The Detox Prescription: Supercharge Your Health, Strip Away Pounds, and Eliminate the Toxins Within ($17) By Woodson Merrell, MD, with Mary Beth Augustine, MS, RDN, and Hillari Dowdle It's for you if you love: Understanding detoxing via a Western medical doctor's lens "Detox" has historically been a bugaboo term for physicians, who often call the pursuit of purging toxins silly at best and specious at worst. But not Woodson Merrell, MD, who's both pro-detoxing and uber credentialed, as the chair of the Department of Integrative Medicine and the founder of the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. Dr. Merrell believes that the body's own detox processes are "extraordinary, " but that increasing exposure to chemicals in food, in household goods, and the environment have lead to health concerns like allergies, infertility, obesity, and heart disease. When you remove exposure to these elements and add clean foods, your body can reset to a healthy place, he writes. Detox skeptics and savants might like how his medical background informs the cleanse process and options: There are three-day (juice, smoothie, and nut milk recipes), seven-day (juice and food recipes), and 21-day (juice and food recipes, and mind exercise) regimens. The recipes are surprisingly culinary and sophisticated—yet involved (polenta with apple compote for breakfast? Delicious, but time-consuming). And even reading the book itself is a commitment. It's black and white, there are no photos, and it's as dense as an almond butter smoothie (337 pages of healthy goodness!). The cleanses are presented as life-changing, or at least lifestyle changing, and with science on their side, who can really argue with that?
