Scott Disick's big Instagram flub raises an important question: What the heck is teatoxing?

Last week, reality TV personality Scott Disick gave us a rare glimpse at the inner workings of celebrity Instagram, where owners of famous accounts can earn thousands of dollars promoting products.

Disick - the father to Kourtney Kardashian's three kids - posted a photo to his 16.1 million followers on May 19 that appeared to contain endorsement instructions:

In the photo, Disick is standing over a barrel of dried powder. The original caption, with emphasis added, read:

Here you go, at 4pm est, write the below. Caption: Keeping up the summer workout routine with my @booteauk protein shake!

The post was later edited to remove the posting instructions.

Disick's apparent slip-up is a window into the circus of social media promotions, where you can market basically anything if you've got the right buzzwords and celebrity endorsements.

But what is Disick hawking, exactly?

It's a "tea detoxing" or "teatoxing" product made by Bootea, one of many companies that sells tea-infused products in bulk and markets them as part of diet plans.

Bootea's detox product, for example, calls for drinking a "daytime tea" and a "bedtime cleanse" in 14- or 28-day stretches. Both teas are blended with added ingredients, some of which the company says have a laxative effect.

How does teatoxing work? Bootea's supposed answer to that question claims to remove "unwanted 'toxins' & built up waste matter ... from your body via the lungs, kidneys, bowels and skin." The Guardian calls detoxing claims a "myth," though, and Science-Based Medicine labels them "a scam."

Tech Insider looked for studies to explain how teatoxing works, what its benefits might be, and any potential side effects, but there doesn't seem to be any research. In fact, we got precisely zero hits for "tea detoxing" or "teatoxing" in Google Scholar, a growing cache of the planet's scientific research.

Still, it's tempting to believe teatoxing may be beneficial because some studies suggest there might be links between good health and drinking tea.

That "might" is crucial: Extensive reviews of tea-drinking research involving people - not animals or in the lab - have found barely any evidence that it can help prevent heart disease, which is one of tea's most widely trumpeted health benefits. Similarly, claims that tea is good for weight loss aren't supported yet, and there's conflicting evidence that tea can prevent cancer.

It's a case of there not being enough evidence, or the effects being marginal, or both.

The benefits of ingesting copious amounts of blended tea-infused protein powder, or oats, or popcorn, or similar products as part of a "cleansing" or "detox" diet plans are, at best, poorly understood to science. The same is also true of any unwanted side effects. (Though Bootea cautions its products might impact the effectiveness of birth control pills.)

And unlike juicing, which can be healthy yet also easily abused, tea detoxing probably doesn't fill you up. That means people might - despite even Bootea's warnings against it - mistake teatoxing as a meal replacement plan instead of a supplement to healthy eating.

"[If patients] go on a detox where they continue their medication and are eating basically nothing - maybe a beverage that has very little into it - that could be problematic," Joan Salge Blake, dietitian at Boston University and a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association, told Tech Insider. "Going on these detox regimens for a long amount of time could actually be detrimental to their health."

What's more, since these tea-blend products are marketed as dietary supplements as opposed to actual foods, the FDA holds basically no jurisdiction over its marketing. A disclaimer on Bootea's site, for instance, notes that ingredients it adds "can be toxic in high doses."

Tech Insider contacted Bootea and Disick for comment, but neither party returned our requests.

We'll note that brands like Lyfe Tea list other ingredients in their teas, as Bootea does, though popular additives including ginger aren't conclusively linked to any health benefits, according to the National Institutes of Health. (You might pin any perceived healthfulness more on a placebo effect than the ingredient itself.)

Other teatoxing brands say that their products are intended to fill in the snacking period between meals rather than replace meals altogether. But for many people who subscribe to fad diets, this advice may be ignored.

"Americans are trying really desperately to get more healthy and get into better shape," Blake says. "But unfortunately, they're looking for the quickest route to do this, and many times the quickest route isn't the healthiest."