Juicing up your blood won’t bring you nirvana
Here we are again: summer holiday time. Whether that means beaches and bikinis or just more partying, looking good is top priority. And so there’s the annual mass panic. Because despite all the usual promises made about losing the winter weight, getting glowing skin, or even just appearing a bit less like the walking dead, things (once again) didn’t turn out that way. And what does everyone still do? That’s right: juicing, detoxing, “clean” eating, or whatever you want to call piling into mountains of fruit and veg, sometimes mulched up and preferably raw. And I am still baffled.
Juicing is the weirdest incarnation of this “detox” and “cleanse” thinking. Since the invention of the juicer in the 1930s, juicing has been on a roll. The idea that liquidising your food — often while extracting some of its components — would somehow be better for you, is an odd one. I really understand if you’re an invalid unable to chew, but otherwise …
A keen juicer explained to me that you do this so that you can manage to get the necessary amount of nutrients into you. Huh? So we’re saying that we’re choosing foods which can’t give us enough nutrients when eaten whole? You know you could just eat a boiled egg, right? And what are all these nutrients in the juice that we’ll be getting more of?
Well, for one thing, if fruit is in the mix, sugar. Which is why turning three apples, two carrots and some beetroot into something to down in three and a half minutes, is hardly the nirvana of good eating.
It’s also unclear how these juices or any other so-called detox foods might actually take “toxins” from your body. Well, of course, if that jug of juice replaced the two croissants you’d usually have for breakfast, then yes, you probably do feel better after a week. It’s the zero croissants that did it; there are no detox properties in your juice. Juice-only or veg-only fasts which promise to “cleanse your blood” are laughable.
What grubby substances are assumed to be floating in your bloodstream, and how will celery and beetroot identify them and suck them out? Nobody can actually say. Your body has organs and mechanisms built in, to keep what it needs and to get rid of, or otherwise process, the rest. If these organs aren’t compromised, they need no help.
It seems the juicing phenomenon has stuck for one main reason: detox is intertwined with the evergrowing notion of “clean” eating, and what looks “cleaner” than a glass of brightly coloured, Instagram-ready liquid, smooth, unidentifiable, removed from the “dirty” business of food production?
The more chewable equivalent in this world of “clean” is the Buddha bowl — with emphasis on raw and vegetable-based. In the bowl version of clean eating, certain grains and pulses are also considered to be purifying, provided they’re on trend. Edamame beans? Amazing! Butter-beans? Not so much.
That the word Buddha is in there — possibly quite offensively to Buddhists — is telling: food orthorexia, in its many forms, is a new religion among well-off urban eaters, and if cleanliness isn’t quite next to Godliness anymore, it certainly assures you a place in virtue-signal heaven. The
Buddha bowl bubble isn’t going to burst anytime soon. Which is fine, provided you don’t believe it’s going to cleanse you either physically or spiritually.