A lot of people don’t really realise the difference between drinking a juice or having a smoothie.

When you juice something you take the whole fruit or vegetable and press it against a blade in a juicer.

The blade squeezes the juice out into one compartment and separates the fibre, which is normally thrown away.

You then end up with the liquid juice, without any bits.

A smoothie is a blend of whole foods, which means that the entire fruit or vegetable is blended with the pulp (the fibrous part) which remains in the drink.

So Which is Healthier?

Proper juicing extracts good nutrition, but leaves the fibre behind. This means that juices can be less filling than a smoothie or a piece of whole fruit.

The fibre in a smoothie can also provide some important gut health benefits, such as cellulose, an insoluble fibre in many vegetables that feeds the bacteria in our colon.

Fibre is also a great way to balance our blood sugar levels, too.

With a smoothie you have more free reign to add in extra nutritional ingredients, such as a protein powder, healthy fats such as avocado or almond butter, and even superfoods such as maca, turmeric, wheatgrass, or ginger.

A point to make about juices is that they tend to be quite high in fructose (the natural sugar found in fruit and vegetables), and too much sugar, wherever it comes from, is important to avoid.

It can be hard to shift the weight when you consume a lot of sugar, whether this is from a fizzy drink or from a ‘deemed healthy’ fruit juice. The reason is because it spikes our fat storage hormone, insulin.

Too much insulin can cause excess storage of fat in the body, which is what we want to avoid if we are trying to get our weight down.

So, in my opinion, a juice every now and then is not necessarily a bad thing, but drinking them day in day out in a bid to lose weight is not something I would advise, due to their sugar content and lack of fibre to slow down its absorption.

Smoothies, on the other hand, are a great for promoting satiety and feeding those beneficial bacteria within our digestive tract!

Knowing the facts is always key to making informed and wise choices when it comes to food and nutrition, and I love to geek out on these facts!

Evoke the Glow.