What is the opposite of a Bacon cheesesteak? It’s a question the remorseful and the portly have asked themselves for years, usually around the time they finish the last bite. The answer to many Americans these days seems to be a big, bitter glass of raw-vegetable juice. And then another. And then another.
It’s unclear whether juice cleansing will go down as a fad, like the macrobiotic regimens of the ’70s or the Atkins mania of the early aughts, but the trend shows no sign of slowing. At any given moment, half of Hollywood seems to be on a juice fast. Meredith Vieira just finished her first one. Fashion blogs were recently abuzz with the news that designer Jason Wu ate a cookie during his monthlong cleanse. At least five new juice-centric diet books have hit the market since early December, including nutritionist Cherie Calbom’s latest ode to juicing, The Juice Lady’s Weekend Weight-Loss Diet, and Jason Manheim’s The Healthy Green Drink Diet.
Even Starbucks is positioning itself to cash in on the next great beverage craze. After buying high-end juicemaker Evolution Fresh in November for $30 million, the Frappuccino purveyor plans to open its first juice bar this spring and build a national chain. And it’s doing this at a time when you can’t go near a fresh juice without being promised some form of ritual purification–or, as Evolution labeled its sweet-greens-and-lemon blend, a Daily Detox.
The basic idea behind a juice cleanse is seductively simple: Our bodies are walking Superfund sites, desperately in need of purging. And what could be purer than unadulterated fruit and vegetable juices? So for some set period, that’s all you consume. The natural qualities of the juices help various organs expunge these impurities, resulting in a lighter, happier, healthier you.
“What’s healthier than fresh juice?” asks Zoe Sakoutis, founder of BluePrintCleanse, a New York City–based company that is part of the $1.6 billion superpremium-juice market that Starbucks is muscling into. BluePrint says it has more than 50,000 customers paying $65 for a daily array of six kinds of fresh juices. Rival Organic Avenue reported $10 million in sales in 2010. Michelle Hall of San Francisco’s Living Greens, which supplements its cleanse regimens with potassium broth (yum!), acknowledges there might be some criticism from experts. But in her experience, “when we juice, we feel better, we look better, we eat and sleep better and overall we just live better.”
The only problem is that there is almost no medical evidence that juice is anything other than innocuous, and the universal opinion of modern medicine is that your liver and kidneys are, when functioning, quite efficient at detoxification. Plus, the weight that comes off so easily during a juice fast tends to be water–the kind of weight you gain back after a single meatball sandwich. When you stop eating or severely cut your calorie intake, your cells burn glycogen, a kind of semiliquid energy reserve. When it goes, so does the water in your body, but both are quickly replenished when you start consuming things other than juices.
“There have been no clinical studies that validate their cleansing properties,” Dr. Leonard Bielory, an allergy specialist at Rutgers University, told me. “Drinking only juice for three days or more doesn’t do much but put the individual in an uncomfortable position.” Uncomfortable tends to mean irritability, headaches and frequent trips to the bathroom. Dr. Bennett Roth, chief of gastroenterology at UCLA Medical Center, is crystal clear on one thing about juice cleansing: “The concept has no basis in scientific support.”
Despite, or perhaps because of, the medical community’s overwhelming lack of enthusiasm, juice fasts have many defenders, including Gwyneth Paltrow (whose lifestyle site, Goop.com co-branded a 21-day cleanse in January), Sarah Jessica Parker (a BluePrint fan) and Salma Hayek (who co-founded a line of juices called Cooler Cleanse). The pro-juice community even has a big-name physician on its side. Dr. Mehmet Oz recommends going on juice fasts for a couple of days but, he warns, “not longer.” A few months ago, he even posted a recipe for a 48-hour cleanse on his TV show’s website. The idea is to give your digestive tract a break and focus your mind on healthier eating.
“I do it when I begin to feel gross,” says Naomi Pomeroy, Food & Wine’s best new chef of 2009, whose Portland, Ore., restaurant Beast specializes in rich, meat-centric food. “It heightens my sense of smell and taste, and I have much more energy.” I’ve heard the same things from many other juice fanatics. And so, despite a bone-deep skepticism toward the process, I decided to go on a three-day juice fast myself, and I made my wife Danit–a petite person who eats so healthily, she won’t consume chicken skin–go through it with me.
BluePrint sent us two sample cleanses, and on Day One I was unhappy. The juices varied from awful to delicious and gave me all the energy I needed, but in my addled state, everything smelled like pizza. Danit, meanwhile, was positively buoyant. By Day Three, I felt more energetic, though it may have just been wrath. I didn’t experience the total euphoria, or “starvation high,” that anorexics talk about, because unlike the super-low-cal Master Cleanse, my juices were giving me more than 1,000 nutritious calories a day, about the same as some nonliquid diets. I lost 6 lb. (2.7 kg) during those three days, but it was a bitter victory because Danit didn’t even bother weighing herself when it was over. To her, that wasn’t the point.
I realized the next morning (over coffee and an egg-and-cheese sandwich) that I had learned one of the central truths about juice cleansing. I had treated the cleanse like a burden, something to be endured; my wife had approached it as a challenge, like Bikram yoga or a half-marathon, two other things I would never want to do. Self-denial and ritual purification are in short supply in our secular age. The juices look and taste clean, and they make the people who drink them feel clean too. From their sleek bottles to the radiant complexions of the stars who endorse them, they seem to promise release from the prison of our clogged, earthbound and less-than-ideal bodies. As with so many things, a lot of it hinges on the packaging. “We don’t make any claims,” BluePrint’s Sakoutis says. “It’s just juice.”
TO READ JOSH OZERSKY’S WEEKLY FOOD COLUMN, GO TO time.com/ozersky
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