Is the Lemonade Diet A Lemon?

The other day on Twitter people were talking about the so-called Lemonade Diet.

Originally made popular in 1976 by Stanley Burroughs, this out-dated diet was re-released and re-popularized in 2005 with a new, more modern look in the form of Peter Glickman’s book Lose Weight, Have More Energy, and Be Happier in 10 Days. The book includes information on the obesity epidemic, toxins in foods, and the ”detoxification process”.

The Lemonade Diet isn’t much different from most “cleanse” or “detox” diets. Basically, you stop eating and start drinking.

You’re expected to start your day with a liter of salt water solution, then six to twelve 250ml glasses of a homemade lemonade concoction throughout the day, finishing off with an herbal tea laxative.

Beyoncé starved herself on the Lemonade Diet to drop 20 lbs. She also has an expensive network of people who look after her. I don't know you, but... you don't.

The lemonade itself contains fresh squeezed lemon juice, water, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup. The lemon juice allegedly dissolves built-up waste in the colon; the cayenne pepper is claimed to rid the body of mucus; and the maple syrup is for energy. The herbal laxative is to aid the elimination process and the salt water acts as a colonic flush.

Good ole’ Pete recommends following the diet for a minimum of 10 days in order to “fully benefit” from the detoxification process but also says that the diet can be followed for up to 20 days. By some unfortunate error in printing he seems to have omitted the bit about the diet having no scientific basis whatsoever. At least he admits that the research he performed to evaluate this diet consists of only informal surveys, and his recommendations and evaluation of “success” are based on this feedback.

First, the good news: As far as weight loss goes, the diet does work. In fact it works in much the same way as not eating at all, and uses the same principle of starving your body of nutrients and calories.

I’m here to tell you that the starvation of nutrients and extreme calorie deprivation for weight loss just isn’t healthy. It’s been 2 months since my 100 day starvation and my fingernails are still have odd ridges in them from malnourishment, the thinned hair seems to be permanent, and there’s a whole host of other lovely side effects.

Back to Pete and his quest to sell some books. He goes on to claim that our food is full of toxic material, which is sorta true what with mercury in fish, pesticides in produce, and HFCS in everything. Where Pete puts on the tinfoil hat is about the time he makes the claim that the toxins are stored in the fat cells within our body, making us obese.

The toxins in-food bit gets into the “cleanse” side of these diets, but let’s back up to the claim of toxins stored in fat. HFCS can contribute to obesity, but it’s because it blocks the ‘full’ signals to your brain and makes you think you’re still hungry, not because it somehow ends up in your fat cells and plumps them up.

Know what plumps fat cells? Storing more energy in them than the body uses. As the ancient Japanese saying goes, it ain’t the mercury in your sushi making you fat but sitting on your shiri eating tempura instead of playing DDR has a lot to do with it.

But we go through life eating crummy food, so a cleanse to get all that crap out of your body now and then is a good idea, right?

Wrongo in the congo. For all the good ‘cleanse’ diets do for actually cleaning out your system, it’d be cheaper and more effective to have a glass of water and a good night’s sleep.

Take the diet’s idea of the lemon juice to dissolve gunk in your colon, for example. On the pH scale from 0 to 14 (0 being very acidic, 14 being very alkaline) lemon juice sits at 2. That’s pretty acidic (battery acid sits at 0) so the bit about using lemon juice to break down waste in the colon seems like it would make sense, right?

Tim liked modelling, but hated when they lopped off an arm and cut open his belly for this gig

Well hold on there, professor. That gunk in your colon – if it exists – would be stuff that’s already passed through your stomach.

A stomach has gastric acid (HCl) in it, which sits at 1-3 on the same pH scale and regulated by a hormone called gastrin. Food comes into your stomach with a usual pH of 6 to 7 (close to neutral). This causes your G cells to pump out gastrin so that the stomach lining can inject HCl into your stomach to start breaking down your food and to lower the pH back to the 1-3 range.

The reason your stomach doesn’t digest itself, even though it’s made up of protein and the HCl in there is designed to eat through proteins like crazy, is that  the stomach walls have a lining that contains epithelial cells that secrete a protective layer of mucus and bicarbonate.

The mucus is pretty much the same stuff which lines our throat and nose. It sticks to the walls of the stomach to provide a physical barrier so the acid doesn’t touch the stomach itself. If the mucus layer fails in small spots, the bicarbonate neutralizes the acid at the stomach wall in much the same way mixing bicarbonate of soda with vinegar makes a neutral mess once the fizzing has died down.

Drinking lemon juice means the stuff going into your stomach just has a lower pH, and less gastrin will be produced. The net acidity in the stomach will be the same, and if that didn’t break down the gunk before you drank the lemon juice it sure isn’t going to now.

Wait – wasn’t the cayenne pepper claimed to rid the body of mucus? But the mucus is what protects your stomach!

Eating spicy food now and then is very good for you. Drinking concentrated pepper powder dissolved in acid, on the other hand, would be potentially lethal if the ingredients in this ‘cleanse’ actually did what Pete says they do. Good thing they don’t. But that means this cleanse, and others like it, are a bucket of horsefeathers.

Fortunately our bodies have a built-in detox and cleanse system. The gut (just after the acid bath of the stomach) prevents many toxins and harmful bacteria from passing from the digestive tract into your body’s other systems.

When nasty and harmful chemicals do enter the body, your liver (that thing some of us beat half to death with liquor bottles in our youth)  steps up and combines the harmful chemicals with other chemicals of its own manufacture to make a water soluble compound that can be filtered out by the kidneys and get peed free of the body. The body thus detoxifies itself, and it’s pretty durn good at it.

“Even if you drink an almost lethal dose of alcohol (which I don’t recommend) your liver will clear it in 36 hours without any assistance from detox tablets,” Sir Colin Berry, Professor Emeritus of Pathology, Queen Mary, London points out. “As a pathologist, I am frustrated by the claims made at this time of year that a detox diet will somehow improve your liver function. The only thing you can do to help your liver after a period of indulgence is to stop drinking alcohol and drink water to re-hydrate.”

Drink a glass of good quality tap water and you’re all topped up again. Good thing there’s water in the herbal tea you’re supposed to drink as a laxitive on the Lemonade Diet, right?

“There is a popular notion that we can speed up the elimination process by drinking fancy bottled water or sipping herbal teas, but this is just nonsense”, says Dr John Emsley, Chemical Scientist and writer for Popular Science. “In fact, many of the detox diets and supplements really aren’t that good for you, nor have they been properly tested.”

Dr Catherine Collins, Chief Dietician at St George’s Hospital Medical School in London, saves this from being a sausage fest when she chimes in with her two bits. “The idea that an avalanche of vitamins, minerals, and laxatives taken over a 2 to 7 day period can have a long-lasting benefit for the body is also a marketing myth. So are there any benefits of the detox concept? Well, the only one I can think of is to remove the ‘tyranny of food choice’ and perhaps get you back on the straight and narrow.

“But the bottom line? I hate detox as a marketing concept which is of little or no benefit to the body for the short term it is used, and for the enduring myths that then make people ambivalent towards foods in their diet”.

What’s the harm? some argue. You might lose a few pounds, you might not, but for the price of a book it might be worth a shot…

In fact it can cost you more than money. Vecko Krsteski of Oatley, NSW, Australia was put on a detox diet by his naturopath. He lost 11 kg in 10 days. He kept losing weight after that, presumably, because he was dead. Dawn Page of Oxford, England went to a nutritionist for help losing weight. She was put on a “detox diet”, suffered brain damage, and was awarded £810,000 by a court.

I’m not saying the Lemonade diet is lethal, but that ‘cleanses’ don’t do anything positive for you except in your mind (google the Placebo Effect. That’s one powerful thing!) and in are cases can have fatal consequences.

According to Professor Alan Boobis OBE, Toxicologist, Division of Medicine, Imperial College London “The body’s own detoxification systems are remarkably sophisticated and versatile. They have to be, as the natural environment that we evolved in is hostile. It is remarkable that people are prepared to risk seriously disrupting these systems with unproven ‘detox’ diets, which could well do more harm than good.”

Peter Glickman and I have something in common. Neither one of us is a licensed health professional. Where we begin to differ is that he’s selling you his book by telling you it’s good for you, whereas I give my info away for free in hopes that I can keep you from hurting yourself. As the Joker said, “hubba hubba hubba, money money money, who do ya trust?”