Wendy Myers is making a systems argument: the gut is the foundation, minerals are the infrastructure, and when both are compromised, your body loses its ability to eliminate what's accumulating. Coffee enemas enter as a liver-stimulating intervention — a way to accelerate toxin clearance when your natural elimination pathways are sluggish. The headline figure is a 600% increase in glutathione production. If that number holds, it matters. Glutathione is the body's master antioxidant — synthesized in the liver, responsible for binding heavy metals, neutralizing oxidative damage, and tagging cellular debris for removal.
I want to be careful here, because the 600% claim deserves scrutiny. This figure traces back largely to early Gerson therapy research — a cancer treatment protocol from the 1940s that used coffee enemas as a cornerstone of detoxification. The mechanism is plausible: coffee absorbed through the colon wall reaches the portal vein, which feeds directly into the liver, stimulating bile flow and glutathione S-transferase activity. But the evidence base is thin. We're not talking about double-blind trials. We're talking about observational work and practitioner reports.
What does hold up: the liver is central to detoxification, glutathione production declines with age and toxic load, and the gut-liver axis is a legitimate and well-studied pathway. The science around gut permeability is solid — when the gut lining is compromised, endotoxins leak into systemic circulation, creating chronic low-grade inflammation that undermines everything from immune function to cognitive clarity.
Functional medicine practitioners like Myers broadly support coffee enemas as a periodic tool. Mainstream gastroenterologists are skeptical — and for legitimate reasons. The risks are real: electrolyte depletion, bowel perforation, infection, and exactly the mineral loss Myers herself warns against. Her caution about moderation is the right instinct. This is not a daily practice. It's a tool with a narrow window of appropriate use, and the warnings she includes should be taken as seriously as the claims.
If you're going to explore this, start with the fundamentals first. Gut health, mineral status, hydration. Myers is right that magnesium is critically undervalued — most people are deficient, and that deficiency cascades through hundreds of metabolic processes before you even get to detoxification. Fix the substrate before you reach for the intervention. And if you do try coffee enemas, the moderation principle applies. Once a week during an active cleanse protocol, not daily.
Here's what I find genuinely interesting: the mechanism Myers describes — stimulating the liver to release stored toxins, upregulating glutathione — is a close cousin to what we see with sauna (read the full breakdown) research. Regular heat exposure also increases heat shock proteins, which refold or clear misfolded proteins. It reduces systemic inflammation, which protects gut integrity. It mobilizes toxins stored in adipose tissue into circulation, where they can be processed and eliminated. The sauna isn't working through the same pathway as a coffee enema, but both are nudging the same underlying system: your body's natural cellular housekeeping. One uses heat. One uses a very different delivery mechanism. The goal is identical — reduce accumulated burden, restore baseline function.
The body is remarkably good at cleaning itself up. The question is whether we're giving it the substrate, the rest, and the environmental conditions to do the work — without constantly adding to the burden faster than it can clear.