/r/FoodMyths
Myths involving food including diets, eating, GMO, natural, artificial, pesticides, carbs, protein, fat, muscle, nutrition, and health. Foodies for organic, vegan, vegetarian cooking and recipes. We're here to fix lies and misinformation of industrial farming and processed food sellers.
/r/FoodMyths
Talking juice cleanses w/ Dr. Faisal Rehman
HH: Joining us today is nephrologist and researcher Dr. Faisal Rehman. A nephrologist is a kidney specialist and as a nephrologist, part of Dr. Rehman's job is to monitor and correct electrolyte, nutrient, and acid-base disturbances in the human body.
FR: My name is Faisal Rehman. I'm a professor of medicine here at the Schulich School of Medicine (UWO in London, Ontario) and I specialize in Nephrology, or kidney disease, and I also do quite a bit of internal medicine as well.
Yeah, so to me, it's similar to if you ingest a whole bunch of vitamins, will you replenish your vitamin stores more? The fact of the matter is if you overeat any specific type of vitamins or consume heavy amounts of vitamins whether it's from the form of food or not, you're just going to excrete it in your urine and it’ll be out of your system. So many of us are not deficient in any spots or two specific vitamins, the B1 vitamin. We are deficient, in Canada, probably in vitamin D. Probably most of us are deficient in vitamin D. So if you take more vitamin D rich foods or vitamin D supplements that makes. But most of us are not deficient in the vitamin B complex that supplements have and C and other important essential vitamins. So all that extra stuff we take with us and from juicing or in the form of pills is just going to be pissed out your kidneys. So I think it's a waste of time again and not, in my opinion, any useful healthy lifestyle modification that's going to change your life.
HH: So just like taking a daily vitamin supplement, if your body isn't deficient in it to begin with, the extra vitamins found in the fruit and vegetable juice just gets peed out. Now, that's the case with water soluble vitamins, which includes vitamins C and all the different vitamin Bs. There's also fat soluble vitamins -- vitamins A, D, E, and K. These ones don't get peed out and once absorbed from the diet, linger around in our body's liver and fatty tissues. Here's another good point -- Dr. Rehman points to the fact that by only taking in the juices of fruits and vegetables that people miss out on another key component of a health diet - FIBER!
FR: I would say that for your digestive health. It's probably just as important to have the fiber part of the fruit and vegetables than just the juice when you're taking in a juice. You still haven’t necessarily digested the carbohydrate moieties or whatever comes in with that vegetable or fruit. So I don't see that as being a point to improve your health and the digestive process going through the digestive process of fiber is actually better for your gut health and for your bacterial flora in your gut. And when you give up fiber you run into issues with constipation and other health issues.
HH: Another reason why many people go on juice cleanses is to lose weight. And fair enough. If they follow the juice cleanse as instructed, most people will likely shed some pounds. This is because juice cleanses will result in people eating fewer calories than they normally would. During juice cleanses, people end up consuming around 800-1200 calories per day. And unless you're a toddler between the ages of 2-3, this puts you at a caloric deficit, with the recommended caloric intake for men being around 2500 and for women, 2000. Now, most juice cleanses only last a few days -- anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks. So let's say you drop 10 pounds during that time period. Will you gain it back? Now let's also take note that there is a disclaimer found in most juice cleanse related blog posts - "don't do this juice cleanse without consulting your doctor first". So what does Dr. Rehman Have to say?
FR: So personally I'm against any kind of extreme measure to obtain your goals, especially when it pertains to weight loss because unfortunately with most of those mechanisms, the gains are short-term and often people gain the fat weight right back. So that's one issue. This is because it's not sustainable to keep doing that behavior. The second thing about extreme measures is that they have unintended consequences and potential side effects and bad things which I've seen, so just to get that out there with respect to juicing per se. A few concerns. So when you take vegetables and fruits and you blend them down and you separate out the juice and you drink that is your primary source of nutrition, you're probably getting a lot of carbohydrates you getting some vitamins you getting very little fiber. Fiber is a very important part of the fruit and vegetable which is important for bowel health, but you're likely not getting enough protein. You're not getting enough fat and with respect to healthy weight loss that cannot be good. You know, you lose too much muscle mass perhaps and we were talking earlier before the interview even about electrolyte abnormalities, you know. If you're taking in a ton of free water in the form of these juices, you're not getting enough solute. You can become profoundly hyponatremic as well in extreme cases.
And again, like I mentioned you're prone to other nutritional deficiencies. I've seen patients come in who've gone on diets similar to juicing with profound iron deficiency anemia. The hemoglobin was 50 and the young nurse that I saw, she came to me saying I feel unwell, and she looked unwell. And I checked her bloodwork and she had life-threatening anemia because she'd gone on an extreme diet.