People have been selling snake oil for centuries. But the way similar marketing puffery has crept into our food politics has been unusually subtle. The US Food and Drug Administration doesn’t even have a firm definition for the words “natural” or “organic”, yet those words have helped sell a reported $40bn and $9bn of food products respectively. In 2013, the gluten-free industry was worth nearly $10.4bn dollars, and it’s only expected to grow despite the fact that only 1% of Americans suffer from coeliac disease.

There are certainly legitimate health reasons to not eat gluten beyond coeliac disease – but there’s no way that there are $10.4bn dollars’ worth of reasons. And something tells me the gluten-free, vegan bakeries sprouting in every gentrified neighborhood care less about your well-being than they do about their ability to charge $6 for a cupcake with the texture of gravel.

I’m not immune to the allure of fad diets gussied up as “clean eating”. About a year ago, my best friend and I decided our time had come to “eat clean”– and to start with a juice cleanse. Our logic was that, to get healthy, we had to purge ourselves of years of eating like teenage potheads. Liquid seemed the most efficient way to get there. So for weeks, we emailed, texted and talked about the nutritious juice recipes we found on detox forums. We watched for good deals on juicers. By the time it came down to actually going through with the cleanse, I was more than prepared – I was eager. I was ready to Become My Best Self.

Just 16 hours into the first day of the cleanse, my fellow cleanser texted to let me know she’d just found a McDonald’s gift card and I had 10 minutes to get ready. I didn’t even hesitate or try and stop her. My mouth longed for something to chew on. Even just the trip to the golden arches made me feel rejuvenated – a feeling I could swear lasted for days. Although it should have produced the opposite reaction, biting into my Big Mac was like a preservative-filled cleanse for my taste buds.

I never looked for actual science to back up the merits of cleansing. Honestly, I didn’t care to. The words “detox” and “cleanse” have been rhetorically exhausted, stripped of all meaning. The effectiveness of detoxes has been thoroughly debunked, and the debunking debunked. And I knew it, but it didn’t stop me.

It still doesn’t: after seeing a promotion for a new matcha latte “powered with anti-oxidants” at an espresso bar recently, I asked the barista what it meant and she gushed, “They’re so great for you, oh my God!”. I almost failed chemistry in high school; I don’t know what an antioxidant is or what they do. But I bought the drink.

The phenomenon of consumerism masked as ethical eating doesn’t end with non-existent health benefits. Walk into any place that sells burgers or fries – from fast food to gourmet – and you’ll see them referred to as “handcrafted”. French fries are now marketed as fine artisanal goods. We have been fooled into believing an underpaid worker with no benefits will lovingly cut up potatoes in a way that makes them taste better than if they went through a machine. I thought the industrial revolution happened so that we could avoid this sort of thing.

In The X-Files, Agent Fox Mulder displays a poster of a flying saucer in his office under which is written, “I want to believe”. I’m jaded by advertising; I am fully aware of the lies I’m fed; I know, logically, that long life and great health isn’t a week or 10 days of drinking nasty green slush away. My juicer sits in my basement collecting dust. But a part of me wants to believe that giving into these false health claims will work, and so I do.