Can Juicing Really Kill You?

When Peaches Geldof died suddenly this week at age 25, focus quickly turned to the British model’s history of extreme dieting. She told OK! magazine in 2011 that she would drink three juices a day for up to a month at a time, explaining, "I have no willpower, but with the juicing I'm like: 'I have to do it because I have to lose this extra 10 pounds.' I'll lose it, and then I'm back going mental for the chips. I juice, and then I eat chips.'"

We're not here to jump to conclusions—Peaches' autopsy was inconclusive, and toxicology tests are still pending. But even if turns out that her diet had nothing to do with her death, we found ourselves wondering whether juicing—if taken to extremes—can ever be fatal.

"I don't ever recommend juicing," says Women's Health medical contributor Keri Peterson, M.D., an internal medicine physician. "I would say for a very short period of time, no harm done, but it's really a quick fix, not a long-term solution."

MORE: How a Fruit Juice Cleanse Affects Your Body

Peterson's chief issue is that juicing drains your diet of protein and fiber, which changes the composition of your body. "When you go purely on a liquid diet for an extended period of time, you'll lose not only weight but also fat and muscle, and your metabolism slows down," she says. Then, you'll inevitably tire of juicing and go back to your regular diet—and thanks to your newly slowed metabolism, it's much easier to gain weight. But it's not just weight gain that's at stake.

Russell Marx, M.D., chief science officer of the National Eating Disorders Association, says juicing also means dealing with a potentially dangerous lack of balance among your macronutrients: fat, protein, and carbohydrates. If you're restricting your diet for an extended period of time, he explains, your body simply adapts to it. Abruptly resuming your normal diet at this point can cause your phosphorus, magnesium, and potassium levels to dip—and that imbalance can lead to heart failure since your heart kicks into overdrive to try to fix it. It's a scary disorder called refeeding syndrome that's often seen in the treatment of anorexia patients. All of which is to say that, while we have no idea if juicing played a role in Peaches' death, it could be fatal for someone who takes juicing to an extreme and then tries to resume their normal diet without easing back into it. 

Both Peterson and Marx emphasize that juicing for more than a couple days at a time is not sustainable...or healthy. 

"Any kind of restrictive diet can lead to an eating disorder or be the consequence of an eating disorder," says Marx. "It's important to have balance and to be aware of the dangers."

MORE: Are Juice Cleanses REALLY Like Eating Twinkies?

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