Juicing, Smoothies of Fruits and Vegetables May Be Bad for Your Gut Health, How to Gain Weight
We have a new member code named Caban at the Raw Paleo Diet forum and he needs some tweaking with his diet to help him gain weight. He thought juicing and smoothies were good stuff so he would do juicing and smoothies every single day. He didn’t know that that was the prime suspect in his ill gut health.
This is my present diet:
I meal – Fresh juice made of apples, parsnips/carrots, zucchini/celery.
II meal – Raw meat, usually beef or lamb with some goose/lamb fat
III meal – Smoothie made from banana, lettuce, juice from one apple, parsley and dill
IV meal – Again raw meat. I tend to choose other kind of meat than the one in the second meal.
I replied with:
Drop the freak juice combinations!
Just eat your apples… alone… as they are… in their natural form.
Just eat your carrots… alone… as they are… in their natural form.
Just eat your zuccini… alone… as they are… in their natural form.
Stop making smoothies. Just eat bananas. Just eat lettuce… alone.
If you stop those (idiotic) juices, your tummy may heal and be solid. You will gain weight.
Stop combining your meats, if it is beef, eat beef. If lamb, just lamb. If goose, just goose.
Overdose on various types of probiotics for 2 weeks to 1 month then stop. It should give you a solid gut and will allow you to absorb nutrients better. You can also add high meat for more probiotics.
A fellow member asked:
Hmmm, what’s wrong with smoothies? We, raw paleo eaters, are already pretty much restricted as to what we can eat, why further remove perfectly good things from the diet? Of course I would agree that a lot of juices is not a good idea – it is hardly paleo, but smoothies are a perfect way to eat, say, raw eggs with a little fruit and a little honey. That makes a nice light breakfast, or lunch if you have to eat in a “social environment”.
In my own experience, I have found that just raw fruits or vegetables, eaten whole, are much harder to digest. Maybe the blending process somehow breaks down the fibers?
I replied with:
What is wrong is what the smoothies and the juices are doing to Caban.
– he is not gaining weight
– his stomach isn’t in top form.
– and the #1 suspect he is doing wrong is smoothies and juicing.
There is such a thing as over dosing. Also irritating the gut with juices.
Juicing will not allow your body, your taste, your smell, your tongue to self regulate your eating.
If you have a bunch of anti-nutrients in your juice, it goes straight to your gut. Ouch.
Eating the fruit alone or the vegetable alone, you know exactly when to stop.
You’d be surprised to find out you don’t need to eat a ton of fruit or a ton of vegetables to satisfy you.
Juicing can be skillfully used in crisis situations by a knowledgable healer. And when I or my pro healer friend recommend juicing, we do not combine the juices… each juice alone.
But in Caban’s case, he is clearly suffering from juicing… absolutely suffering from juicing.
Juicing and smoothies should be relegated to social / fun situations and very small amounts.
Juicing and smoothies is a throwback to those raw vegans to who need enormous amounts of plant food to make up for their not eating meat and fat. Because meat and fat is a concentrated food.
Regarding hard to digest fruits and vegetables:
Don’t lump fruits with vegetables.
Vegetables are hard to digest. They are plants and they have anti-nutrient / toxin defenses.
Fruits are meant to be eaten because trees offer it to us animals, so they are easy to digest.
If the rind is not for you, then don’t eat the rind or the skin.
Plus it depends on what fruit or what vegetable.
It’s mango season here in Manila and my household is just consuming kilos of mangoes a day. We don’t eat the skin or the big seed.
Regarding the issue of raw paleo dieters being restricted in food intake:
We raw paleos are not “restricted”, we are free from all the complex “modern” crap, we butt our heads together in search of the best results.
Eating mono meals optimizes digestion. It allows your body to concentrate on digesting one food at a time. And you will get the optimal results you are looking for. Solid gut, gain weight.