Detox Juices Are Excellent Marketing and Poor Nutrition

By Tina Chagoury, Clinical Dietitian · 5 min read · 2026-09-14

Detox juices are a very effective marketing tool. They are not a health intervention, and done repeatedly they can work against you.

Detox juices are one of the most effective marketing concepts in wellness. As a health intervention, they are considerably less impressive.

What is actually wrong with them

A juice removes the fibre and concentrates the sugar. What you are drinking is a fast absorbing dose of fructose and glucose with very little to slow it down.

Done occasionally, that is unremarkable. Done as a repeated practice, particularly as a multi day cleanse, it can raise inflammation in the body rather than reduce it. It destabilises blood sugar, which is the opposite of what almost every woman I see actually needs.

So it can be harmful to your health, and it can increase inflammation, which is precisely the thing it claims to address.

Your body already has a detoxification system

This is the part the marketing depends on you not knowing. You do not need to purchase detoxification. You already have it, running continuously, through three systems:

The liver, which converts compounds into forms that can be excreted.

The lymphatic system, which transports waste. It has no pump of its own and depends entirely on movement.

The gut, which is the exit route. If elimination is not regular, the waste does not leave.

If those pathways are not functioning efficiently, compounds accumulate. That is the actual mechanism, and it explains why the woman with chronic constipation, or with a liver under strain from a highly inflammatory diet, is the one who struggles most.

What supporting detoxification genuinely looks like

Unglamorous, and effective:

• Digestion working properly and elimination happening regularly. This is the foundation.
• Adequate hydration. Before you feel thirsty, your body has already begun to run short. Blood becomes thicker, the heart works harder, the kidneys filter more slowly, and waste accumulates instead of leaving. Concentration drops with it.
• Support the liver through nutrition, and where indicated, through targeted supplementation.
• Reduce the inflammatory load so there is less to process in the first place.
• Move. Walking and resistance training both drive lymphatic drainage.
• Fibre, which is what carries waste out.

Honestly, there are days where increasing water intake alone resolves half the problem.

About the environmental side

There is a related trend around mould exposure and mycotoxins that deserves the same framing. Mould grows in damp, poorly ventilated places: walls with moisture, air conditioning systems, bathrooms, kitchens, storage areas. Some species release mycotoxins, which enter the body through breathing, food or skin and interact with the immune system and the nervous system, producing brain fog, fatigue, poor concentration and reduced immunity.

The functional question is always the same one: how well is your body handling and clearing this? Which brings you straight back to the liver, the lymphatic system and the gut.

So yes, check your home and your workplace if you have reason to suspect a problem. But the more important and more general action is to support the clearance pathways, because they deal with everything, not only mould.

The summary

You cannot buy detoxification in a bottle. You can support the systems that do it, and those systems respond well to water, fibre, movement, regular elimination and a lower inflammatory load.

This article is nutrition education, not medical advice.

Tina Chagoury is a licensed clinical dietitian specialising in women's hormonal health and inflammation, and the creator of the Hormone Reset Method™. Learn more and start here.