The Legendary Cayenne Pepper Diet: The Recipe Explains the Remedy

Stanley Burroughs’s old-school formula for the cayenne pepper diet, also known as “The Master Cleanse,” is hardly a secret.  You will find the recipe in its exact proportions with just a couple of mouse-clicks, or with one more mouse-click you may order a pre-mixed cayenne pepper kit.  Although the majority of traditional physicians and nutritionists continue insisting the cayenne pepper diet is more snake oil than solid science, a growing body of research into the medicinal properties of each ingredient supports all the extravagant claims about the diet’s amazing powers.  Each ingredient contributes to cleansing and healing, and the combination promotes not only weight loss but also pain relief, regularity, and increased energy.  Literally thousands of websites testify to the strange formula’s effectiveness, and a little careful examination begins explaining why the potion works so well.

• filtered water—Reliable studies demonstrate how nearly three-quarters of all Americans are chronically dehydrated.  Consequently the diet’s emphasis on proper hydration contributes a great deal to people’s feelings of increased vitality and well-being.  Although cayenne pepper dieters must exercise as much caution about over-hydrating as about failing to consume enough water, the regime typically restores the body’s proper fluid content and therefore adjusts its “pH.”  “Filtered” stands-out as the most important word in this phrase, because mixing-up the brew with regular tap water seriously will limit its benefits.  Urban tap water is seriously contaminated with carcinogens, prescription medications, bacteria and viruses, and a frightening array of hazardous wastes.  Simply investing in a faucet-mounted water filter, however, will remove more than 99% of the contaminants, including a lot of the chlorine and fluoride.

• fresh lemon juice—You probably have seen the most common lemon-power demonstration on television or the internet: Take two slices of apple and expose them to the air.  Dip one in lemon juice and leave the other one au naturale.  The lemon-dipped slice will retain its natural apple color for a long-long time, while the fully exposed slice will turn brown within minutes, because it oxidizes.  Although the lemon is far from nature’s antioxidant league-leader, its properties are well-documented, and it stands-out as the most affordable and easily squeezed among the finer antioxidants.  If the lemon has deterred you from a cayenne pepper cleansing, though, you may capitalize on recent studies which indicate the tomato is almost as antioxidant rich as the lemon, and there is little doubt that Burroughs’s brew would taste much-much better if it were tomato-flavored instead of lemon.

• cayenne pepper—The recipe’s leading active ingredient, cayenne pepper contains high concentrations of capsaicin—widely used as a pain reliever and now frequently added to diet supplements because it aids digestion.  In the detox mix, capsaicin both increases the volume of digestive fluids and wards-off bacterial infections which frequently cause diarrhea.  Even more importantly, genuinely reliable research indicates capsaicin can kill several kinds of cancer cells and aids in the treatment of emphysema and other lung diseases by thinning mucous.

• laxative tea—Of course, the word “laxative” here tells almost all the detox story, but tea matters, too.  Lots of beverages stimulate peristalsis and promote bowel action, but tea brings two added benefits to the mix: tannins in tea soothe the stomach, and tea acts as a diuretic so that the body can eliminate toxins through urine as productively as it excretes potentially toxic metabolic wastes in feces.

• grade b organic maple syrup—No, maple does not exactly complement lemon and pepper, but maple syrup naturally sweetens the cayenne pepper mix’s otherwise tongue-twisting spicy-tangy tartness, and it adds vital nutrients. Although Mrs. Butterworth happily would participate in your cleansing, organic maple syrup contains no added sugar or high fructose corn syrup, and it has not undergone so much cooking and processing that it has lost its vitamins and minerals.  Because the carbohydrates in organic syrup are relatively complex, they break-down slowly, delivering energy more consistently over time.