A good juicer and organic produce will allow you to enjoy a wealth of nutrients.
Fresh juice helps us increase energy, strengthens the immune system, and facilitates healing by supplying the raw materials that help our body heal, repair, and renew more quickly and completely. If you want to prevent disease, juicing offers one of the surest paths to a disease-free life. Fresh juice provides the nutritional advantages of plant foods in a concentrated form that is easy for the body to absorb. It is rich not only in water, which we all need plenty of, but also in easy-to-absorb protein, carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and phytochemicals. Simply stated, juicing is a delicious way to increase your consumption of many of nature’s most life giving foods in a very easy to digest form.
I’m often asked if it isn’t better just to eat the whole fruit or vegetable rather than juice. Of course we need whole fruits and vegetables for fiber as well as the nutrients they richly provide. We can get fiber by eating not only fruits and vegetables, but also by eating whole grains, legumes (beans, lentils, split peas), and sprouts. What we appear to be quite short on these days are nutrients such as the antioxidants (vitamins C and E, beta carotene, selenium, and glutathione), and cancer-preventative phytochemicals such as lycopene, indoles, and isothiocyanates. Since many of us don’t get even the minimum five servings of fruits and veggies each day, juicing helps us meet our quota of five to nine servings while providing a concentration of life-giving, disease preventing nutrients.
In the not-so-distant past, some people thought that a significant amount of nutrients remained in the fiber after juicing, but the Department of Agriculture has proven that idea wrong. A study published in 1996 showed that twelve fruit juices, analyzed by the Department of Agriculture, contained 90 percent of the nutrients in the juice, not in the fiber. This is the reason juice, and vegetable juice in particular, is such a great complement to a high-fiber diet.
Juicing is an easy way to add the benefits of vegetables into your diet-something nearly all of us know we need to eat more of. Because fruit is higher in sugar, I don’t recommend drinking very much fruit juice-no more than 2 to 4 ounces a day as a general rule. A good juicer and organic produce will allow you to enjoy a wealth of nutrients as well as parts of plants you might not eat otherwise such as stems, leaves, skins, and seeds. (Yes, seeds are good for you!) But don’t just take my word for it; find out for yourself. Experience the great health-promoting benefits of vegetable juices firsthand. Make juicing a daily habit. Your body will thank you with much improved health and vitality.
Cherie Calbom, The Juice Lady
Author of The Juice Lady’s Guide to Juicing for Health.
See Sanoviv’s recommended juicers here.
