Blending vs Juicing – Which One Should I Do?

I get this question all the time. People write in and they ask me about which one is better a blended drink or a juice? Some people who are not hip to the healthy lifestyle think that a blended drink is actually a juice. If it’s really thin in consistency I can see how they could think that.

But no a blended drink still contains the fiber content of the foods. People like to refer to this as roughage. We’ve all been taught that fiber is good for us. We’re going to have a guest on Konstantin Monastyrsky author of Fiber Menace who argues that fiber is actually damaging to our health. But for the sake of this article, we’ll go with the notion that fiber is healthy for you. The jury is still out on that but just bare with me here…

The answer of what’s better actually depends on a lot of factors. My answer is why choose? If you understand how they both can enhance your health, you’ll know how to use them accordingly. If you have blood surgar issues, definitely blend.

By the way here’s a tip for you if you have blood sugar issues and still want to juice. Only put 1 granny smith apple in your juice with no beet or carrot. Make the apple the sweetest thing you run through your juicer. Then when you’re done, take half of the juice amount (let’s say the juice itself is 16 ounces) and add water to that. That means you’ll add 8 ounces of water to your juice.

I like to make a couple super foods smoothies each day along with a very low sugar green juice. If you’re sick or want to lose weight, then juicing would be a good choice. When you juice there is no fiber so the vitamins, enzymes, minerals and nutrients get absorbed directly into the blood stream within 15 minutes.

As Jay Kordich says, “It’s the juice of the plant that feeds you…” I can hear his voice now. 🙂

Typically I juice my vegetables and eat my fruit. If I make a green smoothie in the morning I’ll add in a ton of green leafy vegetables in it. I know the “Life Food” people like David Jubb say that we aren’t really meant to eat leaves but we’re meant to eat the fruiting body of plants which include broccoli, zucchini, tomatoes and things like that. But after reading Green for Life and listening to people like Brian Clement, it seems to make sense that leafy greens are good for us.

Fruit is really meant to be consumed as is. If you juice 5 oranges for example you’re going to get a huge spike in sugar and insulin levels in your blood stream. We weren’t designed to eat that many pieces of fruit in one sitting with all the fiber removed. The fiber is there for a reason.

When I juice, I think of that like my daily mineral and vitamin supplement. It’s almost like medicine. It becomes detrimental when we start juicing too many sweet things like fruit.

I love juicing and do it just about every day for different reasons than blending.

What I love about blending is the ability to throw in tons of different ingredients in the form of super food powders. I like to add some milk kefir, some raw pastured eggs, chia seeds, Sun Warrior protein powder, hemp seeds, maca and more. When you’re making a juice, you’re not really able to blend those kind of powders into your drink without making it taste chalky and weird.

Blending things into your Vitamix or Blendtec blenders is a fantastic way to add in so many super foods into your diet. Your body still has to digest this because in essence it’s a liquid meal. On the other hand juicing is like medicine and a great way to prevent colds, and get over colds naturally.

Your body has to do almost zero work to absorb the minerals from a fresh vegetable juice. Digestion requires more energy from the body than just about anything else we do.

I say your goal should be to go out and buy some superfoods and some vegetables and make 1 blended superfood drink and 1 low sugar green juice every day. Give yourself the freedom to do whatever you want for your other meals and snacks. Forget about everything else that’s bad in your diet. Just focus on doing those two things every day for a month and start noticing the changes.

Remember, eat your fruit and drink your vegetables…