By Ekaterina Morrissey Juicing has taken a majority of Americans by storm. As a result, millions of people are gulping down their meals in liquid form by the glass. Celebrities are no exception as many of them were known to kick off the New Year by following a week of juice detox, or some just to eat cleanly find it easy to juice their meals. The question is… Does this thirst-demanding trend really promote health or is it just another Hollywood fad? Let’s look at both benefits and cons. 1. Benefits – Juicing is easy and convenient way to replace a meal (when well balanced) now and then, or when on the go. By juicing at home, you do avoid processed toxic fats, dyes, added sugars, MSG, and sodium. You can get creative and design your own drink, avoiding ingredients you don’t like. This gives juicing a solid A. 2. Cons – Vegetables and fruits in their solid form contain plenty of water as well as important for our health vitamins, minerals, good amount of fiber andphytonutrients. Juice, on the other side is a very different story. Fruit juices are sources of highly concentrated fructose (fruit sugar), making them less healthy than you think. Drinking them can spike your blood sugar levels followed quickly by crush, and put you on the blood sugar roller coaster for the rest of the day, followed by cravings, mood swings and/or migraines. When a whole fruit or vegetable is processed into juice most of the fiber is gone, so your benefits are less, since the end product has less nutrients. Vegetables are lower on sugar, however be aware that most commercial vegetable and tomato juices are loaded with sodium, which increases your risk of hypertension and water retention. Unfortunately, even Starbucks is opening a juice section where people who didn’t get enough of a sugar rush from their Grande Latte, can have an extra shot of insulin by buying a juice. I read the ingredients of a fresh squeezed green smoothie in Starbucks and my face wentpale. One of them had 1,200g of sugar! And there are the myths that marketers want you to believe: Myth #1: Juicing will help you lose weight Consider this fact: it takes longer to eat a whole apple or orange, which, by the way, will only be 60 calories and you will feel full. But you will get only 4oz of apple/orange juice from the same fruit, which means it will take more than one apple or any other fruit to make a glass of juice, which will take you only a few seconds to drink. So before your brain has had a chance to register how much was enough, you gulped the whole 8 oz. You might lose a few pounds in the first two days, but there is a price you will pay. Most liquid weigh loss plans have a nutritional gap. The balanced ratio between proteins, carbs, fats and fiber is not there. This will slow down your metabolism, cause dramatic spikes in your blood sugar and lead to fatigue, mood swings and headaches. Second major disadvantage: Liquid calories don’t have the samefilling effect as solid, whole foods, so after a few days of following the liquid diet, you will feel very irritable, tired, and weak. Myth #2: Juicing is a great way to detox/cleanse Not even close! Juices are NOT needed to cleanse your body and detox it. Our bodies, being the perfect machines that they are, are fully equipped with all the tools needed to do that on its own. Just one thing! …You have to cut out the junk and start eating cleanly. Detoxes are not meant to be pleasant, in fact in most of worlds famous detox spas, like the famous Austrian Viva Mayr (a spartan style detox spa), you don’t eat, drink or even look at sugar, let alone a smoothie or juice. The closest you will get to drink anything in liquid form there is pure spring and mineral water, and about 3 1/2 liters a day of it. Detox is meant to clean and heal your gut. Eating any raw food while detoxing is bad, because we can’t digest raw food past 4 p.m. since our digestion significantly slows down. Thisaffects the liver and it produces a lot of alcohol in your gut. In United States, we get easily obsessed with the current trend and market it right away as a miracle and cure-all for everything, in this case obesity, and feeding mania for detoxing. And yes, as I said earlier, you need to remove the toxins from your body before starting the weight loss program, but not by juicing or drinking smoothies. People who eat healthy, whole foods and have a physically active life with moderate stress levels don’t even need to detox that often, maybe only once a year. Another option is to have one day a week, every week with a day of detox with foot/body massage, bath with salts, plenty of water and restricted foods. To summarize: If you are looking to adopt healthy lifestyle, chew your food just the way our great-grandmothers used to. And chew it slowly. Our ancestors survived by eating real foods and not by juicing. Can you enjoy a smoothie now and then? By all means. Just add moregreens than fruit, as well as plain whole yogurt. P.S.: People who are diabetic or with pre-diabetic conditions should NOT drink juices and smoothies. 2 0 0 0 0 On July 29, 2013 / /
