Juicing Diet—A New Way of Living Fully

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Diet is a four-letter word, and often as welcome as any other explitive in a Victorian parlor.  The word brings up images of suffering, deprivation, boring meals, and the list goes on.  But now you need to have a whole new notion of what a diet is.  Your diet is all the things you eat and how you eat them.  It is not a short-term, uncomfortable episode in your life; it “is” your life. Fresh juices greatly augment those nutrients that a usual modern diet short-changes—vitamins, minerals, and other micro-nutrients.

A juicing diet is not a juicing fast.  The fast is designed for 2 to up to 60 days in which only vegetable (not usually any fruit or only lemon juice) is consumed.  The many proponents of this say you feel great and will love the 1-2 pounds lost each day.  The Mayo clinic, however, finds no advantage to consuming juiced produce over eating the fresh whole food, and highly recommends checking with your own medical professionals before undertaking such a fast.

So what does a juicing diet look like in the long run?  It appears most of those who have used juicers for the long term drink one to two glasses of juice daily.  In this quantity, you will consume the nutrients of 4-8 times as much raw produce—probably about the amount of veggies and fruit your mother, Uncle Sam, your personal dietician, and everyone else has always recommended.  The real advantage is the convenience of concentration and the increased nutrient value as even the very same juice bottled commercially will have lost many of the most volatile nutrients to oxidation (and probably heat—in order to meet commercial standards for pasteurization).

Want some ideas for good recipes for long-term juicing diets?  Try these suggestions from “Great Juicing.”  This is a lovely salad-in-a-glass.

Wonder Juice

5 carrots
1 apple, cored
½ cucumber
½ beet
1 stalk of celery

Juice. If you think this juice needs a bit of a zing, add fresh ginger to taste!

This one is very high in vitamins A and C—a great morning drink to kick off the day.  Kids love it—just don’t mention all the ingredients.

Pineapple-Orange Rapture

4 oranges
2 cups pineapple
1 sweet potato

Process in juicer. Stir.

A warning — other than for very short-term cleansing regimens or fasts, a diet of only juice is not sufficient for health.

Foods that are not sold in the produce section of the market are also needed.  Essential fatty acids come only from fish or pressed oilseeds like flax—they cannot be pressed by any juicer.  Vitamin B12 is available only from meats or derived from microalgae—a commercial process.

You also cannot get enough fiber—a range of 25-45 grams daily—from your juiced produce, even if your juicer has a high pulp setting.  You would have to eat the remaining pulp to get the fiber—(putting it in sauces, soups, and gravies is recommended, but unlikely to be sufficient.)

While you can get considerable carbohydrates from the juices, particularly from the sugars in fruits, juicing does not provide sufficient complex carbohydrates (mostly from whole grains) to keep your blood sugars in control.  You can only get enough calories—most of them fructose and other natural sugars—unless you are juicing daily 1 pound of produce for every 50 pounds of weight—3 pounds  for most women and 4 for men.  This would add up to about 50 pounds of produce for a couple each week—or 1.3 tons of produce in a year!

The best juicing diet is one that incorporates the nutrients of the fresh produce that come from 1-2 glasses daily into a healthy combination with other foods.  This ideally includes whole grains, the bean/legume family, dairy or soy products, and either fresh wild ocean fish and some red meat (or dietary supplements that provide the essential fatty acids and B12 vitamins your body cannot otherwise obtain).  Limited quantities of meat and eggs are nutritionally a good idea, but can be eliminated with careful balancing of the complementary nutrients from the other groups.

Adding juicing to your other healthy daily foods is a great idea.  One or two glasses of fresh home-made juice is the essence of a balanced juicing diet.  It is one that will leave you healthy and energized, the best way of living.

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