Toni Salerno decided 13 years ago to turn her life around with an organic, healthier lifestyle to cure chronic sickness and bloating. Her solution to better health? Juicing and a combination of organic fruits and vegetables.
“I have done research nearly every day over the last 13 years about juice cleanses, and I can personally testify that short term juice cleanses help restart and re-energize the body,” Salerno said. “Juice cleansing is the removal of all solid foods to eliminate digestion all together so that nutrients and enzymes are absorbed directly into the blood stream.”
Salerno, co-owner of Palouse Juice in downtown Moscow, has seen more benefits than problems with juice cleanses. She said the cleanses she sells are not found on a shelf in the store because they do not contain unnatural sugars, pesticides and other preservative chemicals.
“We are very passionate about restoring gut health and nutrient health,” Salerno said.
Katie Nelsen | Courtesy
But not everyone agrees with her position.
Two experts at the University of Idaho see potential risks and few benefits to juice fasting. A campus dietitian and assistant professor of nutrition urged caution to anyone considering a juice fast.
UI campus dietitian Mindy Rice said juice cleanses can be a popular fad diet to lose weight, but there are some implications.
“As a dietitian, we are taught to eat a balanced diet and focus on moderation,” Rice said. “When people go on a juice cleanse, they are still lacking certain vitamins and nutrients from eating whole foods.”
Katie Brown, UI assistant professor of nutrition, said there is a lack of convincing evidence in the small body of current research to suggest benefits of juice cleansing. She said the human body does a naturally good job of detoxing itself, using the liver as an example.
“While cleanses offer concentrated vitamin doses, they are not nutritionally sound because they are missing nutrients like fats, proteins and whole grains,” Rice said.
Rice said if someone wants to try a cleanse, he or she is more likely to become malnourished the longer the cleanse is. She said juice cleanses have been around for a long time — with some religions promoting fasting and juicing — but it is not meant to be long term.
Salerno said Palouse Juice offers three, five, seven and 10-day juice cleanses that include six juices a day to drink every few hours.
“The juices from Palouse Juice are 100 percent organic, made solely from fruits and vegetables without any additional preservatives or sugars,” Salerno said. “A juice cleanse regenerates your cells within 72 hours, and you feel amazing afterwards.”
She said juice cleanses her business sells cost approximately $45 dollars per day, with the overall costs varying from $135 to $450.
“The start of a juice cleanse does bring withdrawals and often times a pity party because your body is craving what you would normally eat, but once I got in the right mindset the first time, I became motivated and able to have self-control,” Salerno said. “I felt like a rock star for overcoming that mental challenge.”
But Brown believes that moderation is unpopular, and diets such as juice cleanses are just society’s “quick fix,” she said.
“I get the sense that one reason why juice cleanses and other fad diets are popular is because individuals see themselves as ‘hardcore’ because they are abstaining from eating foods they want and foods others are eating around them,” Brown said.
Salerno said cleanses offer cures for many autoimmune diseases, common sickness, alcoholism, depression and more, according to her own personal research of others’ testimonies.
Because the human body uses a majority if its energy on digestion, it is important to give the digestive tract a break — plus, the body is composed of several pounds of built up fecal matter that weighs it down and causes bloating, she said.
“Juice cleanses re-energize the body, detox the body of metals and chemicals, aid in colon health and digestion, and more,” Salerno said.
Salerno said health is wealth — someone will not be healthy without an engaged mind, body and soul relationship. She said even laughing 20 minutes per day will boost the immune system.
Salerno suggests doing cleanses periodically, roughly every six months, such as doing one in the spring and one in fall, or one in the summer and one in the winter.
“I feel and look better than I ever have before,” Salerno said. “It is important to eat a healthy and balanced diet because restoring gut health means restoring everything else, too.”
In one of her nutrition classes, Brown asks students to fill out a fad diet assignment that outlines the positive and negative aspects of a chosen diet. Some of the questions illuminate any red flags there might be — including whether it excludes any food groups, promises fast results such as losing 15 pounds in one week, or includes celebrity or testimonial support.
Brown said according to the USDA Dietary Guidelines, whole foods have more benefits than juice. For example, eating whole fruit has more fiber and nutrients than juice does, she said.
Slow weight loss is more sustainable and there are more benefits to food than just the nutrients, Brown said.
“We (Palouse Juice) advocate juice fasting or feasting as a great tool to restore gut health in conjunction with a plant based diet,” Salerno said. “We don’t focus on weight loss as much as we focus on the flooding of nutrients for your body and the healing that takes place in the gut.”
Allison Spain can be reached at [email protected]