Almighty Cleanse with Danny Vierra

It looks like we’re in deep doo-doo again! Most people blissfully ignore whatever obsession happens to be gripping the “alternative health” community at any given moment. But make no mistake: clean colons are a hot, hip, and happening item right now, with countless people convinced that all their ailments are caused by the feces inside their digestive tracts. The latest to cash in on this craze for crapless colons is Danny Vierra and his Almighty Cleanse infomercial.

Whatever medical problem you might possibly have, Danny Vierra is here to let you know that “nearly all contemporary chronic diseases have their origins in the bowel.” Some of the effects of a poo-filled colon include: Back aches, ulcerations on the feet, swelling of the legs, sciatica, gas, bloating, indigestion, hemorrhoids, foot odor. Yes, foot odor.

Danny Vierra is a former health food store owner whom host Donald Barrett describes as “an author, lecturer, and health advocate.” The more interesting description, however, comes from Vierra himself: “I’m a health evangelist, a Christian health evangelist.” Apparently this means that Vierra interprets the Old and New Testaments as some sort of big infomercial for natural health cures. Danny rattles off several scripture citations to make this point. When King Nebuchadnezzar ate grass for 7 years (Daniel 4:33) he was eating “wheat grass,” “barely grass,” and “chlorophyll.” When leprous Naaman dipped in the Jordan River 7 times (2 Kings 5: 10-14), he was healed through “hydrotherapy.” Jesus put clay on a blind man’s eyes and cured him (John 9:6-7) and thus sayeth Danny, “…the clay has drawing powers. It’s a great absorbent to the alimentary canal of toxins.” Vierra proudly announces that the same kind of clay Jesus used is in the Almighty Cleanse product!

And I think in one of the Gnostic gospels Jesus tosses a clump of clay to a guy with smelly feet and tells him, “Blow it out your colon.”

Like Klee Irwin on his Dual Action Cleanse infomercial and countless others peddling colon cleansers, Danny Vierra repeats the urban legend about an autopsied John Wayne having 40 pounds of impacted fecal matter. But Vierra does Klee one better by also claiming that Elvis had 60 pounds of feces stuck inside him when he died! And Vierra says these claims are backed up by an article that appeared in USA Today on January 11, 1999. So take that Snopes.com!

When Vierra gets onto the subject of the “parasites”—broadfish, tapeworms, roundworms, hookworms, pinworms—that are infesting uncleansed colons, he describes a world not unlike the movie Aliens, in which strange, malevolent creatures emerge from our innards to attack human beings. “I can tell you of pinworms crawling up a little girl’s leg in the middle of the night when the mother flicked on the light switch and pinworms were crawling back to the cave. They’re living in our children.” In case you missed it, the “cave” Danny is referring to is the A-hole.

Klee Irwin may have been scared by the size of the poop that came out of his young daughter, but it takes a little more than that to scare Danny Vierra: “I passed a nestful of worms when I was 28 years old floating on the top of the water in the toilet. I’m not kidding you. I looked and I about screamed.” That’s some Horatio Alger story!

Danny Vierra is also less shy than Klee about grossing people out with descriptions of the ca-ca that’s inside them. Your colon contains “caked-up layer upon layer of encrusted fecal material. This accumulation can have the consistency of truck tire rubber and it’s hard and it’s black.” In case that description was too subtle Vierra informs the audience, “You have stagnant, rotting, gluey feces within you.” Vierra also recalls making the following bit of small talk with a woman:

She pulls me aside, Donald, and she says, “Something strange is happening. Can I tell you?”

And I go, “Certainly.”

And she says, “This black rope was coming out of me, and I literally had to reach down and grab it and pull it out. And it was like a foot and a half long and hard like a rubber hose. Is this normal?”

I said, “Hallelujah! Praise God! You’re having a healing!”

But Vierra’s main claim to fame in outdoing Klee is that he not only describes this “encrusted fecal material” but insists on showing the world picture of it:

And that is indeed something grosser than Klee Irwin.