Are Juice Detoxes Ruining Your Teeth?
Meal replacement diets including juice detoxes are extremely popular currently, and still rapidly growing in popularity. The idea of a juice detox is to blend raw fruit and vegetables and drink these instead of eating meals. The fresh food is thought to cleanse your body, ridding toxins from your body, leaving you feeling fresher and less sluggish, ridding of bloating and giving you a clearer complexion.
There is differing advice from research, with some people claiming these detoxes work wonders on our body and aid weight loss, and others suggesting that our bodies don't require cleansing, and that any weight lost during a detox will pile back on as soon as you begin eating again. There is also research which suggests this kind of diet can affect your metabolism, causing you more difficulty to lose weight in the long term.
Juice detoxes, however, do offer a great opportunity to break bad habits: cutting down on alcohol, junk food and caffeine. It has been suggested, that if we simply do this for three days per week, we would benefit in a similar way to how we would during a juice detox anyway. Giving your body a rest from such drugs and foods that are hard to process, will allow it a break from working to digest and break down these components. This could be as good as a cleanse, and a lot kinder to your bank balance too.
We are often told that the sugars in fruit are natural and are therefore easier for our body to convert into energy, and less likely to store as fat. However, all the extra sugar on our teeth and gums is likely to cause decay and serious dental problems. Your tooth enamel can be damaged, as well as your gums, which hold your teeth in place. If your teeth don't rot, or become highly sensitive, there's a chance they may fall out if you continue to 'detox' your body in this way.
For the body to function at it's very best, we are probably all aware that we need to be consuming a balanced diet, as well as water to hydrate us. Our diets should consist of a blend of fruit and vegetables, but also fats, proteins, carbohydrates and fibre. Without these vital food groups, our body has to find another way to source energy. For example, a lack of carbohydrates in our diets, can cause our body to convert protein into glucose. Changing the way our body works like this can increase our risk of type 2 diabetes and obesity, leading to serious health conditions.
Exercise levels are likely to dwindle, our ability to absorb certain nutrients diminishes, you will be more immune to catching colds and feeling cold, your digestive system can slow, resulting in more bloat and you may well feel tired and stressed. Our body's weren't built to survive on juice alone and there's no such thing as a quick fix, so look after your body for the long term.
