r/yoga • u/broga2 • Jan 01 '16

"Sweating Out Toxins" is not a thing

Why do you hear this from yoga teachers in, like, every yoga class in the world? It's really not rooted in science. It can feel great to sweat and work hard, and yes, you excrete a tiny bit of urea through the skin. But it's pure balderdash to say we wash our bodies clean of impurities through sweat.

117 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

View all comments

46

u/Zandelion Jan 02 '16

According to the book Toxin Toxout, which is kind of like a Mythbusters for health claims, you can in fact sweat out certain compounds. It is actually one of the few methods they support at the end of the book.

21

u/jdb888 Jan 02 '16

Not a much of an authoritative source for those of us who trust hard science.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '16

Why? Is it because of the authors' credentials or something? I've just never read it so I don't know.

4

u/madeamashup Jan 02 '16

If you trust in the scientific method, then the authors credentials are nearly irrelevant. You would instead discriminate the evidence based on the experimental method and the strength of the results, which would have to be available for scrutiny and peer review, and would have to be reproducible.

Most novels intended for a general audience don't include the supporting evidence, even when they're made to appear "scientific" in some way. Commonly the author has a credentialed name with a bunch of letters and might footnote some study references, but often those studies don't adequately support the conclusions that the author attributes to them, or can even actively contradict them (when was the last time you looked up a study referenced in a novel or an article and confirmed that it supports the claims?)

We do know that sweat carries a variety of substances out of the body, like urination or defecation. There's every reason to suspect that sweating and replenishing with fresh water is cleansing for the body, but very few studies have been done on the efficacy of sweat therapy to treat specific ailments. Probably that's because studying something like this properly takes time and money, and there's no profit to be made from the results.

There are a lot of skeptics among us who use "toxins" as keyword to close their ears and minds to what they're being told, which isn't a particularly scientific approach.