The book I read said days two and three are supposed to be the hardest for most people on the cleanse, so I’m perplexed why I find it so easy and, honestly, boring. I get up, drink salt water, stay home for the next 90 minutes (heh), and whenever I’m hungry all day I drink some lemonade. Easy…

It’s not bringing up cravings. I’m not sitting here bored because I’m not eating. It’s really sort of a non-issue.

I made it to the gym today, and within a few minutes of starting my cardio, I notice that my mouth is all sort-of phlegmy. Not that I have something of a quantity that could be coughed up, it’s all just coated and kind of slimy. And my nose starts blocking up as well. In addition to that, I am really not feeling in the mood to work out. It’s not a physical thing, my body is handling the workout fine. I just don’t feel like being there.

Of course, I just blast the Rent cast recording on my iPod (in honor of the show finishing its Broadway run on June 1), finish the workout despite my feelings, and by the time I’m able to blow my nose or rinse out my slimy piehole, all of the phlegm is gone again. Eriq mentioned his eyes being bloodshot, but I’m not seeing anything like that in mine. So…

Let’s talk books today. I bought three Master Cleanse books in advance of doing this cleanse. I purchased: The Master Cleanser by Stanley Burroughs, the book that started this whole thing back in 1976; The Complete Master Cleanse by Tom Woloshyn; and Lose Weight, Have More Energy & Be Happier in 10 Days by Peter Glickman. A bit overkill, but they are all quick reads.

Had I known how well my body is taking to the cleanse, I would have probably been fine with the original Burroughs book, which clocks in at under 50 pages. The origin of this diet is pretty strange. He supposedly was just inspired to write this diet down as a way to heal stomach ulcers in 10 days. Shortly thereafter, some guy shows up and tells Burroughs he has stomach ulcers that are going to kill him, and Burroughs shows him the paper with the diet written out on it. Sounds implausible, of course. But people have founded religions on less, I suppose.

The Complete Master Cleanse was probably the most definitive of the three, and the one I enjoyed the most. It just walked through his experiences with the cleanse both personally and as a practitioner in Burroughs’s healing techniques. He goes into Burroughs’ other therapy methods, which are a sort-of massage and color therapy, explaining how those could also help during the cleanse, but I’m sticking to just the lemonade.

The Glickman book was enjoyable because it had a lot of different voices represented, as Glickman runs the message boards at TheMasterCleanse.com and included a lot of message board chatter on various topics.

So, I guess it’s really up to how people think they might best receive this information. Burroughs is the minimal approach,  Woloshyn has the authoritative vibe, and Glickman had the most accessible version because it had a lot of different voices once it hits the message board section.

I am still surprised how little I am caring about food. A lot of the books advise not going out to the movies, to big events, or even watching commercial television because of the food ads. I think my being vegan is probably beneficial here, because I hate all the junk they sell at the movies anyway and don’t consider the ads on TV to be selling what I consider to be food, so I’m used to living in a world of sights and sounds that don’t really pull my focus.

I mean, I spent tonight polishing up a cookbook review for this site, and reading through all vegetarian recipes while drinking my lemonade. But still… nothing. I just thought ‘Hmm… this will be a nice recipe to try after I’m off the cleanse.’

I still question whether the laxative tea is doing much. Most of the books say to avoid drinking pure senna tea because you can cramp up, and it should probably be diluted or find a blend that has a smaller percentage of senna instead. I have 100 percent senna tea bags, and on the first pass I steeped in at the minimum recommendation. No obvious reaction. Now I’ve been steeping it longer than it says, and I’m still not reacting to it. Who can tell…

So, nothing major to report aside from the slimy workout action. I’ll have to report whether that comes back at the gym tomorrow.

I had every expectation of not liking Mark Bittman’s new book, “How To Cook Everything Vegetarian.”

I was completely unaware of his column “The Minimalist” that has been running for 10 years in the New York Times, or his previous hugely popular book “How To Cook Everything,” as well as the public television show spawned by that book. My first exposure came through hearing him promote this latest book on National Public Radio’s January 10th edition of Fresh Air, as I’m a subscriber to its daily podcast.

I read the show notes before listening to the show, and was surprised there was going to be a whole segment on a vegetarian cookbook, which is why I guess I was taken aback by an interview introduced by saying the cookbook had an “obvious limitation — no meat.”

Upon relistening to the show, I found Bittman to just be following the lead of the host, as all interview subjects do, who spent seemingly a third of the show talking about how rib-eyes are the best part of the steak, and a method for drying a rib-eye out in the refrigerator for two days before cooking it. Bittman did get into the idea that he did this book because he thinks more people need to include more vegetarian dishes into their diet because of health and the global warming footprint, and the notion that a meat-based culture is damaging and unsustainable. That little nugget propelled me to find out more.

So, I go to Amazon and see this book has a starred review from Publishers Weekly that includes the seemingly back-handed compliment that the book provides “a wealth of recipes that don’t scream vegetarian.” It also says readers will “appreciate Bittman’s avoidance of faux meat products in favor of flavorful high-protein dishes like Braised Tofu in Caramel Sauce and Bechamel Burgers with Nuts.”

Now, I don’t know any good cookbooks that say to go out and buy vegetarian burger crumble from the supermarket and build a dish around it. Certainly none of the books in my collection say such a thing. However, if faux meat refers to seitan, tofu, and tempeh (the only three things I consider as meat substitutes), then they clearly didn’t read far enough into the book, as Bittman includes all of them.

Scrolling down some more on Amazon, there is a blog entry from Bittman where he says he is not a vegetarian, and follows it up with the odd declaration: “I’m not an advocate of a vegetarian diet; I’m an advocate of Americans eating fewer animal products - less meat, fish, poultry, and dairy.” Wouldn’t the latter make you the former by default, whether or not you were a vegetarian?

He goes on to answer the one big question that keep coming up with this book, the old ‘Can I get enough protein as a vegetarian?’ thing. While he’s adamant about not being a vegetarian, which has no qualifications, he jumps right in as a nutritionist without any such caveats. So, in Bittman’s words, can you get enough protein being vegetarian?

“The short answer is, ‘Of course.’ The slightly longer one is, ‘If you eat dairy and eggs, you never even have to give it a thought,’” he writes. “It gets more complicated if you eliminate those as well, but my understanding is this: Even if you were to entirely eliminate animal products from your diet, as long as you replaced them with vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes - and not junk food - you’d be just fine. There is plenty of protein in broccoli, brown rice, and kidney beans.”

So, all of the information is true, but it seems to suggest if you want to be super-duper careful about this stuff, just eat dairy and eggs and never worry. So, once again, I keep liking the fact that he is sort of providing this bridge over which many people may find healthier diets that are more gentle to the planet, and the fact that they might feel more comfortable being led over by an avowed meat-eater than one of many “it tastes just like/better than meat” lying vegetarian cookbook authors, but there is always this sort of ‘But don’t forget, I still eat steak’ vibe rubbing me the wrong way.

I just figured this tone would pervade the book and I don’t really need all this cajoling and convincing to eat vegetarian. But the one thing that intrigued me was that Amazon listed the book as being 1008 pages. That seemed… wrong. Do I have any cookbooks that are more than 500 pages?!

So, one day, my friend and I are in Borders killing time and he’s grabbing some stuff to read over iced tea in the café, and I figure I’ll check this Bittman guy out, as well as “In Defense of Eating,” Michael Pollan’s follow-up to “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which I hope to review on this site in the near future.

First of all, it turns out that the 1008 page thing was a complete lie. There are a mere 996. But beyond that, it just seemed to be amazingly comprehensive. In the introduction, he talks of his appreciation for the noncarnivorous world, health and the effects of the Standard American Diet, treating animals fairly. He also takes people to task for the “but I don’t have time to cook from scratch” excuse, which I know I hear a lot of when people eat my food. He admits that why people become vegetarian is a complicated tangle of personal and political issues.

“But the health and nutrition factor isn’t complicated,” he writes, “and it can be summed up like this: A diet that’s high in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes is a healthier diet than one that isn’t.” (emphasis his)

It seems he comes off much better when it’s not dashed off like a blog entry or subject to the whims of an interviewer. After reading most of the introduction, I flipped through to the recipe index and there was a nice green V on recipes that were vegan, and a vast majority of them seemed to be vegan. What I learned after giving the book a closer inspection is how many of the recipes without the magic V had instructions on how to make a particular recipe vegan (save for the section on Eggs, Dairy, and Cheese, heh).

I kept flipping through the book and found one of the most exhaustive cookbooks I’ve ever read. If you are starting with no utensils and no abilities, it is all covered in here. There are the pantry essentials, cookware, kitchen utensils, knife skills, and this sense of walking people through the recipes continues throughout. There are more than 250 diagrams everywhere showing you how to make your own tofu, cheese, ravioli, pizza dough, which make everything so much more clear-cut than trying to describe it with only text.

The sections included in the book are: Salads; Soups; Eggs, Dairy, and Cheese; Produce - Vegetables and Fruits; Pasta, Noodles, and Dumplings; Grains; Legumes; Tofu, Vegetable Burgers, and other High-Protein Foods; Breads, Pizzas, Sandwiches, and Wraps; Sauces, Condiments, Herbs, and Spices; and Desserts.

And the recipes are all pretty phenomenal. First of all, at no point does it stray from being completist. Many of the dishes have a basic recipe, followed by many ways to alter the recipe in different ways, some with up to 25 variations. The produce section is organized alphabetically by ingredient, and each section starts with a detailed history and description of that ingredient, such as how to buy it fresh, store it, prepare it, and substitute for it when out of season.

One of the most interesting parts of the book is how Bittman views leftovers as the starting point for future meals, rather than just heating it up again. The most hilarious example of this that I found is that, on one page, he has a pull-out section on “Using Leftovers to Make Vegetable Purees,” and on the very next page another pull-out section reads “Turning Leftover Purees into Griddlecakes.” His philosophy seems to include a lot of variety, that cooking extra grains and beans is always a good idea, and then figuring out what to do with them later. It is certainly something I want to make a bigger part of my cooking method, since I’m more of a ‘make a big one-pot dish and live with it’ guy right now.

I hasten to include a sense of the recipes, because I can’t think of much that isn’t touched on. It seems to hit every major cuisine in interesting ways. Just flipping through before writing this, I hit on “Roasted Vegetables, Thai Style,” which has you oven-roasting various veggies with curry or chili paste, coconut milk, peanut butter and soy sauce. I often roast vegetables, and I’ve made Thai curry dishes before, but for whatever reason, I never put those two concepts together.

The one area I didn’t see much evidence of here (although with this many pages, I could be wrong; and one could argue Thai Style Roasted Vegetables is contrary proof) is a celebrated staple of nearly every other vegan cookbooks, which is fusion cuisine where you take the spices of one cuisine and the preparation of another and combine them. But I don’t see that as a detriment, because I don’t recall ever seeing a more exhaustive, globe-spanning, from-the-ground-up cookbook as Bittman’s. I consider this book to be an important work that should be de riguer in every kitchen, from omnivore to vegan.

It was a long journey from being somewhat disenchanted by the notion of this book to where I am now, but it was definitely a worthwhile one.

This book represents a lot of the philosophy behind Vegocentric, which is making informed personal choices to improve your health, your life, and your footprint on the planet. If one of the pied pipers leading people in this direction has the occasional rib-eye, so be it.

I fear these entires will cease to be useful, seeing as how easy I’ve taken to this cleanse. But I put this here anyway, as a sort of famous last words placeholder.

So, drank the laxative tea again last night and slept right through the night without incident. Salt water cleanse, and then started up with the lemonade. Went for a longer visit than I expected at Macworld, which kept me from the gym (I really need to get over my hangup of not going to the gym after 4:30, because the frenzied people with jobs arrive; but seriously, the collective attitude does take a downturn with their arrival. Are you almost done? How long have you been on that machine?)

Sadly, I have still not weighed in, so any weight loss will not really be given a proper measure at this point. Probably won’t bother. Besides, I’ve already lost this weight many times over, so it’s sort of boring. I’ll just go by the true measure: clothes.

Once again, I am surprised by how little I am taking in and how well my body is adapting to it. Today, I will be having 7 glasses of the lemonade, so still on the low end of things. I did check my tongue and it is sort of white and coated, which in the psuedoscience of things is supposed to mean the cleanse is working. I’m basing everything on visual cues, though: toilet bowls, skin clearing up (or breaking out), clothes, etc. I actually don’t bother reading the Master Cleanse bulletin boards much, because it seems daft to need support doing something so banal, and there is so much wisdom floating around them that seems completely fabricated.

Let’s face it. Most of the people doing this cleanse on the boards are trying to lose weight, but they like romanticizing that they are not only losing weight but doing it by healing their bodies from the inside out. I do think there is something valid in letting the body detoxify, etc., but I think it might seem too desperate to otherwise say they are just trying to lose weight to the point where they are drinking a weird lemonade mixture and no food. So, there is a fixation on the science: I only had 2 eliminations, do I need more lemons? More tea? More cayenne? It seems that if you believe in the cleanse… just do it.

Eriq started today, so he’s a day behind me. We both went to Macworld together without incident. Well, aside from the fact that I could easily toss down $5K to get the iMac I want AND the new MacBook Air now,  but that’s always what happens at Macworlds.

The only downside was that I underestimated how long we’d be at Macworld, since I’m used to shredding through them quickly from years of covering them as a tech journalist, so I didn’t bring a lemonade with me. So, I was sort of hungry by the time I got home. I was worried that hunger was a bad thing, that satisfying early indications of hunger when you first sensed them was sort of the proper state of things, and that an actual hunger might be all ‘Lemonade? Are you kidding me?!” But, again, I drank one glass and it was fine.

Still no mint tea. It is mainly offered as something to drink that isn’t Lemonade or water, but the redundancy has yet to be an issue.

I do notice that my teeth seem sort of filmy by late evening, which is not usual. No big concern, though. I just brush them?

In many of the books I read, they said Day One, Three, and Seven are often the harder days for people. One was sort of easy for me, so maybe I’ll have more to report tomorrow?

The cleanse officially began last night sooner than I would have liked. Only 90 minutes after drinking the tea and going to bed, it was working. So, I’ll drink it as prescribed once more tonight, but if it kicks in within two hours, then I’ll have to roll it back and drink it two hours before I go to bed. I mean, the idea is just getting this stuff out, I don’t think when is all that critical.

Upon waking up, I had to drink my quart of warm salt water. This is one of the parts I was most dreading, thinking to salt water gargles when I had a sore throat, it causing me to gag, and having to spit it right back out. I intentionally bought the expensive salt because I’d read online where people said at first they just bought cheap non-iodized sea salt for the Master Cleanse, and it made them gag, so the grey celtic sea salt is supposed to work for that. So, I mixed up the salt water, and… it is a much lower concentration than what I would normally gargle with, but beyond that it goes down pretty easy.

However, once inside, you can tell it’s got something special going on as you feel it sort of make its way through you. The books say it can take as long as 90 minutes to work, and I can’t imagine what could possibly take people that long. I think I was done within 30, with probably half going out the front door and half going out the back door. I noticed immediately how mucus in my nasal cavity seemed to want out, and I was sort of coughing up phlegm, which is not any part of my morning ritual. I know that’s standard for people who consume dairy, but it was strange for me.

Then, after a bit, I made up my first batch of the lemonade. I’m rather shocked that I hadn’t made up a glass well in advance of this cleanse to try it. I mean, this is my only meal for 10+ days, and I go into it blind? Well, let’s face it. I love citrus fruit, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Clearly, the only wildcard in the mix is the cayenne. So, I mix it up, and goes down easy. I try and treat it like nourishment and food, rather than a beverage, so I sip it down slowly while reading e-mail or whatever (which I should do whenever I’m eating anything, I know, I know..).

I was predicting I might be too drained to work out and such on the cleanse,  but I think that is more predicting and anticipating behavior than reacting to your body’s clear signals. So, I made a point to work out on day one. I did 45 minutes of cardio, the usual. One interesting thing was that I was waiting for 11 a.m. for the “all clear” from the salt water, but then had a moment of hesitation about whether I should go to the gym then or wait until after lunch. Of course, lunch and every other meal are just a glass of lemonade, but it just sort of shows how meals sort of set the schedule for my day normally. As though working out through lunch might cause me to faint or something.

The day was largely without incident. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it seemed like it was more like being a slave to the bathroom, or a life that would be made easier with Depends. But, honestly, it’s nothing too crazy. It’s certainly not my normal feeling in regards to needing to eliminate, but more like when you have colon hydrotherapy (if you ever have). You can tell you’re going to have to go well in advance of it necessarily needing to happen. I even sort of let it seemingly build up rather than immediately running to the loo, since I knew it wasn’t going to amount to much anyway. So, it wouldn’t really be a problem in the outside world.

When I read about the 6 to 12 glasses, and that I should only stick closer to the 6 side to reduce, I was a bit worried. I figured I would be floating up around the 12 side, maybe even having more since I worked out. So far, I’ve had four?! And that’s been for like 11 hours? So, I’m actually going to have to make sure I have the minimum six? I certainly wouldn’t have predicted that.

The only thing I didn’t have was the mint tea, which is something allowed on the diet for variety, but not really part of the actual diet itself. I’m trying not to drink too much excess water while doing this, since if you drink too much you can dilute the lemonade. And, if you think the stuff does have special magic to roto-root you out, it would make sense to keep it as concentrated as possible. But again, it’s not that I’ve been wanting or denying myself water or anything else. I feel rather contented by it all.

I did take a nap late in the afternoon, but that’s not unusual or indicative of anything special. I also found that some of the cayenne floats on the surface of the lemonade but some sinks to the bottom, so it’s important to keep swirling it around while you drink it or else that last sip is a bit too hot.

But I also got some stuff in the mail today to review for Vegocentric, so I’ll try and bang through some of that this week, too. More cleanse coverage as it happens…

Tonight, I went to Millennium for dinner. It is my favorite vegan restaurant. For a starter, I had sweet potato gnocchi and mushrooms over a nice cream sauce. My entree was a grapefruit-sesame glazed tempeh with edamame mashed potatoes, kim chee, roasted brussel sprouts and broccoli rabe, and some grapefruit sections. Dessert was a poached pear with ice cream, wading in a lovely pool of coconut milk and large tapioca pearls.

Before going to bed in a short while, I will drink some laxative tea and, starting tomorrow, I will officially be doing The Master Cleanse (aka The Lemonade Diet). Oddly enough, I actually got re-inspired to do it after watching a guy whose videos I regularly watch mention that he had done it before, and was going to do it again soon. If he starts his cleanse while I’m doing mine, I’ll start posting his videos here. He also has a separate site with all of the videos from when he first did his cleanse. In addition, I am doing this cleanse with my friend Eriq, so we’ll probably be talking way too much about this stuff over the next few days, as well.

I’ve always been intrigued by doing a fast (although, technically, fasting is drinking water and eating nothing; this is merely a cleanse). The idea is that your body has a natural ability to flush out your system, hit reset on a lot of lingering habits, and by giving your body a time-out from having to digest food for a minimum of 10 days, it can use that energy to do other things.

Now, I’m a natural skeptic. I have three books about the cleanse, and all of them at some point have that line that is crossed, and we’re into the world or energy, auras, and the oft-derided mucoid plaque (a rubbery intestinal wall lining that only seems to exist among people who simultaneously offer a way to get rid of it). But, I promise, if in the next few weeks a three foot long rubbery stool comes out of me, I will let you know. Oh yeah, I will be blogging this thing on here daily and some of the details are a bit TMI, but I’ll try to go as euphemistic as possible.

Honestly, I’m more interested in writing about the emotional side of the cleanse. I didn’t get where I am today by missing many meals, and I am very hard-wired and rigid about when I eat. So, the concept of going for days without that schedule, well, it’s certainly something worth getting rid of.

To the uninitiated, here’s the basic idea of the Master Cleanse. Every night before bed, you drink a laxative tea, since you will be eating no solid food to sort of kick start the engine down there. When you wake up, you drink a quart of water mixed with two teaspoons of non-iodized sea salt (I got the highly-touted, and expensive Grey Celtic Sea Salt). The salt water is sort of a top-down enema, as the salt gives the water the same acidity as blood so it won’t be absorbed by your system. Along those lines, it’s all coming right back out, by the way, so you should be home for the next 90 minutes after drinking the salt water. The upside is the salt water does give you a bit more of a “schedule” on that stuff, as opposed to the laxative tea, which is a bit more freewheeling with your schedule.

OK, after that you get to have 6 to 12 glasses of the “lemonade,” which is a mixture of water, organic grade B maple syrup, organic cayenne pepper, and organic fresh-squeezed lemons. I am not giving the measurements here, as I consider this a journal of my cleanse and not information from which anyone should start doing the cleanse themselves.

The cleanse both detoxifies and reduces, meaning I’m not only cleaning house internally, but the house should get smaller at the same time. For people looking to lose weight on this, only use half the maple syrup mentioned in the recipe. People wanting to maintain or gain weight can also add it. This is the diet Beyonce used when shooting Dreamgirls, so she could go from shooting her “older” scenes to looking slimmer and younger. It is also the diet Howard Stern’s sidekick Robin Quivers used to lose a lot of weight. That said, there is also a testimonial in the book of a skinny guy who did the Master Cleanse for like 28 days and gained eight pounds of muscle.

Your body uses about 25 percent of its energy on digestion. So, the upside is that you are actually rewarded with more energy on the cleanse, and it shouldn’t get in the way of doing anything else in your life. Working out at the gym is perfectly fine, although I am going to hold off on adding my weight training into the mix until after the cleanse. Of course, I should note that everyone’s experience with the cleanse seems to be very different, some people sit around napping and others keep on jogging.

I am excited by many of the prospects of doing the cleanse, but there is also trepidation. Mainly, I’m an eater. Pretty clockwork about it. When I wake up, I have breakfast. Lunch is pretty fixed, and dinner is also regular. In addition, I’m still looking for a job, meaning I’ve got a LOT of time here, and meals were sort of how I broke up the day. Now, don’t get me wrong, I think this is a good system to dismantle, I’m just point out that it is one of the major hurdles.

One of the main reasons for the cleanse, though, is I want to have the experience of not eating. Back when I was really fat, it was no shock how it came to be. I remember when I was a full-time student with a full-time job, and most days had four meals. There was the breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but then… on the drive home, I would usually get a quarter pounder with cheese (sometimes two), large fries, and a large soda (not sure if I was doing the delusional diet soda or not at that point). By the time I arrived home, this food was already gone, and shortly thereafter I was in bed.

So, I’ve been at the high end of the Standard American Diet, then I was vegetarian for a while, though ovo-lacto heavy, so not as healthy as it should have been. And for the last three years or such, I’ve been low-fat vegan. Even when I overeat now, it is overconsumption of primarily low-fat vegan food, which always strikes me as lame that I’m not at least doing something fun like a pint of vegan cookie dough ice cream.

I’ve covered the whole spectrum from overeating unhealthy foods to being on what most people consider to be a severe vegan diet (which is laughable seeing how enjoyable it is), but I want to cover the final frontier, which is: no food.
Now, to be fair, I’m not going on a water fast here. This is technically food and not a fast. But this is probably as close as I’m ever getting to a proper fast.

Emotional outlook largely determines success with the cleanse, and I’m doing mine up proper. The first book I’ll be reading while cleansing is Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar, who is the Harvard professor that teaches one of the most popular classes on campus, all about happiness. Unlike the more new agey and spiritual things I’ve read along these lines, this seems to be perched across many disciplines, and should be a fun read. If I tear through that, I also have You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, as well as the extended edition of the recently-released movie of the same name. Beyond that, we’ll just fold in some Wayne Dyer to round things out.

So, this is my food blog and I have a separate journal site, but I think this is the most appropriate home for these entries, because food and spirituality and emotional attachments and everything else are a big part of what I’m trying to explore on Vegocentric.

Well, I’m getting tired and I have some laxative tea that needs brewing here. Stay tuned.

I can’t quite grasp why they seemingly dumped a lot of money into this (if for some reason other than to piggyback on the current presidential race fixation), but it was still amusing:

Find more PETA videos at PETATV.com

Michelle Bachmann, the latest Star McDougaller, went from 275 to 170 after finding out about Dr. McDougall’s program by reading another amazing book, The China Study by T. Colin Campbell.

She says: “Obesity has shaped my life, but it no longer shapes my body. I am going to keep on doing what I’m doing, and hopefully when people I know are ready, they will come back to ask me what the McDougall lifestyle is all about. And maybe we can even exchange some recipes!”

Congrats, Michelle!

In the current McDougall newsletter, Dr. McDougall discusses the recent influx of exotic juices with wild health claims, but sticks to his guns about whole foods being better for you than juices. McDougall references the following experiment in the article:

In this experiment ten normal subjects consumed meals based on apples, applesauce, and apple juice. When whole apples are blended into applesauce, nothing is removed, but the natural fibers of the apple are disrupted. To make juice, the fiber is filtered off and discarded. This research found fiber-free juice was consumed eleven times faster than the whole apples and four times faster than the applesauce. Juice was less satisfying to the appetite than was the applesauce and the applesauce was less satisfying than the whole apples.

He goes on to wrap up the article in a way that spikes a lot of the promise of these acai, goji and other exotic juices flooding the market:

“Juices, even exotic and expensive ones, will not correct fundamental problems. Juice is no longer a whole plant-food and the consequence on human health of consuming large amounts of this alteration of whole fruits and vegetables is yet to be determined. At the very least, consuming any kinds of juices, rather than the whole food, will promote weight gain.”