Clean juices and juice-based detox diets provide immediate and significant advantages, whether you want to lose weight, feel more energized, or "reset" your system.

A fast online search will yield a bewildering assortment of commercial and do-it-yourself juice cleaning solutions. For a few days, some people advocate consuming various mixes of fruit and vegetable juices. Some ask to add spices and other soluble ingredients to improve results. The well-known Master Cleanse regimen omits all solid foods for more than a week, mostly water mixed with a particular mixture of lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup

Is juice cleanses, however, beneficial or even safe? With little credible research on juice diets, we turned to WW's scientific team and an independent nutrition expert to help us weed out the hype, decipher the claims, and understand when caution may be warranted.

What exactly is cleaning juice?

There are many different types of juice cleanses, but they all have one thing in common: they replace one or all meals with juice for a certain length of time. Some programs require you to create your own juices from various fruits and vegetables, whilst others deliver bottled mixes to your home. Depending on your schedule, you might be fasting for up to a week—three to 10 days is the most common time frame.

Juice Cleanse Benefits: Fact or Fiction?

Despite the promises of easy weight loss and renewed health from proponents of juice diets, such claims have little basis." There is little to no clinical proof that clean juices or any detox diet truly enhance the body," writes the author." Alicia Romano, MS, RD, LDN, a registered dietitian at Tufts Medical Center's Frances Stern Center for Nutrition.

Some proponents of juicing cleanse point to a 2017 study, published in Scientific Reports, which suggests that a three-day juice-based diet could facilitate weight loss by upsetting the balance of healthy bacteria in the gut. But the study only looked at 20 people, and the researchers didn't track the volunteers' well-being or weight loss results beyond a two-week window. According to Romano, further study is needed to confirm the findings and draw significant conclusions regarding the association between juice, intestinal health, and weight reduction.

Apart from cleansing, researchers are still trying to figure out how juices in general, especially fruit juices, can affect one's health. So far, research has revealed conflicting outcomes. For example, a short-term, placebo-controlled study published in The American Journal of Clinical Inflammation markers were shown to be lower in subjects who drank red-orange juice every day, according to nutrition. In contrast, a 2013 review of three long-term trials involving over 187,000 persons found that drinking more fruit juice was associated with an increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes. A 2019 research review in the journal Nutrients could not determine whether juices are better than soft drinks, and the researchers concluded: "More randomized According to the study, "controlled studies evaluating the metabolic implications of eating fruit juice fasting vs sugar-sweetened drinks are necessary to produce trustworthy public health guidelines."

Providers of juice cleaners frequently claim that their programs can remove the body of metabolic waste, external contaminants, and toxins. But a 2014 review of eight commercial "detox" diets, including juice-based programs, published in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics, found no evidence that such diets work on that front.