A juice cleanse is a short period where you fast from all solid foods, typically for three to ten days, while consuming only the juice of fruits and vegetables to get calories and nutrients.
It’s a drastic step, but many people think it’s a good way to break out of a cycle of unhealthy eating and reset your body. The juice cleanse provides a small to moderate amount of calories, alongside a lot of vitamins and minerals.
This could be just what you need to reset yourself before embarking on a long-term healthy eating program.
The ideal juice cleanse is one that has a good amount of antioxidants, vitamins, and minerals coming from a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, and fortunately for you, our researchers have ranked the ten best juice cleanses available right now.
Research
Rankings
Last updated: December 30, 2022
Juice cleanses considered: 23
Hours of research: 36
Experts reviewed: 7
Scientific papers referenced: 12
1. Organifi Green Juice
Note: we reached out to Organifi and they were nice enough to hook us up with an exclusive coupon for our readers: use coupon code BN15 at checkout to get an additional 15% off your total purchase.
If you’re wanting a juice cleanse that’s backed by 3rd party, clinical, research to boost your immunities, burn fat, and lower cholesterol then Organifi Green Juice is the choice for you.
Every ingredient is carefully chosen to interact synergistically with each other and to make sure there are no gaps in nutrition.
It’s packed with all-star ingredients to make your cleanse the best that it can be.
- Ashwagandha – for stress
- Beets – for folate and manganese
- Chlorella – for protein and a litany of vitamins
- Spirulina – for even more protein, calcium and iron
- Matcha green tea – antioxidants and a reduced appetite
- And more
It’s organic, 100% vegan, gluten-free, soy-free, and dairy-free, with a fantastic taste. We simply can’t say enough good things about Organifi Green Juice.
Bodynutrition.org #1 juice cleanse winner of 2023.
2. Athletic Greens
Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient dense, all-in-one, whole food supplements available.
It has 75 powerful ingredients that pack anti-oxidants, immune system support, digestion help and more into one delicious drink (kind of a minty taste), and it contains all the support your body needs to thrive during a deep cleanse.
On top of that, it’s ultra-clean.
- No chemicals
- No artificial flavors
- No GMO’s
- No Wheat
- No Dairy
- No animal products of any kind
Full of spirulina and other similar superfoods like blueberries and green tea extract; the drink is a probiotic, digestive enzyme and multivitamin all in one.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more complete supplement, or a better drink to use for your next cleanse.
3. LemonKind Super Detox Me
LemonKind makes a quick and easy three-day detox package that contains great variety in its fruit and vegetable content. The juice cleanse involves eight juice pouches per day, and each day involves five different juice blends.
These range from “Awareness,” which contains apple, chokeberry, cucumber, blueberry, and acerola, to “Strength,” which swaps out some ingredients for kale, spinach, ginger, and chlorella from seaweed.
This gives it a high concentration of micronutrients from many different sources. The short duration makes it well-suited for a quick refresh, and less likely to cause problems compared to longer-term juicing protocols.
4. Raw Fountain 3 Day Juice Cleanse
Raw Fountain 3 Day Juice Cleanse is a powder-based juice cleanse regimen that only lasts three days and uses a blend of citrus fruits, veggies, and even protein to clean out your system.
It’s a fast, efficient, and easy way to jump-start a new health routine, and it’s super low in sugar to boot.
5. SMART Pressed Juice Smart
SMART Pressed has a unique solution for juicing on the go—its juicing pouches contain powderized fruit and vegetable extracts which are easily dissolved in water when you are ready to juice.
The powder form also allows SMART Pressed to include ingredients like flax seed, protein powder, probiotics, and chia seeds to bring these green drinks closer to a true healthy meal replacement.
6. Juice from the Raw 3-Day Cleanse
Juice from the Raw takes an all-natural broad-spectrum approach to their 3-day cleanse (the best of their various offerings).
The juice blends you get in this combo range from “red”-focused antioxidant mixes with beets and carrots to a coconut water-based electrolyte replenisher. It’s a great choice if you want more variety in your juice cleanse.
7. Superfood Shot Balance
Superfood Shot Balance provides a highly concentrated two fluid ounce “shot” of juice concentrates. These are mostly derived from fruits and vegetables that are very high in antioxidants, like carrots, beets, kale, spinach, and elderberry.
Thanks to the concentrated nature of these juices, the vitamin content of Superfood Shot Balance is a lot higher than that of many competitors.
It may not sustain a longer-duration juice cleanse, but it’s a very solid choice for a short-term detox.
8. Cleanse on the Go
Cleanse on the Go makes a fast and easy two-day juicing protocol with four different powdered juice mixes. Though drying and powderizing fruit and vegetable concentrates does hurt the micronutrient content somewhat, there’s undeniably a convenience advantage.
These packets contain ingredients like carrot, sweet potato, pumpkin, and spinach, plus cleansing supplements like turmeric and dandelion root extracts.
These put them more in line with a true detox and cleanse program, so this is a more aggressive juicing program even though the duration (two days) is pretty short.
9. RAW Generation 7-day Skinny Juice Cleanse
RAW Generation 7-day Skinny Juice Cleanse uses many of the same ingredients as other juice cleanses, but it stretches the plan out to a full calendar week.
While this is a bigger shock to your system, and is desirable for some people, this might be a bit much from a nutritional perspective: once you get seven days of just juice, your nutrient balance will definitely start to suffer.
10. Country Farms Super Cleanse
Country Farms makes a cleansing product that comes in powder form, though its ingredients are more heavily processed to accomplish this.
The company boasts that it contains 35 different fruits and vegetables, and while this is true, it also means that you aren’t getting a particularly high dose of any one fruit or vegetable.
Category winners
Best juice cleanse overall: Organifi Green Juice
Organifi makes a phenomenal juice cleanse that blends whole food ingredients like coconut water, turmeric, and beets alongside powerful herbal extracts from ashwagandha, wheatgrass, and matcha, to name just a few sources. This potent combination makes Organifi Green Juice great whether you’re trying to use a juice cleanse to lose weight or improve your health.
Best juice cleanse for bloating: Raw Fountain Juice Cleanse
To clear up bloating, you want to make sure your juice cleanse doesn’t contain a lot of sugar—that can make things worse, even if that sugar comes from natural sources, like real fruit juice. That’s why Raw Fountain is our pick for bloating: it uses non-caloric monk fruit extract for sweetness, and has dandelion extract to help you shed excess water.
Best juice cleanse for acne and skin health: Athletic Greens
If you want to improve skin health with a juice cleanse, you should aim for broad-spectrum antioxidants to cut down on systemic inflammation in your body. Athletic Greens is great on this front: with over 75 unique ingredients, your body gets an unparalleled boost in anti-inflammatory power.
Best juice cleanse for weight loss: Organifi Green Juice
With matcha green tea for burning fat, only one gram of sugar, and only 30 calories per serving, it’s hard to go wrong with Organifi if you are looking to lose weight with a juice cleanse.
Best short-term juice cleanse: Cleanse on the Go 2-Day Cleanse
Looking for a quick refresher cleanse instead of an arduous week-long juice-only diet? Look no further than Cleanse on the Go: these easy-to-mix juice cleanse powder packs combine real fruits and vegetables like blackberry, raspberry, and spinach, leaving you feeling leaner and energized after just two days.
Best juice cleanse for beginners: Raw Fountain Juice Cleanse
Raw Fountain is a good choice for beginners because it’s both short and simple. Raw Fountain is based around a small list of ingredients, like turmeric, ginger, dandelion, and milk thistle, and avoids complicated or arcane herbal ingredients, so it’s great if you are just getting started.
Who should buy a juice cleanse?
Doing a cleanse can help you kick old habits and move the dial on your health, especially if you fall into one of the following categories:
People starting a weight loss diet. Juice cleanses are very popular ways to start a weight loss program, not because you can sustain the same juice-only diet long-term, but because the sharp restriction in caloric intake (and missing out on the foods in your typical diet, which isn’t helping) can help shock your body and mind into adapting to a change.
People who want to boost their antioxidant levels and cut down their blood lipid levels. If you need a change in habit for health, whether for a new year’s resolution or just to turn over a new leaf and re-establish a healthy lifestyle, a short-term juice cleanse is a great way to do it.
After finishing a juice cleanse, you can launch into a sustainable, healthy, long-term routine.
While a juice cleanse isn’t a long-term solution to problems like low antioxidant levels, deficient intake of vitamins and minerals, or being overweight or obese, a juice cleans is a great way to jump start a new routine.
How we ranked
To formulate our juice cleanses, we used the following criteria to rate the quality and usability of the juice cleanses we evaluated.
Ease of use. We only examined only products that came in powders or pre-mixed liquid drinks. This was for ease and convenience.
Making your own juice cleanse with a juicer or food processor gets messy, and if you’re not careful, you’ll end up with juices that are not as healthy or nutritious as you’d get in a standardized, prepackaged juice cleanse.
Standardized composition. One additional benefit of a pre-mixed juice cleanse is that you’re more likely to get consistent results thanks to standardized nutrient content.
For this reason, we dropped any cleanse recipes or plans that required you to do any prep work other than mixing powder with water.
No sugar-laden, nutrient-light juices. First off, we dropped products that relied too heavily on sugar-laden and nutrient-light juices like apple or pear juice—these products are going to be hard on your metabolic system because of the high sugar content.
Powerful superfood contents. After that, we looked for characteristic superfood ingredients like pomegranate, dark cherries, and blueberries.
High antioxidant concentration. We also looked for products that included non-fruit or vegetable sources of potent antioxidants, like chia seeds, ginger, and turmeric. Products that contained a lot of these ingredients scored highly, while those that did not scored worse, or got dropped completely.
Cold-pressed or freeze-dried fruit and vegetable content for maximum nutritional value. Having identified the juice cleanse products with the highest-quality ingredients, we then examined the manufacturing practices.
We had a strong preference for cold-pressed juices and freeze-dried powders, as both of these methods do not expose the fresh fruit and vegetables to high temperatures that could damage or destroy some of the nutrition value of their antioxidants.
Cold pressed products, like Suja 3 Day Fresh Start, preserve more of the nutrients and thus ended up higher in the rankings.
Finally, we pooled the powder based and liquid based juice cleanse products and sorted them by quality, resulting in a great mix of high-quality juice cleanses that will suite just about anyone’s needs.
FAQ
Q: Is it good to do a juice cleanse?
A: Juice cleanses can be a helpful short-term solution and also function as a good “punctuation mark” to transition from an unhealthy lifestyle to a healthy lifestyle.
If you have a healthy diet and you already get a lot of fruits and vegetables, you likely do not need a juice cleanse, but if you want to quickly boost your antioxidant levels, a juice cleanse might be a good way to do it.
Q: Can you do a juice cleanse at home?
A: Yes, you can definitely follow a juice cleanse plan or recipe and make your own juices at home using a juicer. However, finding some of the less common ingredients in high-quality juices can be tricky, and you’re not likely to get the same benefits that you’d get from a commercial product with many different ingredients.
As such, the antioxidant boost you get might not be as much as what you’d get from a commercial juice cleanse, especially one that includes green drink powders.
Q: How long should a juice cleanse be?
A: It’s best to keep a juice cleanse on the short side: definitely less than a week. Even as short as two or three days is pretty typical. If you stay on a juice cleanse too long, the lack of certain vitamins and minerals that are no found in juices (plus macronutrients like protein) will start to take a toll on your body.
One of the well-known side effects of being on a juice cleanse too long is the development of calcium deficiency, and the lack of fiber in juices will start to hurt your digestive tract, too.
Q: What should you eat after a juice cleanse?
A: After finishing a juice cleanse, you’ll want to start up eating fairly bland foods that have a decent amount of fiber in them.
That’s because your fiber intake drops basically to zero when you are on a juice cleanse, so to keep your digestive tract moving once you start eating food again, healthy fiber-heavy foods like vegetables and whole grains are a good way to transition back into a healthy diet.
Foods high in lean protein are also a good idea, as your body has been in a protein deficit for several days, owing to the lack of protein that’s in juices from fruits and vegetables.
Q: How much cranberry juice do you need to cleanse your system?
A: Cranberry is a popular ingredient in juice cleanses because it is thought to help fight bad bacteria in your body and has been connected with a lower risk of urinary tract infections.
To get all of these benefits, it turns out that you need quite a lot of cranberry juice (one serving three times per day, in most studies). The acidity from this much cranberry juice can upset your stomach, which is why many people resort to taking cranberry pills instead.
Nevertheless, if you are on a juice cleanse, keeping at least one or two servings of cranberry juice per day as part of the cleanse is still a good way to take advantage of some of its benefits.
Q: How should you prepare for a juice cleanse?
A: The idea behind a juice cleanse is, more or less, to shock your body out of your normal routine, so whatever you need to do to prepare yourself for that is fine—the more important question is what you do after completing a juice cleanse.
You need to make sure (before it ends) that you are ready to immediately transition into a healthy diet and exercise routine to make sure you set yourself on a path for long-term health, and not just the short-term effects that come about from a successful juice cleanse.
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Recap
Doing a juice cleanse is a good way to break out of bad dietary and health habits and get yourself on the right track towards a better lifestyle.
A short-term juice cleanse can get your insulin, cholesterol, and blood lipids trending in the right direction, and can provide you with a high dose of antioxidants while you’re at it.
Keep the juice cleanse short, and take a calcium supplement to avoid any unnecessary stress on your body. Don’t do a juice cleanse if you have kidney disease or any other chronic health conditions, as you may react poorly to the abrupt change in nutrient intake distribution.
For BodyNutrition‘s #1 juice cleanse recommendation, click here.
