PAST ITS PRIME
Once the wellness set’s favorite ‘healthy’ obsession, juice cleanses are now past their expiration date
I N 2012, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a celebrity, fashionista or health nut without a cold-pressed juice in hand. BluePrint had just been acquired by Hain Celestial, Juice Press was expanding like mad and California’s Suja Juice was democratizing the pricey trend by popping up in grocery stores.
Subsisting on a half-dozen juices per day was believed to help shed weight, cure cravings, clear up skin, nix bloating, improve sleep and more. New Yorkers dutifully gagged down pressed spinach and celery, skipping meals in favor of a plastic bottle of green liquid. Celebs, such as Blake Lively and Gwyneth Paltrow, were spotted toting green bottles around the city, and there seemed to be a juice bar on every block.
Six years later, cleansing seems outdated and even dangerous. Organic Avenue, which sold glass jars of juice to moneyed moms, closed in 2015, reopened and closed again last year. Juice Press now offers cleanses made up of whole foods and has a variety of fatfilled coconut milk drinks. New York’s favorite health trend has quietly evaporated, in favor of nourishing hot drinks and meals that require chewing.
When Sorah Kim moved from Texas to New York in 2011, the then-22-year-old started in on a series of juice cleanses.
“I think I was hazing myself into becoming a New Yorker,” she says. “It was very much a psychological thing for me — it was kind of like a form of self-control.”
At the time, Kim thought she was being healthy. “It was the trendy thing to do,” she says. “Everyone was like, ‘Your skin will glow!’ ”
She hoped that swilling the vegetable juices would help her break her snacking habits and
drop some of the weight she was gaining at her stressful job. Initially, she felt like it was working. “I felt super empowered, and I felt lighter,” she says. “I had a lot of energy, but now that I know more about nutrition, I think it was mostly the sugars that were doing that to me.”
She quit doing cleanses for a while, then tried one again last year. “I stopped at Juice 4,” she says. “It didn’t feel good, and I haven’t touched a green juice since.”
That hasn’t been difficult for her. “I don’t hear about juice cleanses at all anymore,” she says.
Ultracrunchy folks have been juicing for decades, but liquid cleanses entered the mainstream in 2006 when Beyoncé used the Master Cleanse to drop 20 pounds for her performance in “Dreamgirls.” The not-so-crunchy took note, mixing up their own pitchers of lemon juice, cayenne, maple syrup and water. In 2007, BluePrint began selling six-packs of vegetable and fruit juices meant for three-day fasts out of a tiny Tribeca kitchen. Their first fans, mostly moms from Connecticut, would either visit the kitchen to pick up their hand-packed cleanses or order a bike delivery from co-founder Zoe Sakoutis, who left the company in 2014. Organic Avenue, then a raw foods store, started packaging their own cleanses soon after, followed by Salma Hayek’s Cooler Cleanse in 2008, in partnership with Juice Generation’s Eric Helms.
“At the beginning, this was nirvana,” says Joshua Rosenthal, founder of the NYC-based Institute for Integrative Nutrition. “[The thinking was], ‘I’m going to drink juice, I’m going to pay someone way too much money and I’m going to lose 20 pounds! And all these mysterious toxins are going to leave my body, and I’m going to be purified!’ ”
But as cleanses became more popular, some brands began cutting corners and the magic began to wear off.
“There [was] a lot of money to be made, and there are a lot of people who realized that,” says Sakoutis. Fruit-laden blends meant to appeal to a broader audience began to saturate the market, while new pressure-pasteurization techniques also allowed companies to extend their drinks’ shelf lives — past the point of good taste. And as quality slipped, many cleansers realized that drinking only juice for several days isn’t actually that healthy.
“A lot of juice cleanses are loaded with sugar because there’s too much fruit in the juices — it’s extremely unhealthy,” says Dr. Frank Lipman, whose own probiotic-heavy, juice-free cleanse is popular with celebrities. “It’s soda without the bubbles.”
Whole fruits contain fiber that slows the absorption of sugar into the bloodstream, but fiberless juices can cause blood-sugar spikes. A 2013 study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that while a greater consumption of certain whole fruits is significantly associated with a lower risk of Type 2 diabetes, consuming fruit juice is associated with a higher risk — a finding that some experts began citing as a reason to avoid cleanses.
Plus, says Lipman, swigging quality juice does nothing to fix imbalance in the gut, which he believes leads to inflammation, bloating and other problems that cleanses are meant to fix.
“I’m a big believer in that if you do a cleanse, you’ve got to clean out [harmful bacteria from] the gut with anti-microbials. A juice cleanse does nothing for that — it doesn’t affect the microbiome,” Lipman says. “Thank God [the juice cleanse trend has] fallen.”
BluePrint is staying relevant by evolving into “a beverage brand,” says current Vice President Emma Frelinghuysen. The company now offers vinegar drinks and kombucha, in addition to cleanses and individual juices, which are sold at Whole Foods and other retailers.
Frelinghuysen won’t say whether cleanse sales have declined in recent years, but will say that many customers have been incorporating juices into their daily lives, rather than consuming only juice — drinking a green blend for breakfast, for example, or using a spicy lemon drink as a cocktail mixer.
When former juicers do want to detox, they turn instead to whole-food cleanses like the monthlong Whole30, during which participants cut out potential allergens such as wheat and dairy, and consume satisfying amounts of Paleo-friendly, nutrient-dense foods. The plan has reached juicelike popularity: Its guidebook was the No. 1 book in the weight loss recipes category on Amazon at the start of the year.
Others opt for gentler, more fiber-rich blended foods.
Nicole Centeno first launched her Brooklyn-based soup com- pany Splendid Spoon 4 ½ years ago, in part to break up with her juice cleanse habit. “There was this mentality of, ‘Let’s go out and have a ramen burger, and then let’s do a juice cleanse to make up for it,’ ” she says. “That didn’t make me feel good, and didn’t feel like it was genuinely healthy.”
So, she swapped juices for soups, turning to blended vegetable mixes for nutrients, rather than fiber-free juices.
“A lot of our customers are people who’ve realized the juice cleanse was just a fad,” says Centeno.
Her company does offer a “cleanse” of six blended soups, but Centeno says that customers are free to supplement them with solid food if need be; and the soups have enough protein and fat to be satisfying on their own.
“It’s not meant to be punishment,” she says, “and it’s not meant to be strict.”
She sees the end of harsh cleanses as a saner approach to healthy eating.
“Juicing was appealing to New Yorkers because it’s masochistic, and I think we’re moving away from that,” says Centeno. “You don’t need to put yourself through agony just to feel good about yourself.”