Green juices, “detox”, “detoxifiers”, fruits, vegetables, to lose weight, as part of fasts … Are they really as healthy as they are painted or just another trend? We have spoken with two nutritionists to clarify the matter a bit more. This is what they have told us.
Dr. María Isabel Beltrán Margarit is specialized in nutrition and dietetics, she is a member of Top Doctors. For her it will never be comparable to drinking a fruit juice with eating a piece . The reason is that when making a juice, the fruit is squeezed, which means breaking its natural cells to extract the juice. It is precisely in these cells that the fiber is found and when discarded, the juice will barely contain it. “If we make a smoothie and include the whole fruit, then the fiber is maintained,” says Marian Alonso-Cortés, dietician – nutritionist, food technologist and head of the technical department at Aizea, Consultancy in Nutrition and Health. If it is liquefied, “it also becomes free sugar but it maintains the effect of the fiber somewhat even though it is sieved,” says Beltrán Margarit.
Returning to the fruit juice that is the one that is squeezed … What does it mean at a nutritional level to leave fiber aside? “When consuming the whole piece of fruit, the natural sugars are” locked “in the vegetable cell cells and with digestion they will be released little by little after the gastric juices act on them. When squeezing it, we break these cells due to the friction of the juicer and the pressure force on them ”, says Beltrán Margarit. This means that if we drink a fruit juice, the sugars being released from their cells, will suddenly enter the body , not little by little as it would happen when we eat a piece of fruit in which there is fiber because we we also eat the cells. This leads to the dreaded glycemic peak , the one that gives you an immediate sugar boost and in a short time plummets and makes your body demand more sugar. Nothing recommendable.
On the website of the Realfooding Center, specialized in nutrition, and whose visible head is Carlos Ríos, creator of the Realfooding movement or real food, the benefits of opting for a piece of fruit are very well explained: “We have to take into account that sugars provided by the fruit are immersed within its food matrix, which makes us find many other benefits in fruit intake: lower energy intake (high composition of water and fiber), greater satiety, high contribution of micronutrients and phytochemicals and improvement of the health of our microbiota ”.
Does the same thing happen if what we prepare is a vegetable juice that has been so in vogue for some time now? “The vegetable has less vitamins and more minerals and starches. It also releases free sugars but in less quantity since the juicer does not break down the starches. These have to be processed in the digestive tract and it is somewhat slower. The smoothies with vegetables are better than those with fruits, but the ideal thing is to make mixtures, ”says Dr. Beltrán Margarit.
And if we talk about vitamins, who wins, the juice or the piece of fruit? “To make a glass of juice of about 200 cubic centimeters we usually use several pieces of fruit, so if we talk about vitamins, a glass of juice contains, in general, more vitamins than a single piece (a glass equivalent to 2 or 3 pieces of fruit, depending on the type of fruit) ”, Dr. Beltrán Margarit tells us. ” With the juice we maintain certain vitamins but we lose others that are also found in the skin and in the pulp,” says Alonso-Cortés.
Everything we have talked about refers to the homemade juice, not the brick juice from the supermarket. Regarding industrial juice, it must be taken into account that in order for it to be kept in perfect condition, it does not alter, oxidize or darken, it is usually pasteurized and sterilized, processes in which vitamins are lost. In addition, on many occasions sugar or sweeteners are added .
Are you one of those who religiously drink an orange juice for breakfast every day for vitamin C? Well, you should know that it would be better for you to have an orange … According to dietician-nutritionist Marian Alonso-Cortés, an un-squeezed orange provides an average of 50 mg of vitamin C per 100g. When we squeeze it, we do not take advantage of 100% of its vitamin C content because part of it may remain in the pulp. And keep in mind what we talked about above ingesting the sugars without the fiber … The orange wins by a landslide.
Another aspect related to juices that we wanted to discuss with the experts are the supposed detox benefits of certain dietary methods based on spending several days on juice, either fruit, vegetables or both. Both specialists have made it very clear: spending several days eating juices does not “detoxify” or clean and is also dangerous. If we do, we will be depriving our body of a large amount of nutrients it needs such as proteins and fats, in addition to providing it with rapidly absorbed sugars. “Juices may contain some ingredients, depending on what they are made of, that help the liver to work better but have more negative than positive effects if they are not consumed with the supervision of a professional,” says Beltrán Margarit.
By the way, other foods like vegetables are not detox either. We cannot detoxify the body by ingesting drinks or food. The organism is prepared to eliminate the toxins that we ingest and others that it manufactures thanks to the kidneys, which eliminate the toxic substances present in the blood and send them to the urine ; the liver that filters and metabolizes them; sweat and feces.
“The appropriate thing is to try to eat well every day , a balanced diet with little fat, sugar, little salt … So the body will not need to” clean “so much. Also having healthy habits: doing sports, avoiding tobacco, alcohol, sleeping, resting … ”, comments Alonso-Cortés.
