Not long ago, I wrote about how detoxes are alright – if you do ‘em naturally.
They’re a waste of money when you fork out a buncha funds to buy them which you could instead be acquiring electronics and lattes with. Why? Because you can basically just mimic the same effect by doing a fast-lite thing on your own. Though I argued the selling of it is just as bad as everything else that’s sold to us that we can do for free (or at least more cheaply), I didn’t argue that the effects of a “cleanse” work. And I still don’t. Because the essence of juicing or cleanses or whatever you wanna call ‘em is that you’re imposing a kind of a quasi-fast on yourself. It’s a dietary restriction And this article I’m just reading now (from like, a year ago) seems to corroborate this concept of dietary restriction not only making you look all vibrantly lit up like you’re in a Nick Sparks flick or something – it can even make you… live longer.
What they propose is that “the most widely accepted theory is that this effect evolved to improve survival during times of famine”. Why? So we can stick around and reproduce. You don’t have to do that (god knows I’m not); it’s not part of the great cosmic Darwinian contract or anything. We can just stick around and reap the sparkling dermal, shiny haired, and wrinkle free rewards. But why’s it even work? And how?
In order to make us stick around (and pork other species members), a limited nutrient intake has a spesh effect.
That effect, they say, is to increase rates of cellular recycling and repair mechanisms in the body. Great, what’s that supposed to mean, Ashley? Well, put it this way: what’s the alternative to recycling? Get new shit, right? Problem with making new cells (replicating) is it makes you old since these things called telomeres shorten each time our cells replicate. Before you start yawning and drooling ’cause you heard a new word, just think of telomeres as being like youth egg timers – their length is like the height of the disappearing sand from the top. Every replication’s a bit of that sand getting shitted into the abyss below. The idea is that – once this is set in motion during a famine (which your body assumes is happening around you since you’re not nomming in excess) – we start to require less food to function at our general optimal level because now those stored nutrients in the cells can be used and recycled. As they are recycling, that means we aren’t replicating (no need, right?) This means the youth-erasing telomere-shortening thing doesn’t hafta happen. BOOM. “Age of Adeline”. In yo face, future nursing home resident me.
Were we in the wild, this would mean we could go hunt down whatever mammal is peacocking and back dat ass up into him like a beeping truck with sleezy white reverse lights. But back here in people society, we would instead-…Eh… Actually, I suppose most of us’d basically use it to do the same damned thing. Except probably with more condoms. And alcohol. Which would negate both the evolutionary function… and the anti-aging effects of this valuable trait. Respectively.
Darwin wins again.