Pick Your Placebo

For four years, since Tricia Barrett first introduced me to the merits of drinking green juice as a dietary supplement, I’ve been drinking four or five fresh green veggie juices daily. These juices—painstakingly extracted from kale, celery, cucumber, sprouts, parsley, lemon, and ginger—have been my medicine, keeping my weight stable, my blood pressure low, and my immune system strong enough to fight even the viruses that infect my whole family.

But then, about a month ago, my assistant April (who, bless her heart, makes my green juice for me) had to leave town. And my husband was working twelve-hour days at his new job, so he couldn’t help out. And I was busy seeing mentoring clients and recording the audio version of my upcoming book Mind Over Medicine. So the green juice never got made, and I didn’t drink green juice for a whole week, something that hasn’t happened for four years.

Lo and behold, I got flattened with a nasty cold.

Green Juice as My Gospel

It got me thinking. Now, I firmly believe that my green juice will keep my healthy. My daughter brings home viruses from her school regularly. At one point this winter, over half of her school was out sick, but I stayed healthy. I credit my daily green juice and praise it often. In fact, every day, when I imbibe my first dose of green medicine, I thank the vegetables for keeping my body fit and healthy and strong.

You might say I worship at the altar of green juice. I have complete, unshakeable faith in its magic and can be found proselytizing about it frequently. In fact, I even bring coolers of my green juice to my mentoring sessions with clients so I can introduce them to it, show them how yummy it tastes, hopefully convert them. You might say I’m a true believer.

Panacea or Placebo?

Now that I’m finally recovered from the fog of my cold and pondering the research I gathered for my upcoming book Mind Over Medicine, I have to wonder whether it’s really the vitamins, enzymes, alkaline goodness, and hydration of my daily green juice that keeps me from getting sick.

Or might it be my unshakeable faith in its power to heal me?

After extensively researching the placebo effect, I now know that positive belief that something will cure an illness or prevent you from getting sick—even if it’s just a sugar pill, a saline injection, or a fake surgery—activates a cascade of healing hormones in the brain that triggers a real physiological phenomenon.

Psychology or Physiology?

Each time I grab my mason jar full of green veggie juice, I fill my body with vitamins, enzymes, and other nutrients that support my body. But my green juice also serves another function. Because I place so much faith in my green juice, every time I drink it, my mind enjoys the thought that I am healing myself.

This thought signals my hypothalamus to shut off the “fight-or-flight” stress response that health fears can trigger, thereby reducing potentially harmful stress hormones like cortisol and epinephrine, which causes my blood pressure to drop, my pulse to slow down, and my muscles to relax. Doing so also stimulates my hypothalamus and pituitary gland to secrete the bonding hormone oxytocin, nature’s morphine, beta-endorphins, and other healing chemicals like nitric oxide and dopamine that activate the body’s innate self-healing mechanisms and ramp up my immune system.

Because I believe green juice heals me, voila! it does.

I’m not suggesting it isn’t also full of nutrition my body needs. It’s no sugar pill or saline injection. It’s full of juicy goodness nobody can deny. But what if that’s only a piece of its benefit? After all, I’m not aware of any randomized, controlled, double-blind clinical trial comparing outcomes of those who drink green juice with those who drink water dyed green. (Quick! Someone do this study, puh-lease! I’m dying to know!)

What’s Your Placebo?

Many of us imbue such meaning into a variety of health-inducing factors in our lives. Maybe you’re a die-hard believer in eating chia seeds every day. Maybe you faithfully chomp on Echinacea all throughout flu season.

When I asked this question on my Facebook page, I found out that you all swear by your alkaline water filter, your raw cacao powder, your medicinal mushrooms, your Usana vitamins, your essential oils, your rose petal tea, your cayenne, your acai berries, your vegetarian diet, and, yes, you believe in your green juice too!

You also swear by your affirmations, your positive thinking, your yoga, your meditation, your joy, and a variety of other health-inducing practices which science proves reduce the body’s stress responses and elicit the counterbalancing relaxations responses.

And don’t forget, when the body’s physiological stress response is activated, your natural self-repair mechanisms get flipped off. Only when your nervous system is in a state of physiological rest can the body heal itself.

Who Cares How It Works?

So is it really the green juice or the fancy water or the supplements or the superfoods that keep you healthy and heal you when you’re sick?

I can’t say for sure. But if it’s working for you, who cares?

What I can say is this. My assistant got home, made my green juice, I gulped down six of them, and twenty-four-hours later, the symptoms that had plagued me for a week were gone.

Coincidence?

Call it what you will; I’m off to grab another green juice.