Juicing: Just how healthy is it?

Throwing a whole bunch of fruits and vegetables into a blender and whirring them together may seem like the picture of health. Plus, you can walk down the street sipping your green juice and be totally on trend in terms of lifestyle choice. But is your juice as good for you as you think?

When you juice, you reduce the fibre content of the fruits and vegetables of the ingredients that you are using. Fibre is what creates the sensation of feeling full. If you are going to juice, one tip you might want to try is using the pulp created from the juicing process in baking needs, thus incorporating at least some of that lost fibre back into your diet.

Many juicing ingredients also contain sugar. While still healthy, juicing may lead you to consume more of this sugar than you otherwise would have. Fructose is the type of sugar found in fruit and vegetable sources, and its digestive burden falls to your liver. Fructose is also the most lipophilic of carbohydrates, which means that it promotes the absorption of fat.

This is not to say the sugar in fruit should be avoided, but you should be conscious during the juicing process of how much you’re taking in. A medium apple has around 90 calories, but only squeezes down to about four ounces of juice. That apple has around 19 grams of sugar. When you eat an apple, you’ll most likely feel satisfied with your snack, but when you incorporate it into a juice, you’re likely to add more fruits to achieve a quantity that feels akin to a snack, adding sugar and calories without achieving the same satiation.

Natural juices can be very high in vitamins, but are often low in protein and healthy fats. Vitamins A, D, E and K are all fat-soluble, so it’s important to incorporate an adequate amount of fat into your life. Omega-3 fatty acids are not manufactured by the body, so you need to get them from the foods you eat.

For an athlete, a green juice is not enough to replenish your body after a workout. Adding ingredients like chia seeds, ground walnuts or greek yogurt can help boost the protein and healthy fat content of a juice.

For people who struggle to meet their daily fruits and vegetable needs, a juice may offer a way to pack a nutritional punch in a single serving. For those of us who enjoy the taste of an apple though, we may be better off just eating it whole.