NEW YORK — For the last few weeks, Vivienne Zhao, an investment banker who lives and works in Manhattan, has spent each Monday on a cleanse, consuming over the course of the day five liquid-based meals delivered in single-serve plastic containers.
Among those typically included on the menu: pinto and black beans cooked with tomatoes and morsels of spinach and bok choy; garlicky carrots mixed with onions and alkaline water; and puréed pumpkin spiked with cardamom and Saigon cinnamon.
Like a growing number of people, Zhao came to the routine — known as souping, or going on a soup cleanse — after finding juice cleanses, which she tried several times, too extreme.
“The juice cleanses are difficult because you don’t chew, and you don’t feel like you’re eating anything for days at a time,” she said. “You’re just really hungry.”
Zhao orders from Splendid Spoon in Brooklyn, which offers vegan, gluten-free soups in single-day cleanses, with the option of adding five hearty soups as meal replacements over the course of a week. Around three-quarters of its clientele — predominantly women — choose the longer version, according to Nicole Chaszar, the company founder. Sales, she said, have tripled annually since the line was introduced in 2013.
In January, Soupure, a company that opened in Los Angeles in 2014, expanded from local delivery to shipping its cleanses nationally. It also operates a popular outpost in Brentwood Town Center there. In Philadelphia, Real Food Works, a meal delivery service, added a soup cleanse to its menu in late 2013.
The appeal of souping, in part, is that it promises an easier detox than a juice cleanse.
“When you do juice cleanses, your blood sugar can spike really high,” said Despina Hyde, a registered dietitian at NYU Langone Medical Center. “Soup cleanses are inherently lower in sugar overall because they’re using more vegetables and complex carbohydrates versus fruit. They also tend to be higher in fiber, which has so many good benefits.”
Elina Fuhrman, who founded Soupelina in Los Angeles in 2013, chimed in similarly: “The juice cleansing trend started from a good place and evolved into something that’s not so healthy, because there’s a lot of sugar and not enough nutrients that the body needs.”
Soupelina offers soup cleanses of different durations as well as single-serving soups, and business has doubled in the past 12 months, Fuhrman said. The soups are prepared mostly with produce from two local farmers’ markets; the colorfully named offerings include Kale-lifornia Dreamin’, Lentil Me Entertain You! and And the Beet Goes On, a borschtlike crimson concoction.
For the most part, the soups that make up these cleanses tend to be quite flavorful, thanks in part to a liberal use of spices like turmeric and cumin. They are often made with seasonally grown ingredients. Packaged without preservatives and delivered chilled, they lack the higher sodium content of, say, a can of chicken noodle from a supermarket. Some are drinkable cold, although eating them warmed up, ideally out of a bowl with a spoon, arguably underlines the sense that they’re a meal.
Soupure includes hydrating, fruit-flavored alkaline waters as part of its cleanses, and a couple of drinks that are challenging to describe as soup, like a thick, sweet blend of strawberries and cashews that tastes somewhat like a dairy-free milkshake.
“I would say that some of our cold products are cold soup smoothies,” said Angela Blatteis, a Soupure founder. “We try to use the word ‘soup’ for ‘juice’ to just get across the point that it’s thicker, it’s more nourishing and it’s more nutrient dense.”
Soup cleanses also tend to be quite low in calories, often hovering around the 1,200 mark for a day’s worth of soup.
“That’s right at the borderline,” said Hyde, the dietitian. “A lot of people I work with need between 1,400 and 1,600 calories a day. You’re going to lose weight on low-calorie diets, of course, but it can lead to muscle breakdown.” For that reason, she doesn’t advise souping for more than one full day at a time.
For those who prefer to make their soups from scratch, several books on soup cleansing have recently been published, including “The Soup Cleanse” by Blatteis and Vivienne Vella of Soupure, and “Soupelina’s Soup Cleanse” by Fuhrman. The founder of Splendid Spoon plans one, too.
Especially for busy people, soup cleanses offer, as juice-focused ones do, an undeniable benefit: convenience.
“My food pyramid was things you could get off a coffee cart,” Jacqueline Harrison of Manhattan said. Now she frequently replaces a meal or snack with one of Splendid Spoon’s soups during 14-hour workdays as an owner of a landscape design and garden installation business. “Bottled soups were really appealing because I could just grab them and go. It doesn’t feel like you’re on a diet; it feels like a meal.”
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