The Juicy Details: What You Need To Know About Juice

Juicing isn't going anywhere. This white-hot trend spans from yoga mums grabbing a green juice in the morning to fitness fanatics embarking on days-long juice fasts in order to detox their systems. But for such a simple and wholesome thing, there's a lot of misinformation and confusion surrounding juicing - which is where we come in!

A Fresh Start

First things first, we're not talking about the sugar-loaded cartons of generic brand orange juice at your local store. When we say juice we mean the real deal: either cother cold-pressed from a health food store or homemade with your own juicer.

The benefits to drinking juice are obvious. By gulping down the liquid nutrients of potentially dozens of fruit and vegetables, you're loading your body up with all the vitamins and minerals they have to offer without having to actually sit and eat them. So juicing is a good option if you're tight on time or if you struggle to fit all the fruit and vegetables into your diet that you know you should.

Proponents of juicing claim that it is better for you than is eating whole fruits and vegetables because your body may find it easier to absorb nutrients in juice-form. They also claim that it gives your digestive system a rest from working on digesting fiber. Juicing has been associated with lower risks of cancer, boosting the immune system, helping remove toxins from your body, aiding digestion and helping you lose weight.

Let's Talk Tools

To the uneducated eye, juicers and blenders may seem like interchangeable kitchen utensils but in reality the two offer completely different products.

Juicers are often more expensive and don't seem to make kitchen-top appearances as often as blenders, perhaps because of their one-trick-pony status. Juicers work by extracting the liquid nutrients from raw fruit and veggies and leave the dry pulp behind. So while you're able to drink up more nutrients without getting full, you're missing out on the fiber content of what you're juicing. Blenders on the other hand blend everything together into a fiber-filled smoothie which is therefore much more of a filling drink.

A Raw Deal 

So while drinking fresh juice is a healthy addition to breakfast or makes a smart mid-morning snack, the truth is, there are no actual benefits to juicing over eating whole fruit and vegetables. In fact, by omitting the fiber from the produce, you lose out of one of the key health benefits of eating fruit and vegetables to begin with.

As for detox diets, it's a contentious issue.  Many individuals embark on juice cleanses in order to 'detoxify' their bodies but it’s not clear that this process actually has any sustainable benefits. There are actually some other pretty good reasons to avoid ‘cleanse’ or ‘detox’ diets altogether. After all, we have entire organs in our bodies that exist solely to detox us. Healthy livers and kidneys are more than capable of handling any undesirable substances our body takes in!