1. Alkalise The blood remains at a constant pH of 7.35. Depending on what you consume day-to-day determines how hard the body has to work to maintain that pH. The typical western diet is very acidic and pro-inflammatory in nature, meaning the body has to work overtime, in order to maintain a pH of 7.35. Drinking vegetable juices have been shown to help the body to achieve this pH easily due to their alkalising nature.
2. Nutrition Because juices don’t have the insoluble fibre that is in the whole vegetable, the body does not have to do the extra work to digest the food, instead when a juice is consumed, there is a flood of easily absorbed nutrients, vitamins, minerals and enzymes. In just one cold-pressed organic juice, you are getting the nutrient equivalent of about 6-8 serves of vegetables!
3. Detoxification When you fast, the energy that normally goes into digesting food is used for detoxification. All the stored toxins from processed foods, herbicides, pesticides, and environmental pollutants begin to be eliminated from the body and the juice helps to assist your body in that elimination process.
4. Brain health The reason you come out of a juice fast feeling like a new person is not only because you experience vibrant physical health but because your brain has actually created new neural pathways when it is fasting! Not only does fasting increase your intelligence but one study found that people who consumed regular vegetable juices were 76% less likely to develop neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
5. Immune health With the diverse array of phytochemical that flood your body on a juice fast, it is no wonder that your immune system feels the love. Fasting for three days has been shown to help reset your immune system by ridding the body of old immune cells and creating new ones and by triggering stem cell regeneration.
6. Bacteria Because we are more bacteria than we are human, it makes sense that we need to make sure we are taking good care of the little guys. Polyphenols found in fruit and vegetable juices have been shown to feed the good guys and suppress the growth of the bad guys meaning we come out of a juice fast with a healthier gut microbiota.
7. Weight loss Of course, it makes sense that if you are not eating you will lose weight, but because of the alteration of the gut microbiota (increase in bactericides and decrease in firmicutes) as well as the anti-inflammatory effect of juice fasting, a sustained weight loss can be achieved with continuous consumption of a healthy diet.
8. Reset If you are finding it difficult to make those healthy changes that you know you need to make, a juice fast can give you that break from your normal routine and the energy you need to help clean the slate and renew your mental, emotional and physical state.
Please do not try a juice fast at home. It is important to be under the supervision of a trained specialist.
Cheng, C. W., Adams, G. B., Perin, L., Wei, M., Zhou, X., Lam, B. S., … & Kopchick, J. J. (2014). Prolonged fasting reduces IGF-1/PKA to promote hematopoietic-stem-cell-based regeneration and reverse immunosuppression. Cell stem cell, 14(6), 810-823.
Dai, Q., Borenstein, A. R., Wu, Y., Jackson, J. C., & Larson, E. B. (2006). Fruit and vegetable juices and Alzheimer’s disease: the Kame Project. The American journal of medicine, 119(9), 751-759.
GreenMedInfo Research Group. (2017). Juice Fasts: Hype-Driven Fad or Evidence-Based Health Habit? Retrieved from: http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/juice-fasts-hype-driven-fad-or-evidence-based-health-habit.