The nice folks at NPR have done us all a favor and taken some used Kinoki foot pads to be tested to see if they’d drawn anything out of a guinea pig reporter’s body. Guess what? They didn’t.

Reporter Sarah Varney bought some Kinoki foot pads and wore them to bed. She also subjected her husband to the (alleged) detox treatment. In the morning, they both awoke to the stinky brown mess that the advertisement had promised. Not convinced that the brown stuff had actually come from their bodies, our hero took the foot pads to a lab and had them analyzed and compared with unused pads.

“Compared to the blank that’s almost identical,” said the scientists. “It looks like three of the same sample, basically.”

A doctor from UC Berkeley confirms the scam diagnoses. Your body already eliminates “metabolic waste” and “toxins” through, um, other means…

“For many hundreds of thousands of years we’ve been successfully eliminating them through the usual means, which is urine and feces, and there has been no demonstrated need to accelerate that.”

So what is all that gunk in the pad? We’re not really sure, but it shows up if you hold the pad over a pot of boiling water. Who knew steam had “metabolic waste”?

Japanese Foot Pad Is Latest Health Fad [NPR]

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