The Juice Bar Brawl, a New York Times article on the new juice bar craze that’s taken root in New York and LA, caught my eye, partly because it’s clear the entire industry has taken note of (but missed the core point of) my Drink My Salad article.

As you may remember, my recommendation for those, like me, too lazy to actually sit and, you know, eat vegetables, was to try throwing them in a blender with a bit of carrot juice and coconut water (for liquidity) as well as raspberries and mint (for sweetness and zing).

Apparently, the LA / NY scene is on to the same idea:

Half a decade ago, most people who were found guzzling and gushing about juice — not grocery store O.J., but the dense, cold-pressed stuff that is made by pulverizing mounds of ingredients like kale, beets, ginger, spinach and kohlrabi — were either zealots from the raw-food fringe or Hollywood celebrities who believed that a “juice cleanse” would nudge their toned bodies even closer to radiant perfection.

But along the way, more people started drinking it. And for consumers and entrepreneurs, a realization took hold: juice did not have to be part of a challenging, expensive cleanse. It could simply be lunch. Suddenly, cold-pressed juice morphed from a curiosity to an industry.

But wait! Not so fast! There’s a big difference between eating the whole, blended vegetable, and just drinking its juice: the fiber!

When you juice a vegetable, you leave the fiber behind. But the fiber is a key component in modulating the way your body absorbs sugars. If you extract just the sweet juice from vegetables and leave the fiber behind, you end up with a sugar rush: the same kind of thing you get from drinking a soda. Rapid fluctuations in blood sugar has been tied to a variety of health ailments, including Type 2 Diabetes. Fiber also lowers bad LDL cholesterol, promotes heart health and gives you the feeling of satiety that helps keep your mind away from unnecessary snacking.

And don’t even start talking Jamba Juice, which adds corn syrup to their “smoothies”, unless you really want to get me started.

When Michelle talks about “whole foods”, it’s usually set in contrast to “processed foods”. But here, it also means: “the WHOLE food”, as in, eat the whole thing, rather than strip-mining just the sweet parts you like.

I had a puzzling conversation with a friend last week that snapped the work I’ve been doing with my food workshop into focus.

What she told me, in essence, was that her child had chronic digestive issues as well as a litany of other ailments, including asthma and eczema, some of which were requiring increasing medication, and she had her own set of health issues. She told me that she was sure that food sensitivities were at the root of many, if not all of these problems.

Then she told me “I know I should change our diet, but I just can’t.”

I’ll admit, I was flabbergasted, at first. You know that the things you’re putting into your own and your child’s body are causing long-term harm, but you “just can’t” stop? Are you addicted? Do you have not have access to alternatives? Do you not care?

But the more I thought about it, I realized that the answer was simpler. She didn’t mean “I can’t change”, she meant “I don’t know how to change, I don’t know where to start and I can’t figure out how to figure it out.”

Now that, I get. I’ve had my share of obstacles in my life where I simply didn’t know where or how to start solving a problem, didn’t know what the first step was, and that’s where the process ended. I saw the problem in front of me like a huge, smooth wall stretching out to the horizon in both directions. My eyes glazed over, I shrugged, turned around and walked the other way.

But for this particular problem, the one that she has, the one that so many of my friends and neighbors have, I do know how to to change, I do know where to start. I faced this exact problem myself:  My family and I suffered from one health ailment after another, the most serious being that my pancreas stopped producing essential enzymes, my husband suffered from colitis, and my son experienced debilitating and terrifying digestive issues. I spent literally years researching and experimenting, trying to learn new ways of feeding myself and my family, knowing that whatever I came up with, I’d have to figure out a way to make it work every single day of the rest of my life.

And because I’d been through it myself, I can help my friend make the change she wants in her life, if she really wants it, that can lead to better health not only for her, but for her children as they grow up. Helping people to live happier, healthier lives? That’s a fine mission for life.

So that’s what I’ll be doing here and in my workshops: sharing ideas, recipes, news and thoughts that can help people change the way they eat to create the kind of healthy lives that we all want.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride. If you have ideas you want to share, please let me know. If you have questions you want answered, same same.

Thanks for reading. Now, let’s get started.