Should You Drink Your Fruits and Vegetables?
Many Americans are drinking, not munching, their fruits and vegetables as juices and smoothies—presumably for the convenience and to obtain a range of promised health benefits. But the benefits of juicing and blending aren’t yet well supported by scientific evidence.
The idea of drinking plants has a certain logic to it: Whole fruits and vegetables provide fiber, vitamins and a range of other beneficial plant chemicals, so it’s not unreasonable to think they would still be healthy in a liquid form. Also, many Americans fall short on the recommended 4 to 5 daily cups of fruits and vegetables, and using produce-pulverizing kitchen appliances could potentially help to bridge that gap.
“Using a blender or a juicer is a great way to incorporate fruits and vegetables into your diet, especially for those who do not regularly eat them,” says Kelly Kane, MS, RD, director of nutrition and business operations at the Frances Stern Nutrition Center at Tufts Medical Center. “It’s also a way to incorporate nutritious foods into your diet that you may not typically eat, such as kale.”
But juicing and blending fall short of whole fruits and vegetables in some important ways, too. “Liquid calories are not as filling as whole foods and it is possible to overdo it,” Kane says. “Some people would not eat 3 cups of fruit in one sitting, but can easily consume that much or more in a smoothie.”
Juiced Out. In addition to delivering many of the vitamins, essential nutrients and phytochemicals in whole produce, juicing also allows you to create interesting taste combinations. But juicing is a type of processing that can alter the nutritional profile of the raw ingredients because of what’s been left behind in the juicing machine: fiber-rich pulp containing beneficial plant-derived chemicals.
“Many of the phytochemicals are pretty strongly bound to the fibers in the peel and need more than just mechanical extraction to release them,” says Diane McKay, PhD, an assistant professor at Tufts’ Friedman School and a scientist in the HNRCA Antioxidants Research Laboratory.
In addition, because you skip the chewing, you can consume a lot of calories and sugars in a short time. The machine has effectively done the initial steps of digestion for you. As a result, your blood sugar may rise more quickly without the delay from chewing and the buffering of the fiber. As the initial feeling of fullness from the juice and blood sugar rise wear off, you could end up snacking more before your next meal.
Are Smoothies Better? If you grind up fruits and vegetables with a high-speed blender rather than simply extracting the juice, you could retain more of the phytochemicals, vitamins, minerals and fiber. Your gut does the rest.
“Bacteria in the colon may break some of the chemical bonds holding the phytochemicals to the fiber and release them,” McKay says. “If the choice is between juicing and smoothies, go with the smoothies. Include the skin, if it’s edible, so that you can get the benefit of its fiber and other valuable nutrients.” Blending also allows you to combine fruits and vegetables with other ingredients, like yogurt, nuts, seeds and leafy greens, all of which fit into a healthy eating pattern.
“You probably can’t drink a smoothie as quickly as you can juice, but it’s still liquid calories, and you can drink a smoothie much faster than eat the whole fruits or vegetables,” says Alice H. Lichtenstein, DSc, director of Tufts’ HNRCA Cardiovascular Nutrition Laboratory and executive editor of Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter. “On a positive note, adding other ingredients to your smoothie, like Greek yogurt, will add additional nutrients, such as calcium, that tends to be low in many people’s diets.”
In the end, among the many choices that you make every day to maintain a healthy dietary pattern, juicing and blending are viable ways to include more fruit and vegetables in your diet. “Ideally, eat them as whole foods,” Lichtenstein adds, “but juicing or blending could be the next best alternative if that’s what works for you. And, always remember to use them as replacements for other items in the diet, particularly those high in refined carbohydrate, and not just add them to your diet.”
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