Blue Collar Scientist

…then why are so many religious people so full of - ahem. Sorry, I’ll try to keep it family friendly here. What I’m talking about today is Almighty Cleanse:

Careful internet research suggests that this is an evangelical Christian bowel flush. Apparently something like radiator flush, except it is isn’t meant for your car, it’s meant for your caboose. The marketing materials include some remarkable claims:

By Peeling off the built up fecal matter and flushing it from your digestive tract and body, this allows for better absorbtion of vital nutrients from the foods you eat.

Note the bizarre use of capital letters, which appears to be a Characteristic of people Who believe strange Things. I point this out so that you, gentle reader, won’t think that I committed a typo while quoting the source. But I also use the statement to show the implicit assumption that fecal matter builds up in the colon and needs to be Peeled away, kind of like a little colon-shaped papier-mache sculpture which, if you asked the artist, you would find was supposed to represent mankind’s straining to overcome the burdens he¹ must carry to the ends of his days.

You are carrying around old fecal matter that is polluting your system.

Right, then.

I can’t imagine how something builds up like that in an organ characterized by the passionate heaving contractions of intermittent peristalsis, but, ummm, I’m not a doctor or anything, and I certainly haven’t crawled up in there to check for myself², so I thought I’d consult an actual smart person with credentials in the field who has, in a sense, crawled up there and had a look.

…as a surgeon, I can tell you from simple experience operating on the colon that hardened feces do not accumulate on the walls of the colon as the colon cleansers claim. Any gastroenterologist who does a lot of colonoscopies could tell you that too. Even in disease states in which colon motility is impaired, we generally do not see the feces “caking” on the walls.

Colon. Motility. Impaired. I don’t ever want that to happen to me, please.

Back to the marketing crap:³

You should be having 3 to 4 bowel movements a day. Are you?

Ummm, no. By which I mean, (a) I’m not, and (b) I really shouldn’t be. Despite having caught the latest incarnation of cold/flu/Alaska’s current seasonal epidemic nastiness, hot on the heels of having caught something remarkably similar three weeks ago, and therefore having a significant risk factor for poop-related malfunctions, I am nevertheless pooping once per day like clockwork. You could probably set your watch and you’d find that my mean delta-poo is less than the equation of time on any given day⁴.

But this really isn’t about me. Honestly, it isn’t: I swear to you that I didn’t start blogging to talk about my bathroom adventures. It is much better to again consult with qualified representatives of the sciences. Accordingly, we turn to our expert, who seems to think that you should poo when you have to go, not in adherence to a particular schedule:

I mean, why would you want to have to drop a bowel movement three to five times a day? It’s bad enough having to urinate multiple times every day.

Yeah. Although it might give me a chance to catch up on my reading.

Back to the colon cleanser’s imposing marketing genius:

If your system is polluted, and you are only having 3 bowel movements a week.

Then what, hey? Ummm, guys, there’s a reason we computer programmers refer to “If-Then” statements: it is because if you start a sentence with an If, then you have to end it with a Then⁵, because if you don’t, your audience will sit there wondering how the story ends, imagining what the dire consequences of pooing three times a week might be, straining to achieve understanding, veritably groaning with desire to learn the, er, outcome.

So learn to finish a sentence, already.

What do you think that water that is being used throughout your system is like? Its filled with bacteria, and other pollutants from the build up caused by a incorrect filtering of the water.

This is, apparently, a reference to water which is absorbed by the large intestine. Our Actual Expert again:

…the very function the colon evolved to have is to remove our digestive wastes safely and efficiently, extracting water, electrolytes, and what little other nutrients are left over, before depositing the waste into whatever receptical the body sees fit to sit on.

I’m going to guess that water gets absorbed by the intestinal wall through something like osmosis, and it just might be that water, which is a really tiny molecule, can get through membranes that, say, bacteria, which are like big huge lumbering gigantic oil tankers full of cytoplasm and miscellaneous cargo⁶ by comparison, can’t really penetrate unless the rectal tissues get, uh, penetrated, through improper penetration of something that may or may not look like an eneMan.

Back to the marketing text:

Loose the bloated feeling, Feel lighter and healthier, cleanse the digestive tract.

Loose. I guess if you were going three times a day, thats how you’d Feel. Sometimes the typos are so appropriate you just can’t improve on the funny.

New and Improved Almighty Cleanse® now includes WILDCRAFTED ingredients! - What are wildcrafted ingredients? “Wildcrafted” plants are carefully harvested from their unspoiled natural habitats.

So now what you’ve got here is a bunch of people tramping their way into some pristine habitat, picking what they want, hiking back out, stuffing it into pills⁷, and selling it. The customer has to hope that the people doing all this environmental damage know how to properly identify the plant they actually want to use as an ingredient. One thing I remember very clearly from trying to learn to identify some species of plant a few years ago in Arizona was that some plants are very difficult to tell apart without the use of molecular methods. You wouldn’t want to be putting concentrated poison ivy into your colon cleansing pills, I’d guess. I emphasize that I’m guessing, because I’m not actually an evangelical expert on colon cleansing, and it is just barely possible that I might possibly be full of crap on that, despite my clockwork visits to the facilities.

And let’s hope that these plants aren’t growing in “unspoiled natural habitats” in Alaska’s national parks or elsewhere, because we’ve got easily measurable levels of mercury, pesticides, and estrogen-mimicking compound in our “unspoiled” places.

My conclusion: If this kind of marketing material sells product, there’s lots of people out there who are a bit too concerned about their poo.

Hat tip to Amanda.

1. Or she - I understand girls poo too. [↩]
2. Actually, a couple years ago at the Ride for Life, a bicycling benefit for cancer research, there was a Giant Colon set up that you could walk through - you know, for education. And if that counts, which I don’t say it does, I can say that despite the presence of hundreds of small children, there appeared to be no buildup of fecal matter there. But then again, that Giant Colon was not actually attached to a working digestive system, although it was, admittedly, here thanks to some local politicians, who have since been discovered to have been so full of ____ that they are now in jail. So, anyway, quit reading the footnotes - get back to the post. [↩]
3. In this case, I’m saying exactly what I mean, with no obfuscatory use of slang or casual terminology. [↩]
4. If you get the joke without clicking the link, you are my kind of geek. [↩]
5. As I just did - see how that works? [↩]
6. Including magic flagella, according to creationists. [↩]
7. I presume it is pills. If they aren’t pills, I do NOT want to know about it. [↩]

Tags: Almighty Cleanse, bowel, cleaning, colon, feces, flush, poo, woo

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 2:48 pm and is filed under hyperbole and satire, medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.