11 Healthy Juice Recipes + Benefits

What do you do when you feel tired or unenergetic? Chug a cup of coffee? Go out for a run? Do a juice fast?  

Many people opt to try juice cleansing or fasting as a way to jump-start their way toward better health, weight loss, and improved gut health. 

But is following this liquid diet effective or even safe? 

A juice fast, also known as a cleanse or detox, usually entails drinking homemade or premade juices made from vegetables, herbs, and fruit (and occasionally nut milk, like cashew milk) in addition to ample water, tea, and sometimes clear broths.

Juicing fruits and vegetables is different from blending because it isolates the liquid of the produce from the pulp and fibrous portion.

Therefore, fruit and vegetable juices will have a more concentrated amount of vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals but less fiber when compared to something like a smoothie. Juice fasts can be as short as 24 hours or as long as 10 days.

Juice fasting has many touted benefits that include reducing inflammation, improving sleep, clearing skin, promoting weight loss1, ridding the body of toxins, and reducing sugar cravings. 

But are these juices really worth the hype? Most of these claims are unsubstantiated and anecdotal rather than science-based, but there may be some positives to note from short-term juice fasting.  

One study2 investigated the effects of a juice fast on health. This study looked at how a three-day fruit and vegetable juice fast affected the gut microbiota, weight loss, and body composition of 20 healthy people.

During the fasting period, the subjects drank six 16-ounce bottles of juices that were a mixture of leafy green vegetables, roots, citrus, cayenne, and vanilla almond, totaling around 1,310 calories per day.

After the fast, the 20 people could then resume their normal diet for two weeks. 

The results showed that people lost a significant amount of weight during the juice fast, and that weight loss persisted over the following two weeks (potentially due to changes in their gut microbiota).

However, the weight loss may have resulted from lower calorie intake in general rather than from the juice specifically, and beneficial changes in people's gut microbiota may have been due to the overall increase of fruits and vegetables in the diet for those three days.  

However, this study shows that a juice fast of this composition and calorie count for up to three days is safe and can be somewhat beneficial. But those benefits can't necessarily be fully attributed to the juice itself. 

Before you start a juice fast, take a moment to think about why you are doing this and set realistic expectations. Is it to lose weight? Curb sugar cravings? Reset your digestive system? 

Whatever your goal is, a juice fast may be a step in helping to reach that goal (depending on what your current eating habits are like), but it is not a fast track to wellness. Making sustained changes to your health and well-being takes time. 

Additionally, you'll want to think through when works best in your schedule to actually start a juice fast.

My advice: Plan it for a low-key weekend at home, where you can run to the bathroom as often as you need to (you will be peeing a lot!).

During a juice fast, you should aim to drink at least six 16-ounce servings of juice. That works out to one serving of juice every two hours from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.

You can also drink as much water and herbal tea as you want throughout the day. Adding one or two more servings per day is OK if you feel like you need more sustenance.

It would be a good idea to not participate in any strenuous physical activity (think HIIT workouts) during a juice fast, as you could become dizzy and fatigued more easily. 

And if you are constantly feeling tired, loopy, unable to concentrate, or your hunger pangs are taking over, it may be a sign that your juice fast is doing more harm than good. 

Research shows that it is completely safe for healthy people to participate in a juice fast for up to three days and then return to a regular diet.

The first day after a cleanse, try eating smaller meals and snacks throughout the day, as a large meal might make you feel nauseated and uncomfortable. 

Salads, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, and whole fruits could help ease you back into solid foods again, but if you don't have a sensitive stomach, you may be able to resume eating your normal diet right away. 

After this short introductory period back to solid foods, it is important to incorporate high-quality nutritious foods back into the diet.

There are several groups of people who should not participate in juice fasting. Children, adolescents, and pregnant and breastfeeding women need adequate amounts of energy and protein for growth, and juice fasting would not meet those needs.

Elite and competitive athletes also have very high-calorie needs, and juice fasting would not support that high energy expenditure or contain the nutrients necessary for optimal recovery.

The most prominent health claim related to juice fasting is its potential to help detoxify, but if you have a functioning liver and kidneys, you really don't need to do anything extra besides eating a balanced diet high in whole, minimally processed foods to detoxify your body.

You can achieve the purported benefits of juice fasting like weight loss and better digestion by simply adding more fruits and vegetables to your regular diet.

Doing this will up your fiber intake, which is good for digestion, and replacing foods like refined carbohydrates with fruits and vegetables can help with weight loss. 

If you like the idea of drinking your fruits and vegetables, try making a smoothie as a meal replacer instead of juice.

Juice fasting and cleansing are essentially trendy, fad diets, and most of the reported health benefits of juice fasting are not backed by science.

There are better and safer alternatives to juice fasting, however, like just adding more fruits and vegetables to your daily diet.