Rebecca Moore stocks up on fruit and vegetables as she succumbs to a growing craze for juicing

You know it’s a new year when you invest in a juicer. You also know it’s the New Year when you spend your Wednesday lunchtime on Gloucester Green market, queuing for 15 minutes so that you can struggle home with a boxful of colourful box of apparent cancer-fighting goodness.

And you know more than ever that it’s a brand new year when you genuinely intend on using aforementioned juicer and consuming every single morsel of veggie goodness.

It’s hard to avoid juicing nowadays. If you’re not doing it, you know damn well that some high-ground prig at work, or down the gym, will take great delight in telling you in precise – and often graphic – detail exactly what you’re missing out on by not juicing, or how many more glugs of goodness you could force into your day if only you’d try. You could be glowing! You could be stomach cramp free! You could be slimmer! Cleaner!

Some proponents – and I’m referring directly to some of my best friends back in my home town who had a fine old time telling me all about it over Christmas – even go as far as to warn you of the dangers of not juicing.

Hearing them drone on, you’d be forgiven for wondering how on earth we fragile and woefully unstable human beings ever evolved as far as we did without a centrifugal fruit pummeller.

Then comes the new year and you find yourself online, looking up the best deals on juicers.

While researching which juicer you should shell out for, you inadvertently open a whole vegetable cupboard full of conflicting information and terrifying nuggets of “raw-food” wisdom. One person tells you that too much fruit juice can encourage diabetes and then another tells you that eating too much fruit decreases your likelihood of ever developing diabetes.

Some even promise you that juicing prevents and cures cancer; that you should avoid fruit and stick with vegetables; that you’ll become stronger than Superman if you juice for only one day.

Anyway, I arrived home two days ago to be met with my juicer, all sparkling new and promising me a whole new world.

After unwrapping it from the box and establishing how to open and clean it, I circled it for a minute or two, determining where the vegetables get inserted and how the pulp comes out.

I managed my first juice which was... edible. I’ll keep trying.

After all, I’ve always fancied being disease and toxin free and this is, supposedly, a sure-fire way to keep anything – even- unwanted come-ons (probably) – away from you.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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