July 6th, 2009

Liver detox diets have been used for hundreds of years

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For centuries, people all over the world have taken advantage of fastings’ near-miraculous benefits, making regular fasts and other liver detox procedures an integral part of their religious and cultural traditions. These practices included a wide range of fasting techniques, from ‘total’ fasting to fasting that allowed water but no food products, to juice fasts and other severely restricted diets.

In the European tradition, Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine, advocated periodic fasting and a liver detox diet as a way to cleanse the body and allow the digestive system to rest. Galen, the mediaeval physician who pioneered our understanding of the heart and circulatory system, both fasted himself and prescribed the approach to his patients. And Paracelsus, whose ground-breaking discoveries anticipated modern theories about germs and viruses, called fasting ‘the greatest remedy – the physician within’.