8 Ways Companies Use Pseudoscience To Sell You Stuff

2. Fetishising "Clean"

The detox market is currently massive, which is impressive considering it has literally no basis in reality. It might as well be the unicorn dust market.

The human obsession with toxins and detoxifying actually goes back thousands of years. People used to think that ill-health was cause by everything from bad spirits to imbalanced humours. With the rise of germ theory, we all got very obsessed with the idea of being able to pick up bad juju from our surroundings.

Basically, we're always convinced that there's something about our society that is making us sick, it's where we get our ideas about sin and guilt from, and juice cleanses and clean eating are just the latest in a long line of remedies.

The follows on from the "natural is better" line by taking the idea of healthy and turning it into a moral good (the opposite of "clean" being "dirty").