Greeetings to listeners of the Today programme on BBC Radio 4. About 20 minutes ago I was on the show talking about detox nonsense. Nas Amir Ahmadi of detoxinabox.com denied the rather foolish contents of her own website, and confidently claimed that I must be thinking of the wrong company. I read a quote. She laughed and said I was mistaken.

The audio is here:

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I promised on air that I would double check and post on badscience.net. It will not surprise you to hear that she is completely wrong, and I am completely correct.

EDIT: The Today programme, bless them, share my anality and clarified that I was right and she was wrong.

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Here is Nas Amir Ahmadi, managing director of Detoxinabox (which earns her the soubriquet “MD”):

www.detoxinabox.com/nas.html

And this is her webpage. I read directly from it on the air:

www.detoxinabox.com/diet-a-detox/detox-benefits.html

One of the most complex detoxification functions is against heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadminum, nickel, arsenic, and aluminum.

As I said, they can’t even manage to spell “Cadmium” correctly. The website goes on to explain that their detox programme will expedite the removal of these nasties from the body, without troubling itself to offer any evidence for these claims. Nas explained that she didn’t need to because it had nothing to do with her.

It strikes me that to confidently deny the contents of your own website can only denote a rather careless approach to the facts, or at worst, we might tenuously speculate, in our darkest thoughts, a rather clumsy attempt to obfuscate when caught out.

I have emailed Nas Amir Ahmadi to inform her of her error, in the hope that she will be able to clarify on this issue, and look forward to her apology for misleading the 2 million listeners of the Today programme, and for incorrectly claiming that my research into her absurd website was mistaken. I’ve also rung the Today programme on the one in 5 million chance that they will clarify this on air, partly because I am the most anal person in Britain, and partly because I think it is important to be clear about these things. If it had happened on any subject I would want them to clarify.

Seriously. The barefaced cheek of these characters will never cease to amaze and delight me.

EDIT: And on that comment they have now changed the text of their website. Heh. Note to Nas: changing your website does not change the fact that you were wrong and pwned.

If you enjoyed this dogged anality in the cause of scientific clarity you may also enjoy my vaguely bestselling book. Ignore Amazon, it’s not out of stock, that was just Xmas, there are zillions arriving there tomorrow or something, and if you’re impatient you can click “More Buying Choices” and buy it from elsewhere through Amazon for the same price.