If you’ve spent any time online in the past few months, odds are you’ve noticed at least one person praising celery juice for solving all sorts of ailments, small and large. But this now-commonplace trend hasn’t been around forever. What is convincing us that now is the time to start juicing and downing the bitter veggie every morning? And why are people so obsessed with it?
Ever since Anthony William, author and medical medium — we’ll get into that in a minute — began posting about the purported benefits of drinking celery juice every morning, people started turning to the sour elixir to solve all their problems.
If nothing else, the juice does provide extra nutrients to bolster the average person’s diet, but whether or not the other fantastic claims are true is another story.
Why Is Everyone Drinking Celery Juice?
According to the video first posted by the Medical Medium in 2018 titled “Celery Juice Can Save Your Life” the juice allegedly cleans out the body, killing bugs that cause problems.
After drinking 16 ounces every day, William claims that people solve their digestion issues, clear brain fog, clean out the liver and help people move forward in their lives, away from medical problems — no matter what the problems might be.
Despite all the alleged benefits discussed, however, the video offers no explanation as to what exactly the juice does or how it achieves all of these widespread benefits. On his site, William breaks it down further, discussing the details otherwise unmentioned in the video.
Here, he claims that drinking 450 grams of celery juice daily on empty stomach is “highly beneficial for people who suffer from chronic and mystery illnesses” including everything from vertigo to IBS to UTIs, acne, OCD… the list goes on and on. Yet, the only source he cites is his own website.
With a huge audience to speak to though (2.2m followers on Instagram, to be exact), his messages are heard loud and clear. A celebrity wellness guru, he has “been using his gift to “read” people’s conditions and tell them how to recover their health.” According to his website, “his unprecedented accuracy and success rate as the Medical Medium have earned him the trust and love of millions worldwide.”
And thus a fad was born.
So, Does Drinking Celery Juice Actually Work?
Sure, it sounds great in theory — but the claims that celery juice can solve all these problems seem too good to be true. And doctors around the world seem to agree. “There’s no scientific evidence to support any of the claims being made,” Rachel E. Scherr, an assistant research scientist in nutrition at the University of California, Davis told the New York Times. The fact that there have been no studies to prove that the wild claims are true also makes them less believable.
While doctors and nutritionists mostly agree that William’s claims are far-fetched, there are other ways it could be beneficial. In addition to being hydrating (since it’s mostly water), celery juice also contains vitamins and minerals that people with a poor diet might not ingest otherwise. “For those who were consuming few vegetables and are now drinking celery juice, nutritionists say that’s a good change,” the New York Times reports.
Whether you choose to follow the trend or not, just be wary of the neverending list of benefits. Just as it’s unlikely that there would be medicine to cure every sickness in the world, the odds that one juice could achieve everything it claims are slim. If you already drink water throughout the day and eat a healthy amount of vegetables, celery juice is probably an unnecessary addition to your diet.