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The Juice Cleanse: A Strange and Green Journey

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The Juice Cleanse: A Strange and Green Journey

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Charlie, Alex, and Gonzalo

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Juices from BluePrintCleanse, a cleansing program that the author tried. Credit... Evan Sung for The New York Times

A MONTH ago I went on a juice cleanse. You know what it cleans out of you best? The will to live.

This is not entirely fair, because I didn't strictly play by the rules. But I was trying this increasingly popular purge after realizing there was perhaps room for improvement in my lifestyle choices. When did I know this for sure? Was it when I was at the Temple Bar one evening, having eaten nothing all day so I could enjoy my repast of three mojitos, five bowls of popcorn and six deviled eggs? Or was it the day I realized that I was about 20 pounds overweight as I rounded out my 40s?

I had to start somewhere. Why not here?

The idea of consuming only water or juice to rid the body of so-called toxins is not new. Virtually every major religion has some fasting and cleansing ritual that supposedly allows the body to heal, regenerate and, in a sense, apologize for being such a jerk. The Hebrew word for fasting, for example, is "tsum" - which means, roughly, "to afflict the soul." But everything old is new again, which may be why juice cleansing has been on the rise; this year, juices and juice-cleanse companies were as ubiquitous at Fashion Week events as cigarettes and Adderall.

Cleansing's more recent popularity is traceable to the 1990s, when Peter Glickman, the Scientologist and entrepreneur, repackaged a 1940s diet called the Master Cleanse (Stanley Burroughs wrote the book "The Master Cleanser" in 1976). The Master Cleanse involves lemon juice, cayenne pepper, maple syrup and 10 days of your life. Celebrities as varied as Beyoncé, Jared Leto and the Moore/Kutchers (Demi and Ashton were tweeting about it this week) swear by its energizing and weight loss effects, weight loss being not all that surprising, when you consider that you are essentially sucking lemons and a few teaspoons of sugar for 10 days. And the diet has a glorious circular logic to it. As Mr. Glickman explains on his Web site, if you experience symptoms like cravings, fatigue, irritability, headaches, pains, nausea, vomiting, hot bowel movements (!) ... congratulations! That means you were supertoxic, and the cleanse is working.

In the last few years, the idea of cleanses has again evolved. Now there are kinder, gentler - and seemingly saner - alternatives. The new cleanses contain about 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day; there is generally a nut-milk component for fat and a little protein, and vegetable juices for vitamins and minerals and live enzymes. Salma Hayek, a juicing aficionado, started Cooler Cleanse, a home-delivery juicing program with Eric Helms (who owns Juice Generation); and the detoxina Gwyneth Paltrow champions a similar system called Organic Avenue. On Ms. Paltrow's Web site, goop.com, Denise Mari, the Organic Avenue founder, explains that her juices are based on the elements of LOVE: live, organic, vegan experience.

There were three levels of intensity in these cleanses: Renovation, Foundation and the ominous-sounding Excavation ("We're digging deeper"). The difference in intensity has to do with the number of green juices consumed every day. While common sense should have dictated that I take the beginner's Renovation level, I opted for Foundation, since Renovation involved drinking beet juice. Maybe beet juice is considered a fruit, or fruity, or something. But in my mind beet is a fruit in much the way Joe Lieberman is a Democrat.

Before I ordered I asked the service representative, delicately, if a cleanse meant that I wouldn't be able to be more than 10 feet from a bathroom for three days. She laughed. "No, not at all," she said.

In fact, a juice cleanse is not cleansing in the sense I feared it would be. You're drinking about 20 pounds worth of produce a day, Ms. Sakoutis told me later, but not roughage. The cleansing component comes mostly from the other part of the program, the part that, in my enthusiasm, I didn't really consider: At the beginning and the end of the three-day program, the BPC people highly recommend a colonic. A colonic is better known as many gallons of water shot into your rectum through a tube, only to pass out of you again, this time with the contents of your intestines.

So, colonics: a big "No thank you."

Colonic or no, BPC advises its juicers to prepare their bodies for fasting by spending a couple of days ahead of time eating lightly: salads, fruits, raw foods. No problem! Of course, the strip steak I had two days earlier surely didn't count, because it was resting on a bed of lettuce, along with its friends the hard-boiled eggs, bacon and avocado. You were also supposed to forsake tobacco, alcohol and caffeine. I don't smoke, so I was already many virtue points ahead of the rest of the world. And a white wine spritzer isn't what anyone would really call liquor. It was practically another juice. Also - and this was key - you are allowed to cheat with a half cup of black coffee during the fast, to ward off a caffeine withdrawal headache. So already I decided that in choosing the religion of juice cleanses, I was going with Reformed.

Anyway, I really did stick with the precleanse program, and by the time my juices arrived in the morning, I was already feeling so pure and good that I wondered if all this fuss was really necessary.

But the six juices, numbered and meant to be drunk in a particular order, looked so tasty. What's not to like about spicy lemonade, or pineapple with mint? Cashew milk flavored with vanilla and cinnamon was a little cloying, but ... I mean, c'mon, cashews, the George Clooney of nuts. When it came to the green juice, I read the label and tried hard to concentrate on the "lemon" and "apple" parts of the equation: romaine, celery, cucumber, green apple, spinach, kale, parsley, lemon. Bright side: no beets.

So now I was not only queasy, but also ashamed of myself. Micki Oliva wanted me to succeed. I'd have to power through.

Dr. Colbert said: "You have to ask yourself this question: With a juice cleanse, what are you really cleaning? Really, nothing. The bowel self-cleans. It's evolved over millions of years to do this."

Dr. Gillow recalled one recent client who was "somewhat prone to magical thinking."

"She had a fantasy that juicing would rescue her from her overeating - and the underlying neediness," she added. "So she juices intensely, loses 20 pounds, goes on a vegan diet for the next three months, breaks down, and resumes her romance with cheese fries. The weight quickly piles back on."

"The Master Cleanser" by Stanley Burroughs.

Another patient, Dr. Gillow said, "shows up in my office on Day 2 of a juice fast depressed and miserable. She essentially needs me to give her permission to stop juicing. She decides to give up this cycle of juicing and binging, goes on a moderate, portion-controlled diet. Eventually she loses weight. I see both these sorts of patients again and again."

And me? What did I learn from all this? I've decided there is nothing wrong with the placebo effect now and then. What's so bad about feeling a little better, even if there's no demonstrable proof that you actually are better?

At the end of the three days I felt rather lithe and long-limbed, like a gibbon. I also felt a kind of shimmering on the surface of my skin, as excess weight worked its way out of my pores and escaped my body. No one would have known I was hallucinating. Or so I thought, until the night of my second food-free day. As I was putting my sons to bed, my son Henry whispered: "Mom, listen. When we're all asleep, just eat something. No one will know."

I didn't, though. I made it through. And celebrated with a fennel salad and sparkling water. Oh, O.K., an Ess-a-Bagel and a box of Good & Plenty. But I may do a juice cleanse again. Maybe there's some green juice, somewhere, I can drink. Because I did enjoy the floaty sensation, but more than that, I loved what generations before (and undoubtedly after) me loved about fasting: the triumph, however briefly, over sensuality.

I wasn't thinking about food. I wasn't thinking about drink. I wasn't even thinking about sex. The appetites that rule me every single day were my slaves, for once. By that third day I wasn't craving anything. I was free.
In an earlier version of this article Micki Oliva's name was spelled Olivia.

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The Juice Cleanse: A Strange and Green Journey (Published 2010)

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A MONTH ago I went on a juice cleanse. You know what it cleans out of you best? The will to live. This is not entirely fair, because I didn't strictly play by the rules. But I was trying this increasingly popular purge after realizing there was perhaps room for improvement in my lifestyle choices.

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Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence

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Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence

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Kamran Bozorg-Chami, Hana Dang, Evan Carr

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Abstract

Detox diets are popular dieting strategies that claim to facilitate toxin elimination and weight loss, thereby promoting health and well-being. The present review examines whether detox diets are necessary, what they involve, whether they are effective and whether they present any dangers. Although the detox industry is booming, there is very little clinical evidence to support the use of these diets. A handful of clinical studies have shown that commercial detox diets enhance liver detoxification and eliminate persistent organic pollutants from the body, although these studies are hampered by flawed methodologies and small sample sizes. There is preliminary evidence to suggest that certain foods such as coriander, nori and olestra have detoxification properties, although the majority of these studies have been performed in animals. To the best of our knowledge, no randomised controlled trials have been conducted to assess the effectiveness of commercial detox diets in humans. This is an area that deserves attention so that consumers can be informed of the potential benefits and risks of detox programmes.

Keywords: detoxification; dietary intervention; energy restriction; toxins; weight loss.

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national center for biotechnology information

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Detox diets for toxin elimination and weight management: a critical review of the evidence - PubMed

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Detox diets are popular dieting strategies that claim to facilitate toxin elimination and weight loss, thereby promoting health and well-being. The present review examines whether detox diets are necessary, what they involve, whether they are effective and whether they present any dangers. Although ...

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Tatum Anderson, Akem Bathh, Skyler May

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It seems everyone is talking about "detox" or considering a "cleanse." Detox diets often are misunderstood - especially since your body already comes equipped with a detoxification system. Understanding how detox works may help clear up some confusion.

How the Body Naturally Detoxifies

Detoxification is a process that the body performs around the clock utilizing important nutrients from the diet. It's the process that transforms toxins so they can be removed from the body. They fall into two main categories: toxins that are made in the body during regular metabolism, and those that come from outside the body and are introduced by eating, drinking, breathing or are absorbed through the skin.

Toxins that are produced in the body include lactic acid, urea and waste products from microbes in the gut. External toxins may include pesticides, mercury in seafood, lead from car exhaust and air pollution, chemicals in tobacco products and drugs or alcohol.

Detoxification also uses the process by which medications are metabolized and removed from the body. Because toxins are potentially dangerous to human health, they need to be transformed and excreted through urine, feces, respiration or sweat. Each person's ability to detoxify varies and is influenced by environment, diet, lifestyle, health status and genetic factors, suggesting some people may require more detoxification support than others. But if the amount of toxins to which a person is exposed exceeds his or her body's ability to excrete them, the toxins may be stored in fat cells, soft tissue and bone, negatively affecting health. This is the rationale behind the use of practices that support the body's own detoxification capabilities, but more research is needed.

Most detoxification programs recommend removing highly processed foods and foods to which some people are sensitive, such as dairy, gluten, eggs, peanuts and red meat. They also recommend eating mostly organically grown vegetables, fruit, whole non-glutenous grains, nuts, seeds and lean protein. Other programs recommend fasting, a potentially risky practice for some people, which may actually suppress detoxification pathways in the body. This is why many health practitioners advise against this practice.
Many noncredentialed people claim to be experts in detoxification; however, there is a lack of research at this time to support its use. Plus, detoxification programs can vary widely and may pose a risk for some people (such as people with health problems, those with eating disorders, those who take multiple medications, and pregnant or breastfeeding women).

8 Ways to Support Your Body's Natural Detox

Detoxification support doesn't need to consist of a rigorous plan; doing some or all of the following can support your body's natural detoxification:

Stay hydrated with clean water.

Eat five to nine servings of fruit and vegetables per day.

Consume dietary fiber each day from vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and whole grains to help maintain bowel regularity.

Include cruciferous vegetables, including broccoli and Brussels sprouts, berries, artichokes, garlic, onions, leeks and green tea. These support detoxification pathways.

Consume adequate amounts of lean protein, which is critical to maintaining optimum levels of glutathione, the body's master detoxification enzyme.

Consult your health care provider or registered dietitian nutritionist if you're interested in taking a multivitamin/multimineral to fill any gaps in a healthy diet.

Eat naturally fermented foods such as kefir, yogurt, kimchi and sauerkraut - to help promote a healthy gut.

If you have questions about your eating style and its role in supporting the body's detoxification, check in with a registered dietitian nutritionist. RDNs can provide sound, easy-to-follow personalized nutrition advice to meet your lifestyle, preferences and health-related needs.

Robin Foroutan, MS, RDN, is an integrative medicine dietitian practicing in New York City.

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It seems everyone is talking about "detox" or considering a "cleanse." Detox diets often are misunderstood - especially since your body already comes equipped with a detoxification system. Understanding how detox works may help clear up some confusion. How the Body Naturally Detoxifies Detoxification is a process that the body performs around the clock utilizing important nutrients from the diet.

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Margarita Bautista, Bruce Bowler, Julia Candelario, Sania Chopra

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The best way to do a detox diet, according to nutritionists

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The best way to do a detox diet, according to nutritionists

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https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/best-way-do-summer-detox-according-nutritionists-ncna885161

Natalya Arnest and Madison Spiess

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Many people are drawn to cleanses to reset their GI system, but there's no evidence that the cleanses and detoxes you typically read about have any benefit. Instead of trying to flush out toxins, take measures to boost your gut health so it can do its job well. "A healthy gut is important for almost every aspect of wellness - from boosting your mood to helping you sleep, from weight management to preventing chronic diseases, the list goes on and on. To reboot your diet and reset your gut, remember to eat the three P's: prunes, pulses and pears," says Patricia Bannan, MS, RDN, nutrition and healthy cooking expert.

"Prunes help maintain good digestive health and can positively affect the bacteria living in the gut, potentially reducing the risk of colon cancer. And pulses (which include lentils, beans, chickpeas and peas) can improve gut health by strengthening the gut barrier and reducing the risk of gut-associated diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). Pears contain prebioitic fiber that helps promote intestinal health by providing food for beneficial probiotic bacteria." The point is, you need a variety of fiber sources to optimize your gut health so make sure to include these foods, as well as others rich in fiber (such as whole grains and an array of fruits and veggies), often.

"Alcohol may lower inhibitions, which could make you more likely to reach for unhealthy foods," says Keri Gans, RD, Nutritionist, and Author of The Small Change Diet. Anyone who has tossed back a couple of margaritas and some chips and guac at happy hour can relate! Save the booze until after your reboot. "Once you're firmly back on track, if you want to reintroduce alcohol in moderation, go for it," she says.

"The human body is about 60 percent water, and your body needs to be continually hydrated throughout the day in order to optimally function," explains Amy Gorin, MS, RDN, owner of Amy Gorin Nutrition in the New York City area. "In addition to drinking H20 and water-rich, low-calorie beverages like tea, you can also prioritize eating foods that are full of water - including fruits, veggies, broth-based soups and even oatmeal. These foods are also full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that will benefit your body. In the summer, I love blending fruit into a breakfast smoothie and grilling peaches for dessert," she says.

Dawn Jackson Blatner, RDN, author of "The Superfood Swap," offers this tip: Swap grazing for plated snacks. "I have a tendency to graze mindlessly, and even if it's on healthy stuff, it adds up," she says. "Grabbing a spoonful of 'this' while standing in the kitchen, scooping a handful of 'that' while working at my desk, or eating just a few little bites of 'something' while watching TV." Anyone else familiar with this scenario?

When I need to give my diet a reboot, I focus on having two nourishing, planned snacks per day.

"When I need to give my diet a reboot, I focus on having two nourishing, planned snacks per day, like a pear and pecans, or grape tomatoes and string cheese, or berries and yogurt. And I put the snacks on a plate, sit down and enjoy them." This part is especially key. When you graze or snack mindlessly, you don't register those foods as well as when you plate them. No plate? No problem! Use a paper towel, napkin, cup or whatever is available to you to help you eat more mindfully.

This is the one cleanse I can get behind! You've probably seen news reports that social media can heighten feelings of isolation and anxiety, but it can also increase feelings of body dissatisfaction. If certain accounts make you feel down about your body, your weight or the way you eat, it might be worth using the handy "unfollow" tool. Ditto for any accounts that recommend overly restrictive eating behaviors. There are healthy ways to lose weight that honor and respect your body so rid yourself of all the social noise that might be toxic to your overall wellbeing.

Want more tips like these? NBC News BETTER is obsessed with finding easier, healthier and smarter ways to live. Sign up for our newsletter and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

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Nutritionists say these 7 steps are the best way to detox for summer

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Many people are drawn to cleanses to reset their GI system, but there's no evidence that the cleanses and detoxes you typically read about have any benefit. Instead of trying to flush out toxins, take measures to boost your gut health so it can do its job well.

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Avery, Caitlin, and Nicholas, Detox Diets: Cleansing the Body,
https://www.webmd.com/diet/features/detox-diets-cleansing-body#1

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Matthew and Connor, Eating for Autism, https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.scu.edu/lib/santaclara/reader.action?docID=479084

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