More proof that influencers are full of crap.
Dutch supermodel Doutzen Kroes’ YouTube channel may only be four months old, but the former Victoria’s Secret stunner is already getting heat for promoting a pseudoscientific “liver cleanse” in which she claims she passed “tiny green stones that looked like vegetables” during 10 trips to the bathroom.
But the so-called cleanse is utter “nonsense,” says Dr. David Bernstein, chief of hepatology at Northwell Health. “There’s no such thing as a liver cleanse. It’s people trying to sell things. It doesn’t exist.”
Most likely, those tiny green stones were nothing more than, you guessed it: “Little balls of stool,” Bernstein says. “Like rabbit poop. When you eat and drink like a rabbit, you poop — like a rabbit.”
The 35-year-old mother of two based the exercise off “The Amazing Liver & Gallbladder Flush” by Andreas Moritz, a self-described “medical intuitive” and practitioner of Ayurveda — who died in 2012.
“If you want to achieve outer beauty, you must develop inner beauty first,” Kroes says early in the video. “Wise words by Andreas Moritz.”
In her video, Kroes details the seven-day process, which involves eating a vegan diet for five days, drinking lots of apple juice, a short fast, drinking lots of Epsom salt and water, then drinking a grapefruit and oil mix, and then boom: “It’s party time, the stones come out,” Kroes says.
Kroes complains of headaches during the process, which, she believes, are “toxins leaving her body” but in reality are just “symptoms of dehydration and hunger,” says Bernstein.
“From a medical perspective, there’s no rationale or explanation for what they are describing at all,” Bernstein says. “Stones don’t cause chronic liver disease.”
And, he adds, “those large stones wouldn’t pass out of the gallbladder, if they did pass, it would be in the stool.”
YouTube commenters are also calling out Kroes’ cleanse.
“These things are not only pseudoscience but they’re also harmful to the body. Please, for your own health stop following these fad diets and cleanses that are not supported by evidence and can in fact be BAD for you!,” user Wonderwall wrote.
“It’s time for a social-media cleanse,” wrote user Recco.
“The healthy body has kidneys, a liver, skin, even lungs that are detoxifying as we speak, our body is capable of getting rid of unwanted stuff by itself. Whole detox industry is a scam,” added Sapphire N M.
The Post has reached out to Kroes for comment on the criticism, and will update this story if she responds.
When it was all over, Kroes says she felt energetic and “so clean.” The cleanse also involved two high colonics in a week, another non-medical procedure that the Mayo Clinic says is “unnecessary” and Bernstein says should only be done “with extreme caution,” if ever.
Bernstein says that some of the things Kroes did during the week, like drinking a lot of fluids and adhering to a vegan diet, do help the liver, which could explain her increased energy and why she was feeling better.
“All the things you can do to improve your body and become a better version of yourself,” Kroes says in the video. “That’s why I’m doing this.”