What Are the Benefits of Juicing?
By SHAPE diet doctor Mike Roussell
You know it's important to get the right amount of fruits and vegetables, but does it matter how you eat them? We wanted to know if there was any real benefit to drinking fruit or vegetable juice over choosing whole fruits and veggies, so we went to the diet doc to find out! Here's what he had to say:
There aren't any benefits to drinking fruit juice over eating whole fruits. In fact, eating whole fruit is a better choice. In regards to vegetables, the only benefit to vegetables juices is that it might enhance your consumption of vegetables; but you'll miss out on some key health benefits by juicing.
RELATED: How Much Calcium Do I Really Need?
One of the benefits of eating vegetables is that they have low energy density, meaning that you can eat a lot of vegetables (a large volume of food) without eating a lot of calories. This has powerful implications when it comes to weight loss-eating fewer calories while still feeling full and satisfied. Plus, research shows that if you eat a small salad before your main meal, you will eat fewer overall calories during that meal. Drinking water prior to a meal, however, has no effect on how many calories you will eat, and it doesn't increase feelings of fullness. Vegetable juice is comparable to water in this situation.
According to a study published in the journal Appetite, when researchers looked at eating fruits in different forms (apple juice , apple sauce, whole apple), the juiced version performed the poorest in regards to increasing feelings of fullness. Meanwhile, eating the whole fruit increased fullness and decreased the number of calories study participants at by 15 percent in the meal that followed.
RELATED: The Real Deal on Detoxes and Cleanses
So juicing isn't going to help your weight-loss efforts, but health is not all about weight loss. Will juicing make you healthier? Not exactly. Juicing doesn't give your body access to more nutrients; it actually decreases nutrient availability. When you juice a fruit or vegetable, you remove all of the fiber , a key healthy characteristic of fruits and vegetables.
If you need to get more fruits and vegetables in your diet, my advice is to simply eat more fruits and vegetables in their whole form. Make vegetables, not grains, the foundation of every meal-you won't have any trouble meeting your vegetable intake goals, eating fewer calories, or feeling satisfied after each meal.
More on SHAPE:
The Best Snacks to Satisfy Your Late Night Munchies
6 Foods You Can't Overdo
Everything You Need to Know About Calories
