A friend of mine had been taking the capsules for a few months when her sister collared her at a christening. “Right, what are you at with your skin?” she said. My friend hadn’t a notion what to tell her. Same moisturiser, same routine, same everything. She just looked well, and she couldn’t explain why. If you have ever heard a version of that, or said it about yourself, this one is for you. Because when it comes to Juice Plus skin health, there is a real study behind that compliment, and most people have never heard of it.
So let me tell you what it found. No hype, and nothing I cannot stand over.
What is actually going on under the skin
Your skin is fed from the inside. Under the surface there is a network of tiny blood vessels, finer than a hair, and they carry oxygen and nutrients up to the cells that keep your skin firm and hydrated. The blood flow through those little vessels has a name. Doctors call it microcirculation. When more of it reaches the surface, your skin has more of what it needs to look and behave like well-nourished skin.
A cream sits on top. This is the plumbing underneath. And it only works if the goodness in your food actually gets into your blood in the first place, which is a fair thing to wonder about a capsule. I wrote about whether these concentrates genuinely raise the nutrient levels in your bloodstream in an earlier piece, because that is the question everything else hangs on.
The trial that put numbers on it
Back in 2012, a group of researchers ran the kind of study that settles arguments. They took 52 healthy middle-aged women and split them into two groups. One group got a fruit and vegetable concentrate, the same whole food nutrition that goes into the capsules. The other got a dummy with no active ingredients. Neither the women nor the researchers knew who was on what until the end. That is the gold standard, a double-blind placebo-controlled trial, and it ran for twelve weeks.
Then they measured four things in the skin with medical-grade equipment, the sort of kit a clinic uses. Actual instruments taking real readings. In the women taking the concentrate, set against the placebo group, here is what moved:
- blood flow through the skin, that microcirculation, was up by about 39 per cent
- skin hydration was up by around 9 per cent
- skin thickness was up by about 6 per cent
- skin density was up by around 16 per cent
All four went the right way, and the changes were big enough to be unlikely down to chance. You can read the trial for yourself if you want the fine detail.
Let me be straight about who was in it, though, because it matters. These were healthy women in their middle years, not people with a skin complaint and not anyone on medication. So this is about ordinary skin getting more of what feeds it. Nothing more dramatic than that, and nothing that needs dressing up.
The bit that makes me pay attention: it happened twice
One study on its own is interesting. Two is worth sitting up for. A separate trial, published the year after in the British Journal of Nutrition, looked at a completely different group of women, this time women carrying a good deal of extra weight, and measured skin blood flow again. Same result. The concentrate group had significantly better skin microcirculation than the placebo group. Different women, different lab, same finding pointing the same way. That second trial also tracked inflammation, and the way everyday nutrition calms low-grade inflammation sits in the same picture.
The honest limits of Juice Plus skin health
Now let me draw the line clearly, because this is where people get carried away. Juice Plus is food. Fruit, veg and berries, dried and put into a capsule, and nothing more than that. It does not treat any skin condition. And it will not turn back the clock, whatever anyone tells you.
What the research shows is narrower and, to my mind, far more believable. Feed your skin better from the inside and, over a few months, it behaves a little more like well-nourished skin. A bit more blood flow, a bit more moisture held, skin quietly doing its job. That is the whole of it. And it rests on the same dull foundation everything else does. Most of us do not eat enough fruit and veg, and closing that daily gap is what makes any of this possible in the first place.
There is a reason this lands now, at the turn of the season. A summer of sun and salty water leaves skin tired, and the first cold snaps of autumn dry it out all over again. The months when your skin is quietly asking for more from the inside are the very ones ahead of us. A good time, then, to make the veg count.
So what do you do with that?
Nothing complicated. Eat the veg. Eat the fruit. On the days real life gets in the way and the veg drawer goes soft, top up the gap however you top it up. Your skin is one of the places that nutrition ends up, and now you know there is proper research showing it.
And the next time someone stops you and asks what you are doing differently, you will have a better answer than my friend did. The trial is linked up above if you fancy reading it yourself. No sales pitch from me. Just a study worth knowing about.
