Apple, beet and carrot go into a blender, and out comes a deep pink drink that has been trending on TikTok. The name is ABC juice, after the three ingredients. The promises attached to it run from clearer skin to a flatter stomach, and one popular caption puts the recipe at five carrots, an apple and a beet per glass.
Korea has been pouring the same glass for years. By mid-2020, Korean media were calling ABC juice the star of the moment, and most of the proof on offer came from television segments and a book. That changes how the whole thing reads, so it is worth slowing down before you buy a beet.
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| A glass of ABC juice, the apple, beet and carrot blend that Korean TV segments made famous. |
Pressed or Blended: Where the Fiber Ends Up
ABC juice is only apple, beet and carrot, and whether the fiber survives depends on how you make it. Western recipe sites give you two routes. You can feed everything through a juicer, or you can blend it and strain the pulp out through a nut-milk bag. A few leave the pulp in the glass.
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| Apple, beet and carrot in a blender jar, ready for a two-minute morning drink. |
The Korean book version leans the other way. A Taiwanese outlet summarizing a Korean book on the drink describes a thick blend made with skins and pulp intact, closer to something you eat with a spoon than something you sip. The same write-up mentions spin-offs such as ACC, which swaps in cabbage, and BBC, which adds banana. How common the spoon-thick style is in Korean home kitchens is unclear, so treat it as one author's recipe rather than a national standard.
The book's own argument for keeping the pulp is that the insoluble fiber in skins and flesh helps waste move through the gut and can ease constipation. That is a general claim about fiber, not a finding about this particular drink, but it explains why the Korean recipe makes a point of keeping the leftovers in the glass.
Ratios drift from kitchen to kitchen, too. The TikTok caption mentioned above calls for five carrots to one apple and one beet. One popular food blog uses two carrots, one apple and one beet. That is a big difference in sweetness, and it explains how two people can both say they drink ABC juice and be describing different drinks.
Pressed Versus Blended
The gap between juicing and blending matters more than it sounds. Cold-pressing removes most of the fiber and leaves it behind as pulp. A Kaiser Permanente article on juicing quotes a doctor who tells people to blend instead, and who describes a plate of roughly two parts vegetables to one part fruit as a sensible target. Fruit juice without its fiber delivers a large dose of sugar, which is the concern behind that advice.
Pressed versus blended is the same gap as drinking apple juice versus eating an apple. Against that yardstick, a blended ABC with two carrots and a beet for every apple sits on the friendlier side of the line, though that is a judgment call and not a measured result. Strain the pulp out and most of that advantage goes with it.
Why Korean Mornings Leave Room for a Two-Minute Drink
Skipping breakfast is common in Korea, and a drink you can finish in two minutes is an easy fix for it. According to the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency's 2022 national health statistics, 34 percent of the whole population skips the first meal of the day. Among people in their twenties the figure is close to 60 percent, and it peaks at 63.3 percent for women in that age group.
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| ABC juice with a boiled egg and yogurt, a simple breakfast for a busy morning. |
The habit sits awkwardly beside Korea's own advice. Breakfast has long been treated there as a health necessity, and an English-language news report on those figures notes that eating habits shifted as industrialization changed working hours. A survey of 446 Seoul office workers, cited in a study of national survey data, found that 88.8 percent knew breakfast was important while only 33.2 percent ate it every day. The year of that survey is not given, so read the exact percentages loosely. The gap between knowing and doing is the interesting part.
Lack of time keeps surfacing as the reason. In an older survey of workers and college students in the Gyeongnam region, published around 2010, running out of time topped the list at 41.7 percent. Korea's agriculture information agency made a similar point in a January 2026 report on the government's 1,000 won breakfast program, which serves rice-based meals to students and industrial-complex workers for about 70 US cents. The report treats skipped breakfast as a structural issue, with time and cost behind it as well as health worries.
Whether skipping breakfast does harm is still argued over. An analysis of Korea's 2017 national nutrition survey found no significant link between skipping breakfast and metabolic syndrome once other risk factors were adjusted for. A 2023 study of Korean adults aged 18 to 39 did find a link, and its authors cautioned that correlation does not prove cause. Neither result turns a pink drink into a cure for a missed meal. At best it fills a gap when you are hungry, which is a smaller claim than the videos make.
What the Big Claims Actually Rest On
The loudest claims about ABC juice come from television segments and a book, not from trials of the drink itself. One Korean health program reportedly followed a test group for four weeks and saw visceral fat fall by 43 percent, a figure repeated in a Korean magazine guide to the drink. A Taiwanese write-up of a Korean book says a TV personality who drank a cup every morning for three weeks ended up 11 centimeters smaller around the waist.
Those make good television. The reports behind them do not say what else the participants ate or how much they moved that month, and they do not mention a comparison group. Without one, a number like 43 percent only describes what happened to those people during those weeks.
A 2020 Korean news article credits the drink's fame partly to Hollywood actors who supposedly drink it, the same pitch that made noni juice famous. For noni, the article names a specific star. For ABC juice, it names nobody. The claim that the drink is already a well-known detox in Europe and North America shows up again and again in Korean and Taiwanese coverage, and no independent Western source turned up to back it.
The skin claims on TikTok follow a similar pattern. The usual argument points to the beta-carotene in carrots and the antioxidants in beets. A nutrient list tells you what is in the food, and it does not tell you what a daily glass does to your face.
The beet is the one ingredient with real research behind it. An earlier meta-analysis of randomized trials found that beetroot juice and nitrate supplements lowered systolic blood pressure by about 4.4 mmHg on average, with no clear change in diastolic pressure. Beets are rich in dietary nitrate, the usual explanation for the effect. Those trials tested beet juice or nitrate on its own, though. No trial of the apple, beet and carrot combination turned up, and the detox language could not be traced to one either.
A few cautions follow. Apples and carrots add natural sugar, which is one more reason to stay at a single glass. If you take blood pressure medication, ask your doctor before making the drink a daily habit, since the beet's best-documented effect is on blood pressure.
A Weekday Version That Takes a Few Minutes
One apple, two carrots and one small beet, blended with about half a cup of water, make a glass in roughly the time it takes to brew coffee. That ratio follows a popular recipe that suggests a green apple for tartness and a squeeze of lemon if the result tastes too sweet. Scrub everything well, core the apple and pull out the seeds. The 2020 Korean news article recommends leaving the skins on after a thorough wash, which keeps more of the fiber in the glass.
Go easy on the beet the first time. Its earthy flavor can be strong, and recipes written for beginners suggest starting with a small beet and adding cold water until it tastes right. Use less water for the spoon-thick style, or more for something you can drink through a straw. Rinse the blender right after you pour, because beet pigment gets harder to remove the longer it sits.
If you strain the drink and end up with a bowl of leftover pulp, some home cooks stir it into rotis or bread dough instead of throwing it out. It is a small way to get the fiber back on the plate, and it keeps a day's worth of carrots from going in the bin.
A glass of apple, beet and carrot is mostly carbohydrate and fiber, with very little protein or fat. A boiled egg or a small cup of yogurt beside it turns a drink into something closer to a meal. That pairing is a kitchen suggestion with no study behind it, and it works with whatever else is in the fridge.
If the TikTok version caught your eye, a week of small-beet ABC juice makes an easy experiment. Keep the skins on and the fiber in, and judge it by how it tastes and how your mornings go. The television numbers can stay where they came from.
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