Do Juice Cleanses Work?
100% fruit or vegetable juice can be a healthy addition to your diet. Juice can help hide the taste of some fruit of vegetables that you wouldn’t eat otherwise because you don’t care for their taste. You are also able to consume more juice than whole food which can help you reach your daily intake requirements. If something is good in moderation, it must be great in excess, right? Juice is being touted as more than just a healthy drink choice; proponents and juice industry companies are claiming juice can ‘cleanse’ the body. As with any nutrition fad, the juicing philosophy is steeped in quasi-scientific theory.
I wouldn’t waste any money on a juice cleanse kit which can run from 30 bucks upwards to $400 or more. People claim to feel toxic release through their skin and GI tract. Well after you have had nothing but juice for days, I’d say, ‘congratulations, you have ODed on vitamin C and have the runs…a real picture of healthy!’ During a juice cleanse, you are basically inducing diarrhea by not eating solids. This can cause electrolyte imbalances resulting in headaches, weakness and nausea which is not healthy. Some claim that the worse you feel the more toxins you have in your colon. This feeling is not release of toxins or cleansing, it is excess. The body doesn’t feel well when you consume anything in excess. Cleanses can irritate the eyes or skin. This is also mistaken as a cleansed feeling but toxins are not released from your eyes, it is a result of too much citrus in the diet. The colon is a self-cleaning organ and diarrhea does not clean it out. Ironically, if anything cleans the colon it is fiber that works like a bristle brush as it naturally passes through, but juicing removes the fiber from produce.
Juicers claim that drinking squeezed juice is kind of like taking a supplement, but it is healthier because the vitamins and minerals are all natural, rather than synthetic. True, but why not just eat the orange? The claim is that juice makes the vitamins more readily available and absorbable because part of digestion has already been done by taking it from a solid to a liquid form. This begs the question; would IV vitamins be even better? Why exactly do you need the vitamins in your bloodstream now and not 20 minutes from now when your stomach has digested the orange?
What is the purpose of a juice binge? 3 days worth of juice is not going to make up for 5 years of cocktails and fast food. Filling your body with junk and then chasing it with this Draino - Juice approach is not going to result in any health benefits. Juice can not flush the plaque you’ve developed in your arteries from eating hamburgers for years. Drinking juice is fine, but binge drinking is not healthy, whether it is OJ and vodka or lemon, carrot juice. Juice cleansing serves more as a ceremony than anything else. People who want to stop eating junk use a cleanse as a starting point, but that is all it is…an uncomfortable ceremony. Keep your body healthy and clean by avoiding processed foods, eating a plant-based diet and exercising. Enjoy juice, but keep in mind that it is not human Draino.
Posted by Dani 
