Juicing Is Bad for You and the Earth
- May 1, 2016
- 2 min read
There’s a reason your mother told you to eat your vegetables, not juice them.
When juiced, a basket of fruit would probably serve half—if not less—the amount of people as it would if eaten whole. Lost to juicing are fibers that satiate (including the skin which is loadedwith heart-healthy, cancer-fighting flavonoids), vitamins, and most importantly, fat. Fat matters because the body needs it to absorb a whole host of vitamins like A, D, E, and K. Without fat in that juice combo, those vitamins pass right through you.
Juicing fruits or vegetables high in sugar (like beets instead of leafy greens), can raise blood-sugar levels as much as drinking a can of Coca-Cola. That’s because fruit sugars (fructose) are consumed without fiber to control how fast they’re absorbed.
There’s a reason humans cook food instead of pulverizing and drinking it: we get more calories and nutrients.
Boiling, steaming, and frying foods unlocks antioxidants, phytochemicals like lycopene and specific vitamins for the body to digest, according to a 2007 study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. As Rui Hai Liu, a professor of food science at Cornell University put it in 2009, “the heat from cooking breaks down a plants’ thick cell walls and aids the body’s uptake of some nutrients that are bound to those cell walls.”
Juicing might even be worse for the environment than it is for you.
After the juice has been squeezed out of food, tons of pulp is left behind, thrown into landfills where they emit significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
As always, mom was right: eat your veggies, just cook them first.
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