Crossposted from Dietitian at Home.

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Food fads are one of my pet peeves. I fully admit I get my back up when I hear about most new “health” food trends, probably sooner and more often than I should. Each one comes in like a saviour on a steed claiming to cure us of our unhealthy ways, then slowly fades away, only to be resurrected the following decade.

Juicing is the trend du jour, purporting to provide mega doses of vitamins and to enable said nutrients to be absorbed more effectively than through the traditional chew-and-swallow method. This article did some great investigation and discusses the truths and fallacies of these claims. In a nut shell, higher doses of vitamins, be it through juice or supplements, are only effective if you’re deficient. Once you’ve got enough, you pee out the rest. To put it another way, if your body’s stores of vitamin C are at 100%, it doesn’t matter whether your orange-cucumber-kale-beet-arugula juice has 100%, 200%, or 1000% of the DRI (daily recommended intake) of vitamin C, you will pee it all out. So, for the people privileged enough to have a huge supply of vegetables and a juicer, nutrient deficiency is incredibly unlikely and juicing couldn’t plausibly realize the claims made in its favour.

This actually brings up a few bigger issues I have with the juicing trend. The first is that for each serving of juice made, frequently 5 or more whole vegetables and/or fruits are used, with some recommendations as high as several pounds of juiced vegetables daily. By most standards, that is a LOT of vegetables. Look, I’m all for encouraging fruit and vegetable intake since fewer than half of Canadians meet the recommended minimum intake. We should fill our plates and fill up on vegetables, but we still don’t need to over consume. This also makes juicing a costly endeavour, making it effectively inaccessible to the large number of people who struggle to afford enough food on a regular basis.

The next issue I have with juicing is the claim that putting all the nutrients in liquid form is somehow needed due to poor digestion (N.B. not likely a real phenomenon for most healthy people) and that this liquid form allows for super-fast absorption for nutrients. Let’s be clear, unless you are seriously dehydrated or have literally swallowed a whole cucumber, standard vegetables WILL be liquid once they reach your small intestines as they have been chewed, mixed with saliva, churned, and mixed with stomach acid. This is basic ingestion and digestion. The real issue with turning solid food into juice is the assumption that we only need vegetables for the vitamins within (like a leafy, green vitamin pill), but this is simply not the case. Health benefits come from eating WHOLE vegetables, including the fibrous parts. The interactions or nutrients within our foods and within our bodies is incredibly complex, and there are undoubtedly many compounds within our veggies and fruits with beneficial effects we have yet to discover. Removing a large fraction of these foods may actually result in us losing nutrients.

My last issue with the juicing trend is that it turns fibre-rich plants into fibre-less juice. Given that most North Americans need more fibre, this seems like a poor nutritional strategy. Luckily (and hilariously) it seems that others have picked up on this and offer suggestions on how to deal with all that vegetable pulp. So this food trend is effectively take all the fibre out and then find ways to put it back in. Which is better than nothing, I suppose.

This whole scenario begs the question: given all the work and expense it takes to make juice, then the additional work to manipulate vegetable pulp into your regular recipes, wouldn’t it just be simpler (and cheaper, and faster) to just eat your vegetables?