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Stressed out? Try fixing yourself a glass of gingercantaloupe juice, complete with rind. A touch of Lyme disease? Nothing like a healing draft of spinach-parsley-tomato-green-pepper juice. Feeling senile? Treat yourself to a dose of ginger-beet-apple-carrot juice. These remedies are likely to have no effect whatsoever on your ailments - but they'll sure make a lot of other people feel better. In fact, the folks selling juice machines and juice books are already beaming. They're cashing in on juicemania, which just may turn out to be the biggest kitchen fad since the boom in homemade fettucine left a pasta machine in attics from coast to coast.
Two new books are fueling the trend: "Juicing for Life," by Cherie Calbom and Maureen Keane (Avery. $12.95), and "The Juiceman's Power of Juicing," by Jay Kordich (Morrow. $15), a best seller even before its publication date this week. Together with their 1989 precursor "The Juicing Book," by Stephen Blauer (Avery. $8.95)-the one responsible for pummeling the word juice into a verb - these manuals have nearly a million copies in print. Juice extractors are best sellers, too; more than a dozen models are on the market, priced from about $50 to nearly $300. Manufacturers and retail stores say they can't keep up with the demand.
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For many buyers, homemade juice is nothing short of an elixir. Lucy and George Kostrikin of Redwood City, Calif., used to live on hamburgers and packaged macaroni and cheese. Constant stress and high blood pressure forced them to change their habits. Now they eat less red meat, more chicken and fish-and lots of vegetable juices. Lucy starts the day with carrot-broccoli juice; George has a pick-me-up in the afternoon. They say they feel better than they have in years, and they credit the juice. "It's sort of pea-green, not very pretty," says Lucy. "But it's delicious."
Kordich, whose half-hour commercials for the Juiceman juice extractor are seen on local television stations around the country, advocates drinking six glasses of juice a day. Calbom and Keane recommend a similar regimen. But while fresh juice is a great drink, nutritionists warn against substituting it for whole fruits and vegetables. Not only do you miss out on the fiber, but scientists still don't clearly understand how the disease-fighting properties of fruits and vegetables work. Vitamins and minerals may be only part of the story. " My view is that there are probably nonnutritive compounds in fruits and vegetables that are also beneficial, and we don't know for sure whether they're in the juice," says Johanna Dwyer, head ofthe nutrition clinic at Boston's New England Medical Center Hospital.
Juice as a way of life presents a few other problems, too. A family of four drinking six glasses of fresh juice a day will need to buy some 50 pounds of produce a week. Apartment dwellers will be storing the stuff in their bedrooms. As for the mountains of pulp that will be left over daily, Kordich advises throwing it on your compost heap. Again, not a good option for urbanites. But if fresh fruit juice in season, or an invigorating glass of carrot juice in the afternoon, appeals to you, don't rush out and buy a juice extractor at full price. Wait until next fall's garage sales - you'll have your pick. You might even find a good espresso machine to go with it.
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