“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”-Hippocrates

Do you want to know an activity you can do in 15 minutes that improves your health more than exercising for an hour?

Juice vegetables.  Drinking raw vegetable juice is like drinking a living health elixir.  This elixir will flood your body with all the good stuff from fresh, raw, organic produce:  all-natural vitamins, minerals, enzymes, phytonutrients, chlorophyll, biophotonic light energy, the life energy from the living plant itself, and compounds of good health that science has yet to discover.  These nutrients cannot be replicated synthetically with powders or pills.

This living elixir will feed some of the nutritional deficiencies your cells are starving for, flush out toxins poisoning your system, and increase oxygen availability to your body’s systems.  This juice will strengthen your immune system which supercharges your defensive shields against microorganisms, and boosts your ability to heal itself from injury and disease.  This juice is the best detoxification supplement available.  Your body has an incredible ability to heal itself if it’s just given the chance.

 Why Not Just Eat Whole Vegetables?

Why not just eat some vegetables instead of juicing?  After all, juicing removes some of the vegetables’ nutritional value, and a good juicer will remove most or all of the fiber in the food, and everyone knows you need some fiber in your diet.  The answer is that digesting fiber and pulp requires a tremendous amount of your digestive system’s time and energy, energy that can be spent by the other systems in the body, such as the immune system for healing and repairing itself; and most of the micronutrients contained in the vegetables will be destroyed during digestion by stomach acid, digestive enzymes, and time.  Heating, cooking, and processing food also destroys much of a food’s nutritional value as well.

Most people have trouble eating large quantities of raw vegetables, and even the most health conscious fitness freak will have great difficulty eating a pound of raw vegetables in one sitting.  But a good juicer will compact more than a pound’s worth of raw superfood micronutrients into a small 8 ounce glass.  The juice will be pulp free so your digestive system won’t destroy the good stuff when you drink it.  Instead, the micronutrients will be absorbed directly into your bloodstream.  Indeed, some of the elixir’s enzymes will be absorbed even before your swallow reaches your stomach; they’ll be absorbed directly by mucous membranes in your mouth and esophagus.  This is great news for your poor digestive system, which is sluggish, weak, and tired from a lifetime of eating modern processed foods, chemicals, and pesticides.  It could use a vacation since most people eat constantly throughout their waking hours, rarely giving it a break from its arduous digestive work.

How Long Will Vegetable Juice Stay Fresh?

After a juice is made, your highly perishable preservative-free tonic will start to oxidize. Time will destroy many of its micronutrients and healing enzymes.  So it’s best to consume a juice immediately after you make it, but if you do store it, make sure you place the juice into an airtight container with minimal air, and drink it within 8 hours.

Which Juicer Should I Buy?

Which juicer should you buy?  Almost any juicer can juice oranges and other fruits.  What you want is a juicer that can extract the maximum micronutrients from vegetables, especially the dark green leafy ones.  The ultimate juicer is the Norwalk 280 which is $2,495, which includes a grinder and juice press.  I can also recommend the Super Angel for $1,349 and the Tribest Green Star Elite for $549.  These are excellent twin gear juicers which extract a large percentage of micronutrients and juice, leaving a very dry pulp, but they are difficult to clean.  The juicer I own is the Omega J8004 which is $226.  It is a single auger masticating juicer which works similarly to a meat grinder.  It is almost as effective at extracting micronutrients as a grinder and press, or a twin gear juicer; and cleaning it takes about 2 minutes.  I also have a home-made juice press I use in conjunction with my J8004 which provides equal benefits to the much pricier Norwalk juicer.

What About the Vitamix or Similar Blenders?

I do not recommend using a high speed blender like the Vitamix for juicing.  I have a Vitamix and it is great for making smoothies, but it is a terrible juicer.  There are several reasons why.  Water must be added for it to work, which dilutes the juice’s concentration.  The juice cannot be concentrated further since only small amounts of produce fit in the Vitamix.  The pulp is not removed, forcing your digestive system to digest the juice and micronutrients.  Also, blenders pulverize the produce, and this processing further destroys many micronutrients.

Juice Recipe

My favorite juice is kale, lemon, parsley, and cucumber.  I recommend keeping your juices limited to 3 or 4 different ingredients and rotating them regularly to decrease the odds of developing food intolerances, and to give your body the maximum plethora of micronutrients it craves.  Always add a dark green leafy vegetable such as kale, collards, turnip greens, chard, spinach, mustard greens, broccoli, or cabbage to your juice.  The only fruit I recommend adding to your juice is lemons, limes, or cranberries.  Even though these fruits are acidic, they contain alkalizing components, and they contain almost no fructose (for an explanation on this see Eat Fruit But Don’t Drink Fruit Juice); they’ll also remove some of the bitterness from your dark green leafy vegetables.  Other ingredients I like to add are parsley, cilantro, and turmeric.

Add a healthy habit into your life and try juicing.  After a month of juicing, let me know what health benefits you experience from it by dropping me an email at [email protected].