The Health Benefits of Fresh Juice
Drinking homemade fresh juice recipes is one of the best things you can do for your health. Nowhere else are you likely to find such a rich concentration of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phytochemicals and living enzymes. Multivitamin and mineral supplements are an exception but they don’t have the bio-availability that fresh juice does. Research shows that nutrients in real foods are more available for digestion than in supplements.
“Is it better to eat whole fruits and vegetables or to juice them?” is a good question that is often asked. If the response requires a solid yes or no answer, then the response is no, it is not better to juice instead of eating fruits and vegetables. Juicing discards fiber from fruits and vegetables that is essential for the wellbeing of our colon and elimination system. Fortunately real life does not give us such an ultimatum and the best answer is do both!
The area in which fresh juice outranks whole fruit and vegetables is in sheer volume of nutrition. The fiber is effectively sacrificed so that we can receive an abundance of everything else instead. This works in two ways. First, you need more fruit and/or vegetables to make a fresh juice than you can possible eat in one go. For example you need to juice about 4-5 oranges to make a juice – that a lot of nutrition! To make a carrot juice you need about 10 carrots! Second, juicing breaks open the fibers so that we can access more nutrition. There is a lot of nutrients, especially phytochemicals, deep in the fibers that we would not access just by chewing fruits and vegetables. The blades in the juicing machine extensively chop up the fibers and the result is a drink that is a nutrient cocktail brimming with antioxidants.
Regardless of which fruit or vegetable you juice, if you drink a daily glass of fresh juice you can be assured that you are getting plenty of antioxidants. Antioxidants combat unstable oxygen molecules, called free radicals, that damage our cells and cause inflammation. This damage can lead to premature aging, cancer and degenerative disease like arthritis, diabetes and heart disease.