Having tested both the best juicers and the best blenders, we think both appliances play an indispensable part in any kitchen. And while blenders do so much more than make smoothies, there’s no denying that homemade juice from a juicer also tastes more like you might expect from your favorite freshly-pressed store-bought juice.
Which juicer is best for home use?
However, there is more to both appliances, and if you only have space for one, it’s important to know all the distinctions and which one works best for which funciton. Here is how to choose between a blender and juicer for your next purchase.
Juicer Vs Blender: What Is The Difference?
Blenders pulverize fruit, vegetables and just about anything else you put in them to make smoothies and sauces. They create thick and creamy drinks with no waste,
Juicers work to remove the juice from celery, apples, ginger and other healthy foods to turn them into delicious drinks, leaving behind the flesh and pulp which can either be used elsewhere in your kitchen or thrown away.
While blenders all more or less do the same thing, different types of juicers operate in different ways. The best cold press juicers claim to extract more nutrients and keep fiber intact, with a greater health payoff and less food waste than their centrifugal counterparts.
Juicer Vs Blender: Which Is Healthier?
Marginally, blenders are better than juicers for your health. Because you’re ingesting far more of the fruit or vegetable, there are a lot of advantages to blending your drinks. Blenders retain all of the fiber, whereas much of this will be lost to a centrifugal or even a slow juicer. Fiber is important to your gut health and digestion, so you could be missing out on a big part of what makes apples and carrots healthy if you pass them through a juicer.
That said, most of the good stuff can be found in the juice. This includes a higher concentration of vitamins, and it’s easier to ingest a higher concentration of this when it’s in a call glass of juice, compared to having to eat the equivalent of three stems of celery or numerous apples.
Which Is Best For Weight Loss?
Arguably a juicer is better for weight loss. The enemy of most diets is sugar. While good in moderation, having too many fruits in your diet can drive up blood sugar levels and result in you drinking your calories. You’ll find most of the sweetness in a fruit comes from the juice, so when blended it’s easier to cut back on the volume you’re ingesting because it’s bulked out by pulp and other matter.
What Is Cheaper, A Juicer Or A Blender?
Blenders are cheaper than juicers, because, while it is possible to find reasonably priced juicers, it’s hard to find them at the same low prices you can pick up a blender for. This is because they not only blitz up fruits and vegetables, they also remove the pulp, which makes them more advanced machines. If you’re on a budget and want fresh and healthy drinks, opt for a blender. You’ll find that the best portable blenders are often the least expensive.
Which Is Easier To Use, A Juicer Or Blender?
Again, blenders win out here. To use a blender you simply add your ingredients and start. Juicers require monitoring, and you will have to add one piece of fruit or vegetable at a time.
Which Is Easier To Clean, A Juicer Or Blender?
Cleaning a blenderis usually easiest. Many blenders can simply be placed straight into the dishwasher, but it’s hard to find a juicer that doesn’t require at least some hand washing. This is because they come with strainers and other more sensitive attachments that require proper scrubbing to remove built up pulp and particles.
Which Makes The Better Drinks?
While it’s down to personal preference, we think that juicers deliver a better drinking experience than blenders with most drinks. Take celery juice, for example. While it’s never tasty, it’s a lot easier to drink a glass of juiced celery than blended celery, with all its pulp and fiber. This is also true of most fruits, although you can’t juice select fruits such as bananas.
Juicers Vs Blenders For Juicing
Juicers win out when it comes to juicing since they remove all the pulp, leaving you with just the juice.
Juicers Vs Blenders For Celery Juice
Juicers win out when it comes to extracting juice from celery. In fact, celery juice offers greater health benefits than celery eaten raw. That said, there is still lots of benefit to be had from drinking blended celery.
Juicers Vs Blenders For Smoothies
Blenders are best for making smoothies; where a juicer will remove the majority of the pulpy fiber, with blenders you are drinking the entire fruit or vegetable.
Which is better for health juicer or blender?
The argument that a blended drink is better than extracted juice largely rests on the claim that you waste a lot of goodness when you are juicing by discarding pulp, whereas you include everything in the drink when blending. This is only half true because with an efficient juicer you are mainly wasting the fibre element of the ingredients. Humans can’t digest insoluble fibre anyway, although it does provide a useful function as an intestinal broom in the healthy digestive system. If you already get enough fibre in your diet generally, what is the big advantage to adding more in the form of blended vegetable drinks? The whole point of removing the fibre when juicing is so that you can consume the liquid nutritional contents of much morefruit and vegetables and get a super-dose of phytonutrients. To understand this point more fully we need to look at what is potentially misleading in the claims made by Vitamix.
Vitamix ‘Total Juice’
It’s difficult to know where to start when unpacking the untenable information put out by Vitamix in the past about their ‘Total Juice’ concept but here are just a few of the claims they used to make in their marketing:
“Juice extractors throw away a majority of the disease preventing phytochemicals contained in fruit and vegetables”– They support this outrageous claim with a little table with numbers on it. A good quality juice extractor does exactly the opposite to what Vitamix say here. They are selling blenders by trying to introduce a fear of the risk of disease if you use a juicer. These claims are made in bold headings in literature that they’ve produced and they are completely unsupportable.
“The pulp that juicers throw away has more vitamins and minerals than extracted juice” – Again this is completely misleading and to support this claim they would need to produce an extremely inefficient juicer for the test. If I juice a bunch of grapes there is a tiny proportion of waste, consisting mostly of grape skins. Am I to believe that although the squeezed pulp makes up less than ten percent of the original fruit, it still contains more than half the total vitamins and minerals available when compared to the 90% plus that I drink? With fibrous vegetables there is more waste, because there is more fibre. The waste from a good juice extractor consists mainly of this indigestible plant fibre and the majority of the nutritional content available is already extracted in the juice, so juicing is not as wasteful as claims by some blender manufacturers disingenuously suggest.
The most misleading aspect of this negative, anti-juicing, parasitic marketing is that it conveniently fails to address the main nutritional advantages that juicers can offer. Vitamix also used to refer to their blenders as ‘total juicers’ to imply that it gives you juice, but with more complete results nutritionally than an actual juicer. A blender doesn’t produce juice at all and nor does it produce ‘total juice’ – there is already a name for the ‘total juice’ concept – it’s called a smoothie.
Blendtec Too?
The other main American raw food blender manufacturer is at it too, but this time instead of calling it ‘total juice’, Blendtec call it ‘whole juice’. Same hype; different manufacturer. But we’re probably being naive if we expect marketers to tell it like it is. It’s a great shame, because both Vitamix and Blendtec produce extremely efficient and powerful blenders that are a great asset in any healthy kitchen. Instead of concentrating on the positive features of their blenders, they have attacked juicing as wasteful and less nutritious to try and steal sales. They’ve taken a very positive aspect of juicing – the fact that you discard the fibre in order to drink the juice from a larger amount of fruit and veg – and tried to turn it into a negative.
The Advantages Of Using A Juicer
Naturally, neither Vitamix nor Blendtec mention the main ways that good quality juicers offer access to better nutrition. Along with Nutribullet, they’d prefer to skip over the distinct advantages of juicing. First I want to address the false idea that juicers are particularly wasteful, as this is one of the most harmful bits of propaganda put out by these manufacturers. With a good juicer there is no reason why high quality juice drinks should be either expensive or wasteful. Fruit and vegetable juice will cost less than a pound a pint for many ingredients and when you consider the abundant nutrient content, that is extremely good value.
Some cheap juicers may be wasteful and there are some bad examples out there that can make juicing into a less economical activity. Good quality juicers will provide a high yield of juice and if we compare the nutritional performance of a good quality masticating juicer to a blender, the Vitamix ‘total juice’ argument looks a lot less convincing.
One significant problem with blended drinks that we can mitigate with juicing relates to ingredients that have not been grown organically. Non-organic fruit and veg often contains residues of agrochemicals, like pesticides and herbicides. If you are blending rather than juicing, you are drinking most of these toxins. If you are juicing – you are throwing most of the toxins away. Unlike animals, plants can’t excrete toxins, so they store them away in the cell walls. What are the cell walls? Fibre. That stuff that you can’t digest anyway, but the same stuff that some blender brands claim to pulverise into a very fine form to make it easier to digest! How would you like some pulverised chemical residues with your smoothie? Cell walls are also that stuff that juicers ‘waste’ in the form of pulp. If you can afford to blend only organic ingredients then no problem. But with a juicer, you are also removing most of the plant’s stored up agrochemicals, by removing most of the fibre.
We’d be lying if we said there was no waste with juicers and this varies depending on the method of juice extraction and the ingredients being juiced. But when we read alarmist hype about ‘throwing away disease preventing phytochemicals’, we suspect foul play. Nutritional therapies have evolved around the fact that fruit and vegetable juices are teeming with nutrients. The main advantage of a juicer that blender manufacturers don’t mention is that juicing allows you to get good quality nutrition from a much greater quantity of fruits or vegetables than you could ever consume in blended form. To illustrate this, one can easily drink a pint or two of fruit and vegetable juice per day, as well as eating healthily. That juice will contain the majority of the nutritionally valuable components from up to a couple of kilos of fruit and vegetables. You take this huge nutritional boost in addition to the rest of your normal diet. Smoothie type blended drinks are definitely highly nutritious and offer something different to fresh juices, but if you were to attempt to drink up to two kilos of fruit and vegetables in smoothie form, you certainly wouldn’t be able to eat a full balanced diet on top of that and you would probably have to be prepared to commit to more bathroom time! It doesn’t matter how smooth a vegetable smoothie is when it comes out of a blender, you are going to get pretty full pretty quickly, because of the amount of fibre it contains. Vegetable smoothies are great – but perhaps in smaller volumes.
Juice can also be more easily digested than a fibre-rich blended raw vegetable drink. This is another reason nutritional therapists recommend juicing to their clients; because it delivers larger quantities of nutrients as well as placing less of a burden on the digestive system. The claim made by Nutribullet that their mini blender ‘Transforms food into its most nutritious and absorbable form’ is deeply misleading. First of all, nothing is ‘transformed’, it is simply homogenised by high speed blades. Secondly, the nutrients in smoothies definitely are not more easily absorbed than those in juice – the opposite is true because more fibre content slows the digestion process. The aspect of being readily absorbed makes fresh juice nutrition just as advantageous to healthy people as it is to those who are fighting illness. With a juicer you can take a mega-dose of nutrients that are instantly digested and put to work. A blended vegetable smoothie however sits in the gut for longer, fills you up, and requires more energy to digest. Contrary to what the blender sales pitching suggests, there is a lower limit to the amount of vitamins, minerals and enzymes you can take on board from blended vegetable drinks, when compared to juice.