Activated charcoal drinks

A hospital-grade detox at your convenience?

Looking for a quick shot of something that will improve your health from the inside out?

You might have noticed some very black beverages appearing in the health and wellness aisles. There are an increasing number of drinks that now offer the added extra of activated charcoal. Activated charcoal is a special type of highly microscopically porous charcoal used to soak up unwanted particles, not to be confused with burned toast or barbeque briquettes.(1)

In medical settings, it has been used for over 180 years as an important means of treating people who have ingested a poison or overdose of drugs. It binds to many drugs or poisons to prevent them being absorbed by the body. In the wellness drinks world, it is peddled as everything from a hangover cure to a beauty aid to a detoxifying agent. The theory goes that if it works to take away nasty drugs from your gut then it must also be able to mop up other nasty toxins in your digestive system. These ‘toxins’ tend to refer to unwanted things in our diet, rather than things that are actually toxic.(2)

The way devotees promote the drink is something along of the lines of: “activated charcoal binds to toxins in food, like pesticides and other chemicals, and it is so good at it that medical professionals use it routinely to treat people who’ve been poisoned”. It all sounds highly plausible, and the mention of its use by medical professionals affords credibility, but there’s absolutely no scientific proof that drinks with added activated charcoal work at all.

The dose of activated charcoal used for poisonings can be around 100 grams, followed by further doses every few hours. The amount included in a typical drink is around half a gram. Is this really going to do much? It’s pretty unlikely. Manufacturers won’t be very motivated to include much more as the activated charcoal may impair the taste and mouthfeel of drinks — something that is more likely to drive down sales than worries over whether it is effective or not. Even if it were actively drawing away molecules, ask yourself how this activated charcoal would know the difference between the nutrients you want to absorb and those that you want to get rid of. The answer is, of course, that it doesn’t know. Activated charcoal is fairly indiscriminate so if a molecule has the right structure to stick to it then that’ll happen whether it is a toxin, a medicine or a nutrient.

At the low levels typically included in wellness drinks, there’s unlikely to be much harm from them although you should probably avoid these drinks if you take medication as the charcoal might render it less effective if it prevents the active ingredients being absorbed. And, for those of you hoping it’s a great cure for a hangover you can give up on that hope right now. Activated charcoal is poor at binding with alcohol so in this regard would be pretty useless anyway.

1. As advised by the National Capital Poison Center in the US (National Capital Poison Center, ‘Activated charcoal: An effective treatment for poisonings.’ https://www.poison.org/articles/2015-mar/activated-char- coal). Do people really confuse them?!

2. The dictionary definition of toxic is ‘poisonous’, which is rather over-exaggerating the harms of most of what we eat.