After a solid week of marinating your liver in tequila and chimichangas, the poor guy deserves a helping hand. While a balanced diet and a normalized sleep schedule (ha, right...) is your best bet, the active ingredients in milk thistle extract have been clinically shown to aid the liver in the detoxification process. Milk thistle might not (read: definitely will not) cure a case of Hep A, but it might help get you back on your horse in time for the weekend.
While your parents might have warned you to check your bags for bed bugs and other critters that may have hitched a ride back to Penn, you may still have an undiscovered but equally unwanted guest chilling in your lower intestine. Though it tastes like someone’s rubbing your eyeballs in Italian seasoning, oregano oil has been clinically proven to be incredibly effective at ridding the body of intestinal parasites. You might develop an unbridled hatred for the herb, but that’s a small price to pay for a critter–free colon.
A number of seaweed varieties have long been known to aid in detoxification and filtration. Studies on toxin remediation have shown that many edible seaweeds are great at pulling out heavy metals such as lead and cadmium, and apparently they’re second to none at lapping up radioactive strontium (all you who spent break hiking around Chernobyl or diving near Fukushima, we got your back.) A number of seaweed powders and dried sheets are available online or down in Chinatown, but make sure the manufacturer is reputable—seaweed is even better at toxin remediation when it’s alive, so if harvested from polluted areas it’s likely to already be up to its ass in nasty stuff.
Bonus Round: World's grossest detox concept—excluding things that go in your ass.
In a nutshell, this detox concept advises you to purchase from your local butcher a pound of his freshest cow liver, chop it into bite–sized pieces, wrap them individually and stick them in the freezer to be consumed, raw and frozen, a piece a day. The rationale is that all the nutrient components your liver needs to function and heal itself will be the most bio–available in another animal’s raw liver. While the science is still out (behind the house, retching a little) on this one, there’s something romantic about the concept of eating another animal’s organs to gain its strength, almost a la creepy shaman–priest from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.”
