Welcome to brain Stuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam here with another classic episode from former host Christian Sagar, and this one we tackle the phenomenon that is juice cleanses. What do they actually do to our bodies? And what about us needs cleansing in the first place? Hey brain Stuff, Christian Sager. Here, let's talk about purity because we are surrounded by toxic
stuff in this modern world. Car emissions in our air, factory runoff in our water, herbicides and pesticides, and our food trolls and our comments sections. If our bodies are temples, every pizza role is a desecration. How can we become pure again? Well, juice cleanses supposedly rid our bodies of toxins and restore our digestive systems. Depending on the specific and sometimes copyrighted cleans you spend a couple of days to a couple weeks consuming nothing but liquefied fruits, vegetables,
and maybe some nut milk. Since lots of people are pretty bad about eating enough fruits and vegetables to begin with, this may mean that during a juice cleanse, you'd be getting more vitamins and minerals than usual. These are substances that your body needs to turn food into energy and to grow and maintain cells. Some even have antioxidant properties, which means that they can help prevent cellular damage under
particular circumstances. The benefits of these vitamins and minerals are real, but keep in mind that your body can only process a certain amount of them at once. After that, you're just going to excrete the rest. Research does show that eating fruits and vegetables rich in these substances can decrease some risk of some diseases in the long run. The key phrase here is in the long run. The best way to reap these benefits is to consistently eat five
or more servings every day. One juice bin isn't gonna do much. Consuming nothing but juice for a few days also means that you'd get a lot less fiber, fat, and protein, and way fewer calories than normal. Fats and proteins are just as essential for healthy cellular function as vitamins and minerals, and fiber in the diet is actually part of your colon's normal cleansing system. It absorbs water and water soluble waste in your intestines and moves everything
on out. Plus fiber can slow down your body's uptake of sugar, keeping your blood sugar levels more stable. Without it, and considering the high levels of fruit sugars and the limited calories involved in a juice diet, you will feel extra hungry and may experience dizzy and blood sugar spikes and crashes. A day or two of this shouldn't do any harm to the average person, but restricting calories and nutrients for much longer than that can trigger starvation mode.
Your body doesn't know when it's going to get more food, so it slows your tabolism down. When this happens too often, the change can be permanent, so is it worth it? Psychologically, maybe you'll probably lose a little weight to the decrease in calories, which might be what you're looking for, and people around the world have been using short fasts to practice mindfulness for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But physiologically, juice cleanses don't help clear toxins out of your body.
The thing is that your liver and your kidneys are natural detoxifiers. They filter bad stuff out of your body all the time, but they need the full complement of nutrients provided by a healthy diet in order to do so. Today's episode was written by me and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other topics, is it has stuff works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
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