Cold coffee where the sun don’t shine

Good morning. How’d you like your coffee? Long black? Flat white? Up your ass? No, this is not the greeting of a fatally hungover barista, but January health advice from that highly respected lifestyle website, Goop, writes Suzanne Harrington.

You know, the one that advocates steaming your vagina like it’s a bag of kale, before shoving a jade egg inside for reasons that have never been made entirely clear.

Now, having successfully annoyed your fanny, it’s time to infuriate your rectum.

Coffee enemas, said no medical professionals ever, will ‘supercharge’ your ‘detox’. Never mind that we have livers and colons designed exactly for this — go right ahead and squirt some coffee inside yourselves, people.

Not hot coffee, or your ass will melt; and not instant coffee either. Nescafe or Maxwell House will not do.

No, Goop says that we should make ourselves a nice pot of proper coffee, then stick it where the sun don’t shine, using one of their $135 enema kits.

After it has cooled down, obviously.

The January Detox is as embedded as December excess in our ridiculous binge-purge culture.

But unless you are trying to come off heroin or a daily vat of vodka, the word ‘detox’ is a misnomer. It’s a lazy word used to sell stuff to the gullible, which these days, is all of us.

All you need to do to ‘detox’ yourself is to eat proper food and drink water - but where’s the money in that?

I speak as someone who has — in the interests of journalistic research, obvs — spent an afternoon with a distilled water hose up my ass, as a nice lady in a faux-medical white coat pumped out all the horrors of the world, while soothingly telling me that I would soon be ‘detoxed’.

Certainly I was quite a bit lighter at the end of what was a surreally awkward episode, but ‘detoxed’?

A furious doctor wrote in the Guardian how, “There are no toxins to be cleansed or irrigated. That is fake medicine.”

Yet if individuals wish to hose out their colons, why not? If people think something is good for them, doesn’t that mean that it is generally a positive thing, on a psychological level if

nothing else?

“No!” screams the entire medical profession. “No, no, no, no, no!”

At worst — sepsis, perforation, infection, imbalance of gut flora, pain and vomiting. At best — flushing your cash away along with everything else.

As a punter, I categorise myself as one of the worried well.

By always being ever slightly concerned about my health, I remain both horrifically healthy yet open to all kinds of alternative witchcraft; such is my prodigious vitamin intake that I have the most expensive urine this side of a racing stables, I studiously avoid actual toxins like booze, fags and asbestos, and avoid stress by hiding in my room.

But I am never, ever going to pour my morning coffee anywhere other than through the hole on the front of my face.