Are juice cleanses beneficial?

Exploring the effectiveness of one of the most popular health trends of 2019.

Mary Conaway, News Editor

As summer approaches, many women become more anxious about their “summer bodies” and feel the need to go to extreme measures, such as the juice cleanse, to lose weight. It is so easy nowadays to pick up a phone, use Pinterest and search for “summer diets” which seems like the perfect solution to lose weight for the summer. But what many searchers do not know is that Pinterest and many other medias or websites do not always source accurate information, hence “don’t trust everything you read on the internet.”

Our “breakfast” barely got me through 1st period and it just was a constant downhill from there. We both felt extremely drained, irritated, hungry, and completely out of touch. At the end, we didn’t feel any better, just relieved to eat actual food. In my humble opinion, it was not worth it.

Juice cleanses are usually done with intents for fast and dramatic weight loss. But most of the weight loss is water weight (not actual fat), which comes right back. Medical News Today reported, “The participants lost an average of […] 3.75 pounds (lb), after the fast. At a follow-up 2 weeks later, their weight remained […] 2.01 lb, lower on average.”

Not only that, juice cleanses for over the recommended amount of time of 3-10 days, have been medically proven to do possible damage to kidney health. According to the The National Kidney Foundation, “Certain nutrients may need to be limited because the kidneys cannot filter them from the body effectively.”

They also don’t do what they claim they do, like ridding your body of toxins. As reported by the New York Times, “The kidneys and the liver do the main removal work. They draw substances out of the bloodstream and process them…”

If you are person with average health and are thinking about losing weight for the summer, stick with a healthy balanced diet of carbs, fats, proteins, vitamins, and minerals. These “fast diets” are quick with losing weight, but you gain the weight back just as fast.