December 9, 2009 • 16 mins
In this episode of Stuff Mom Never Told You (that you probably don't want to listen to while you're eating), Molly and Cristen discuss the colon cleansing trend, from the finer points of colonics to how medical research weighs in on the practice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From house Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen, I'm Molly, So Molly, I think
(00:20):
that we could say that we're officially in the holiday season. Yes,
at the time of recording this, we're smack dad between
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yes, and also smack dab on my birthday.
I know it's Christmas Birthday today, everyone's birthday to me,
but when people listening, it's not actually my birthday today.
But you know, belated birthday wishes are always welcome. So
(00:41):
since we are now in this in this month of festivity, um,
it also means that I don't know about you, Molly,
but it means that, uh, I'm planning to eat a
lot more and I usually do you know people bringing
snacks into work, Kevin holiday parties, pot luck get togethers.
(01:02):
There's so much cake and pie and cake and pie, eggnog, cider, cider.
Some stories are having the fancy hot chocolates. Yeah. So basically,
it's a bad time to want to fit into your jeans. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, I think we should all be festive,
but to be slightly superficial about as well, Like the
(01:24):
amount of food I'm consuming this month is not good. Yeah,
and you know it can and it can kind of
do a number on on your body. Once after you've
recovered from New Year's you might wake up and say, man,
I I just feel kind of gross on the inside. Ye,
maybe it's time for a cleanse. A cleanse, I mean,
celebrities do it, yeah, Beyonce. Beyonce loss supposedly like twenty
(01:48):
pounds by doing a detox stunt for her role in
dream Girls. And you know, if you're if you're already
home on the couch for the holidays and just watching
you know, bad TV, you're gonna see all these commercials
saying that they can help you lose weight, eat like
so fast and basically colon cleansing, which should either take
the form of doing some kind of diet or drinking
(02:08):
tea you're taking laxatives, or you can go and get
a colonic, which we'll talk about more um in a minute,
But it's based on this concept called otto intoxication that basically,
and this idea has been around since ancient Greece, and
it's the idea that toxins accumulating your bodies leading to
disease and possibly poisoning us, so every now and then
(02:29):
we need to flush them out right, and um, it
was very popular at the turn of the twentieth century,
early nine, and then the medical community came in and
was like, hey, no, there's no evidence of this, um,
and it kind of went out of book. But they're
coming back in a bit right now. Yeah, colon cleansing
is a lot more popular, um than it used to be.
(02:50):
I know people who get regular colon cleanses. I know
a person who did it once and it was too
painful to do again. Yeah, it doesn't sound like fun. Basically,
if you go and get a colonic um, you have
a tube inserted in your rectum and then they're gradually
you have about twenty gallons of water that are going
to be flushed up into your colon and usually the
(03:13):
therapist will massage, massage you're tummy, to work out all
all your poop, all your waste. Because there's this thinking
that um, you know, like Christens saying, all of these
toxins get up into places they shouldn't be and also
there's thinking that once they're up there, they kind of
disrupped everything. You know, normally food works its way out
(03:33):
of our system in one to three days, maybe a
week at most, but some of it's getting stuck. Yeah,
it's like getting compacted up there. You usually see it
referred to as like colon sludge. But just to just
to tell you a little bit about how your colon works,
there's already a lot of stuff up there to keep
the colon clean because every three days the colon will
(03:55):
slough off cells and regenerate new ones first of all,
and then back Heia. Natural bacteria um in our bodies
are most abundant in the colon, which has about one
billion bacteria per milla leader. Yeah, it's a lot. So
you've got all this stuff working to to keep keep
(04:15):
all that food that's moving through heading on out the
other end. And in most cases the colon works pretty
well on it so, which is why the medical community
says you don't necessarily need to help it along. But
you know, sometimes you look at these pictures. Not that
I advise looking at these pictures, especially if you're about
to eat soon, but people who claim success can show
you these pictures of all the stuff that got cleaned
(04:36):
out of their body, just like the sludge, just gigantic
piles of pooh. And I who have thought I'd ever
say gichanic piles of poo on the podcast Not Me,
Not Me, A happy birthday to you, Christine, thank you
a present of poop um. But according to the Harvard
Medical School, it might not be the best idea to
(04:56):
get a colon cleanse um because the thing is, you know,
when we're talking about all this sludge, uh, Harvard points
out that when fecal matter accumulates, it compacts into quote,
firm masses in the open interior of the colon, So
it doesn't it's not clinging to these intestinal walls and
clogging anything up. Yeah, it's based on a false assumption
(05:16):
of how you know this cleansing would even help your
body um. And also if you do see like a
huge pile of poo, it might be because the person
was put on like a fiber regimen before the process started.
So sometimes these these diets will have you have taken
just a ton of fiber and then of course you're
going to have more to take out, and it probably
would have gone through your body anyway. Now, so far,
(05:39):
medical literature has not concluded whether or not colon cleansing
is necessarily good or bad for you, as long as
you're going to um, you know, reputable colonic dispensed eary,
what would that be called colon? A trade practitioner, a
trained practitioner, Yes, and who are obviously using you know,
very sterile. It meant um. But there are a lot
(06:03):
of risks involved. And there are some people who should
not get colonics at all. Right, if you've got Crohne disease,
heart disease, kidney disease, heart disease, what am I leaving out,
Kristen old, sort of colitis? I believe those people should
not even be considering this. But um, even for the
most healthy people, there are some some side effects. One,
it's going to be uncomfortable. It's a tube up your rectum.
(06:27):
But twenty gallons of water where once there was not
twenty gallons of water. Yeah, well, Molly, those they don't somewhere,
they don't turn the faucet on full blast. It's gradually
there's still a lot of water. It's a lot of water, um,
and it can cause nausea, infection, and like Kristen said,
it might flesh out the good stuff. Yeah, it can
(06:49):
remove electrolytes and also a lot of those bacterial flora
that I was talking about um earlier that are in
the colon to to help clean it out. And this
is very rare. I mean, every everything we read about
this procedure notes that this is very rare. But I
just want to throw two words out at you. Rectal perforation.
(07:10):
It could possibly perforate the rectum. That does not sound
fun so um. Now, if some people say that this
is a good thing to do if you might have
parasite infection, um, But if you do happen to go
through a colum cleansing and flush out all the stuff
and you do see parasites, you need to go to
the doctor still, like you probably didn't get them all
out just by cleansing your column. Now, Molly, they're like
(07:33):
we said at the beginning of the podcast, colonics are
only one method for doing a kind of cleanse colon
or um, even a liver cleanse, because there are all
these diets that you can do. One of the most
um well known is called this Master cleanse, and you
basically drink a combination of lemon juice cay and pepper
(07:54):
and maple syrup UM and just that warm salt water. Yes,
in warm salt water UM to flush your systemount and
that's supposedly what Beyonce used to to lose all that
dream Girl's weight, right, and so you're supposed to do
that for ten days. And the purpose of all of
these things. In addition to the weight losses, people say
you can also relieve everything from headaches, joint pain, fatigued depression. UM.
(08:17):
But again the medical community does not have anything to
back that up. And going back to the Harvard Medical School, Uh,
they do not recommend these kind of dies because you're
essentially starving yourself. You're putting yourself on an extremely low
calorie diet that makes your basil metabolic rate drop because
(08:37):
your body is struggling to conserve energy. And the reason
why um, you're losing weight is from fluid loss because
of low carbohydrate intake and frequent b m s because
you are drinking the salt water. Uh. So when you
get off the diet, you're gonna gain the weight right
back and pretty fast. Right. It's it's basically just cleaning
(09:00):
out all the fluids and as soon as you take
in normal the normal amount of fluids you should be.
It's it's the waterway, it's I'm gonna come back. And you're,
just like Christen said, starving yourself. You're not getting in
the protein, fatty acids, essential nutrients that you need. Um,
So don't be tempted by, you know, a promise of
a ten day fix or just a few days. We
did find one CNN article that said, if you're gonna
(09:22):
fast on some sort of juice or fluid diet one day,
one day, you got one day to do it. And
after that you need to start introducing back healthy, nutrient
rich foods. Because unfortunately, as as nice as it would be,
especially around this time of year, to magically make an
apple pie, that someone ain't all by themselves on Thanksgiving.
Not that I'm saying I did that disappear, It's just
(09:45):
not going to disappear every night. Yeah, and um, if
you really want to get your your body kickstarted, just
start flushing some stuff out the natural way. You need
to just amp up the fiber you're eating. So maybe, Molly,
you know, if you are planning on Christmas to maybe
eat a whole apple pie to yourself, just put a
lot of fiber, maybe in the fiber crusts, on all
(10:06):
fiber crusts, because a lot of us aren't eating and
a fiber every day we're supposed to get a high
fiber diet is considered UM twenty five to thirty five
twenty excuse me to thirty five grams of fiber in
your daily diet, right And you know we actually we're
reading once c A an article about UM the coal
and cleansing and those costs, you know, a hundred dollars
of pop probably at least maybe more in some places,
(10:29):
and they're saying all brand a box of just good
high fiber cereal just cost a few bucks. So if
you need to flush things out, like christ And said,
start with the fiber and realize that there is no
short ten day fix. UM, it's gonna involve lots of
healthy foods, fruits, vegetables, all the stuff you know you
should be eating but that you don't. Yeah, and even
and I think we should say one thing about UM
(10:51):
liver cleansing as well, because obviously are you know, our
livers kind of take a beating during the holidays, probably
too UM. And the one thing that's often UM touted
as a way to cleanse your liver. Liver is something
called herb milk thistle, and research once again has shown
that there's really no need to take this. It doesn't
(11:11):
really produce any long lasting healthy effects for your liver.
If you really want to detox your liver, say no
to the booze. Right, Oh, Chris and I have a
question for you all right. Footpads, Yeah, your name name, Molly.
Footpads are a hoax. I don't know if you've ever seen,
um what moleanna are talking about. You might see them
on those kind of TV commercials. Are these paths that
(11:32):
you put on your feet, you go to sleep, and
you wake up and pull them off and they're covered
in gunk that supposedly was leached out from your from
your foot or these magical pads. But um, the same
thing is going to happen as far as the changing
color and pulling the gunk out if you just spray
them with water. Yeah, it's just a chemical reaction from
(11:54):
your foot perspirations. Well, so, Molly, I think you can
term that box of footpaths. That's why I got you
for your birthday. You have a gift receipt. Ralph try
and find one because now I know they don't work.
So everyone out there have fun on the holiday season,
enjoy yourself, live life large, because I would rather have
(12:16):
two bites of a great Christmas cookie than ten days
of cayenne pepper. Yeah. And if you need to cleanse,
treat your body right, say no to the cigarettes and
the alcohol. Get that healthy diet, going a little exercise,
little we help a lot of sleep, and uh, you
should be on your way to healthy and happy new year.
(12:38):
All right. On that note, listener mail, yes today, Christen.
Our listener mail is about our Debutante podcast, and our
first one comes from Hannah. And she also has a
birthday coming up December twenty. She'll be eighteen. Happy birthday, Hannah,
and happy birthday to everyone who has December birthdays. Just
(12:59):
on throw that out there. So Hannah writes, I'm a
member of National Charity League, and every girl who graduates
from my chapter, which is in Houston, Texas, um as
a high school senior participates. It's not required, however, highly
recommended in something called senior presentation. It is very similar
to a debutante because girls are required to wear a
flora length black dress. Here, black is traditional for some
reason and be escorted by her father, who wears a tuxedo.
(13:22):
We're also required where a single strand up pearls as
jewelry were paraded down a runway escorted by our father
while an m c reads a blurb about our life.
If you cannot tell already, I'm not particularly thrilled about
this event, However, both of my grandmother's pushed me to
do it, even though my mother's mother hated her debutante
experience and my grandmother never participated. But I decided to participate.
Even though I am not a Texas native, nor am
(13:42):
I as frou frou as the other participants. I consider
myself very much a feminist, and I believe that feminists
can still participate in an event like this, whether it's
for themselves or someone else. It was nice to mother
with my mother playing for this event as well as
bring my family together to attend. My best friend as
well as my boyfriend be attending as well, even though
none of my close friends are at she participating. Unfortunately,
senior presentation does not include a ball or the Texas
(14:05):
Dip for that matter. However, part Texas tradition, I have
the senior Women's Ball as well as ProMED to look
forward to for that. Even though I was hesitant to participate,
I think that this event really shows the positive evolution
that has taken place in the debutante tradition. Senior presentation
is not only to present women into the world, as
name implies, but also to honor graduating seniors for their
accomplishments in high school and give us a time to
(14:26):
celebrate becoming a woman. All right, Well, I have another
Debutan email to read from Vernet, and she had her
debutan earlier this year, a couple of weeks after she
turned eighteen. She said, it's a tradition in the Philippines
after you turning teen, the young girls have a debut.
It's not mandatory, but I know a lot of my
friends had him. Mine was of the traditional Filipino debut
(14:48):
or American one, but I did have the basics down. Um.
She had nine boys and nine girls on her court.
She said, there was no waltz or any other dances,
but it was more of a social setting with live entertainment,
and instead of my court lighting candles to express their
wishes to me, they gave me roses and instead of
just one escort. My friends convinced five of my guy
friends to walk with walk in with me during my entrance.
(15:11):
As for my dress, I didn't get the traditional white one.
My mom didn't allow me to. She said that white
dresses are only for weddings and I agreed with her.
So two months before my debut went to l A's
Fashion District and got me a light blue puffy dress
for a hundred forty nine dollars. She said, the other
dresses I saw were four hundred dollars and I could
never imagine buying a thousand dollar dress for that matter,
So she said, anyway, that's my story of my debut experience.
(15:35):
Not very traditional, and I suppose a bit more modern. Overall,
I had a great time and wouldn't mind be living
that night again. Thanks for Annette. So there you go.
If you've got anything you want to share with us,
just shoot us an email. It's mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com. We also have a blog called
how to Stuff, And if you go back through the archives,
Kristen's got a blog entry on detoxing without colonics and
(15:59):
laxative tea is and all that followed are all and
if you want to read an article about detox diet
and article about coal and cleansing. You know where all
that is how stuff works dot Com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot Com. Want more how stuff works, check out
(16:20):
our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot Com home
page brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom never told you?
From house Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Kristen, I'm Molly, So Molly, I think
(00:20):
that we could say that we're officially in the holiday season. Yes,
at the time of recording this, we're smack dad between
Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yes, and also smack dab on my birthday.
I know it's Christmas Birthday today, everyone's birthday to me,
but when people listening, it's not actually my birthday today.
But you know, belated birthday wishes are always welcome. So
(00:41):
since we are now in this in this month of festivity, um,
it also means that I don't know about you, Molly,
but it means that, uh, I'm planning to eat a
lot more and I usually do you know people bringing
snacks into work, Kevin holiday parties, pot luck get togethers.
(01:02):
There's so much cake and pie and cake and pie, eggnog, cider, cider.
Some stories are having the fancy hot chocolates. Yeah. So basically,
it's a bad time to want to fit into your jeans. Yeah,
I mean, I mean, I think we should all be festive,
but to be slightly superficial about as well, Like the
(01:24):
amount of food I'm consuming this month is not good. Yeah,
and you know it can and it can kind of
do a number on on your body. Once after you've
recovered from New Year's you might wake up and say, man,
I I just feel kind of gross on the inside. Ye,
maybe it's time for a cleanse. A cleanse, I mean,
celebrities do it, yeah, Beyonce. Beyonce loss supposedly like twenty
(01:48):
pounds by doing a detox stunt for her role in
dream Girls. And you know, if you're if you're already
home on the couch for the holidays and just watching
you know, bad TV, you're gonna see all these commercials
saying that they can help you lose weight, eat like
so fast and basically colon cleansing, which should either take
the form of doing some kind of diet or drinking
(02:08):
tea you're taking laxatives, or you can go and get
a colonic, which we'll talk about more um in a minute,
But it's based on this concept called otto intoxication that basically,
and this idea has been around since ancient Greece, and
it's the idea that toxins accumulating your bodies leading to
disease and possibly poisoning us, so every now and then
(02:29):
we need to flush them out right, and um, it
was very popular at the turn of the twentieth century,
early nine, and then the medical community came in and
was like, hey, no, there's no evidence of this, um,
and it kind of went out of book. But they're
coming back in a bit right now. Yeah, colon cleansing
is a lot more popular, um than it used to be.
(02:50):
I know people who get regular colon cleanses. I know
a person who did it once and it was too
painful to do again. Yeah, it doesn't sound like fun. Basically,
if you go and get a colonic um, you have
a tube inserted in your rectum and then they're gradually
you have about twenty gallons of water that are going
to be flushed up into your colon and usually the
(03:13):
therapist will massage, massage you're tummy, to work out all
all your poop, all your waste. Because there's this thinking
that um, you know, like Christens saying, all of these
toxins get up into places they shouldn't be and also
there's thinking that once they're up there, they kind of
disrupped everything. You know, normally food works its way out
(03:33):
of our system in one to three days, maybe a
week at most, but some of it's getting stuck. Yeah,
it's like getting compacted up there. You usually see it
referred to as like colon sludge. But just to just
to tell you a little bit about how your colon works,
there's already a lot of stuff up there to keep
the colon clean because every three days the colon will
(03:55):
slough off cells and regenerate new ones first of all,
and then back Heia. Natural bacteria um in our bodies
are most abundant in the colon, which has about one
billion bacteria per milla leader. Yeah, it's a lot. So
you've got all this stuff working to to keep keep
(04:15):
all that food that's moving through heading on out the
other end. And in most cases the colon works pretty
well on it so, which is why the medical community
says you don't necessarily need to help it along. But
you know, sometimes you look at these pictures. Not that
I advise looking at these pictures, especially if you're about
to eat soon, but people who claim success can show
you these pictures of all the stuff that got cleaned
(04:36):
out of their body, just like the sludge, just gigantic
piles of pooh. And I who have thought I'd ever
say gichanic piles of poo on the podcast Not Me,
Not Me, A happy birthday to you, Christine, thank you
a present of poop um. But according to the Harvard
Medical School, it might not be the best idea to
(04:56):
get a colon cleanse um because the thing is, you know,
when we're talking about all this sludge, uh, Harvard points
out that when fecal matter accumulates, it compacts into quote,
firm masses in the open interior of the colon, So
it doesn't it's not clinging to these intestinal walls and
clogging anything up. Yeah, it's based on a false assumption
(05:16):
of how you know this cleansing would even help your
body um. And also if you do see like a
huge pile of poo, it might be because the person
was put on like a fiber regimen before the process started.
So sometimes these these diets will have you have taken
just a ton of fiber and then of course you're
going to have more to take out, and it probably
would have gone through your body anyway. Now, so far,
(05:39):
medical literature has not concluded whether or not colon cleansing
is necessarily good or bad for you, as long as
you're going to um, you know, reputable colonic dispensed eary,
what would that be called colon? A trade practitioner, a
trained practitioner, Yes, and who are obviously using you know,
very sterile. It meant um. But there are a lot
(06:03):
of risks involved. And there are some people who should
not get colonics at all. Right, if you've got Crohne disease,
heart disease, kidney disease, heart disease, what am I leaving out,
Kristen old, sort of colitis? I believe those people should
not even be considering this. But um, even for the
most healthy people, there are some some side effects. One,
it's going to be uncomfortable. It's a tube up your rectum.
(06:27):
But twenty gallons of water where once there was not
twenty gallons of water. Yeah, well, Molly, those they don't somewhere,
they don't turn the faucet on full blast. It's gradually
there's still a lot of water. It's a lot of water, um,
and it can cause nausea, infection, and like Kristen said,
it might flesh out the good stuff. Yeah, it can
(06:49):
remove electrolytes and also a lot of those bacterial flora
that I was talking about um earlier that are in
the colon to to help clean it out. And this
is very rare. I mean, every everything we read about
this procedure notes that this is very rare. But I
just want to throw two words out at you. Rectal perforation.
(07:10):
It could possibly perforate the rectum. That does not sound
fun so um. Now, if some people say that this
is a good thing to do if you might have
parasite infection, um, But if you do happen to go
through a colum cleansing and flush out all the stuff
and you do see parasites, you need to go to
the doctor still, like you probably didn't get them all
out just by cleansing your column. Now, Molly, they're like
(07:33):
we said at the beginning of the podcast, colonics are
only one method for doing a kind of cleanse colon
or um, even a liver cleanse, because there are all
these diets that you can do. One of the most
um well known is called this Master cleanse, and you
basically drink a combination of lemon juice cay and pepper
(07:54):
and maple syrup UM and just that warm salt water. Yes,
in warm salt water UM to flush your systemount and
that's supposedly what Beyonce used to to lose all that
dream Girl's weight, right, and so you're supposed to do
that for ten days. And the purpose of all of
these things. In addition to the weight losses, people say
you can also relieve everything from headaches, joint pain, fatigued depression. UM.
(08:17):
But again the medical community does not have anything to
back that up. And going back to the Harvard Medical School, Uh,
they do not recommend these kind of dies because you're
essentially starving yourself. You're putting yourself on an extremely low
calorie diet that makes your basil metabolic rate drop because
(08:37):
your body is struggling to conserve energy. And the reason
why um, you're losing weight is from fluid loss because
of low carbohydrate intake and frequent b m s because
you are drinking the salt water. Uh. So when you
get off the diet, you're gonna gain the weight right
back and pretty fast. Right. It's it's basically just cleaning
(09:00):
out all the fluids and as soon as you take
in normal the normal amount of fluids you should be.
It's it's the waterway, it's I'm gonna come back. And you're,
just like Christen said, starving yourself. You're not getting in
the protein, fatty acids, essential nutrients that you need. Um,
So don't be tempted by, you know, a promise of
a ten day fix or just a few days. We
did find one CNN article that said, if you're gonna
(09:22):
fast on some sort of juice or fluid diet one day,
one day, you got one day to do it. And
after that you need to start introducing back healthy, nutrient
rich foods. Because unfortunately, as as nice as it would be,
especially around this time of year, to magically make an
apple pie, that someone ain't all by themselves on Thanksgiving.
Not that I'm saying I did that disappear, It's just
(09:45):
not going to disappear every night. Yeah, and um, if
you really want to get your your body kickstarted, just
start flushing some stuff out the natural way. You need
to just amp up the fiber you're eating. So maybe, Molly,
you know, if you are planning on Christmas to maybe
eat a whole apple pie to yourself, just put a
lot of fiber, maybe in the fiber crusts, on all
(10:06):
fiber crusts, because a lot of us aren't eating and
a fiber every day we're supposed to get a high
fiber diet is considered UM twenty five to thirty five
twenty excuse me to thirty five grams of fiber in
your daily diet, right And you know we actually we're
reading once c A an article about UM the coal
and cleansing and those costs, you know, a hundred dollars
of pop probably at least maybe more in some places,
(10:29):
and they're saying all brand a box of just good
high fiber cereal just cost a few bucks. So if
you need to flush things out, like christ And said,
start with the fiber and realize that there is no
short ten day fix. UM, it's gonna involve lots of
healthy foods, fruits, vegetables, all the stuff you know you
should be eating but that you don't. Yeah, and even
and I think we should say one thing about UM
(10:51):
liver cleansing as well, because obviously are you know, our
livers kind of take a beating during the holidays, probably
too UM. And the one thing that's often UM touted
as a way to cleanse your liver. Liver is something
called herb milk thistle, and research once again has shown
that there's really no need to take this. It doesn't
(11:11):
really produce any long lasting healthy effects for your liver.
If you really want to detox your liver, say no
to the booze. Right, Oh, Chris and I have a
question for you all right. Footpads, Yeah, your name name, Molly.
Footpads are a hoax. I don't know if you've ever seen,
um what moleanna are talking about. You might see them
on those kind of TV commercials. Are these paths that
(11:32):
you put on your feet, you go to sleep, and
you wake up and pull them off and they're covered
in gunk that supposedly was leached out from your from
your foot or these magical pads. But um, the same
thing is going to happen as far as the changing
color and pulling the gunk out if you just spray
them with water. Yeah, it's just a chemical reaction from
(11:54):
your foot perspirations. Well, so, Molly, I think you can
term that box of footpaths. That's why I got you
for your birthday. You have a gift receipt. Ralph try
and find one because now I know they don't work.
So everyone out there have fun on the holiday season,
enjoy yourself, live life large, because I would rather have
(12:16):
two bites of a great Christmas cookie than ten days
of cayenne pepper. Yeah. And if you need to cleanse,
treat your body right, say no to the cigarettes and
the alcohol. Get that healthy diet, going a little exercise,
little we help a lot of sleep, and uh, you
should be on your way to healthy and happy new year.
(12:38):
All right. On that note, listener mail, yes today, Christen.
Our listener mail is about our Debutante podcast, and our
first one comes from Hannah. And she also has a
birthday coming up December twenty. She'll be eighteen. Happy birthday, Hannah,
and happy birthday to everyone who has December birthdays. Just
(12:59):
on throw that out there. So Hannah writes, I'm a
member of National Charity League, and every girl who graduates
from my chapter, which is in Houston, Texas, um as
a high school senior participates. It's not required, however, highly
recommended in something called senior presentation. It is very similar
to a debutante because girls are required to wear a
flora length black dress. Here, black is traditional for some
reason and be escorted by her father, who wears a tuxedo.
(13:22):
We're also required where a single strand up pearls as
jewelry were paraded down a runway escorted by our father
while an m c reads a blurb about our life.
If you cannot tell already, I'm not particularly thrilled about
this event, However, both of my grandmother's pushed me to
do it, even though my mother's mother hated her debutante
experience and my grandmother never participated. But I decided to participate.
Even though I am not a Texas native, nor am
(13:42):
I as frou frou as the other participants. I consider
myself very much a feminist, and I believe that feminists
can still participate in an event like this, whether it's
for themselves or someone else. It was nice to mother
with my mother playing for this event as well as
bring my family together to attend. My best friend as
well as my boyfriend be attending as well, even though
none of my close friends are at she participating. Unfortunately,
senior presentation does not include a ball or the Texas
(14:05):
Dip for that matter. However, part Texas tradition, I have
the senior Women's Ball as well as ProMED to look
forward to for that. Even though I was hesitant to participate,
I think that this event really shows the positive evolution
that has taken place in the debutante tradition. Senior presentation
is not only to present women into the world, as
name implies, but also to honor graduating seniors for their
accomplishments in high school and give us a time to
(14:26):
celebrate becoming a woman. All right, Well, I have another
Debutan email to read from Vernet, and she had her
debutan earlier this year, a couple of weeks after she
turned eighteen. She said, it's a tradition in the Philippines
after you turning teen, the young girls have a debut.
It's not mandatory, but I know a lot of my
friends had him. Mine was of the traditional Filipino debut
(14:48):
or American one, but I did have the basics down. Um.
She had nine boys and nine girls on her court.
She said, there was no waltz or any other dances,
but it was more of a social setting with live entertainment,
and instead of my court lighting candles to express their
wishes to me, they gave me roses and instead of
just one escort. My friends convinced five of my guy
friends to walk with walk in with me during my entrance.
(15:11):
As for my dress, I didn't get the traditional white one.
My mom didn't allow me to. She said that white
dresses are only for weddings and I agreed with her.
So two months before my debut went to l A's
Fashion District and got me a light blue puffy dress
for a hundred forty nine dollars. She said, the other
dresses I saw were four hundred dollars and I could
never imagine buying a thousand dollar dress for that matter,
So she said, anyway, that's my story of my debut experience.
(15:35):
Not very traditional, and I suppose a bit more modern. Overall,
I had a great time and wouldn't mind be living
that night again. Thanks for Annette. So there you go.
If you've got anything you want to share with us,
just shoot us an email. It's mom stuff at how
stuff works dot com. We also have a blog called
how to Stuff, And if you go back through the archives,
Kristen's got a blog entry on detoxing without colonics and
(15:59):
laxative tea is and all that followed are all and
if you want to read an article about detox diet
and article about coal and cleansing. You know where all
that is how stuff works dot Com. For more on
this and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot Com. Want more how stuff works, check out
(16:20):
our blogs on the house. Stuff works dot Com home
page brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
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