Spas and wellness gurus are still peddling ideas that science left behind, as The Times’ Susan d’Arcy reports in her rundown of the industry’s most stubborn myths. Here are nine worth retiring.
1. 10,000 steps or nothing. The magic number began as a 1960s Japanese marketing campaign to sell pedometers. A 2025 review of 57 studies, published in The Lancet Public Health, suggests 7,000 steps is plenty, and a short walk after meals helps blunt glucose spikes.
2. Chemical-free skincare is safer. No such product exists. “Everything is a chemical: either natural or synthetic,” d’Arcy notes. The Royal Society of Chemistry once offered £1 million to anyone who could make a 100 percent chemical-free product.
3. Your digestion needs a break. The NHS says detoxes are unnecessary for healthy people, since that’s what the liver and kidneys are for. By detox-clinic logic, your lungs deserve a break too.
4. A calorie is a calorie. Cambridge geneticist Professor Giles Yeo debunked this in Why Calories Don’t Count. The body absorbs only about 70 of every 100 protein calories, versus at least 90 percent of carbohydrate calories.
5. Skipping breakfast is best. What you eat matters more than when. A 12- to 14-hour overnight gap may give the gut lining time for “housekeeping,” but older women benefit from eating protein within an hour of waking.
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6. Express facials work. Quick facials usually skip the massage, which relieves jaw tension and boosts circulation, the real source of that glow.
7. Healers always deliver. D’Arcy says spiritual healers have ended sessions when she wouldn’t share personal details. One called her “a rock.”
8. A good sweat purges fat and toxins. Saunas may help heart health, but sweating won’t melt fat or flush toxins.
9. Potatoes, pasta and bread are the enemy. Chilling cooked potatoes or pasta overnight, then reheating, converts at least half their digestible starch into resistant starch, which feeds the gut microbiome. Freezing bread does the same.
