Eating Eight Servings of Vegetables is a
Piece of Cake
(Okay, not literally; but it is easy)
Nearly every health authority recommends that you get six to eight servings of vegetables and fruits per day. Hardly anyone follows this advice.
Although the majority of Americans say they are "trying" to eat more fruits and veggies, most are missing the mark. More than half are, in fact -- even when potatoes are counted as a vegetable (which you definitely shouldn't -- potatoes are just a step away from sugar).
You're about to find out how to make it easy to eat your quota… and if you don't care much for vegetables — keep reading, because this approach makes them better tasting and more enjoyable, too.
Continued below. . .
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One of the best treats you can give your body
Unless you've had your head stuck in the sand the past few years, you've probably heard a thing or two about juicing — or green smoothies. (I'll tell you the difference in a moment).
What makes it so attractive is that juicing is an easy way to vastly increase the amount of vegetables in your daily diet. The benefits are remarkable. You'll notice a difference in the way you feel.
Fresh juiced vegetables give your body an instant infusion of nutrients, enzymes, vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidants and other compounds in a form you can easily get down the hatch, digest, absorb and use. Just the way nature intended.
Juiced vegetables work synergistically to give you the raw materials that promote healing, boost your energy level, and protect you from disease.
Many people find they struggle with eating a couple of pounds of vegetables and fruits per day, but have no trouble when they switch to a glass of fresh vegetable juice.
Here's another important benefit of juicing: Cooked food is poor in nutrition. Some health experts recommend consuming around 80 to 85 percent of your foods in their raw state. Cooking and processing food destroy valuable and sensitive micronutrients by changing both their shape and chemical composition. (For more about this, check out my Special Report, The Missing Ingredient for Good Health.)
 
It's a sure bet that hardly anyone eats 85 percent of their food raw. With juicing, it becomes easy, and the resulting increase in your intake of nutrients can hype your health to levels you've never experienced before.
6 more reasons to consider juicing
If juicing's benefits are not already obvious, here are some other reasons to consider it.
- Green juices contain chlorophyll, an excellent detoxifier that purifies and helps rebuild blood cells (due to its similar structure to hemoglobin), removes mold, parasites and other toxins, and can help prevent and remove cancer cells.
- Cleanses your cells. According to macrobiotic.co.uk, all fundamental improvements in health start at the cellular level by oxygenating and cleansing your system of toxins and other foreign invaders. The cellular environment includes your lymphatic, digestive, and cardiovascular systems, and it's a matter of life and death to keep them clean.
- Extremely alkaline. Many health authorities teach that a fresh vegetable diet is alkaline rather than acidic, and for this reason places much less stress on the entire body. A high level of meat and carbohydrate consumption, on the other hand, makes the body more acidic and contributes to all the degenerative diseases — the so-called "diseases of aging." By this theory, eating vegetables alkalinizes the body.
- Fresh vegetable juice is a natural healer, and may contain nutrients that kill harmful microbes.
- A juice concocted from multiple vegetables lets you "hide" vegetables you don't like. Most people eat the same vegetables in their salad each and every day. That violates the wisdom of regular food rotation and raises the risk you could develop an allergy to a particular food. It's an axiom of food allergies that it's usually your favorite foods you're allergic to. Changing up your diet helps avoid this. Eating the same foods every day also robs you of nutrients provided by foods you've never tried.
- The vitamins, minerals, and other phytonutrients in juice are absorbed more quickly and easily, which helps restore your biochemical and mineral balance, and helps prevent disease and premature aging of cells. Easy absorption can be especially important if you've eaten a typical (i.e. bad) diet for many years. Juicing helps "pre-digest" the nutrients for you.
The list could go on, but I think you get the idea.
What do you lose when you juice instead of eating the whole vegetable? Fiber, and lots of it. While fiber has many benefits, it does have a few drawbacks. It fills us up faster so we eat fewer helpings of the vegetables we need. And once in the gut, it slows down the digestion and absorption of the nutrients embedded in the heavy fiber.
Juicing gets most of the fiber out of the picture so you're mainly consuming the most nutritious parts of the vegetable, in much larger quantities than you ever would if you ate the whole thing — and the nutrients are absorbed quickly in the gut. I would say it's easy to consume two to three times the vegetables you now eat by taking them as juice.
This is especially important if you're ill with cancer or other serious conditions — your body can absorb more because it doesn't have to break down fiber. And the nutrients are absorbed in a matter of 10 minutes or so, not hours.
When it comes to healthy people, I have misgivings about advising them to do an end run around fiber (it's another component of food most people don't get enough of). But considering we have a health crisis brought on, in part, by not eating vegetables — juicing strikes me as a good choice.
Congratulations!
You've decided to try juicing… Now what?
Whether you've never juiced before, or are already a pro, you can probably learn something from this tip sheet.
- Start with what you know and already enjoy. Juice should taste pleasant, not make you feel nauseous. Do what you can to make this fun, short of adding sugar or a shot of vodka.
- Use pesticide-free veggies. As much as possible, choose organic. Pesticides can lead to serious damage to your system, as we've detailed in Issue #40 and many other issues of this newsletter. Despite the misleading Stanford study in September of 2012, conventional pesticide exposure is much worse than they made it out to be1. If you juice your vegetables and thereby eat far more than ever before, you'll be taking in even more pesticide if you don't choose organic produce.
Shortcomings in the Stanford study included using an odd statistical model no one understands, and failing to distinguish between single/multiple or light/heavy pesticide traces. It ignored the "cocktail effect" — multiple pesticides on a single fruit. Additionally, the researchers ignored a growing body of research about harm to human fetuses at very low levels of pesticide intake. Finally, scientists have discovered a lot about the way so-called low levels affect amphibians — and it ain't pretty. In short, you don’t want to eat pesticides.
Make a special point of choosing organic when you purchase celery, spinach, kale, collard greens, lettuce, carrots, and cucumber. When grown conventionally, these vegetables are among the most contaminated by pesticides.
- Start with light, easy-to-digest vegetables (celery, fennel, and cucumbers).
- Then add red and green leaf lettuce, Romaine, endive, spinach, and escarole, followed by cabbage, Chinese cabbage, and bok choy.
- Finally, add a few pieces of the bitter greens (kale, collard, dandelion and mustard greens), some onion and garlic, sprouts, or any other fresh produce you haven't tried yet.
- Make your juice palatable, and even delicious, with these ideas:
- Herbs are wonderful companions to veggies. Cilantro is a great detoxifier, but some people don't like it. You either love it or hate it.
- Other favorites: basil, oregano, parsley, chives, mint…
- Lemons and limes — they're low in sugar, and they can help cover the taste of more bitter veggies
- Cranberries. Researchers say they're chock full of phytonutrients, contain five times the antioxidants of broccoli and may protect from cancer, stroke, and heart disease. But they also contain sugar, so keep to a limit of 4 ounces per pint of juice.
- Fresh ginger. Gives your juice some kick! Start small, even tiny, because it's powerful. Ginger supports cardiovascular health and helps lower cholesterol. Again, season to taste. I'm not sure I'd include it every day.
- Sea salt. A healthy, mineral-rich salt, unlike "normal" table salt which has nothing but sodium chloride and additives you don’t want (which keep it from clumping).
- Maximize vegetables and minimize fruits, especially if you struggle with your weight, have high blood pressure or uric acid, or are fighting a major health problem. Remember, sugar feeds cancer and heart disease, so limit your fruit to a few berries or a half an apple.
- Drink your juice immediately! Or store it very carefully. Otherwise it will start oxidizing. Vegetable juice is highly perishable.
You can, however, store it up to 24 hours by: (1) Pouring it into an airtight jar, filling to the very top to minimize air, and covering tightly, or (2) Getting a food vacuum pump (like Food Saver) that will suck out all the air.
Some people like taking their juice to work in a sealed coffee mug and drinking it there. Bear in mind that the longer you wait, the more the nutrients are compromised.
- Listen to your body, especially when first starting. If your stomach does cartwheels for hours after adding something you've never eaten before, don't force the issue. Just move on to a different vegetable next time.
Watch out for this common juicing mistake
I'll be the first to admit that juicing does require a time commitment.
So the natural tendency will be to find "natural" or organic juices from the store and call that good. Save the effort, right?
Big mistake… and here's why.
First of all, anything packaged absolutely fails on the point of drinking it right away, or within 20 minutes or even 24 hours. The sheer length of time between creation and consumption is enough to kill any nutrients and enzymes in these packaged juices.
Perhaps even more important, bottled, store-bought juices are pasteurized, so the nutrients have been denatured through the heating process.
This means you're drinking, in essence, empty calories. The nutrients have literally been boiled out of it. Better than Coke? Maybe, but still not beneficial... And hardly anyone is well served by empty calories. I see fresh, unpasteurized juices bottled and sold in some health food stores, but there's not much variety — mostly citrus and maybe carrot if you're lucky.
One more caution…
Most people, unless they're using juicing to detoxify for a certain period of time, need other nutrients and more variety in their diet… those provided by high quality fats like coconut oil, butter, and olive oil, and high quality proteins such as true free-range organic eggs, beef, and chicken.
So unless you're juicing under a doctor's guidance, I caution against the all-or-nothing mentality. Choose maybe one to two meals a day for juicing/smoothies, and then a more traditional meal for the rest.
Does a smoothie count as "juice"?
Let's clear up the difference between juices and smoothies. They are different and require different machines.
Call it "juice" ONLY when it's extracted and the fiber remains in the pulp collector on your machine. (Use it for soup broth.) Juicing gets more nutrient-dense food into your diet, that you might not be willing to eat if it involved consuming two pounds of whole broccoli, kale, Swiss chard or whatever. By juicing these and other vegetables you grab the nutrients without having to swallow as much stuff.
A smoothie, on the other hand, has the whole food blended into a thick drink using the entire piece of produce (minus skin and seeds as appropriate). Its fiber helps fill you up, keep you regular, and is generally far more beneficial for someone who is in good health and for long-term use.
Incidentally, my contributing editor declares smoothies are a great parental aid in getting kids to eat things that would usually make them turn up their noses. Healthy produce goes masquerading as a tasty drink.
How to choose a juicing machine
If you don't already have a juicer or blender — or don't like the one you have — here are your choices…
There are basically two types of juicers — centrifugal and masticating.
A centrifugal juicer rips your produce at very high speeds of 3,000 to 7,000 rpm's to separate the juice from the pulp. The juice is extracted by the power of centrifugal force, similar to a washing machine spinning to remove water from clothes. The juicer is easy to use and to clean.
But there's a major problem: The Gerson Institute — which builds its famous cancer protocol to a very large extent around juicing — does not recommend centrifugal machines because they kill off the beneficial enzymes through heat and oxygenation. The Gerson people pretty much originated the notion of juicing as a cancer treatment, almost a century ago, so I respect their position.
That leaves masticating juicers. There are three types — the Champion juicer, the single gear juicer (crushes the produce), and the twin gear machine (presses and crushes the produce and strains the juice through a screen).
The Rolls Royce of the juicing world, a twin gear machine priced at $2,500, is the Norwalk Press. Dr. Norman Walker created it in 1934, as a result of his search for the perfect juicer that would fully use the nutrients in the fruits and vegetables.
There are also a number of blender options. The Rolls Royce in this category is the VitaMix, which is a versatile machine that can do a lot more than make smoothies, with a price point of $450-plus.
Some machines are easier to clean than others. My contributing editor has used a VitaMix for nearly 20 years, and she says it's a cinch to clean — as long as you don't use any fats or oils, and you wash and rinse it out immediately.
If you're new to juicing and smoothies, and you don't already have a machine, start with a moderately priced machine — or borrow one from someone who has one sitting around unused (there are a lot of people like that, because juicing is some work, and many people don't stick with it; check Ebay). You want to find out if you're committed to the process before you spend your life savings on a machine.
Share your favorite smoothie recipe with our readers
One very simple combination to try is water, spinach, and an orange. Fill a blender about 2/3 full of spinach (don't pack down), a peeled and halved orange, 1-2 cups of water, and blend. The orange tones down the spinach a lot.
If you juice or make smoothies, and you have a favorite combination of produce, please go to our Facebook page and comment on your favorite combo. https://www.facebook.com/CancerDefeated We'd love to hear from you! |
