancel culture. Where's he going with this? 0.65

00:30:08.220 I just want you to keep naming what you think the one disease is.

00:30:12.620 I'm just free associating of what like this low rent Ben Shapiro, what he would say.

00:30:19.540 No, he says there's one disease and he calls it toxemia.

00:30:23.020 Oh. So if we get toxins out of our bodies, we will be cured of all disease and symptoms. And

00:30:29.260 he does say repeatedly, you will be cured of death. When I read that quote, I was just like,

00:30:36.160 oh my god, this is like jet fuel doesn't melt steel beams. Yes. This is if it's a globe,

00:30:41.680 why don't we fall off it? Yeah. Right? Like, you're just like, oh, honey, this is some real

00:30:47.120 flat earther shit dude i have a relative who's into like deep into conspiracy stuff and the last 0.98

00:30:53.740 time we actually got into an argument he was saying that like the illuminati has to exist 0.99

00:30:57.860 because it's a group and other groups also exist so he was like look if you believe in the boy

00:31:03.860 scouts you have to believe that the illuminati is real i was like uh i don't know man at this

00:31:09.540 point also define believe in the boy scouts things are getting rough over there that's a

00:31:16.840 bad example, actually. So, throughout the book, Stanley also claims that allergies, asthma,

00:31:22.360 colds, flu, clogged arteries, high cholesterol, heart disease, and any illness that happens in

00:31:28.380 your lifetime is a result of failing to cleanse these toxins from your system. He says that if

00:31:36.300 you are upset at any point, it is because you aren't following the cleanse, right?

00:31:42.960 Right.

00:31:43.420 He says you should be having two to three bowel movements a day,

00:31:46.120 which I don't understand where those bowel movements are coming from by day 10.

00:31:49.940 Yeah.

00:31:50.200 What are you, what are you boweling?

00:31:52.180 And he says, if you, if that's not happening,

00:31:54.880 then you should double down on your saltwater flush,

00:31:57.400 which is you're supposed to drink a quart of lukewarm saltwater.

00:32:01.460 That sounds dangerous.

00:32:02.720 That's a lot of saltwater.

00:32:03.960 It's bad news.

00:32:05.080 Yeah, don't do that.

00:32:05.860 Anytime he talks about sort of like the physical discomfort or like

00:32:09.300 hesitation that you may have, he says, and I quote,

00:32:11.620 remember this can't harm you only toxins and unhealthy tissue will be eliminated

00:32:18.280 oh my god yeah god it's like dating johnny depp it's just like all this like abuser language

00:32:26.260 it's so gross yeah if you aren't doing it right it's your fault yeah he also says that the master

00:32:32.480 cleanse will cure addiction okay quote the usual cravings experienced and suffered in breaking

00:32:39.140 away from drugs, alcohol, and tobacco no longer present themselves during and after this diet.

00:32:44.800 It is truly a wonderful feeling to be free from slavery to these many habit-forming and

00:32:51.720 devitalizing articles of modern living. Coffee, tea, and the various cola drinks as habit-forming

00:32:58.960 beverages are also readily conquered with the marvels of the lemonade diet.

00:33:03.780 Unless what you're addicted to is looking super hot. That's a thing. It's going to promote.

00:33:09.140 the hot but like mean i know on the toilet all the time hot in your bathroom

00:33:15.780 toward the end of the book he gives a bunch of recipes for sort of like how you should

00:33:22.480 eat outside of the master cleanse and honestly it's like not that bad it sounds like pretty

00:33:27.140 decent vegan food honestly so he's uncanceled it's like oh garbanzo bean salad sounds nice

00:33:32.280 listen it's similar to moon juice right where i'm like just say it's a good recipe yeah

00:33:37.500 just as a little treat for you there are a number of recipes at the end of the master cleanse book

00:33:43.220 that include our old pal carob no in the 1940s carob carob so much carob the only thing i hate

00:33:52.680 more than carob is the germ theory of disease which is incorrect i'm learning yeah nothing

00:33:59.060 to worry about fake if they're gonna kill you why are they so small

00:34:03.080 as part of sort of looking into this cleanse i found a ton of examples there's actually a whole

00:34:15.360 book that is a collection of people's experiences on the master cleanse where they just do

00:34:19.520 like a diary a daily diary of their experiences on the master cleanse

00:34:23.760 i was like oh this will be fun it was not fun it was mostly really sad what were they like

00:34:29.220 They're all these sort of glowing reviews, but they all also talk about like, I had a lot of

00:34:34.400 nausea and diarrhea. I broke out a ton. I feel hungry all the time, but that's just the toxins

00:34:39.920 leaving my body. So it's just like a bunch of people constantly talking themselves into

00:34:46.300 restriction that their body is like very rightfully resisting. The biggest one of these,

00:34:53.860 which we'll talk about in a minute, was written by Jeffrey Steingarten for Vogue.

00:34:57.880 Okay.

00:34:58.380 He's often a judge on Iron Chef America.

00:35:00.620 He's, I think, a well-regarded writer and food critic and all kinds of stuff.

00:35:03.800 He does this sort of diary of him and his wife doing the master cleanse.

00:35:07.780 He writes about trying to write, which is his job, but finding when he writes that 90%

00:35:13.660 of the words he types has errors in them.

00:35:17.160 He talks about feeling woozy and weak and not standing or walking particularly well.

00:35:23.840 he talks about finally sort of breaking his fast and eating a piece of melon and a bite of smoked

00:35:29.920 salmon and then promptly vomiting yeah quote the master cleanse is not truly difficult but for 10

00:35:36.740 days it will deprive you if you're like me of a powerful source of happiness and it's ruinous to

00:35:43.080 your social life at least the fraction of it conducted over dinner which for me is most of it

00:35:48.220 yeah on the other hand i lost 12 pounds which i gained back within another week because i went

00:35:52.800 back to normal eating and that's how the body works. Quote, most have reappeared over the past

00:35:57.140 three days. So let's call it four pounds. And then he goes on to say he's going to do it again.

00:36:02.860 And that's like most of these stories is like, this was a horrible experience and I hate it.

00:36:08.020 And it was terrible. And I'm going to do it again. It's weird how resistant people are to the

00:36:14.240 extremely well supported dietary advice that are like, make reasonable modifications to your diet

00:36:21.860 and exercise that you enjoy and can sustain in the long term. Yes. But this weird thing where

00:36:26.980 like I have to do something fucking bananas for 10 days and then gain the 12 pounds back and then 0.98

00:36:31.600 do something bananas again. It's just so weird to me that people think that that's like a more 0.97

00:36:36.380 reasonable option than just like, hey, maybe I'm not going to do fried foods anymore or something.

00:36:41.100 Yeah, that's right. I mean, you will get the maximum benefits that you would get from whatever

00:36:45.880 detox through eating more vegetables and drinking more water yes period why are we doing all this 0.93

00:36:52.540 shit to avoid just eating vegetables and if you already eat vegetables congratulations you did it 0.92

00:36:57.320 you're done like what this like yo-yoing like sort of deliberately yo-yoing it's just very strange 0.98

00:37:03.680 considering the evidence that yo-yo diets are bad for you is like pretty voluminous yes and also like

00:37:10.080 the facts of human behavior and sort of the soup of like capitalism plus diet culture that we're

00:37:16.240 living in means that most diets are yo-yo diets. Sorry. Even if you call it a cleanse, even if you

00:37:22.040 call it a detox, even if you call it a lifestyle change, most of the things that we associate with

00:37:27.640 fat people, things like diabetes, things like hypertension, heart disease, all that kind of

00:37:32.240 stuff is linked just as strongly, if not more so, to weight cycling.

00:37:36.520 Yeah. So what's your relationship to cleanses? Have you ever done one?

00:37:39.500 i've never done one i mean like uh i will say as a fat lady cleanses always felt sort of beside the 0.96

00:37:45.680 point like they were something for thin people that like first order of business is like lose 0.91

00:37:51.400 weight and then once you've lost weight then you can cleanse your body and treat it like a temple

00:37:55.760 or whatever but until then you need to be like putting out cigarettes in your intestines or

00:38:00.280 whatever if that means you're full and you don't eat food great it's just like it has always felt

00:38:05.860 like sort of the provenance of thin people and particularly like the vast majority of people who 0.94

00:38:10.940 I know who have done the master cleanse have been like other queer women. And I don't know what 1.00

00:38:15.340 that's about. I mean, you live in Portland. You're gonna have some cleansing lesbians. I live in

00:38:19.180 Seattle. I know what it's like. Clesbians. Clesbians. Cleansbians. Cleansbians. So the last

00:38:27.420 thing I wanted to talk about before we sort of close out is just to be really clear, there is a

00:38:31.760 ton of criticism of the master cleanse, right? Harvard University Medical School is very clear,

00:38:38.080 like they have a whole thing on cleanses and detoxes, including a thing on the master cleanse.

00:38:42.560 They say it will, and I quote, disrupt the native intestinal flora microorganisms that perform

00:38:48.700 useful digestive functions. A person who goes on this diet repeatedly may run the risk of

00:38:53.680 developing metabolic acidosis. Severe metabolic acidosis can lead to coma and death.

00:38:59.760 oh not great there are plenty of people who do it and it doesn't kill them and also it can so

00:39:04.900 be aware of that but then okay this goes back to something i mean we mentioned earlier you know

00:39:09.920 people in portland that do this i know people in seattle that do this yeah i'm pretty magnanimous

00:39:14.760 about this stuff on a personal level like if i'm at a cocktail party and i'm chatting with somebody

00:39:18.740 like how's your week been and they're like oh you know i'm a little tired i'm doing a juice cleanse

00:39:22.100 i'm not gonna like yell at them in that moment or be like did you know i i try to just be like

00:39:27.740 nice to people and not sort of do the well actually thing on an individual basis. I'm

00:39:33.160 more interested in sort of the way that these things are regulated, the way that they're

00:39:36.420 subsidized or not subsidized, whatever. So like, what is your approach with something like this?

00:39:43.180 Like, what do you do with your Portland queer lady friends who do this? 0.98

00:39:48.020 I mean, I do the same thing. If you want to do it, you can do it. If you want to know what I 0.93

00:39:51.480 think about it, I will tell you what I think about it. But if you don't ask me, I'm not going to

00:39:55.400 volunteer and be like the human embodiment of an internet reply guy. Right. Well, actually,

00:40:00.820 like, no, nobody wants that. Nobody needs that. It's hard enough to have a body.

00:40:06.040 Yeah. I mean, I will say I think there's one case in which I might decide to say something

00:40:10.180 to someone individually. And that is if we had had a conversation in the past about them having

00:40:17.240 disordered eating, if they had brought to me, I struggle with an eating disorder or disordered

00:40:22.020 eating. And then they also brought to me, I'm doing this juice cleanse. I might have a very

00:40:27.680 light touch conversation with them about like, so how does this square with your disordered eating

00:40:32.420 stuff? Like, does this not feel like a trigger for that? Does this not feel like, you know what

00:40:35.700 I mean? Like just have like a genuine exploring conversation if they were open to it with their

00:40:41.320 consent, all of that kind of stuff. And if we had that kind of relationship, this is like an

00:40:46.640 incredibly delicate conversation that like they need to be in the driver's seat of i mean now

00:40:52.500 that now that we're talking about it there have been times when with close friends i've said like

00:40:57.400 well um it sort of seems like you're doing this sort of faddish kind of diet thing and it seems

00:41:02.860 like you've done a lot of these before and ultimately they really haven't made you happy

00:41:06.520 right but also like i would not do that with somebody that i'm not close to that's some like

00:41:10.300 there's like three or four people in my life that i would do that with but that's not some like i'm 0.67

00:41:14.740 next to you at a dinner party and i'm gonna fucking intervene on your behalf right same here 0.59

00:41:18.600 there's like people i can count on one hand yeah this is not a an intervention style thing to your 0.97

00:41:24.900 point earlier right like this is not the kind of thing where it's like look you need to sit

00:41:28.060 somebody down and tell them the hard truth right and that also comes from you having information

00:41:34.540 about them right because i think a lot of these sort of well actually conversations are people

00:41:40.060 waiting for an entry point for them to like play a tape about like actually the peer review

00:41:44.540 literature from Harvard. Whereas the more important thing, if you're going to even consider broaching

00:41:50.680 the topic or in any way bringing this up, you have to first gather a lot of information about

00:41:55.160 that person of like, have they done this before? Is this something they're foregoing other

00:41:58.960 treatments about? And like, unless you're somebody's medical doctor or close friend,

00:42:03.080 it's not like in your wheelhouse to gather the kind of information that you would need about

00:42:07.380 the person to do a kind of intervention like this. I've been doing a lot of research about

00:42:12.500 the sort of the new atheist movement and the way that it basically curdled into like men's rights

00:42:18.220 and white nationalism over 10 years. And I think the central problem with that movement was that

00:42:24.580 it had a political ethic, but not a personal ethic. And it was all about sort of being the

00:42:29.300 smartest person in the room and not really thinking about the way that that was going

00:42:33.220 to affect other people's feelings. And I think that like, it's important to have a political

00:42:36.980 ethic, but you also need to have an ethic above most other considerations of not being a dick 0.93

00:42:42.640 and ruining people's day. Right. And I'll also say like, so as someone who has had 0.93

00:42:46.940 not insignificant struggles with disordered eating in the past, and particularly like

00:42:52.140 restrictive disordered eating, right? Like I am a fat lady. This is what people expect of me.

00:42:56.240 And at a certain point, I just started doing it that you just like stop eating. You don't eat

00:43:00.720 when people can see you. There were a couple of people who tried to talk to me about it where we

00:43:05.740 didn't have that relationship and it made me feel like i wasn't going hard enough on my eating

00:43:10.600 disorder oh really that i was like doing a bad job of having an eating disorder if people were

00:43:15.620 noticing oh do you see what i'm saying so it pushed me further underground like sort of made

00:43:21.880 me want to disconnect from those people because i was like they're onto me and that's not safe

00:43:25.860 i got a thing going here and i don't want you to interrupt it so i think like it's also worth

00:43:31.120 noting like part of the reason we're saying don't talk about it isn't don't care about people

00:43:35.400 but it is like take stock of the relationship that you have and be aware that these conversations can

00:43:41.380 also very genuinely backfire right although on the other hand yes if you see a store selling

00:43:47.260 these things for 85 burn it down that's fine commit an act of terrorism mike totally chill

00:43:52.940 allegedly what's the what are the words that people say so we don't get sued allegedly

00:43:57.440 mike is telling you i'm not listen if he's gonna do this i'm not going down with the 0.97

00:44:05.020 person don't be a dick at dinner parties property damage do it burn it down 0.84

00:44:10.940 i wanted to close this out with a quote that felt not only sort of hopeful to me but also feels like

00:44:19.220 why i enjoy doing this podcast so much and why it feels important to me because it's balancing

00:44:25.520 out your mucus levels finally after your lifelong journey so this came from a great new yorker piece

00:44:32.500 called Improving Ourselves to Death. So this references and includes a quote from Will Storr,

00:44:39.600 who is a British journalist and author who has sort of written about this sort of like,

00:44:44.660 almost like cult of self-improvement stuff that's happening now. Quote,

00:44:48.760 if the ideal of the optimized self isn't simply a fad or even a preference,

00:44:52.860 but an economic necessity, how can any of us choose to live otherwise? Storr insists that

00:44:59.920 there is a way. Quote, this isn't a message of hopelessness, he writes. Quote, on the contrary,

00:45:06.440 what it actually leads us towards is a better way of finding happiness. Once you realize that it's

00:45:12.060 all just an act of coercion, that it's your culture trying to turn you into someone you

00:45:17.720 can't really be, you can begin to free yourself from your demands.

00:45:22.300 Ooh, I like that. I'm sitting here in my sweatpants with my halo top ice cream and my

00:45:27.780 giant cold sore feeling good about myself you know what i'm gonna keep it i just felt like it

00:45:34.680 was like really like that is actually genuinely how i feel that's why i collect diet books that's

00:45:39.340 all of that kind of stuff right is it's a very like the emperor has no clothes right right that

00:45:45.520 you stop like you don't have to engage in the same way it's the great and powerful odds right

00:45:50.160 right that's why this stuff all feels really important to me not to make people feel bad

00:45:54.980 for doing it or having done it. But just to say, look, there are very clear reasons why all this

00:46:01.000 stuff is the way that it is. And in this case, it's mostly so that people can make money and

00:46:05.980 mostly so that people can feel better about themselves in the short term and then feel

00:46:10.020 worse about themselves in the long term. Right. And so much of the cure for this is just showing

00:46:13.680 grace to yourself. Absolutely. Your habits aren't perfect. Fucking nobody's habits are perfect.

00:46:19.120 Maybe you're not as like thin as fucking Gwyneth Paltrow or as like athletic as I can't name an 0.99

00:46:24.280 athlete but like it's okay like we're all doing our best instagram isn't real eat what you feel 0.97

00:46:31.040 like eating i don't know it's just like forgive yourself for not having this perfect life that 0.79

00:46:35.540 fucking nobody else has either frankly absolutely and also like it is not your fault for falling 0.84

00:46:41.560 into a trap that was set for you oh totally yeah that's not actually on you there's no reason to 0.98

00:46:47.520 feel bad or guilty about having engaged in this stuff in the past this is a real no better do

00:46:52.420 better situation, right? Now you know you can decide what to do with that information. That is

00:46:57.400 your call now. I think the main thing that we've taken away from this episode is listen to whatever

00:47:02.720 Gwyneth Paltrow says. She was right. No, Mike!

00:47:22.420 Thank you.

Maintenance Phase - March 02, 2021

The Master Cleanse

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Transcript