192: Coffee is Your Friend, Not Your Enema (feat Mallory DeMille)
This episode has been brewing for some time. This week we ask: which hole is coffee really supposed to go in? Because, in the contrarian and conspiratorial wellness world, a growing number of influencers advocate for your morning java to go where the sun doesn't shine. If that's not alarming enough, they claim coffee enemas will treat autism, cancer, parasites, and much more.
Mallory DeMille is here to finally flush out this nonsense.
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I don't fuck with that oat milk stuff that you love, Mallory.
Oh, okay.
I won't take that personally.
Julian, what about you?
Large Brevet Latte, just two shots, please.
Perfect.
And Matthew?
You know, I don't know if you can meet my aesthetic.
It has to be a copper bar, tiny espresso cup and spoon, have to be surrounded by old Italian men.
They have a cigarette in one hand, a rosary in the other.
I'm not into coffee for wellness.
I know I'm going to die.
I just drink it for the melancholy.
All right.
Well, mine is an oat milk latte.
I'm going to run down to my closest Mouth Coffee Cafe and I'll be right back.
Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Derek Barris.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
I'm Julian Walker.
I'm Mallory DeMille.
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And a reminder that you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
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Conspiracuality192.com.
Coffee is your friend, not your enema.
Featuring Mallory DeMille.
Coffee enemas are like all the rage right now.
Detoxing your liver.
The light that is in your eyes again is just like next level.
Did you know that sticking coffee up your butt literally has the most insane health benefits?
This is not a joke.
This is serious.
It's called a coffee enema.
Coffee.
I love it so much.
Imagine what it does when it goes up your butt.
I'll tell you what it does when it goes up your butt.
What coffee does when it goes up your little booty.
Alright, let's do a coffee enema together, shall we?
You're cleaning your colon with coffee way more than you would be with water.
So you're just boosting your detox.
My body healed itself of multiple chronic illnesses and a huge factor is coffee enema.
Hello, listeners.
This episode has been brewing for some time now, and I'm here to finally flush it out.
Coffee is a piping hot topic in the wellness world.
There was, of course, the peak of Bulletproof Coffee, where self-proclaimed father of biohacking Dave Asprey convinced everyone to put butter in their morning joe because of health.
He now sells Danger Coffee, re-mineralized beans that are allegedly mold-free.
Oh, you didn't know that your coffee is filled with mold now?
Apparently, and often only according to folks who stand to profit from some sort of new wellness coffee linked in their bio.
Then there's the various mushroom powders that you can turn into hot mushroom juices that claim to be some sort of healthier coffee alternative.
Look, if you want to drink hot mushroom juice, that's up to you.
But if I was coffee, I would be terribly offended.
Also, good luck taking my oat milk latte from my warm caffeinated hands.
But hot mushroom juice sounds so appealing.
Have you tried it, Dylan?
Because, full disclosure, I've tried it a few times.
I actually befriended someone who was working for Four Sigmatic and he gave me a bunch of boxes and no, I'm sorry, I am not sold on it.
If you dig it, totally cool, but quit trying to pretend that it replaces coffee.
Never tried it, but my late friend, Diane Bruni, who's a beloved yoga teacher here in Toronto, got into Chaga while she was in cancer treatment because, you know, like so many in desperate situations, she was willing to try anything, but she didn't give up on her chemotherapy.
I haven't tried it either and mushrooms aside, if this is all starting to sound like a lot to consider first thing in the morning, I am afraid to share that we haven't even gotten to the new main question you need to ask yourself, which is what hole should I put my coffee in today?
People know that coffee enemas are really good to help your liver detox and so often when I have a coffee craving now because I've done so many and this is two shots of Espresso.
So it's basically an Americano.
When I have a coffee craving, it's like, where do I crave the coffee?
And if I check in, sometimes it's the other end.
There's also this myth of like how long it takes to do an enema.
This is a 60 ml.
We'll put the link in the chat to what particular syringe this is.
So that was it.
So yeah, it's a lot faster than drinking an Americano.
But what I find Is that either it'll totally get absorbed or it'll just simply pull stuff out and you don't get the same, and I don't really understand why, you don't really get the same experience of caffeine in your physiology.
Yeah, so that is Kate Stillman, who has been a minor yoga therapy and Ayurveda influencer.
These are unlicensed gigs for many years under the moniker yoga healer.
And, you know, Listeners, you can't see what she's doing, but she's actually administering enema while she's speaking.
That's what the little pauses are.
She's always affected a kind of no-nonsense, you know, let's just make it work vibe.
And this is really apparent in the visual here.
So she's standing in her kitchen.
She's taking her pants down behind her kitchen island and squirting coffee with a big plastic syringe that could be a turkey baster, which then she just puts down on the counter.
But then if you scroll through her feed, You know, something a little more serious becomes clear, which is that she's just been through a year of cancer treatment.
So I think this is a really great place to start, Mallory.
Yeah, you know, that video is really something.
I purposely have not listened to any of the clips because I want to, I want to be able to react to them live and authentically, but I had seen this video and you know, one thing you didn't say there, Matthew, is it's like she never breaks eye contact the whole time.
There's something, there's like this casual exhibitionism and practiced routine normalcy of like, I'm just doing this thing back here while I'm talking to you.
And then watch, it's part of her alternative cancer care.
Well, she doesn't say so specifically, at least in that reel or in the captions, but the reel is released within the timeline of other Cancer Journey materials.
And there's two comments on the YouTube release, with the first one being from a fan who excitedly writes, like, well, I do this with my fresh urine.
And so it kind of reminds me of, there's something very sort of homespun about it.
It's like she's giving a baking or a recipe on a website where someone says, well, you can substitute, you know, flour for every teaspoon of cornstarch or something like that.
It's very odd.
And also, when she says, it's much faster than a cortado, I drink coffee because I am addicted and I'm fine with that particular addiction, but I also find pleasure in the taste of it.
So the idea that you need to just shove it up somewhere to get it in as fast as possible, it has a very capitalist mentality to it.
She also has, I can't believe I'm about to say this, she also has a video where she mixes her urine with dried cow dung to make a paste that she claims to put on her gums and- You're trolling us, you're trolling us.
No, I swear to God I'm not.
I just, we don't have time to get into it today.
I'm so sorry I even brought it up.
Today is butt stuff only, specifically coffee enemas, the wellness influencers normalizing them, the companies profiting off them, and the sus or even non-existent science they're all pointing to.
I was first introduced to the idea of coffee enemas as a wellness practice a number of years ago while reading about Jessica Ainscough.
Jessica, also known as Australia's Wellness Warrior, died of cancer in February 2015 at the age of 30.
She had amassed thousands of social media followers after she turned away from chemotherapy in favor of garrison therapy, an unproven treatment for cancer that involves supplements, a strict vegetarian diet, a lot of juices, and, you guessed it, daily coffee enemas.
Jessica's mother, who also had cancer and also pursued garrison therapy, passed away in 2013.
A more recent anecdote of this therapy, which listeners may be familiar with if they're tuned into MLM discourse online, is Jesse Lee Ward.
Diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in early 2023, the self-proclaimed number one network marketer in the world ultimately decided against chemotherapy.
Jesse Lee seemed to be trying a lot of alternatives, and Garrison Therapy was mentioned more than just a few times.
She was suddenly on her Instagram stories regularly while juicing or broadcasting Instagram live streams to her thousands of followers while administering a coffee enema on her bathroom floor.
Jessie Lee passed away in September of 2023.
Yeah, I mean, we're going from what is admittedly kind of a quirky and almost funny seeming practice to something incredibly sad.
And as Matthew, you flagged earlier, you know, desperate people taking their health into their own hands and being willing to try anything, right?
Yeah, I also want to flag a not uncommon paradox in these stories, which is the scene of wellness influencers publicly self-administering bad treatments while they are going through health crises, sometimes terminally.
Recently, we saw it with Mother God, Amy Carlson, who's chugging colloidal silver on Facebook live streams while she's dying of starvation and alcoholism.
But there's a longer history behind this, and it has to do with photographic media.
I think it's amplified by the Instagram age.
Yoga master BKS Iyengar was so stressed out by performing for the pictures in Light On Yoga, which is the top-selling yoga manual in history, that he was hospitalized for two weeks after the filming stopped.
Almost every picture in that book is paired with a description that described a health benefit, but he was on his way to the hospital, and so I think you just really never know what you're looking at with these things.
Yeah, and with Iyengar, we know that at least once he was past a certain age, anytime he was teaching one of those You know, incredibly, one of these workshops with this, where he was the marquee name, he's having to be carried up the stairs by assistants, you know, an hour before everyone arrives because his body is in so much pain, right?
Yeah, it's a very strange scene.
And then it makes me think too of Brett Weinstein and his wife Heather taking ivermectin, you know, like for the first time on a live stream as well.
The live streams are really interesting because you really honestly don't know what you're looking at.
It's such an extreme reminder of how on social media, it can be like an absolute highlight reel or really whatever you want to puppeteer it to be, even if it's for something dire.
Not to mention the flip side of it, which we're not really going to touch on today, where folks have been caught faking diagnoses and treatments.
It's also a reminder of how easy it is to say whatever the fuck you want on social media.
Here's none other than Troy Casey, the certified health nut, to introduce us to Gerson Therapy.
Oh, your first date.
Did you ever go on a second?
I got ghosted.
He never called me back.
Coffee enemas go right in line with Gerson Therapy.
Gerson Therapy is green juice for terminal cancers, right?
Green juicing for stage four, You know, tumors, this, that, and the other thing.
Get the body into autophagy and flood it with minerals, vitamins, and enzymes from predigested mineral-rich nutrition, which is juicing.
I've been juicing for 33 years.
So this is Gerson therapy, Max Gerson.
And then you got to get the channels open.
So the poop chute, most important channel.
There's something in coffee and there's a nerve or a valve that goes from the liver to the colon.
And, uh, it gets stimulated when you put coffee up there.
And so the liver will purge as well.
So they're very effective in purging the body.
I'm sorry.
I just have to react to this guy.
I mean, he has that classic tone of like, Oh yeah, I'm an expert.
I can just reel off all these different things.
And then he's not sure if it's a nerve or a valve.
Which I hear are the same thing, so I don't think it matters.
So Derek, who is Max Garrison and what do you think his coffee order would have been?
Well, I'm not going to speculate on his coffee order because apparently he just wants it up there as quickly as possible.
But we should pull back here and I'm going to go a little into the science of it, but enemas have been around since biblical times.
But it is Max Gerson who really put the coffee enema craze into the consciousness of these wellness influencers.
In fact, he's really behind a lot of the pseudoscience that we cover on this podcast.
The challenge with debunking someone like Gerson and his Gerson therapy protocol is that since it's a collection of practices, It's never been clinically studied.
So proponents of his therapeutic protocol take this as a sign of its efficacy, which is usually under the guise of, this is what big pharma doesn't want you to know.
So Max Garrison was born in what is now Poland in 1881.
And as a Jew, he eventually lost a lot of his family to the Nazis.
But before that, he was treating patients in the German Empire for tuberculosis.
So in 1927, he developed a diet that he said could treat that particular disease, along with migraines.
And then the following year, he also said that his diet could treat cancer.
Gerson's restrictive diet only allowed you to eat uncanned fresh fruits and vegetables and oatmeal.
So you mentioned aspirin before.
He would have a problem with oatmeal, right?
So we're moving into some conflicting territory now.
Not only could you not use salt and spices, he forbade using aluminum utensils or pressure cookers as well.
Now, after six weeks on Gerson's diet, you could add proteins from milk products.
Now, he prescribed medications along with this, including niacin, iron, brewer's yeast, fresh defatted bile, all sold in capsules.
He also recommended liver capsules and crude liver extract injection using fresh livers from calves.
Oh, and all of the vegetables in Gerson's diet could only be taken in juice form from a machine that he exclusively sold for $150.
In what year, Derek?
That's a long time ago, isn't it?
This is before his death.
So this was in the, I think, in the 50s when he was selling this machine.
Yeah.
So this was a very expensive juicer.
Wow.
I'm starting to get the scam here, right?
It's like have people eat no fiber and then sell them on the need to do enemas.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
The fiber's the big one.
He said you had to have one copious bowel movement per day, and that's where the coffee enemas come in.
So you can see why this protocol can't actually be clinically tested.
There's no way to actually use a control in this sort of model.
Now, this protocol evolved over the decades, but it's all based on the notion that the human body is just loaded with toxins.
What type of toxins?
He never actually said.
The bad kind.
So you can see why modern wellness influencers will just create a choose-your-own microbiome adventure with his protocol.
And the diet was mostly vegetarian, except for the calf liver injections, which then had to be taken in capsule form.
So, he died in 1959.
So, Matthew, the juicer would have had to have been before that.
But then his daughter, Charlotte, ran his institute until her death in 2019.
Now, she discontinued the use of calf liver in 1981 when 10 of her patients were hospitalized after eating the liver resulted in sepsis.
And five were put in a coma and one died within a week.
We should note that fans of Gerson claimed that his death was a government conspiracy because he was getting too close to the truth.
Now, in reality, he had fled to the U.S.
to escape actual persecution from the Nazis, but while here, he lost his medical insurance in 1953 and he was actually disbarred as a physician in 1958.
Charlotte founded the Gerson Institute in 1977, and she mostly had to treat her patients in Tijuana since the US has those pesky regulations.
Now, she has a clinic in San Diego, or had a clinic in San Diego, so she seems to have been jumping back and forth between the nations.
Now, as I said, there have been no clinical trials given the complexity and shifting nature of the protocol, but Gerson did publish a book claiming success at treating cancer in 50 patients.
All the stories were unverified anecdotes.
Now, in 1994, the Journal of Naturopathic Medicine, which would actually be sympathetic to such a therapy, followed 39 Gerson patients to Tijuana and they couldn't really prove anything since they didn't have the actual medical records.
But a follow-up study found that 10 of them had died and they couldn't find 23 of them.
The National Cancer Institute actually followed Gerson patients on a number of occasions.
They tried to take him at his word and they never once found proof of efficacy for his protocol at all.
But that's a lot.
There's a lot of moving pieces there.
The one thing that has remained and is actually picking up an influence are his coffee enemas.
And those have been studied and the only thing that's been verified is their adverse effects.
Which include risk of infection, heart problems, lung issues, seizures, and death.
And that's because regularly using enemas can cause dehydration, colitis, which is inflammation of the bowel, and ironically, constipation.
Now, that didn't stop Goop from selling coffee enema kits in 2018, however, as part of their Beauty and Wellness Detox Guide, and they were sold for $135.
Well, holy shit.
I want to note that that particular intersection is part of why our podcast actually exists, because in 2018, holistic psychiatrist Kelly Brogan was a top goop celebrity.
And she was hawking coffee enemas and kundalini yoga through her own protocols as replacements for psychiatric medications.
Actually, for all medications, because she made all patients agree to abstain from things like Tylenol, Advil, birth control, allergy medications while they were in treatment with her.
That's how effective she thought her ass coffee was.
But when she became one of the first and loudest COVID denialists in March of 2020,
I dug into how her anti-psychiatry pro enema protocols were working out for her clients.
And there were some really bad stories that came out of that.
And I think it was really that story that gave me the framework for understanding
the whole conspirituality thing.
There's something in here too, about how the notion of health has become abstracted
in this spiritualized way, right?
Where, you know, the way it was formulating in my mind is like, live fast, die young, but have a really good looking like colon and lower bowel tract, right?
Like there's some sense of like, the idea of being super healthy actually being something that can kill you.
And the sort of disconnect there is somehow not perceived.
Well, I think we should note that enemas do have legitimate uses.
I'll get to that in a moment.
But first, just to show you how far astray this technique is going, here's a clip from Hal Elrod.
Now, he's a motivational speaker and self-help author who was recently on Fox News talking to Jesse Wooders about his recent book, Miracle Morning.
Now, here he's describing using coffee enemas for something it's definitely not going to help with.
Coffee enemas, he said it's the most effective preventative measure to not get cancer.
And if you have cancer, he believes, based on all the research he's done and the people he's interviewed, it's the most effective way to beat cancer.
What a coffee enema is, you brew this coffee, you pour it into this 32 ounce stainless steel bucket, then there's a tube, there's a very gentle tip, you put a little coconut oil on that, you put that in your butt, flip the switch, you take all 32 ounces of the coffee up, hold it in there for 12 minutes minimum.
It is stimulating bile production.
I believe it's in your liver.
That's where all of your toxins are stored.
That leak out into your bloodstream, that leak out into your organs, that turn into cancer.
You don't feel caffeinated at all.
It doesn't absorb in your system in the same way.
You have no impact from the caffeine if you drank that much coffee.
But it stimulates bile production.
It hyper detoxifies your body.
It rids all the accumulative toxins that can turn into not just cancer but other diseases.
How many times did he say toxins?
I think I lost track.
I want to note, we have Jen Gunter on the podcast next week and in her new book, Blood, which we'll be talking about, she talks about this menstruation product of sticking CBD into your vagina and she's like, marijuana works for certain mechanisms in certain ways that could possibly be efficacious for pain relief.
But not if you stick it into your vagina.
It's not how it works.
And the same thing is happening here with coffee.
I don't want to look past the fact, though, that enemas do have medical uses.
They're often used before operations or colonoscopies to clean out the bowels.
People with severe constipation sometimes really need them.
This is an anecdote, but when I was 11, I broke my femur, and back then the treatment was extensive rest with no mobility.
So, I was in traction with a rod through my leg for a month and then a full body cast for eight weeks.
And as you can imagine, three months in bed meant that my digestive process was fucked.
So, I relied on enemas as it was the only way for me to go.
And I can say nothing about that experience that was enjoyable, but it was medically necessary.
It's so awful, Derek.
Man, that's awful.
11 years old.
Yeah, that was a year of my life.
Until I walked again, normally.
So, a final thought.
As I was caught up in wellness land for a while, and back in the aughts, I had three colonics over a two-year period, and I understand why people who believe in detoxing are into this.
Every time I left the office, I felt super high for the rest of the day.
And I can't explain the physiology, but I can say you do feel light after you have one.
Now, that said, colonics have the same risk as enemas and this long-standing wellness notion that things are stuck in your colon or intestines simply is not true.
If it was, you'd need to go to the hospital right away because that's how our bowels actually work.
Nutrients are absorbed into your body, and when it gets to your stomach and everything else makes its way out.
So this notion that there are pieces of things just clinging to your intestines or colon is completely fabricated.
Bowel obstruction is real, and this can be caused by adhesions, tumors, strictures, intestinal twists.
There's something called paralytic ileus, where your muscles or nerves aren't working properly, and all of these conditions require immediate medical care.
But if you're not vomiting, if you're not constipated, and if you're not unable to pass gas, and if you're not in severe abdominal pain, then things are probably okay.
And any sort of purported detox is a marketing technique, not a medical necessity.
Now, Derek, I never did a colonic.
That's actually pressurized water, is that right?
And part of the experience is watching the output hose?
Yeah, it is.
There is a show element to it because the facilitator will say things like, looks like you ate this last night.
And it goes off the rails when they talk about everything being stuck in your intestines, which they do as they're coming out.
They're like, oh, look what's coming out.
And that's all just for show and untrue.
I feel like it is my unfortunate duty here as like a TikTok correspondent to report that those output hoses are all over TikTok.
There's no trigger warning.
They're often framed as some sort of validating, like you said, Derek, like, look, oh my God, see, look, told you.
Yeah, and of the three of us here, I probably got the most into organ cleansing in the early 2000s.
I've probably had three, I can't remember, three or four colonics and a huge part of that experience is watching what's coming out of you in that transparent tube at the place I went to here in West LA.
The table or the bed thing that I was situated on was positioned so as to be comfortably watching it, almost like a TV display.
I mean, as comfortably as possible, given the presence of a sizable cold metal nozzle pumping water in and out of my ass.
Wait, it was on a screen?
It's not really a screen.
It's like set up in such a way that the tube is curving You can look at it as part of the machinery.
It's purposely sort of exposed and transparent and it's like right there in front of you in the place I went to.
Imagine the machine has a section with a plastic opening so you can see it being filtered from the machine in and out.
So that's what's going on.
That's awesome.
That's like an early live stream.
Literally.
Yeah, so I can confirm.
Well, first of all, at the end, I'm going to say something about like, what does it mean when we have an industry based around, oh, let me show you what I did, because I think that's a little bit interesting.
But I can confirm that there are disorienting and not unpleasant effects that can come from the enema therapies that I learned when I was into Ayurveda.
The focus there was on the purported cleansing, but also the nourishing qualities of herbs and medicated oils.
The main premise was that the downward motion of the enema was soothing and pacifying.
And for whatever reason, it usually did, you know, I can confirm Derek, it did make me feel light.
I don't know exactly what that means, but also sleepy.
I guess it was some kind of post-enema clarity, or I think it was also mildly traumatic.
I mean, it belongs to that category of strange sensations that I can't really categorize outside of, oh, something shocking and unfamiliar happened to me, and my body's just kind of vibrating a little bit, and it doesn't really understand what happened.
Listeners, meet Happy Bum Co, an Australian company that describes themselves as detox and gut health specialists.
They've been on my radar for a while now, but more recently, I have been on theirs.
Here's Kaya Siri, Happy Bum Co founder, sharing the company's story.
I started the Happy Bum Co because I wanted to help people who were suffering with their gut health issues just like me.
15 years ago, I was sitting in a doctor's office.
Getting the advice that the only thing left for me to possibly do about my constipation was remove 90% of my bowel.
To me, that was life-altering and it was extremely drastic, and I wanted to explore what other options I had first.
I had suffered with constipation.
My bowel actually stopped moving.
I had what's called colonic inertia from the age of about 13.
I tried every laxative, every medication, tons of invasive tests, all to have the doctor say, there's just nothing we can do.
I felt really alone.
I was really embarrassed.
I was always feeling really bloated and tired.
I had skin breakouts.
I felt really depressed and it really stressed me out.
I felt like I had no one to talk to about it and I just felt like it was me and I was all alone with this problem.
I actually started the Happy Bum Code because what saved me with all of my constipation and my gut health issues was the ability to detoxify the body at home myself.
And my enema bag saved my life.
I've been doing enemas daily for the last 15 years ever since I was introduced to them by my colon hydrotherapist.
where I grew up in Seattle. Enemas are so incredible for all facets of health because
it's only once we remove the the aspects that are actually making us sick that we can then
begin to heal. I want to share one thought before we go any further. Last month I made a few videos
on my social media about Happybum, basically asking them for receipts for the claims they're
making and a handful of coffee enema advocates commented saying something to the effect of well
Coffee enemas saved my life.
My response to them was, I think that's great.
I respect folks' lived experiences, and even Kaya, I would never deny the personal story that she just told us.
The problem is, Happybum isn't a person, it's a company.
And what I don't have respect for is companies making incredibly misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the products they're selling.
And in Happybum's case, there is some pretty astonishing claims.
I think we can see how it happens here in this unregulated charisma world of glorified anecdotes.
Like, Kaya has a moving personal story of overcoming horrible digestive issues that did need medical attention early in life, and it sounds like she had a very radical procedure offered to her that she just couldn't imagine
undergoing and maybe it was not a good clinical situation.
And so she finds this solution and it seems to work and at a certain point, it's not enough that it works for her,
but she crosses over some line of confidence into evangelizing and monetizing that thing that she knows worked for her.
And as soon as you do that, you're going to go looking for anything, I think, that validates this pivot from anecdote to prescription to the masses.
It is a lot of personal stories.
And again, beyond Happy Bum, this is something that a lot of wellness companies do, but their marketing specifically includes a lot of testimonials.
And on their socials, they're often crowdsourcing quotes from Happy Bum customers.
I mean, like so much of this stuff, the entire business model would just collapse if everyone understood that the plural of anecdote is not data.
Yeah, but the layperson would also have to find the discourse of research just as compelling as personal narrative.
And I feel like that's the core dilemma of science communications.
I think it really is, and why even research it further if the influence on your For You page is so wildly confident in the claims they're making?
It worked for them, and then they're going to provide you with a discount code.
And speaking of confident claims, Happybum has a lot of them.
According to Happybum across their Instagram and website, some of the benefits of coffee enemas include eliminates heavy metals and mold, eliminates excess estrogen, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which means it'll calm you down, detoxes the liver, but first they make sure you know that drinking caffeine will be a burden to the liver.
They detox and purify the blood.
They eliminate parasites and candida.
It has been over a year since my parasite cleanse TikTok episode and apparently the worms are still worming.
Yeah, worms never sleep.
But hold on a second.
Caffeine through the mouth is not so good for you, but the other way is super healthy?
Yeah, yeah.
I feel like coffee is so split in the wellness world and it really just depends on what you're selling.
And like I've said in episodes before, a lot of it, it's just folks, they're just selling confidence.
And here's where things take a turn.
There is a very heavy and obvious emphasis between Happy Bum's social media and their website on garrison therapy and the vital role that coffee enemas have in it.
On their Instagram, Happy Bum has an entire highlight dedicated to garrison, which is slide after slide after slide of information on garrison therapy overlaid on Happy Bum promotional photos.
It also includes slides of them point-blank asking their followers if they have cancer and to contact them if they're using coffee enemas for cancer.
On their website, there's an entire page on their FAQ dedicated to garrison therapy and, again, the vital role that coffee enemas play.
To me, this is a pretty disgusting way of getting around making direct claims, which would likely get them into legal hot water.
So instead of saying we, so instead they're like, we sell coffee enemas and then separately, hey, did you know that coffee enemas are vital in this cancer therapy?
Without making this entirely about me, here's a quick series of events that led to a coffee enema company blocking me on Instagram and TikTok.
So 2024 is off to a great and appropriate start.
Using a video of Happy Bum's founder saying that detoxing isn't mainstream and it should be, I shared some thoughts on what I called capitalist detoxing, this idea that detoxing is something that you have to buy.
Because one could argue that detoxing is so mainstream, most folks' bodies are doing it already, all the time.
Are there things that you can do to support the organs and systems?
Of course, but they're definitely not as sexy to sell.
And happy bum, between their cutesy name and conventionally attractive models carrying enema bags around someone's backyard promo material, they are definitely looking to up the sexiness of the practice.
Someone must have sent my video to them because a few hours after posting it, they started commenting.
It seems Happy Bum's bum wasn't so happy anymore.
In fact, I imagine I was being a straight-up pain in the ass for them.
Oh, Happy Bum was chapped.
How dare I ask them to substantiate any of the claims they were making, right?
Yeah.
Over a handful of comments, Happy Bum made it clear that they would be adding evidence, evidence with air quotes, to their website.
Seeing as you asked.
I asked so nicely and they're like, definitely.
We definitely totally had that evidence.
They also wanted to make sure that I knew that they were both FDA and TGA approved.
TGA is the Therapeutic Goods Administration, which is Australia's government authority responsible for evaluating, assessing and monitoring products that are defined as therapeutic goods.
Yeah, I noticed on their website that it's FDA approved, so of course I had to search the FDA's database and their orange and purple books, which are all different ways of getting FDA approval, and I couldn't find them.
Now, that said, getting FDA approval for an enema kit isn't exactly hard.
I've seen others.
All that really means is that their device is approved for use as an enema and is up to the standards necessary for using an enema.
The bag is good.
The bag's okay.
Yeah, the bag works.
Our contention here isn't the validity of the device, it's their medical claims that are the real issue, not whether or not you can actually use it as an enema.
So them putting FDA and apparently TGA approval, I'm just learning about that, on their site is totally fine, but it shouldn't serve as a distraction from the fact that coffee enemas have never been clinically verified for treating or curing anything.
And as you said, Mallory, the anecdotes are important, but they are making medical claims.
And you can't say the device works in this realm, but you're actually making a medical claim about something it's being used for.
And that's the sleight of hand that it appears that they're trying to do here.
Yeah, you know, we've got our TGFI rating that says... TGIF?
We've got our TJIF rating.
If you take this supplement on a Friday, the capsule really is an approved capsule that contains the stuff inside.
We can't make any claims about whether or not those work, or we will make claims, but we can't prove anything.
It's total sleight of hand.
Saying it's been approved as a functional enema, of course, is not the same as saying the FDA approves the reasoning or the claims for using it, right?
Totally.
And I actually looked into the TGA, what they were approved for.
It was super easy to find.
It appears the, you know, according to their Instagram bio, the premium coffee enema kit company has their enema bags approved for one only, one single intended purpose.
And again, for the second time in this episode, I can't believe I'm about to say this out loud, but the one single intended purpose is to gently wash the colon with purified water via the rectum for personal use.
That's it.
So if you're thinking, oh, so they're only selling coffee above and beyond the intended purpose, listeners, I've been keeping something from you.
You see, in addition to selling coffee enema kits, Happy Bum also sells products for turmeric enemas, alkalizing greens enemas, pre and probiotic enemas, and hormone blend something enemas.
These organic blends in a Happy Bum bulb are there to quote, support and revitalize post enema detox.
Yeah.
They're food.
It's food.
So yeah, so the idea is that you flush out the old bad stuff and then you use the smaller bulb-sized applicator to renovate your insides with the good new stuff, which is very nutritious.
I mean, it's brilliant.
They're upselling you with variety.
There's a whole menu, right?
So you don't get bored.
There's a whole menu and they sell them.
And then there's another video that they don't sell it, but there's another video that suggests, why not put celery juice in an enema?
Like they're just, why not?
Seems legit.
Sure.
And actually they also do sell a magnesium oxide supplement for $70 and it's meant to, according to their website, soften your stools and increase colon cleansing from the enema.
So You know, again, it reminds me of the parasite cleanse products we covered.
There's the pre-detox, the detox, the post-detox, and then you rinse and repeat into infinity.
And then there's the mastermind enema course that you can take, right?
You can become another enema kit seller, totally.
The marketing copy for those magnesium oxide supplements says, quote, take four capsules with a tall glass of filtered water before bed.
If you do not achieve three to five bowel movements the next day, increase by one capsule each night until you achieve three to five bowel movements, which.
Absolutely sounds like a medical claim.
They also state, if you want to increase the amount of waste and toxicity that comes through with your enema, this is the trick.
Washes away old compaction so you feel brand new.
To which I say, prove it.
Well, wait though, because they'll probably send you photos and reels and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
I'm still getting over from the parasite cleanse TikTok episode where I had to look at so many no-trigger-warning parasite photos.
Honestly, I wasn't convinced with Happybum that they'd follow through on updating their website with studies, but the good news is that they stuck to their word.
Bad news is that what they added, in my opinion, actually makes them look worse because you see a few examples of what they consider resources worth adding were a link to a PDF from a supplement company, various YouTube videos, including one between a chiropractor and a celebrity fitness expert.
Awesome.
A 1920s study done on rats.
Perfect.
A blog post from a yoga studio.
Science!
Science!
And an overall incredibly heavy emphasis on garrison therapy and the Garrison Institute.
So, Derek, I had sent you these resources.
What do you think?
Are you convinced?
They say that enemas have been cited in the medical literature for over 150 years.
That's a quote.
Completely irrelevant to the point that they follow with.
Well, using leeches for bloodletting was surely cited in medical literature for like 150 years before that, right?
Are you suggesting a leech enema now, Julian?
Should I not announce that yet?
Is that proprietary?
It's getting a bit S&M, right?
It reminds me of, like, I've been posting about Andrew Huberman lately, and I plan on doing some follow-up stuff.
But, like, first off, what they're doing is they're posting things on their website knowing that people are not going to actually click through and read it.
Because that's a point that I made on social media recently, was that people are like, Huberman always cites his evidence.
And my reply is, Did you go read the studies?
Because if you actually read what is written there, it contradicts what he's actually saying.
I see this all the time in wellness spaces.
And yes, Huberman's there and Happy Bum is doing the same thing.
They cite a University of Minnesota study.
That I could find only on colonic sites and on influencer pages.
When I searched PubMed, nothing.
Couldn't find it at all.
Their other references are all to Gerson therapy claims, which as I said earlier, have never held up to scrutiny.
So like a lot of influencers, they cite a Merck manual claim that supports coffee enemas, but I actually found Jen Gunter again in 2018 showing on Twitter that they absolutely are not supported by Merck.
And this is how the companies try to fool people.
As I just said, long marketing pages jam-packed with photos, videos, claims that seem to be supported.
As soon as you start diving in, it all falls apart.
So like I said earlier, enemas have therapeutic and medical uses, so the fact that they've been cited in medical literature shouldn't surprise us.
Of course, they are beneficial.
That fact doesn't support Happy Bum's claims about enemas helping Chronic disease, depression, anxiety, fatigue, hormonal imbalances.
Again, here's Dr. Gunter.
She specifically cites that term in her new book as a red flag because it's a made-up wellness term to sell products.
So, sorry Mallory, I am not convinced.
Well, darn.
I've got a call out for listeners.
Anybody who can write a couple of bars of rap in which Huberman and Happy Bum are kind of balanced and synthesized?
Awesome.
Send it to us.
No, I don't want to hear people's raps.
No, I don't want it either. No, no. In addition to this brand new webpage, Happybum also updated
the disclaimer at the bottom of their website.
Now, I personally find it suspicious when a company categorizes the products on their website by symptoms, like chronic disease, constipation and IBS, anxiety and depression, hormonal imbalances, fatigue, and burnout, while also having that sneaky, we do not claim to treat, cure, or prevent any disease using these products disclaimer.
That's in very small writing at the bottom of their website.
But in big bold font on their homepage?
Well, that says whatever you're suffering from.
Our two-step detox approach can help.
You could fit gallons of coffee in the gap between what they claim versus what their disclaimer says.
Yeah and that's literally the old snake oil cure for what ails you slogan but using different words.
I remember the first time I came across a treatment website online where it was everything was listed alphabetically all of the things that this was supposedly good for.
So you know it starts with it starts with acne and you know ends with like whatever starts with the Z and it's like really all of these things that's super impressive.
Yeah, and I mean, HappyVom is obviously far from being the only wellness company that has this claim disclaimer discrepancy.
It's the exact same as when we talked about the Healy, when we talked about those TikTok Parasite Cleanses, and even when we talked about Light Language TikTok, because those healers had those same disclaimers on their website.
Happy Bum just so happens to be another phenomenal case study for this.
A follower of mine actually messaged Happy Bum and asked what the proven cures of coffee enemas are, and all of the sudden Happy Bum was very shy in offering up information.
They said they don't claim to cure anything and directed them to the Garrison Institute for more information.
When they inquired further, Happy Bum blocked them.
It took me less than five minutes on Happy Bum's Instagram to find posts that said, and I'm quoting these directly, how coffee enemas cured my constipation, how coffee enemas healed my leaky gut, SIBO, and constipation, how I cured hormonal acne with coffee enemas, and lastly, how turmeric enemas helped my knee surgery recovery.
So Derek, maybe when you broke your femur, you would have recovered faster if you just put turmeric up your ass.
That's what I get for going to an orthopedic surgeon instead of a naturopath.
I'll learn.
If only Happybum was around earlier.
I think companies like this really bank on folks not seeing those disclaimers in the sales funnel, but even then, by the time you make it to the bottom of their webpage, like if you even make it there, you've likely been confronted with enough convincing claims and your credit card is out and ready.
So listeners, if you've got your wellness company claim bingo card out, Happy Bum so far has stamped cancer, chronic illness, and parasites and mold to name a few, but there's two other major ones before we can yell bingo.
First, fertility.
In a podcast I listened to with Kaia, the founder, she suggests that the detoxing from coffee enemas played a role in her three, quote, beautiful pregnancies.
Do you know if you still deal with PCOS?
Are you comfortable sharing that?
I was diagnosed with so many different things as a teenager.
You know, we ran every test and did every blood and it was so doom and gloom there.
But my diet was horrible.
I was totally overloaded with chemical toxicity from so many different sources, mold and emotional health.
And, you know, I was on over-the-counter birth control, taking lots of different over-the-counters.
You know, I was on tons of antibiotics as a kid.
I mean, there was every piece of the puzzle that can give you a lot of different symptoms there. When I started doing
coffee enemas, I had been told when I was a teenager that I would have to be on hormonal replacement
therapy and it probably wouldn't happen. And that was really hard to be told as a teenager
as well. I'd always wanted to be a mom.
I started to realize that my hormones were shifting because of the period pain and the
breast tenderness. And then I've had three of the most beautiful pregnancies and I attribute that so
And again, I work with so many women, and a lot of my very, you know, my very natural coffee-enema moms, you know, my crunchy moms, have all had very similar Very beautiful pregnancies, not a lot of morning sickness, and I attribute a lot of that to the detoxification before I fell pregnant.
Happy Bum's website has a pregnancy section that features a pregnancy bundle, water enema kit, and natural constipation and bloating relief for $150.
Another suggested product at the bottom of that page is Women's Hormone Balance Bundle Premium Coffee Enema Kit Plus Hormone Support and that's $210.
This product's key benefit is to relieve the symptoms of hormone imbalances and you can absolutely bet that infertility is listed as a symptom.
I want to flag that in the Happy Bum origin story, we ran off the top.
In the video, listeners, you wouldn't have seen this, but Kaia is seen with her feet entangled with the feet of, I guess, her partner.
And the camera is lovingly panning down over the enema bags hanging on the shower wall to show them with their legs up the wall together.
They're snuggled up and giggling.
And at that point in the voiceover, she's talking about founding the company to bring the uncomfortable issues of bowel health to light.
And the scene suggests just that, that enemas can bring couples closer together, remove shameful obstructions between them, foster intimacy, and encourage the exchange of sweet nothings.
There is definitely something more going on than ass flushing here for sure.
And I'm not surprised that the wellness content leads on to fertility.
Yeah, one final time too.
That's a really good point.
But I want to point out Jen Gunter.
We'll probably talk about this next week.
And Cat Bohannon made the same point when I talked to her last week.
Is that it is so awesome if you are a woman and you have an easy pregnancy, if you go through it and it's a beautiful process that's wonderful.
That is not the experience for most women, or at least a lot of women.
They do not have wonderful pregnancies.
And so when you hear someone like that who genetically for whatever reason had a good one, it puts a lot of shame on women who haven't.
And the fact that you're trying to say, oh, if you just do this thing, you could have had that, it's really kind of gross.
And that is something I'm definitely going to be drilling down on with Dr. Gunter next week.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
It's like the pregnancy version of the prosperity gospel, right?
Yeah, exactly.
That's good.
That's right.
It's pretty gross, but now we're going to go to the second claim, which I think is a bit, which is also very gross.
I'm so sorry.
It's the one that we always kind of wait for companies to ultimately make.
It's at the center of the bingo card and that is autism.
Oh no, we have a winner!
We do, and this one is heartbreaking and actually really caught me off guard.
I truly was not expecting it, but Mary Darnell, who goes by HealingCaveLady on Instagram and has over 61,000 followers, posted a reel about helping autism with detox and diet, specifically referencing her son.
And this reel was accompanied by a number of Instagram story slides where she tagged none other than Happy Bum, discount code included.
These stories are now saved under a highlight on her profile titled Autism, and here's a snippet from those stories.
Animals are for a lot more than just constipation.
When my son was young, he was constipated, but we were also trying to help flush toxins quicker because when he was four and all the madness was going on, he was just chock full of heavy metals and toxins.
We pass our toxins on to our children and that's why I always tell people like if you're thinking about getting pregnant like learn from my mistake and detox before you get pregnant because you cannot detox while you're pregnant and all of those store toxins go to baby.
Quincy and Stassi are my healthiest children because I detox like crazy before I had them.
And if you look at his skin, his eye whites, no cradle crap, no baby acne.
Heartbreaking, but also like white hot rage here because, you know, Mary is describing giving enemas to her, if you look a little bit more deeply into her content, she's describing giving enemas to her nonverbal autistic child.
Which is already a huge red flag.
But then she starts waving that red flag around with, you know, this clear sense of anxiety and frustration when at one point she describes that, you know, he's four years old and she has to drag words out of him.
And then I dug a little bit farther and saw things get even more grim as you can watch her demonstrate how she tightly swaddled her toddler into a restraint position to administer enemas.
And she uses a big teddy bear for a model and shows how to use a fitted sheet and quote, pulls it as tight as I can, unquote, to restrain their arms and then roll the child onto their side to watch Barney on the iPad.
It's really dystopic.
Yeah.
I mean, here's where the, that's going to require a lot of therapy quip goes, except that this poor violated kid may not be able to verbalize what happened.
It is heartbreaking and obscene.
And I just have to say, as a parent, like the most awful thing, the most awful experience I've had as a parent is having to hold my toddler who could not comprehend what was being done to her down while she was getting an IV inserted.
While she was being given injections, various medical procedures where she was just terrified out of her mind.
And the sense that in order to save her life, I have to traumatize her.
And I have to say, it's going to be okay.
And we're doing this against your will.
So to think of them, this extra piece of what you're describing, Matthew, just awful.
Well, especially if it's avoidable.
Yeah.
Or if it's nonsense.
I mean, yeah, and with regard to being pre-verbal, my understanding is that the real therapeutic threshold is that the memory will be more or less accessible according to developmental stage.
And like, as we know, Julian, from looking at, you know, how much of the wellness world wallows in a kind of, you know, pseudo theory of trauma, kids raised in conspirituality homes are gonna be very vulnerable to elaborated, recovered, scrambled memory.
And if we just put aside how closely this mirrors the medical nightmares of child abuse at the heart of QAnon fantasies, this is also like a big slice of the generally ableist neurotypical attitude towards the neurodivergent child.
Where whatever the child is doing that's non-normative is seen as a poison, an invasion, not really them.
It's something that has to be radically changed up to the point where you would start messing around with enemas and you have to tie them up to do it.
Yeah, it's akin to exorcism, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Then the idea that the polluted child has to be exorcised is not a minority attitude.
I mean, it's so well accepted that we've run this clip before where RFK Jr.
is gaining followers by going on stage and saying that he can tell by looking who the unvaccinated children are.
And then he gives a caricature of the autistic child as having no light or love in their eyes.
Which of course is this horrible projection that of course will drive people like Mary to take very aggressive and invasive measures and to confuse this, you know, sort of the idea that we pass toxins along materially to our children with something that's much more obvious in terms of a toxic psychology that can be handed down through the generations.
Yeah, and bringing it back to Mary, between the tagging and the discount code, I can speculate that Mary is a Happy Bum affiliate.
Happy Bum absolutely does have an affiliate program.
It's on their website.
Happy Bum reposted Mary's Instagram story and added, quote, Thank you for sharing, Healing Cave Lady, how she used on her son with autism."
Happybum also shared that detox and diet for autism reel I mentioned, adding, quote, "'So many moms have shared stories like this.
Detoxing and enemas have helped.'"
End quote.
Mary ended up commenting on my happy bum video saying, God bless happy bum and every other company that helps people like me who had chronic illness.
When I re-shared this, tagged happy bum and asked if their affiliates were allowed to make claims like this, happy bum finally blocked me.
So Mallory, do you have any therapies you're going to try for flushing out that blockage?
Oh, oat milk lattes with extra seed oils, please and thank you.
We're at the tail end.
It's always great, Mallory, to have you on to espresso yourself.
You always bring the crema to the top.
And I'm not going to bung up this fine reporting with all of the compacted thoughts I have about Enema's late capitalism and a whole century of psychoanalysis devoted to figuring out body fascism.
I'm going to let that percolate.
My next bonus episode will be on Patreon.
On that, I'll just say for now, I think it makes a lot of sense that enemas are an increasing fascination in a culture that knows how filthy it's making the world, how full of shit and paralyzed it feels, and how much it craves even tiny amounts of control over something, even if it's as small as a sphincter.
You know, but I'll also, you know, add some positive speculations in this.
It might not be all so grim.
I mean, we could consider that taking the premier drug of grindset productivity, coffee, and mixing it with our waste products, we might be putting out an unconscious call for help.
We might be saying, like, enough with this caffeinated life.
I just need to lose my shit for a while.
I think what ultimately grinds my coffee beans the most is how, and it's not just Happy Bum, how all these wellness companies can seemingly make whatever claims they want on social, even on their website, and then this disclaimer at the bottom of their site acts as some sort of get-of-jail-free card.
I feel the same about the influencers who make what are obviously medical claims, but use the, well, this is just what I'm doing, I'm just sharing my own story, loophole.
And I think this is why it's so important for there to be folks debunking in the same space that all of these unsubstantiated claims are being made.
And for me personally, my goal for my content as someone who is not a scientist or a doctor is to just get folks to start asking questions.
So like, is it suspicious that the company who sells detoxes is trying to convince you that you should be detoxing?
Yeah, it kinda is.
And is it suspicious when a company makes bold medical claims without compelling evidence to support these claims?
Yeah, it kinda is.
And so, you know, this episode doesn't exist to completely roast a coffee enema company.
It exists as yet.
Another unfortunate reminder of the money in wellness' manipulative marketing, which often banks on folks who are looking for, sometimes desperate for, healing.
And all we can do is talk about it, poke holes in their marketing, seek and advocate for accountability, and keep asking questions instead of taking company claims at face value.
Now, if you'll excuse me, after all of this, I need a mouth coffee.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Conspiratuality.
Please join us here next week when we welcome Dr. Jen Gunter to talk about how she combats health misinformation online and in real life, as well as to discuss her excellent new book, Blood, the Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation.
