This is a side by side comparison of smoothies V.S. juicing.
It is important to note that using a juicer is entirely different than making a smoothie in a blender. A juicer extracts the juice and the fiber is discarded. It requires a lot of produce to get a little bit of juice. Once the juice is extracted, there is a glass of juice and a pile of nutrient packed fiber left for the compost. What a waste of good food.
Not all the nutrients are extracted with the juice. Much of the nutritional value is bound up in the fiber thrown away.
This is the number one reason why blender drinks are more nutritious than juice. For most fruits and vegetables, the entire food can be used in a blender drink. Blender drinks are whole foods. Even if a fruit is peeled, like an orange, it is still a whole food. Juice strips the food of its fiber and many nutrients. In some foods, nutrition is concentrated in the skin, but juicing does not include the skin.
Fiber helps the body metabolize sugar.
Without the fiber, juice can cause sugar spikes. A high sugar content in fruit, like oranges for example, should not be a problem when combined with the fiber in a whole orange, but it can cause a spike in blood sugar when the fiber is removed.
While juicing does have a high nutrient value, it is still not as high as blending.
Due to the lack of fiber, juicing is not filling. This is unlike a smoothie that will satisfy hunger.
It is amazing how many carrots it takes to make a glass of juice. The cost comparison between juicing and blending is enormous.
Juicing is much more expensive than blending.
It can cost many more times as much money to juice as it does to blend. This varies with different vegetables, but kale is a good example. You could juice an entire bag of kale and get almost no juice at all, but with blending you get all the kale in your glass and it will help fill you up.
I tried this with a 5 lb. bag of kale and was shocked that my entire bag of kale was gone with a miniscule amount of juice to show for it. This combined with the inability of juicing to satisfy hunger adds up to blender being significantly more cost effective than juicing.
Below is an example showing the difference in yield between blending or juicing.
The first photo shows 1 1/2 pounds of carrots and two oranges of the same size on both sides. The left side was blended. The right side was juiced.
1 1/2 lbs. of carrots and two oranges on each side.
Below is the outcome. The glasses on the left side show the yield for the blended carrots and oranges. The right side shows the yield for the juiced carrots and oranges and the waste from the juicing process. The peels were not used in either case, but will be added to vinegar to make a household cleaner.
Left: blender
Right: juice
Juice can have a place in healthy eating habits.
Juice should be in addition to, not in place of, whole fruits and vegetables. Juice can also be helpful for people who are working to heal their guts and are not yet able to tolerate whole fruits and vegetables.
Juicing is a lot more time consuming than blending.
It requires cleaning a lot of fruits and vegetables to produce a small amount of juice. It also takes a lot more time to process each item individually rather than throwing it all in the blender and processing them all at the same time. Cleaning a blender takes about a minute. On the other hand, juicers take a lot of work to clean.
Except for a person with specific health issues that don’t allow for many whole fruits and vegetables, blending is far superior to juicing.
For those who have illnesses that prevent them from getting much needed fiber and nutrients from whole fruits and vegetables, there is hope. Dr. Jordan S. Rubin and Dr. Joseph Brasco have a wonderful book called Restoring Your Digestive Health that gives step by step instructions for healing the gut and gaining optimal health. You can find it on Amazon.com.
By Cynthia DeWitte
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Recap of graphic comparison. Vegetables and fruit go much further with blending than they do with juicing. There is little to no waste with blending. All the fiber is wasted with juicing. A smoothie can satisfy hunger, Juicing can only satisfy thirst. Smoothies can be hard on the digestive systems of people suffering from digestive disorders. Juicing is more easily tolerated by those with a compromised digestive system.