Mercola - Natural Health Products & Articles

Juicing is one of the easiest ways to regularly consume massive amounts of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and antioxidants. While eating fresh fruits and vegetables whole gives you the same nutrients, juicing delivers them in a form that your body can easily assimilate, absorb and digest.

For nutritionist Cherie Calbom, bestselling author of Juicing for Life, juice is therapeutic since it can be used by your body immediately with little effort. Nutrients from vegetable juice are already within your bloodstream after 30 minutes of consumption. That’s how fast you experience juicing’s health benefits.

In the past, some have suggested that juice is inferior to whole fruits and vegetables and that juicing strips the plants of fiber, where the nutrients were supposedly stored. In reality, juicing concentrates the nutrients in the juice. The Department of Agriculture analyzed twelve fruits and discovered that 90 percent of the antioxidants were in the juice, not the fiber.

Fruit and vegetable juice does not contain insoluble fiber but they contain soluble fiber, which is excellent for digestion, helps lower blood cholesterol, stabilize blood sugar and encourage the growth of good bacteria in the bowel.

Aside from providing you with a quick source of nutrients, here are some of the many benefits of juicing:

• Weight loss – A recent study showed that adults with weight problems who drank at least 8 ounces of vegetable juice as a part of a calorie-controlled diet lost 4 pounds compared to those who followed the same diet but did not drink any juice. Calbom attributes this to the fact that vegetable juice and juice from alkaline fruits help balance your acidity levels, allowing your body to release the fat cells containing the acid because there’s plenty of alkaline-buffer to neutralize and carry the acid out of the system.
  
• Enhanced immune system – Fruits and vegetables are loaded with phytochemicals, substances that boost your immune system and help protect you from disease, injury and pollution. Research shows that those who have a diet rich in phytochemicals have a lower incidence of cancer and other diseases.
  
• Convenience and Variety – Don’t you get tired or bored of eating the same salads every day? Or would you like to eat certain vegetables but don’t like their texture or how they smell? Juicing allows you to easily consume a variety of vegetables and plant parts like roots, stems and leaves that you probably wouldn’t eat but are good for you.

To squeeze the most out of fruits and vegetables, you’ll need a quality juicer, not a blender. A juicer separates the liquid from the pulp (the source of the insoluble fiber) while a blender merely turns everything that is placed in it into liquid, mixing the pulp and the juice together.

Natural health physician Joseph Mercola recommends the Omega Juicers. What sets these juicers apart from the rest? If you have a blender-type juicer, it’s quite noisy because it relies on high speeds to do the juicing. These high speeds reach anywhere from 1,000 to 24,000 RPM, which heat the juice and damage the perishable nutrients.

The Omega Juicers easily and rapidly produce large amounts of juices but it uses a “slow” 80-RPM single gear with a milling-type screw that eliminates the heat factor and the impact from the high speeds to retain the flavors and nutrients and reduce oxidation. It also juices green leafy vegetables and wheat grass with ease, unlike most masticating and centrifugal juicers.

The Omega Juicers also do more than just provide you with nutritious beverages; you can also use it to mince and chop meat, fish and herbs and spices. Clean-up is also a breeze. Just a quick rinse under the tap and you’re all done!

An important reminder from Dr. Mercola: make sure that you’re juicing vegetables that are suited for your unique Nutritional Type. If you’re a protein type, about 3-4 ounces of juice a day should be enough; if you’re a carb type, it may be more appropriate to take about a quart of vegetable juice daily.

For Mercola, vegetable juice mixed with some essential oils and chlorella is an excellent breakfast. If you’re new at juicing, you can add coconut, cranberries, lemons or fresh ginger to make your juice tastier. Also, vegetable juice is very perishable so you may want to juice only what you can consume and drink it immediately at room temperature.