Post by Willow on May 26, 2014 15:00:37 GMT 9.5
POLLY was a normal 17-year-old girl, and like any normal 17-year-old was like a litmus paper to our society, absorbing every bit of the cultural swamp we live in and reflecting its health, for good or bad. That's why we should have taken note when Polly started swapping her meals for juice.
"Every girl I know was very influenced by celebrities," says Polly. "It doesn't take very long before you realise all these papped shots of them have them holding on to their juice, like they're so wonderful and clean and pure as well as skinny." Even though she was a healthy weight, Polly replaced food with juice for three days, following instructions in a juice-fast book that was then the best-selling book on Amazon: "I told myself I wasn't starving, I was 'detoxing'."
She lost a few pounds and liked it, but the weight returned with normal meals, so she started swapping a juice for breakfast, then lunch. Her father wasn't too happy, but accepted it as a health kick. Little did he know how it would spin out of control - in her worst six months she was barely eating solids at all, and if she did felt she had to then "cleanse" her body with juices.
When Polly began fainting and feeling too weak to leave the house, her family finally sought professional help. Now, she's horrified at what happened: "I tricked myself into the healthiness of it; now I see juice is just full of sugar, no protein, no fibre."
In the Middle Ages, young women like St Catherine of Siena were venerated for giving up food in favour of sipping a bit of wine, aka the blood of Christ. Since then, while we still worship the cult of thinness, it is accepted that giving up food for liquid is not the answer - except, that is, for the fact that almost every celebrity these days has to have a paparazzi shot of them clutching a beaker of green sludge, our secular sacrament of 2014.
The juicing phenomenon has crept up on us under the guise of its semi-religious vocabulary: juice-marketers make claims of "purifying", "cleansing" and "detoxifying", "resting" the digestive system, renewing cells, boosting immunity and fertility. Actresses, singers and reality TV stars take up the chorus. No matter that this is all pooh-poohed by mainstream medicine, they call to an urge for purging in the modern mindset. And it is young women vulnerable to eating disorders who are paying the price. According to psychologists in the field, "juicerexia" is growing: juice fasts that entice healthy women into anorexic habits and allow anorexic women to hide their difficulty with food.
Sara Shammas, a clinical psychologist who specialises in treating eating disorders, believes the real question is how a fad so lacking in medical support has been allowed to become pervasive under the guise of health. When I meet her in her consulting room - weighing scales discreetly in the corner - she talks with visible frustration. Every day "juice-fast" casualties walk through her door, wraithlike teens "barely able to make it up the stairs". When she asks girls like Polly, who was one of her patients, "how did it get this bad before your family stepped in?", they shrug their bony shoulders and say the healthy aura of juice had given their renunciation of food respectability, even admirability: "I was on a juice fast. It was cleansing."
The Renfrew Center, one of America's best-known eating-disorder treatment facilities, says at least half its patients have experimented with juice fasts. Dr Pauline Powers, who leads the scientific advisory committee of the Global Foundation for Eating Disorders, calls juice cleanses "the perfect pathway to disordered eating". This country is right behind.
"Month by month, the increase I've seen in this kind of problem is amazing," Shammas says. "In a good 50 per cent of my work, juicing is involved. It's this whole concept that they can have a juice instead of a meal, making it a nightmare to treat people. It's a specific brand of eating disorder that is all the more sinister because it is normalised, it's made out to be healthy, so it masks the true nature of the problem."
Diets have come and gone, fuelled by the obesity epidemic. They may offer false hope, but at least they offer food. Up until this point in history it has only been infants and the infirm who had to slurp mush in place of meals, since they couldn't handle mastication. Now, in a bizarre cultural anomaly, the world's most glamorous women suck at plastic beakers or bottles of juice like toddlers wary of solids. Who is the sucker here?
Those of us who enjoy a bit of juice for breakfast may be incredulous about these extremes, but just take a glance at Instagram or any celebrity news website: "juicing" acolytes are everywhere. Peaches Geldof told OK! magazine in 2011 that she repeatedly fasted on juices alone for a month at a time. "I do juicing," she said. "You juice vegetables and then you drink it three times a day. It's gross. I do it usually for about a month. I have no willpower but with the juicing I'm like, 'I have to do it because I have to lose this extra ten pounds'."
Jennifer Aniston told Grazia her "glow" comes from living on juice alone for one day a week; Beyonce told Oprah that she went on a "Master Cleanse " diet, only drinking lemon juice sweetened with syrup; Gwyneth Paltrow once wrote: "I did the Master Cleanse, which left me hallucinating after ten days". She now warns her followers off juice fasts.
Shammas says that the celebrity magazines her clients bring with them to sessions are full of reports of actresses taking a restrictive approach to solids. An exception is British Vogue, which this month investigated the juice cleanses sweeping the fashion world and pronounced them "a symptom of a dysfunctional food culture - not a cure for it."
The aim of the juice fast muddles "cleansing" and weight loss. Juice is not particularly low-calorie, but fasters lose weight by restricting portions. Shammas tells me juices concentrate any sugar in the fruit and strip away the fibre, two processes exactly contrary to the latest research in maintaining a healthy weight. Indeed, the popularity of juicing is growing: sales of juicers are up 60 per cent in 2013 at John Lewis; Mintel predicts the market in packaged juice will increase by more than 25 per cent to pounds 5.9 billion by 2017.
A large-scale study of nurses by the Harvard School of Public Health last year, showed that drinking just three cups of juice a week increases the risk of diabetes by 8 per cent, while eating whole fruit lowers it. The American Cancer Society states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that extracted juices are healthier than whole foods". This month the UK's most senior nutritionist, Alison Tedstone of the NHS body Public Health England, gave an official warning to limit juice consumption to no more than 150ml a day and always accompanied by food, the first time UK health officials have set a limit.
And yet the juice craze builds. In Juice Master: Keeping It Simple, Jason Vale, one of the patron saints of the juicing movement (he has sold more than three million books), states: "Studies have shown that almost every ailment known to wo/mankind has either been completely alleviated by drinking freshly extracted raw fruit and vegetable juices or reduced dramatically - including the big 'C' (cancer)."
Shammas despairs. "These claims are irresponsible, and I find it deeply concerning that this message is seeping through to the vulnerable parts of society and running wild. You can imagine, when I see the damage it does to people every day, how frustrating it gets. My clients have their struggles anyway. To have the media pushing all these people drinking juice, instead of a meal, just shouldn't be another pressure. What I would like to see is some kind of authority looks at companies who market these things and challenges them for scientific proof."
Her clients initially believe the juicing is the healthiest thing in their lives, despite their obvious health problems. "A girl walks in the room weighing 38kg and says she's just been juicing, but she'll say she's OK because she's been getting all the vitamins. It's really serious. They go further down the road before they seek help because everyone around them thinks they're getting really healthy by just drinking juice. I have known people who have died, not from juicing, but from anorexia in which juicing will have been a big part."
Juicing is heavily marketed in the vocabulary of virtue: Shammas says her clients talk about juice as if it confers an "angelic quality". "The people I see tell me they had a green juice for lunch and expect praise for that. They can be open about disordered eating because having juice is a matter of pride. That's not OK, but it's part of a wider cultural issue."
Does Shammas ever have juice? Sometimes, she says, and I look surprised. "Look, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of juice. It's not a meal, it's just a drink."
harleystreeteatingdisorderclinic.co.uk Some names have been changed
The Times
I am a big fan of juicing as a supplement NOT a replacement - key is to have high proportions of vegies which are low in sugar and just enough fruit to make it taste nice about 4 or 5 parts veg and 1 part fruit - and there's plenty of evidence that the extra nutrients and phytonutrients from green and other juices DO make a difference to health
"Every girl I know was very influenced by celebrities," says Polly. "It doesn't take very long before you realise all these papped shots of them have them holding on to their juice, like they're so wonderful and clean and pure as well as skinny." Even though she was a healthy weight, Polly replaced food with juice for three days, following instructions in a juice-fast book that was then the best-selling book on Amazon: "I told myself I wasn't starving, I was 'detoxing'."
She lost a few pounds and liked it, but the weight returned with normal meals, so she started swapping a juice for breakfast, then lunch. Her father wasn't too happy, but accepted it as a health kick. Little did he know how it would spin out of control - in her worst six months she was barely eating solids at all, and if she did felt she had to then "cleanse" her body with juices.
When Polly began fainting and feeling too weak to leave the house, her family finally sought professional help. Now, she's horrified at what happened: "I tricked myself into the healthiness of it; now I see juice is just full of sugar, no protein, no fibre."
In the Middle Ages, young women like St Catherine of Siena were venerated for giving up food in favour of sipping a bit of wine, aka the blood of Christ. Since then, while we still worship the cult of thinness, it is accepted that giving up food for liquid is not the answer - except, that is, for the fact that almost every celebrity these days has to have a paparazzi shot of them clutching a beaker of green sludge, our secular sacrament of 2014.
The juicing phenomenon has crept up on us under the guise of its semi-religious vocabulary: juice-marketers make claims of "purifying", "cleansing" and "detoxifying", "resting" the digestive system, renewing cells, boosting immunity and fertility. Actresses, singers and reality TV stars take up the chorus. No matter that this is all pooh-poohed by mainstream medicine, they call to an urge for purging in the modern mindset. And it is young women vulnerable to eating disorders who are paying the price. According to psychologists in the field, "juicerexia" is growing: juice fasts that entice healthy women into anorexic habits and allow anorexic women to hide their difficulty with food.
Sara Shammas, a clinical psychologist who specialises in treating eating disorders, believes the real question is how a fad so lacking in medical support has been allowed to become pervasive under the guise of health. When I meet her in her consulting room - weighing scales discreetly in the corner - she talks with visible frustration. Every day "juice-fast" casualties walk through her door, wraithlike teens "barely able to make it up the stairs". When she asks girls like Polly, who was one of her patients, "how did it get this bad before your family stepped in?", they shrug their bony shoulders and say the healthy aura of juice had given their renunciation of food respectability, even admirability: "I was on a juice fast. It was cleansing."
The Renfrew Center, one of America's best-known eating-disorder treatment facilities, says at least half its patients have experimented with juice fasts. Dr Pauline Powers, who leads the scientific advisory committee of the Global Foundation for Eating Disorders, calls juice cleanses "the perfect pathway to disordered eating". This country is right behind.
"Month by month, the increase I've seen in this kind of problem is amazing," Shammas says. "In a good 50 per cent of my work, juicing is involved. It's this whole concept that they can have a juice instead of a meal, making it a nightmare to treat people. It's a specific brand of eating disorder that is all the more sinister because it is normalised, it's made out to be healthy, so it masks the true nature of the problem."
Diets have come and gone, fuelled by the obesity epidemic. They may offer false hope, but at least they offer food. Up until this point in history it has only been infants and the infirm who had to slurp mush in place of meals, since they couldn't handle mastication. Now, in a bizarre cultural anomaly, the world's most glamorous women suck at plastic beakers or bottles of juice like toddlers wary of solids. Who is the sucker here?
Those of us who enjoy a bit of juice for breakfast may be incredulous about these extremes, but just take a glance at Instagram or any celebrity news website: "juicing" acolytes are everywhere. Peaches Geldof told OK! magazine in 2011 that she repeatedly fasted on juices alone for a month at a time. "I do juicing," she said. "You juice vegetables and then you drink it three times a day. It's gross. I do it usually for about a month. I have no willpower but with the juicing I'm like, 'I have to do it because I have to lose this extra ten pounds'."
Jennifer Aniston told Grazia her "glow" comes from living on juice alone for one day a week; Beyonce told Oprah that she went on a "Master Cleanse " diet, only drinking lemon juice sweetened with syrup; Gwyneth Paltrow once wrote: "I did the Master Cleanse, which left me hallucinating after ten days". She now warns her followers off juice fasts.
Shammas says that the celebrity magazines her clients bring with them to sessions are full of reports of actresses taking a restrictive approach to solids. An exception is British Vogue, which this month investigated the juice cleanses sweeping the fashion world and pronounced them "a symptom of a dysfunctional food culture - not a cure for it."
The aim of the juice fast muddles "cleansing" and weight loss. Juice is not particularly low-calorie, but fasters lose weight by restricting portions. Shammas tells me juices concentrate any sugar in the fruit and strip away the fibre, two processes exactly contrary to the latest research in maintaining a healthy weight. Indeed, the popularity of juicing is growing: sales of juicers are up 60 per cent in 2013 at John Lewis; Mintel predicts the market in packaged juice will increase by more than 25 per cent to pounds 5.9 billion by 2017.
A large-scale study of nurses by the Harvard School of Public Health last year, showed that drinking just three cups of juice a week increases the risk of diabetes by 8 per cent, while eating whole fruit lowers it. The American Cancer Society states: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that extracted juices are healthier than whole foods". This month the UK's most senior nutritionist, Alison Tedstone of the NHS body Public Health England, gave an official warning to limit juice consumption to no more than 150ml a day and always accompanied by food, the first time UK health officials have set a limit.
And yet the juice craze builds. In Juice Master: Keeping It Simple, Jason Vale, one of the patron saints of the juicing movement (he has sold more than three million books), states: "Studies have shown that almost every ailment known to wo/mankind has either been completely alleviated by drinking freshly extracted raw fruit and vegetable juices or reduced dramatically - including the big 'C' (cancer)."
Shammas despairs. "These claims are irresponsible, and I find it deeply concerning that this message is seeping through to the vulnerable parts of society and running wild. You can imagine, when I see the damage it does to people every day, how frustrating it gets. My clients have their struggles anyway. To have the media pushing all these people drinking juice, instead of a meal, just shouldn't be another pressure. What I would like to see is some kind of authority looks at companies who market these things and challenges them for scientific proof."
Her clients initially believe the juicing is the healthiest thing in their lives, despite their obvious health problems. "A girl walks in the room weighing 38kg and says she's just been juicing, but she'll say she's OK because she's been getting all the vitamins. It's really serious. They go further down the road before they seek help because everyone around them thinks they're getting really healthy by just drinking juice. I have known people who have died, not from juicing, but from anorexia in which juicing will have been a big part."
Juicing is heavily marketed in the vocabulary of virtue: Shammas says her clients talk about juice as if it confers an "angelic quality". "The people I see tell me they had a green juice for lunch and expect praise for that. They can be open about disordered eating because having juice is a matter of pride. That's not OK, but it's part of a wider cultural issue."
Does Shammas ever have juice? Sometimes, she says, and I look surprised. "Look, there's nothing wrong with a little bit of juice. It's not a meal, it's just a drink."
harleystreeteatingdisorderclinic.co.uk Some names have been changed
The Times
I am a big fan of juicing as a supplement NOT a replacement - key is to have high proportions of vegies which are low in sugar and just enough fruit to make it taste nice about 4 or 5 parts veg and 1 part fruit - and there's plenty of evidence that the extra nutrients and phytonutrients from green and other juices DO make a difference to health