Juicing: Fad? Or Helpful?
Juicing! This is a popular fad that many people immediately think of when they hear terms like “cleansing” or “healing” or even “healthy”. Walk into any health food store and you will see all sorts of fruit and vegetable juices ready made for you for “healthy” drink or meal alternatives. But is juicing just a fad? Or is there something to it?
It actually depends on what your goals are, and the details of how you go about it. Juicing can be helpful or harmful depending on when in your journey you start juicing, and what exact ingredients you include.
So let’s talk about what juicing will not do, or what unhelpful goals are to start a juicing process with!
3-5 days is not enough time to actually cleanse or detox the body. If you think you are going to do one juicing cleanse and be “detoxed” by the end of it- you are going to be sorely disappointed. The reality is, many of the compounds in vegetables and other plants are very stimulating to our detoxification pathways and it can be a great detox support. But these processes can take months if not years, and it is much better to do a little juicing over long periods of time rather than hit it hard all at once and expect great results.
The other issue is- are you expecting to be drinking an a lot of fruit juice and get good results? This is a huge problem, because when many people think of juicing they include big glasses of pineapple, mango or apple juice. This massive dose of fructose to the liver is anything but detoxifying!
Fructose must be metabolized by the liver, and a large dose of sugar from fruit can feed candida and parasites. This does not mean fruit is always bad- it can absolutely be a healthy part of a balanced diet. But when you are dealing with severe gut dysbiosis and liver congestion, fruit is not always the best option, and I would certainly not define it as “cleansing”.
A truly cleansing juice would be vegetable based. However, that brings me to my next point:
Juicing vegetables to excess can give you oxalate toxicity!
Check out “cleansing juice” recipes and you will generally see high amounts of: kale, spinach, beets, chard, turmeric, etc. These are all high oxalate vegetables! Now, I am not going to go into a lot of detail about oxalates and oxalate toxicity here, I have other videos and blogs about that, but in short, oxalates are crystalline compounds in plant foods that can be very irritating and toxic to our tissues- especially the gut, kidneys, joints, thyroid, and more. It is important to structure your detoxifying juice to be only low or medium oxalate, so you do not cause other health issues by accident.
To summarize:
-Juicing is not a quick fix, it is one component of a long term detox process
-Don’t expect drinking a bunch of fruit juice to be “detoxifying”
-Watch the oxalates!
Here is my own “liver cleansing juice” recipe:
Celery (1 stick) OR Carrots (1 large)
Cabbage (a few leaves)
Beet (1/2 a small beet)
Fennel (1/2 a bulb)
Parsley (1 bunch) AND/OR arugula (1 bunch)
Ginger (1 thumb)
