Whether blending or juicing is best may be the most common debate at the juice bar. Lorie Ward, owner and juice artisan at Fairhope Juice Company, has the answer to which is best: “Both!” she says. “After all, the one thing our diets lack is a high volume of cellular nutrition from real vegetables and fruits.”

Ward explains that both blended smoothies and freshly extracted vegetable juices offer exponentially better nutrient absorption than even whole, raw foods. “Even though some people think of their high-powered blenders as ‘juicers’, blenders retain the fiber, whereas juicers are designed to separate the fiber, leaving only a liquid packed with nutrients.”

The difference then, is that when the juice is separated from the pulp, one can easily consume a much larger volume of vegetables than by drinking a smoothie containing pulp. For example, a smoothie may contain a few leaves of kale along with some fruit and liquid. Whereas one pound of kale juiced yields approximately eight ounces of juice. “A person can easily drink an eight ounce serving of juice without fiber and drinking raw, fiber-free juice, particularly on an empty stomach, eliminates strain on the digestive tract because the juicer has already done most of the ‘digestion’ work of separating the fiber from the juice for you,” says Ward. “Without fiber to digest, the juice can be efficiently shuttled into your bloodstream within 30 minutes.”

While juicing is great for delivering concentrated nutrients to the cellular level, it does not replace the need for food and smoothies. “A well-rounded diet of whole, plant-based foods that are packed with fiber is still foundational to a healthy life. By consuming blended foods and fiber-free juices on an empty stomach, we are receiving the best of both worlds,” says Ward.