Juicery Offers Back-to-School Cleanse for Kids, Shocks Parents

Parents are not impressed with Pressed Juicery. The cold-pressed juice brand advertised a sale on a “Back-to-School Cleanse.” It was either an ill-conceived promotion for kids and teens or a tone-deaf approach toward marketing its weight-loss product to adults by using “back to school” as a catchall phrase, as Refinery29 pointed out.

Pressed Juicery is offering an assortment of six juices with ingredients ranging from kale and parsley to ginger and lemon. “Hit reset with a cleanse!” the ad suggests, noting that the deal is available for a limited time, in stores only.

Critics were quick to point out the inappropriate nature of selling weight-loss juices to minors, who are already struggling with body-image issues and peer pressure. “Hey #teens: High-school sucks and we’re here to make you feel even more self-conscious!” one Twitter user quipped. But others were more earnest, questioning the promotion.

Another problem? No one is certain that juice cleanses are healthy for anyone, even adults. “There’s no data whatever” that shows detoxes or cleanses work, said Roger Clemens, director of analytical research at USC’s School of Pharmacy, to the L.A. Times. He added that they can even be “nutritionally compromising and harmful” to people with chronic illnesses, though he didn’t address the effects of cleanses on young people.

Related: Daily Habits That Kill Your Metabolism

“I don’t like the marketing around juice cleanses,” adds Eric Ravussin, associate executive director for clinical science at Pennington Biomedical Research Center, according to BuzzFeed Life. “That it’s going to detox and mobilize all these toxins and all that — this is pure marketing.”

Though juice cleanses are famous for helping people shed pounds, Pressed Juicery doesn’t specifically mention weight loss in its online product descriptions. “Drink it before to get digestive juices flowing” and “great natural digestive aids and help regulate metabolism” are some of the phrases the company uses.

Can juice cleanses actually cause harm?

“[If you’re healthy to begin with,] there’s very little evidence that it does anything bad for you,” confirms Dr. John Buse, M.D., Ph.D., chief of the division of endocrinology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill tells BuzzFeed Life.

Related: 8 Post-Workout Snacks Registered Dietitians Love

So it all comes down to the message being sent to kids and teens by marketing a juice cleanse to them, and some feel that’s enough reason to come down on the brand. According to research from Common Sense Media, kids start to become concerned about their body image as young as pre-school. And according to the National Eating Disorders Association, 46 percent of 9 to 11-year-olds are “sometimes” or “very often” on diets, and more than one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy tactics such as skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives to lose weight.

If the campaign was never intended for children (but for parents who have more time for a cleanse with the kids back in school), it does at least teach one very important thing: the importance of proper messaging, especially on social media.

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