Hello and welcome to the nutrition diva podcast. I'm your host Monica Reinagal.

When you're trying to make good choices about food and nutrition, you sometimes find yourself in a situation where you feel like you have to choose between competing benefits and or risks.

But often these nutritional dilemmas that we tie ourselves into knots over are really not

that big of a dilemma after all. For example, I got an email just this

week from a woman who was in a quandary over vegetable juice. On the one hand, she had read that

nutrients are better absorbed from juice than they are from whole foods.

On the other hand, because juicing removes most of the fiber from the vegetables,

the natural sugars in vegetable juice are much more quickly

absorbed and this could potentially lead to a blood sugar spike. What a pickle.

Actually, not really. Let's look a little bit more closely at the details here.

Let's say you've made yourself a nice glass of fresh carrot juice.

That's a whopping 45,000 international units of Vitamin A, which is about a nine day supply.

However, the sugars in carrot juice are absorbed into your bloodstream very quickly,

and when it comes to blood sugar

slower is usually better. Now in a past episode on juicing I suggested that you

might consume vegetable juice together with higher fiber foods as a way to

slow down the absorption of those sugars. Now it is true that the fiber might reduce

your absorption of that vitamin A by as much as 40 percent.

But because there is so much in there to begin with,

you'd still be absorbing five days worth of Vitamin A in a single shot. Look, even 60% of that much

beta carotene is still a heck of a lot of beta carotene. And when I think of all the other benefits of fiber,

everything from promoting digestive health to feeding the beneficial bacteria in my gut,

...