While juicing your food can increase your intake of fruits and vegetables, drinking juice doesn't have the same beneficial effect as eating these foods. Juices contain all of the calories and little of the fiber that comes with whole fruits. You'll also feel less sated if you drink your meals instead of chewing them. Juices lack essential nutrients, making juice diets potentially unhealthy for you in the long term.
Calories
Juice contains all the sugars within fruits, but little of the low-calorie fillers such as pulp, pith and skin. Because of its relatively higher ratio of sugar to pulp and other fillers, a 12-oz. glass of orange juice contains 168 calories. A whole orange provides approximately 60 calories. If you drink sweetened juice cocktails and fruit-flavored drinks like lemonade, you may get even more calories per glass.
Fullness
Your body processes liquids more quickly than it processes solid foods. When your stomach no longer feels full, sensory neurons in your stomach lining communicate with your brain to tell it to start thinking about your next meal. When you drink your meals in the form of juice, those meals don't last as long in your body, leaving you feeling hollow and hungry sooner than you would after a meal of food you must chew. Eating fruits and vegetables instead of drinking their juices gives you a fuller feeling.
Fiber
Dietary fiber helps give fruits their structure. Your body cannot digest this plant matter, so the calories in fiber move through your digestive tract without contributing calories to your diet. Soluble forms of fiber such as pectin transform into a filling gel that takes longer to leave your stomach, while insoluble fiber promotes gastrointestinal health as it moves through your body. Processing fruit into fruit juice means leaving almost all of its healthful fiber in the juicer.
Malnutrition
If you vary the juices you drink, you'll get a full complement of many vitamins and minerals along with a rich supply of carbohydrates. However, your diet may lack two important macronutrients: protein and fat. Few fruits contain significant amounts of fat and protein, and vegetables that contain these macronutrients, such as avocados, beans and lentils, do not lend themselves to juicing. Without sufficient protein, your body has no raw materials with which to build new tissue. A lack of fat leaves your skin and hair in poor shape and contributes to malabsorption of fat-soluble vitamins.
Flavor
When you go on a restrictive diet plan that limits your flavor options, you're at greater risk of craving foods that aren't on your diet. An all-juice diet removes virtually all flavor and texture stimuli from your meals. Without textures and flavors that satisfy your innate desire for variety in your food, you may find that your meals leave you feeling unsatisfied or deprived. That sense of deprivation can lead to a dietary rebound, urging you to eat more as soon as you stop your juice diet and potentially causing you to gain more weight than you'd lost.
References
- MSNBC; Does Drinking Your Fruits and Veggies Count?; Karen Collins; April 2007
- Harvard School of Public Health: The Best Diet Is the One You'll Follow
- U.S. National Library of Medicine: Malnutrition
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: Rethink Your Drink
- U.S. Department of Agriculture Household Commodity Fact Sheet: Orange Nutrition Facts
- University of Minnesota Department of Food Science and Nutrition; Dietary Fiber and Body Weight; Joanne L. Slavin; 2004
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