Juicing: Benefits And Downsides

Juicing is a great way to add some vitamins and other nutrients for people who don't eat enough whole fruits and vegetables. Some people hate the sweetness of fruit, and others hate plain green veggies. The best way not to miss out on vitamins because of this is to get a juicer and incorporate them to your diet in a liquid form. Even if you do start juicing, you still have to eat some fresh fruit and veggies just because juicers discard all the pulp, and with it goes away all fiber. In order not to miss out on fiber, you can take some pulp and put it back to your juice, or eat some other fruit later in the day.

Top 8 Benefits Of Juicing

• The Healing Properties

Juicing allows creating specific prescriptions for specific needs. You can make one juice for inflammations, other to relieve stress, third to regulate the digestion, treat heart disease, cancer, whatever you need at any given moment. Hippocrates said “Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food”.

• Better nutrient absorption

Most adults nowadays have weakened digestive systems. Digestive issues like lactose intolerance, acid reflux, inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, constipation and many others are very common and as a result, nutrients can't be properly absorbed. When you juice your plants, they are pre-digested, the juicer does it for you, breaking down the cell walls of fruits and vegetables so your body can soak them up.

• Cleansing

Juicing helps to get rid of toxins by cleaning your digestive tract and allows metabolism to become faster and more efficient.

• Volume

By juicing, you can take in large amounts of fruit and vegetables at once that you may not be able to eat in their raw form for some reason, whether it's just too much, or you don't like them. Juicing helps the body to absorb more enzymes and vitamins. Drinking your fruit and vegetables allows the vitamins to rapidly enter the body, giving your digestive system a needed rest.

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• Antioxidants

Fruits, veggies, nuts, seeds and herbs are loaded with antioxidants. They destroy free radicals that cause cellular damage which make the body more susceptible to cancer.

• Juicing preserves the micro-nutrients

When you cook or process food, the micro-nutrients are altered and harder to absorb. Drinking the fresh and raw juice means that all the micro-nutrients are maintained.

• Hydration

Our bodies are made up of anywhere 50 to 80 percent of water, depending on our age. To function properly, cells need hydration. Raw juice contains the water much needed to replenish the lost fluid in addition to give you vitamins, enzymes and minerals.

• Alkalinity

If your body is acidic — and if you follow a standard American diet it probably is — you'll experience more stress, disease and pain than you would experience if your body had an alkaline environment. Alkaline environment provides better energy, reduces pain and inflammation, and reduces the signs of ageing.

Juicing Or Blending: Which One Is Better?

People often confuse terms blending and juicing. Some call everything a smoothie, and others call all the machines juicers. Essentially, what's important to know is that juice is made in a machine called juicer, that extracts the juice and discards the pulp. Blenders repeatedly chop plants many times into small pieces and the final product is not a clear juice, but something like a mush. Things are never fully black and white, so it can't be said which option is better. It all depends on your needs at the moment.

Best juicers are those working on slower speeds. One of the benefits of having a juicer is that you can fit more plants, or get more produce in you. For instance, some juicers can fit 1 pound of spinach or arugula inside. This way you can get a lot more nutrients, except the fiber. Another benefit of juicers is that they're almost quiet. The cons are lack of fibers, time required to do all the work before getting the juice, and a lot of cleaning after.

First and the most obvious con of a blender is noise. Another one is that the plants have to be diluted, so we get less nutrition. One of the pros is that blenders are very fast and we can have product mush sooner than we would have in the juicer. Blenders are easier to clean, and of course — we get the fiber. If you don't dilute your smoothie with water, it's extremely healthy, perhaps even healthier that juices.

Because juicing removes fiber, it is great if your goal is fast digestion and feeding your cells extremely fast. Let's say that you want to workout, but you feel a little hungry, and your energy levels are low. This is where juicing machine comes handy, and in this situation it's better to juice than to blend. When blended, even though they're in the liquid form, plants still need an hour to digest because of all the fiber. One more example when juicing is better than blending: let's say you did a hard workout and you need to repair your muscles fast, but you are not hungry to eat a real meal yet. Drink your no-pulp juice and all the goodies coming from fruit and veggies will be in your blood cells in not more than 15 minutes.

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When you blend, you have to add water or some other liquid, so you're basically diluting the nutrients. When you juice, you have high level of macro-nutrients, but you also voluntarily discard some of them. Regarding the quality of the final product, it is probably similar. The best thing to do is to juice, blend and eat the whole plants interchangeably.

It really doesn't matter which option you'll pick, just get those nutrients in. Any way where you can include more fresh fruit and vegetables in you diet, whether they're juiced or blended, or chewed in you mouth is far better than eating processed food, and that's the most important message to spread about this topic.