No one is fully free from harmful chemicals and pollutants. No matter where you live or what food you carefully consume, small amounts of toxins and microplastics still find a route to your body. Even Antarctica has a pollution problem now, according to Greenpeace. And what about outer space? Forget it – NASA is tracking about 27,000 bits of space junk.
A juice detox or juice cleanse can help rid your body of accumulated toxins. The word ‘detox’ was unheard of before the 1960s, but usage has skyrocketed since the 2000s according to the Google Ngram Viewer. While not medically approved per se, many companies or high-street businesses offer everything from a cup containing your 5-a-day to home-delivered juice detox programmes. According to leading juice detox business Wild Juice Co, a ‘juicetox’ can leave you feeling ‘fresh and revitalised’ by supercharging your system with invaluable vitamins and minerals.
How can CBD help me detox?
CBD is a powerful anti-oxidant. Medical studies have proven that CBD interrupts free radicals (oxygen-containing molecules that spark chain reactions leading to disease) and transforms them into less active forms. CBD oils, tinctures, isolates and gels have a range of health-boosting properties that work together to boost homeostasis, or optimal balance in the body to fight off disease. While CBD only has medical approval in the US, the EU and the UK to treat serious forms of epilepsy and seizures many companies are adding it to their detox juices for its unique and therapeutic properties.
Therapeutic properties in CBD are also attributed to terpenes, the compounds that produce taste and smell in plants the world over. Limonene, for example, is common in citrus fruits and peppermint and is a natural anti-inflammatory that improves digestion, mood, acid reflux, acne, eczema, psoriasis and asthma. Caryophyllene – common in cinnamon and clove – is a known painkiller and anti-fungal agent, which also particularly improves liver function caused by alcohol abuse.
Any form of CBD designed to be taken orally can be safely added to juice. CBD will not react negatively with any fruits or naturally-occurring extracts. Its known side-effects are few and include tiredness, changes in appetite and lowering blood pressure. CBD oil can also interact with certain steroids, HIV antivirals, benzodiazepines and more (consult a full list here). Generally, though, the interactions are a result of CBD stopping the liver from releasing medicines into the blood by exporting chemicals from the body.
How can I add CBD to a juice detox?
CBD is most commonly taken orally as a percentage mixed with an oil-based carrier. At Pure Organic CBD, for example, we mix our organic CBD oils in strengths of 10%, 20% and 40% with sunflower oil. However, as you well know, oil and water don’t mix. If you add a few drops of CBD oil to your juice, you might end up with it floating on top or sticking to the sides of your container.
According to Maine Juice Co. there’s a way round this in juices that contain lemon or lime. Let’s take a look at a typical green juice detox as an example.
Ingredients:
- 2 cups baby spinach leaves
- Handful parsley leaves
- 1 medium green apple
- 1 large seedless cucumber
- 1 inch-long piece of ginger
- 1 medium lemon
To incorporate a CBD oil all you’ll need to do is max your juice mix (minus the lemon) and set is aside. Combine your citrus juice with CBD oil using a blender until frothy – about 20-30 seconds. Pour juice over the CBD and citrus juice mixture and whisk for about a minute. The citric acid in the lemon juice should help emulsify and keep the CBD evenly suspended in your beverage.
CBD also comes as an isolate – which comes as a white powder – and also in water soluble forms. These newer additions to the popular CBD market allow you to simply add CBD to your juice detox as you would any other supplement like spirulina, maca powder or liposomal vitamin C.
How quickly will CBD in a juice detox be absorbed into my body?
According to scientific studies orally-ingested CBD has a bioavailability between 6-19%. That means no matter the quality and potency, the body just cannot absorb more than about a fifth of the CBD you take. That’s why at Pure Organic CBD we advise placing a few drops of CBD under the tongue which allows for greater access to the bloodstream. Just swallowing a few drops sees digestive acids and enzymes inevitably destroy some of the CBD.
CBD ingested orally also takes longer to enter the bloodstream. In one experiment, cookies infused with 40mg of CBD produced peak levels in the blood between 1.5 to 3 hours after consumption. This is compared with reaching peak levels under 2 hours when taken under the tongue for 20-30 seconds before swallowing. But it’s not all bad. When eaten, CBD stays in the body much longer than if vaped or taken in a water/soluble solution. The average time CBD oil stays in the body when ingested is 4.2 hours.
Water soluble CBD is CBD oil broken down using nanotechnology to make particles smaller. These tiny particles are much more easily absorbed into the body, leading to faster CBD uptake and allowing for easy mixing with a juice detox. Depending on the quality, water soluble CBD solutions can also have greater bioavailability compared to CBD oils even up to nearly 100% – though they don’t always stay present in the body and blood for as long.
At Pure Organic CBD we believe in organically-grown CBD for a number of reasons. Aside from planetary benefits, we’ve read the incredible news stories about hemp used in Chernobyl and parts of Spain to clear up radioactive and contaminated soils. This is because the cannabis sativa plant has a capacity to absorb heavy metals and toxins – but this also means such chemicals remain in the plant. If you’re looking to have a juice detox and cleanse your system with CBD, it wouldn’t make sense to add more chemicals to your body along the way.