”

Is chlorophyll ‘high in oxygen’?
No. It helps to make oxygen. In sunlight. And it’s pretty dark in your bowels: in fact, if there’s any light in there at all then something’s gone badly wrong.

So any chlorophyll you eat will not create oxygen, and even if it did, even if Dr Gillian McKeith PhD stuck a searchlight right up your bum to prove her point, and your salad began photosyn-thesising, even if she insufflated your guts with carbon dioxide through a tube, to give the chloroplasts something to work with, and by some miracle you really did start to produce oxygen in there, you still wouldn’t absorb a significant amount of it through your bowel, because your bowel is adapted to absorb food, while your lungs are optimised to absorb oxygen.

You do not have gills in your bowels.
Neither, since we’ve mentioned them, do fish.

And while we’re talking about it, you probably don’t want oxygen inside your abdomen anyway: in keyhole surgery, surgeons have to inflate your abdomen to help them see what they’re doing, but they don’t use oxygen, because there’s methane fart gas in there too, and we don’t want anyone catching fire on the inside.

There is no oxygen in your bowel.

Science writer Dr Ben Goldacre has a thing for Gillian McKeith.