"I'm trying to get healthy so I've been juicing"
I’m not sure exactly when juice became a cultural phenomenon to signal a healthy lifestyle. The cold pressed juice market is over $4 billion annually and growing quickly. There are a million juice bars in our cities and a ton of different brands that sell shelf stable juice for antioxidants on the go.
The people who proclaim the benefits of juicing describe a few major advantages - the high concentration of nutrients, the easier absorption, and the detoxifying effect - that consuming cold pressed juice will have on your health.
You can read articles from diverse sources such as the Mayo Clinic, Harvard Public Health, the Food Network, and Dr. Oz that will all give you information on the health benefits of juicing.
There is big money here since cold pressed juices can sell for a lot more than the fruits and vegetables that make them up.
Unfortunately, juicing is a total scam
Honestly, you can stop reading now.
If you get never get anything else from this newsletter, I’m content to let that be the message I send to the world (along with hydroxychloroquine having no role in Covid treatment).
But if you want to dig into the details a bit more, let’s get into it.
One of the explanations for the health benefits of juice that you’ll see in ariticle after article is the claim that drinking juice may help you get servings of fruits and vegetables that you aren’t getting from solid food.
This takes a true piece of information - that people don’t eat many fruits and vegetables - and bastardizes it to mislead in a manner that ultimately makes us less healthy.
This style of misleading claim is everywhere in the world of health and nutrition
This is a really common structure that you’ll see in the world of health and nutrition.
Step 1: take something that’s true - Americans don’t eat many fruits and vegetables
Step 2: propose an easy fix that only fixes an inconsequential part of the problem
Step 3: profit
Once you recognize this structure, you can begin to deconstruct misleading health and nutrition claims on your own.
This type of nonsense is everywhere, and it’s part of the reason why nutrition messaging feels so complicated.
But wait, can you get back to the juice thing? I still don’t get what the problem is
Juicing is fundamentally taking an unprocessed food and making it processed to speed up the way that we absorb the calories from a natural substance in an unnatural way.
We get a huge hit of sugar that raises our blood sugar, spikes our insulin, and causes our body harm.
The claims that the “high concentration of nutrients” and “easier absorption” are benefits of juicing is actually the opposite.
The people that make these claims are gaslighting you.
When you eat an apple, it takes time for your body to digest the fruit. You get a lot of fiber and indigestible matter along with all of the palatable sugar. As Robert Lustig once said, “When God made the poison he packaged it with the antidote.”
A major premise the is supposed to be evidence of a benefit for juicing is really just a description of why it’s bad for you.
Do more fruits and vegetables make you healthier?
There’s a lot of observational and indirect evidence that people who eat more fruits and vegetables are healthier than those who don’t.
But there are a lot of confounding pieces of information that could also explain this effect.
People who eat more fruits and vegetables tend to be wealthier than those who don’t
People who eat more fruits and vegetablestend to be more health conscious than those who don’t
People who eat more fruits and vegetables generally do it at the exclusion of fast food
In other words, how much of the "benefit” of fruits and vegetables that you see in the nutritional literature is from the fruits and vegetables themselves and how much is it from the things that go hand-in-hand with their consumption?
I’m not arguing that fruits and vegetables are bad for you. The point is that when you apply the science, you need to interpret it in the right way.
Nutrient deficiencies cause real harm - but juicing doesn’t fix them!
I’m talking real nutrient deficiencies - scurvy, rickets, beri-beri, kwashiorkor, etc - which are all real medical problems.
But the “nutrients” that juicing advocates are referring to aren’t essential vitamins and minerals.
Juicing isn’t preventing scurvy.
These nutrients are the plant chemicals that demonstrate a benefit in a test tube - think anthocyanins, polyphenols, antioxidants - that we don’t measure and don’t know the proper dose of.
You certainly don’t have a critical resveratrol deficiency.
The dose makes the poison, after all.
And there’s even scaremongering to be done about getting too many antioxidants, which is another nonsense claim designed to make nutrition more complicated than it is.
It’s amazing what an impact marketing has on us
I’m always amazed at the symbiotic relationship that exists between the health media world and bogus nutritional research that conspires to make healthy eating feel complicated.
I’m fairly convinced at this point that good nutrition is more about avoiding crap than it is about finding the exact recipe for our own perfect health.
[Although there’s certainly more to be written on the concept of ‘precision nutrition’ which I’m saving for a later newsletter]
Be wary of magical claims and be skeptical about nutritionism.
The bottom line: don’t waste your money on juice. It’s a scam that makes you less healthy and more poor.
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