The ancient Egyptians believed that all disease resulted from food rotting in the bowel and they wrote extensively about the need for colon cleansing. But you're not an ancient Egyptian. You're an intelligent, thinking person who knows better. But you may not know how to articulate your beliefs to the well-meaning family and friends who make their livings selling "natural" health supplements. Let me give you three arguments that will help you out of those uncomfortable situations.
1. No one has produced credible proof that we're all carrying old fecal matter inside us. Some people in "natural" medicine would have us believe that we're all going through the day with pounds of old, dried fecal matter stuck to the walls of our colons. The fact is that the cells of your colon wall shed regularly as old cells die off and new cells take their place. Just as the cells of your skin shed, the cells of your colon wall shed. Any fecal matter stuck to your colon wall would simply slough off with the old cells.
2. Mucoid plaque, a term often used to explain the thick, tarry appearance of bowel movements during a cleanse, isn't even a medical term. In fact, it didn't even exist until a few decades ago and still doesn't appear in medical texts. "Mucoid plaque" is a term apparently coined by Richard Anderson--a fact he acknowledges in his article "What Is Mucoid Plaque". Most likely, the bizarre appearance of fecal material expelled during a cleanse is the result of the materials contained in the cleanser. As Dr. Saul Green puts it, colon cleansers "produce what the product is claimed to cleanse".
3. If "mucoid plaque" and "old fecal matter" were really present in the colon you would see evidence during the "cleanse" you do in preparation for a colonoscopy. If you've ever had a colonoscopy, you know that in the 2 to 4 days prior to the procedure, you observe a very specific diet and drug regimen to void your colon. Thousands of people have colonoscopies every year but none of them report passing thick tarry "ropes" of fecal matter. And if you've ever accompanied a loved one to a colonoscopy, you know that the bowels are clean and pink--not caked in fecal matter. Where did the caked on fecal matter go? It wasn't voided during the pre-op cleanse and it's nowhere to be found during the exam.
For most people, colon cleansers are perfectly safe but they're also completely unnecessary. And now you have the information to debate this issue intelligently and confidently.
