Our diet is either the cause of, or solution to, all of life’s problems. I’m paraphrasing a great philosopher. We just can’t seem to let food be food. Today each ingredient we eat seems to be demonized or glorified. Gluten is the latest evil. It used to be fat. At some point in the past, it was MSG. Or it’s a superfood, preferably local, organic and GMO-free. Even on the healthiest diet, however, we’re apparently still ingesting too many harmful chemicals. After all, this is apparently a toxic environment we live in. Gwyneth Paltrow says so. So does the Food Babe. In an era of daily television quackery and loony internet health conspiracy websites, one might think that bizarre food ideas are a recent phenomena. But worries that we’re being poisoned from within are probably innate. One of the oldest surviving written documents is an Egyptian papyrus from the 16th century BCE that linked the cause of disease to digestive wastes in our colon. Since that time, our scientific knowledge about the cause of disease has advanced, but the underlying obsession with diet and elimination hasn’t waned. Anecdotally, it seems to be growing. The idea that our bodies need to “detox” is thriving, despite the fact that it has no scientific basis or validity. Part of the modern appeal of “detox” may be that detoxification is a legitimate medical term and treatment. However, in the alternative-to-health perspective, the word has been co-opted, but the science part has been ignored. Fake “detox” is easy. And now proponents of “detox” have taken it one step further. They’re using real medicine for a fake “detox” with. That’s how activated charcoal has become the latest health fad.

The popular use of charcoal got a big boost in 2014. After Gwyneth Paltrow’s magazine “Goop” named charcoal lemonade as one of the “best juice cleanses”, the idea of socially consuming charcoal really took off. If you spot someone drinking what looks like a bottle of ink, it could be “lemonade with activated charcoal” made with “alkali” water and sweetened with cane sugar. All this for just $8.99 for 500mL, making this fad a pretty costly one.

Paraphrasing another philosopher, if you integrate fantasy with reality, you do not instantiate reality. And when you add charcoal to lemonade, it doesn’t make your lemonade tastier, or healthy. Nor does it give a beverage any magical properties. It gives you black, gritty, gag-inducing lemonade...

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/activated-charcoal-the-latest-detox-fad-in-an-obsessive-food-culture/