Detoxifying

January 12, 2009 |

An experiment carried out by NPR (National Public Radio) tested the Kinoki foot pads on a reporter’s body to see if the pads do draw out toxins.

Reporter Sarah Varney bought some Kinoki foot pads and wore them to bed. She also had her husband try them out. In the morning, they both awoke to the brown mess that the advertisement had promised. They took the foot pads to a lab to have them analyzed and compared with unused pads.

The results? The gunk is almost identical to an unused pad but would show up if you hold the pad over a pot of boiling water.

So, are these foot pads totally useless? According to Dr. Mercola’s interview with Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt, who is a pioneer in natural medicine, and founder and president of the American Academy of Neural Therapy, this is what Dr. Klinghardt said:

” I came in contact with the foot pads about ten years ago through a Swiss-based company that was marketing the first foot pad in Europe. The company is called Seguin, and they’re marketing the traditional Japanese foot pad. It’s been out for over 100 years; the Japanese are using fermented bamboo vinegar, Now, what struck me at the time is that this bamboo juice had to be fermented for nine years before it was used.

We tried other foot pads, and there was clearly an effect similar to acupuncture, where people’s energetic systems improved.

I did not see any significant triggering of detoxification- we just saw improvements in the autonomic nervous system, depending on where you put the foot pad.

Typically, by putting it on the soles of the feet, there is, in acupuncture, a relationship to the kidney meridian. And we did find that an improvement in urine, and in the organic acids. The kidneys bind toxins to organic acids, and the more organic acids come out, the more effective the kidneys are working.

And we clearly saw an improvement with that. So, the benefit is not really relating to heavy metals, but more to the carbon-based toxins.

Then several other companies came out with different concoctions of things that they put in a footpad — that were not fermented for 9 years — other sorts of more exotic things, and they made all sorts of claims…

I simply use my muscle testing in my autonomic response testing system, and none of the [commercial] pads have held up. Some of them looked promising, but none of them held up and have become part of my approach. I don’t want to say that all of them are bad or worthless, but the ones I tested certainly didn’t hold their promise.

There’s always an initial placebo effect when you do something like this.

Certainly I can say that bamboo vinegar in the original pads had clear benefits that we could also biochemically demonstrate, but I think there is a lot of questionable science out there with that, so I have stopped using them.”

Source: Consumerist, 19 August 2008; Mercola, 14 October 2008