For a long time we and most other natural health advocates we know have advocated juicing as the best way to get the many plant nutrients we need to maintain health.
Information we received recently shows this to be an error. We wanted to let you know about this right away.
The Truth About Juicing
For many years we’ve seen commercials, even whole infomercials touting the benefits of juicing, extracting the juices of plants with machines, some of them very fancy.
Juice extractors get the juices out of plants but the instructions tell the user to discard the pulp, considered “waste.” Well, it turns out that the pulp is often loaded with nutrients, sometime as much or even more nutritious than the juice!
Extracted Juice Not Whole Food
Extracted juices are NOT “whole foods” as we believed. They are, in fact, fundamentally flawed, unbalanced nutrition. For this reason we no longer promote juicing as the way to attain health.
For instance, the straight juices of root vegetables such as carrots contain way too much concentrated sugar for most people when juiced. However, when pureed (with the pulp left in), the natural plant fibers in the puree help slow the body’s absorption of the sugars and keep the blood sugar from peaking and then crashing. This more even blood sugar level helps prevent hypoglycemia and diabetes.
An FDA-registered study by Lancaster Laboratories showed that the carrot pulp we’ve been discarding with a juice extractor is packed with valuable nutrition and fiber. In fact, the report shows that the betacarotene benefit from properly pureed carrots is twice that of extracted juice.
Extracted juice removes healthy parts of whole foods – the result can be a reduction of nutritional value of up to 91%!
Better Than Pills!
Whole foods are also much better for the body than isolated nutrients and vitamin pills. Consider this:
Strawberries contain a powerful healing compound known as ellagic acid. Studies show that it may protect you against cancer, disarming cancer-causing agents before they can cause DNA damage In fact, if you have cancer cells anywhere in your body (and you may not know it), ellagic acid vigorously attacks them, inhibiting their ability to reproduce.
It’s vital that you know that ellagic acid cannot be found as a supplement, because the pure form of ellagic acid cannot be absorbed by the bloodstream. You must take it in its natural state—in your food. So if you want powerful protection against cancer, eat the strawberries!
Only when you eat this yummy fruit do you release the potent cancer fighter into your bloodstream. According to a recent Rutgers University study, processing strawberries in a highly efficient puree machine pulverizes strawberry seeds to release a powerful dose of nutrition that would otherwise not be available for digestion or absorption. Ordinary juicers are not designed to accomplish this task.
So What’s the Answer?
Puree your vegetables, as you may have guessed, and you are right!
But not in one of those standard blenders. They are just not designed for the work. Most of them will not only do a poor job but will burn out very fast if you try to force them beyond their meager capacity.
Regular blenders also have too small a capacity to make whole meals for a family.
You need something that has real guts and a big capacity for this job so we suggest a high-powered machine designed for the purpose
We hope this info gets you thinking and that we can help you get onto the whole foods diet your body needs.