The Benefits of Juicing

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Juicing benefits you in two main ways. The benefit of juicing your own vegetables and fruits is that it allows you to fit a healthy diet into a hectic life-style. You can juice combinations of fruits and veggies quickly, drink the juice quickly, get the nutrients you need, and be on your way. The convenience of juicing means you are more likely to get a balanced diet than if you try to eat all the portions you need throughout the day.

Moreover, you can combine the ingredients of the juices you make yourself to make the juice more flavorful than the ingredients eaten separately, and you can combine them for both a balance of nutrition and for special health needs.

Be Careful About Where You Get Your Information

You will find a lot of claims on the Internet about the health benefits of juicing particular fruits and vegetables. Be skeptical of them.

Website owners who wish to sell you something are probably willing to give claims the benefit of the doubt rather than check them carefully. And it is difficult to find good scientific studies of how juicing benefits your health. Nobody has the exclusive right to natural foods, so why should anyone pay for a study when everybody else can then use it to sell their competing products? There are some studies of juicing benefits, but they tend to be small scale and lack confirmation. And when you do find a published study online, the writing tends to be impenetrable, so it takes a lot of effort to decipher what they are saying.

A site which needs a reputation for reliability may be a good compromise. For example,

• The Mayo Clinic  has to be reliable. Their success depends on their reputation. They have a Google page rank of 7 on a 10 point scale and over 900,000 links to their domain.
• WebMD.com has a Google page rank of 8 (very high), and over 10,000,000 links into it (very, very high), which indicate that it has an excellent reputation.

Juicing Versus Buying Juice

Why should you consider juicing instead of buying prepared juices?

1. Juicing is cheaper over time, especially when the ingredient are in season.
2. The ingredients will be fresh. Prepared juices need to be homogenized (heat treated to kill bacteria) which eliminates some of the nutrients.
3. Your juice won’t contain preservatives.
4. When you juice, you can choose your own blend based on your flavor preferences, and your health and nutrition needs.
5. There’s no risk of finding out you’ve bought a fruit-flavored drink by mistake.

Juicing Versus Cooking Your Own Vegetables

How does juicing stack up to cooking your own vegetables?

If you cook your own vegetables, you will get the entire vegetable, including all the fiber, which is good for keeping your intestinal tract healthy. You do want some whole fruits and vegetables in your diet.

On the down side, with cooking:

1. The heat of cooking breaks down some of the nutrients.
2. Boiling will dissolve some of the nutrients.
3. It is hard to prepare veggies so that they are tasty and attractive.
4. It takes more time to cook veggies well. (I do Indian cooking, and it takes me about an hour, no matter what I’m preparing, but they are tasty.)

Juicing Verses Eating Raw Vegetables And Fruits Plain

What about eating veggies raw? That does eliminate the problems with loss of nutrition. The down sides are

1. The mouth feel of some veggies may put you off of them.
2. It can take more time chopping and chewing than you can fit into your schedule.
3. It’s hard to get a pleasing combination of flavors. You can do salads, but salads are pretty bland without dressing, so you are probably committing yourself to make your own dressings. Lime juice works pretty well in dressings, which can lead you into juicing to make the dressings.

Juicing Versus Eating Vegetables at Restaurants

It is hard to get good veggies and fruits in some restaurants. The best for veggies are probably Oriental and Indian. The worst are Mexican restaurants and pubs. Steak houses offer some veggies, but veggies are not their forte.

Juicing To Satisfy Health Needs

It is beyond the scope of this one web page to try to give a complete list of medical conditions and which specific fruits and vegetables are used to treat them, but here are a few examples.

Cancer prevention: vegetable consumption is widely accepted to offer protection against cancer. This is perhaps due to chlorophylls and carotenoids.

In particular, chlorophyll from green veggies has been shown to prevent red meat toxicity in the intestine which reduces the risk of colon cancer. It may help prevent other cancers as well.

Resveratrol, a chemical found in red wine, red grape skins, and purple grape juice, is used to prevent cancer as well as treat atherosclerosis, lower LDL (“bad” cholesterol) levels, and raise HDL (“good” cholesterol). The research is not totally clear yet how much it benefits humans.

The antioxidants in many fruits and veggies remove the free oxygen radicals that cause cell damage and lead to some cancers. Grapes, particularly red grapes, contain flavonoids which are good antioxidants.

Detoxification: Chlorophyll has been shown to help with iron detoxification. Wheatgrass juice reduces myelotoxicity during chemotherapy.

Ulcerative colitis: Wheatgrass juice can treat ulcerative colitis.

Ulcers: Fresh cabbage juice greatly sped up healing time for duodenal ulcers and gastric ulcers.

Blood improvement: Wheatgrass juice reduces need for blood transfusions in patients with thalassemia, a hereditary disease wherein the body produces defective hemoglobin.

Kidney stones: Orange juice helps prevent recurrent kidney stones, although lemonade does not. Cranberry juice has been credited with helping to prevent recurrent kidney stones, but the seems to be no evidence that it works. Cranberry juice is probably comparable to lemonade that way. (This is according to WebMD.com.)

Urinary tract infections: There is some evidence cranberry juice does prevent bladder and other urinary tract infections in women. It contains a substance that prevents certain bacteria from sticking to the walls. The researchers found that many people stopped drinking it during the study, so pure cranberry juice may not be viable. Using a juicer to create more palatable mixtures may be the way to go.

Heart attack and stroke: Grape is used for preventing heart attack and stroke and other diseases of the heart and blood vessels. The trans-resveratrol found in the skin of red grapes is thought to expand blood vessels as well as reducing blood clotting.

Aging: Grapes contain flavonoids that can remove free oxygen radicals which cause many of the effects of aging. Many other fruits are good sources of antioxidants as well.

These are just a very few of the benefits of a diet rich in fruits and vegetables.

Conclusion

The benefits of juicing are twofold: juicing benefits your health by providing you with the nutriments your body needs, and juicing benefits your hectic lifestyle by providing you with those health benefits quickly in a form you can quickly consume and with a variety of flavors you will not tire of.

Given the pressures of our hectic lives, you are more likely to get the nutrition you need using a juicer. You can guarantee a balanced diet and include more of the ingredients you need. You can make juices that you enjoy drinking quickly and easily.

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