Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. 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 of 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. Wool. 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 binge 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 from 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 metabolism 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 asks 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. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.