Another bit of top health advice below from Health Hacks – a group on Facebook. Needless to say there is plenty to unpick.
.
“This unusual method will literally heal you in your sleep.”
It will clean your blood. Onions contain phosphoric acid which is absorbed into the foot and has a cleansing effect on the blood.
Phosphoric acid (H3PO4) is an inorganic acid used as a food additive (E338) – you can find it in Pepsi for example. I wonder if Health Hacks would claim that Pepsi cleans the blood? An E-number is a chemical that has been approved as safe for food use. In the case of phosphoric acid it can be used to add tang/sourness (it is a strong acid) to drinks and jams. It is also used by dentists for etching teeth in preparation for certain treatments and it can be used in teeth whitening.
The body already has two organs dedicated to cleaning the blood; the liver and the kidneys. The liver breaks down various hormones, including insulin, so that they stop affecting the body’s tissues. It also turns ammonia into urea, produces catalase (an enzyme that prevents the build up of hydrogen peroxide) and breaks down bilirubin to make bile. The kidneys extract urea to make urine, regulate the water content of blood and maintain a nearly constant pH. Even if phosphoric acid were to be absorbed into the feet it would not be contributing to any cleansing of the blood.
Bacteria and germs are filtered out of the blood and killed off.
This is a ridiculous claim. The most recent research (January of this year) has a typical adult male consisting of about 30 trillion human cells and about 40 trillion bacterial cells. Not all these bacteria are harmful so you wouldn’t want them killed off. There seems to be increasing evidence that your long term health is very strongly influenced by your microbiome – the community of bacteria that live in and on you. There is absolutely no way that a piece of onion could filter bacteria out of your blood – it makes no sense whatsoever! It implies that the blood is passing through some sort of a membrane and leaving the bacteria behind. Piffle!
The stimulation of the sole activates various points throughout the body in a similar way to acupuncture. This relaxes you and relieves pain.
I used to visit a reflexologist so I am familiar with the notion that all parts of the body can be accessed via the feet. Unfortunately this also has no basis in fact. Acupuncture is based on the notion that the human body has a system of connecting energy grids. When one of these energy flow lines is “blocked” acupuncture can be used to reconnect or stimulate the pathways. Whatever else sticking needles into the skin might achieve, it does not interact with energy flow lines because such things do not exist. Having some onion in your sock may relax you, I will leave that up to you, and if you are more relaxed you may feel less pain.
It might sound strange, but your feet will actually smell better. The onion slice draws all the chemicals and poisons out of your foot and even cleans the air around you.
I am very happy to believe that somebody’s feet will smell better if they have onion in their sock. That is not at all a shocking claim to me. It is a slightly subjective one though as what smells nice to one person may not appeal to another. What I take considerable issue with is the idea that onion “draws all the chemicals and poisons out of your foot“. This tells you that the person making the claim either has no scientific understanding whatsoever or is ignoring whatever education they have acquired. For example, water is a chemical. Does the onion draw all of the water out of the feet? This would kill every cell in the foot causing it to become necrotic and fall off. Phosphoric acid is a chemical and yet it is supposed to be entering the foot at the same time that all chemicals are leaving the foot! Also, why “chemicals and poisons” – what are these non-chemical poisons? Poisonous thoughts? Poisonous fairies?
“Share this trick for cleansing the body in a 100% natural way without actually having to do anything.”
It is a small and pedantic point but putting slices of onion in your socks over night is doing something. It is not a big thing but it is not “without actually having to do anything“.
Questions…
- From how many elements is phosphoric acid composed?
- What job does blood do in the human body?
- Give an example of an organic acid.
- Which nutrient is regulated in the blood by the presence of insulin?
- What role does bile perform in digestion?
- What metabolic processes produce the nitrogen-rich waste product ammonia?
- What characteristic do bacterial cells and red blood cells share that sets them aside from typical human cells?
Comments