Colonic: A Load Of Old Shit?

Cranks, crooks and charlatans have never had it so easy when it comes to fleecing gullible souls who long for short-term fixes to their unhealthy lifestyles. A society which demands maximum benefit from minimum effort will always take a pill rather than participate in exercise. Detoxifying diets and supplements empower the lazy and encourage them to rely on potions, lotions and placebos rather than a sensible approach to looking after their own bodies.

A drunken conversation (what a delicious irony) recently turned to the subject of colonic irrigation. Amongst a group of friends were sceptics and believers. Unsuprisingly, i was in the former camp for a number of reasons: i don't ever want a four inch speculum up my arse, i'm firmly of the belief that the anus is an outlet rather than an inlet and i'm confident that my body is adept enough at expelling faeces so as not to need any additional help.

So i now have sufficient motivation to investigate the potential benefits of having your colon cleansed - i can save some of my naive friends the indignity of having their bottoms uncomfortably invaded by health 'gurus' to no discernible benefit and paying for the 'privilege'.

For those who have managed to exist in blissful ignorance about what this procedure involves, essentially a tube is whacked up your bum, tepid water (or sometimes coffee?!) is pumped inside and then flows out carrying with it pieces of poo. Delightful, eh?

Obviously, there is no better place to begin a research project than that popular bastion of reliable information: Wikipedia. Wiki asserts that there is no scientific evidence to suggest that colon-cleansing has any health benefits and goes on to espouse the values of the bowel's ability to clean itself 'naturally and without assistance'. But can we trust this website any more than we can trust those encouraging us to drop our drawers and have litres of water pumped into our anal cavity? Probably not. So i looked at some real scientific articles and discovered the following...

The liver, kidneys and gastro-intestinal tract are a finely tuned machine when it comes to expelling anything which is not supposed to be inside us. There are no pockets, nooks or crannies where food can hide. Your intestines work on the same principal as your oesophogus, squeezing food (or in this case waste food) down a pipe using muscular contractions - you never hear about anyone needing throat irrigation!

Dr Steven Jones from the eminent UCLA School of Medicine thoroughly disagrees with any assertion that the 'cleansing' of the colon can add any extra years to your life (apparently this is a popular misconception although i'd never heard of it). Another phallacy is that there are parasites in the colon which can be expelled through the procedure. Not so, according to the experts. Or not in the western world, anyway. We don't have these parasites due to our clean drinking water and clean food sources (thank heavens for Asda).

Cindy Iverson from the Colo-Rectal Cancer Initiative at the Cancer Reasearch & Prevention Foundation cites colon cancer as the second biggest cancer-killer in the USA (56,000 deaths a year). It's certainly in her interest to promote colonic irrigation if it has any health benefits but she says that in order to prevent such conditions we should have a healthy lifestyle by eating fruit and veg, drinking less alcohol and maintaining a healthy weight. Colonic irrigation, to paraphrase the Cancer Research people, is a load of crap.

The shit that you see coming out of the tube, is indeed, shit (i still don't know why they need to use a clear hose - surely most people would be perfectly happy if it was matt black). It is not, however, old shit which is lodged in your colon. There is nowhere for it to get lodged. Your intestinal tract is a smooth, muscular pipe which squeezes things out extremely effectively. What comes out of the hose is merely crap which hasn't made it out of your arse yet. If you hadn't shit it out during the colonic irrigation, you would have shit it out the next day anyway. You're just having your next dump a bit earlier than usual.

Colonic irrigation is utter bunkum. The human body is the most complex, efficient and highly evolved machine on the planet. The colon is a one way system and should remain that way. Paying to have your colon cleansed is tantamount to flushing your cash down the toilet.

Incidentally, if you have any further desire to read about poo/dietary myths head to the excellent Bad Science website where you can chuckle away to twenty-four articles about the execrable Gillian McKeith's unique brand of bullshit.