The Health Benefits Of Juicing

Why Juicing Is The Natural Choice

The demands of modern life can be a strain on even the healthiest of us and the more we focus on maintaining vibrant good health through proper nutrition, the more likely we are to feel happy and well as we go about our days. Drinking fresh, raw vegetable and fruit juices on a daily basis is one positive lifestyle choice you can make if you want to stay healthy.

Parents quickly discover that juicing is also a great way of getting lots of goodness into their children. Fresh juice is vibrantly coloured and delicious and it often surprises people how pleasant and naturally sweet even vegetable juices can be. For children, whizzing up a smoothie with some fresh juice and other healthy ingredients in a blender is great fun and a healthy habit that is easy to encourage at home.

For those of us who are unfortunate enough to suffer illness, supplying the body with the unadulterated nutrition from fresh living vegetable juices is a powerful tool in the task of overcoming disease. Juicing is used in nutritional therapies, some of which claim great success with life-threatening illnesses. The scientific evidence to support the great benefits that many of us experience when we drink fresh juice is compelling. But you don’t need a degree to understand and experience the benefits of juicing for yourself – you just need to start using a juicer on a regular basis and within weeks your body will provide its own evidence to convince you. There is a lot of common sense behind choosing the juicing lifestyle and we have some excellent books on the subject if you want to find out more.

Repair and Rejuvenate

Hippocrates was telling us ‘you are what you eat’ thousands of years ago. There is no longer any doubt that poor nutrition contributes to many of the degenerative illnesses we see in the developed world and an increased understanding of the role of nutrition in medicine has transformed the way that Doctors approach the topic in recent decades. The human body is an incredibly complex system with millions of interacting metabolic processes taking place simultaneously at any given moment. All of these processes are fuelled and optimised by the nourishment we take in and although the body can create many of its own nutrients from the food we provide, there are also some essential components we can only find in our diet.

Raw, freshly prepared vegetable and fruit juices are abundant in natural organic nutrients that are easily absorbed and delivered in the form that the body requires for its many processes. Delivering this high quality nutrition in liquid form means you get a super-dose of organic plant nutrients in a single glass. Fresh juices provide some of the fundamental building blocks of the metabolic processes that go on at a cellular level throughout the body, rebuilding and regenerating healthy tissue. You can drink the essential nourishment from a far larger quantity of fruit and veg than you could possibly eat, when it is extracted in fresh juice, ensuring your body gets plenty of what it needs in order to function with vibrant health.

Fresh Juice is a ‘Living’ Food

Learning to make fire was a pivotal step in the evolution of our species and there is no doubt that learning to cook our food was also an important discovery. However, when we cook food we also make significant changes to the make up of the nutrients it contains, so it is important that we also still manage to provide ourselves with nutrients that have not been heated.

Cooking food destroys a proportion of the valuable nutrition that it contains and chemically alters the structure of some vital nutrients, making them more difficult to process in the body. Enzymes, proteins, vitamins and minerals are destroyed or deteriorate significantly when heated. These are the building blocks the body needs. It sounds alarmist but as well as destroying some of what we need, sometimes cooking produces by-products in our food that are positively harmful. Raw Food enthusiasts hold this knowledge close to their hearts as they experience the benefits of a diet that is abundant in high quality, uncooked nutrition. For the rest of us the idea of giving up some of the delicious cooked meals we enjoy is a little daunting but don’t worry, we can all still get plenty of raw, vital nourishment by juicing at home, without undergoing any major lifestyle upheavals.

Because fresh juice is a living food you won’t find it on any supermarket shelf. Shop bought products are heat-treated or pressure treated and some are made from pre-pasteurised fruit and vegetable purees on an industrial scale. Despite the marketing hype, even some of the most expensive of these juice products just offer you a pleasant flavour rather than an abundant source of high quality nutrients. When you juice at home, you take living fruit and vegetables and transform them instantly into delicious, vital drinks of a vastly superior nutritional quality, at a fraction of the cost.

Juicing and Weight Loss

If we eat a diet containing a high proportion of cooked foods, our bodies continue to crave the nutrients that cooking takes out and we can inadvertently gain weight. In this kind of western diet we take in more and more ‘empty calories’ in an effort to replace the missing nutrients that have been destroyed by heat or processing. Time and again our customers tell us that they experience a huge transformation in their feelings of energy and wellbeing when they start using a juicer and one phenomenon that is commonly reported is fewer food cravings. If you are investing in your body’s health with regular deposits of high quality fresh juices it stands to reason that your appetite might be smaller. Your body has its own intelligence, so if you are giving it the full range of what it needs, cravings subside and appetite reduces accordingly. One of our more mature customers recently reported that she had lost 38 kilos as a result of her juicing, diet and exercise regime! She and her husband got a nasty wake up call during a health check-up and they bought a high quality masticating juicer. Green vegetable juices played a big part in their regime and nutritional therapists will often prescribe green juices for their alkalising properties and abundant micronutrients. The physical transformation for this couple was self evident but the sense of wellbeing they reported was perhaps more important. When we hear someone enthusing about how they feel ten years younger, how they seem to need less sleep and yet have more energy, how exercise is fun and no longer a chore, how they are less susceptible to colds and other viruses, how their attention and concentration have improved, how their skin looks radiant and healthy – we know it’s the juice talking!

Juicing Makes Perfect Sense

The team at UK Juicers share several decades of combined experience of what juicing can do for us and many of our customers are also delighted to report back what a positive change juicing has made to the quality of their lives. If you want to read more detailed and well referenced scientific information on the various benefits that different juices can offer we strongly recommend looking at Steve Meyerowitz books in our book section. But no amount of information could be more convincing than the direct benefits experienced by actually trying it for yourself.

Juicing is easy with the right juicer. Most people will happily spend some time preparing and enjoying a delicious cooked meal, in spite of the fact that we lose some of the vital nourishment in the process. You can have a glass of the most delicious fruit and vegetable juice in just a few minutes, teeming with undamaged nutrients that will make a massive contribution to your well being. Whether you want to just add juicing to your life as a little extra health insurance or whether you want to make it part of a broader commitment and become juicing enthusiasts like us, it just makes perfect sense.