Vegetable Juicing: The Ultimate Multivitamin

For years we watched Jack Lalanne demonstrate juicing on TV. Compared to the wonderful pictures of seafood and steak in other commercials, juice can look pretty unexciting. When considered alone, however, juice from raw fruit and vegetables can be downright inspiring!

Vegetable juice is an important source of raw food critical to good health. Most of us don’t get enough vegetables to reap the benefits they offer. OK, but can green juice really taste good? Despite its disgusting look, it is, in fact, tasty.

Fruit juicing is certainly good for you but it has one disadvantage over vegetable juicing: Fruit juice is high in sugar and tends to increase insulin levels when consumed. Carrots and beets function similarly to fruit in this respect. Nevertheless, fruit juicing is still much better than drinking soda pop! Instead, add a bit of fruit to your vegetable juice to sweeten the flavor.

Let me suggest three reasons why you should consider incorporating vegetable juice into your health program:

1. Juicing allows you to consume an optimal amount and wider variety of fruits and vegetables in an efficient manner.

Although the National Cancer Institute recommends five servings of vegetables and three servings of fruit each day, the truth is: The average American eats only one and one half servings of vegetables and, on average, no fruit on any given day. Juicing can compensate for our fruit and vegetable deficient diets.

2. Juicing helps absorb all the nutrients from the fruits and vegetables.

Many of us have compromised intestines as a result of poor food choices over many years. This limits our body’s ability to absorb all the nutrients from vegetables and juicing tends to facilitate this absorption.

Juice therapy proponents, such as Jack Lalanne, have long known the benefits of valuable and fragile micronutrients destroyed when heated or trapped in the indigestible fibers of vegetables. These include enzymes, phytochemicals, chlorophyll, as well as more common nutrients, and water.

Enzymes act as catalysts in hundreds of thousands of chemical reactions that take place throughout your body. Enzymes are essential in digestion and food absorption, in the conversion of food into body tissue, and for the production of energy at the cellular level. In fact, enzymes are critical for most of the metabolic activities taking place in your body every second of every day. Since enzymes are destroyed by heat above 114 degrees, fresh raw juices are a viable source of enzymes.

Phytochemicals as found in collard greens, kale, kohlrabi, mustard greens, rutabaga, peppers, carrots, and cabbage are enzymes, or more often, enzyme building or enzyme activating chemicals. They play essential roles in protecting cells from damage.

Chlorophyll, a substance found exclusively in plants, has a structure similar to hemoglobin, the substance in the blood that is responsible for transporting oxygen. Research has found that chlorophyll enhances the body’s ability to produce hemoglobin, thus improving the efficiency of oxygen transport.

Nutrients from citrus fruit provide healthy portions of vitamin C. Carrot juice contains large quantities of vitamin A in the form of beta-carotene. Green juices are a good source of vitamin E. Essential minerals like iron, copper, potassium, sodium iodine, and magnesium, which are bound by the plant in a form that is most easily assimilated during digestion.

Since juicing removes indigestible fiber, these nutrients are available to the body in much larger quantities than if the piece of fruit or vegetable was eaten whole. Many of the nutrients are trapped in the fiber – 1% of the available beta-carotene is assimilated from a carrot eaten whole. When a carrot is juiced, removing the fiber, nearly 100% of the beta-carotene can be assimilated.

Finally, fruits and vegetables provide another substance absolutely essential for good health – water. More than 65% of most of the cells of the human body are made of water. Brain cells can be as much as 80% water. It’s no insult to be called soggy brained! Many for the fluids we drink such as coffee, tea, soft drinks, alcoholic beverages and artificially flavored drinks contain substances that require extra water for your body to eliminate. Fruits and vegetables are free of these unneeded substances and are full of pure, clean water.

3. Vegetable juicing is beneficial to the body because it balances acidity.

In America most of us eat an abundance of grains and grain-fed animals. This acid-forming diet, as well as emotional stress and toxic overload results in an acidic environment known as acidosis. Acidosis will decrease the body's ability to absorb minerals and other nutrients, decrease the energy production in the cells, decrease its ability to repair damaged cells, decrease its ability to detoxify heavy metals, make tumor cells thrive, and make it more susceptible to fatigue and illness. Vegetables are more alkaline. Vegetables in juicing concentration has a neutralizing effect on the acidification of the body’s internal environment.

Experience the health benefits of vegetables by jam packing them in their rawest form into your body. Take steps to prevent cancer, heart disease, arthritis, and a host of other diseases by starting your day with a glass of vegetable juice.