The Healing Power Of
Fresh Juices And Whole Foods

Countless studies show that a high intake of fresh fruits and vegetables can lower the incidence of heart problems, cancer and the degenerative diseases of aging. The evidence is so convincing, in fact, that the US Recommended Daily intake of fruits and vegetables has increased. Additionally, the more colorful and natural your diet, especially nutrient and antioxidant-rich produce, the healthier and more youthful you’ll become.

One way to increase your daily consumption of fresh produce is through juicing. Freshly made juices are concentrated nutritional elixirs that heal and rejuvenate the body and help bring balance to all the body’s cells. Juicing is also one of the easiest, most efficient and delicious ways to ensure you are meeting your daily produce quota.

Juicing is different than blending. When you juice, you separate the juice of the fruit or vegetable from the fiber. Some of you are probably thinking, “Why would I do that? Fiber is essential for good health.” I agree and recommend both a high-fiber diet and fresh vegetable juices. The fiber found in raw vegetables, fresh fruits and other plant-based foods plays a vital role in the health of the colon, the promotion of regular bowel movements and the transport of toxins out of the body. To maximize the benefits of a whole foods diet, we need a good balance of and an emphasis on whole raw foods, as close to the way nature made them as possible, as well as freshly extracted raw vegetable juices. To understand more clearly, here is a nutshell view of digestion.

The process of digestion begins in the mouth. Everything you eat is masticated (chewed), mixed with your salivary enzymes and moved on to your stomach and intestines. Ultimately, the food is liquefied so that the nutrients can pass from the small intestines into the bloodstream and lymph fluid for distribution. The remaining fiber is passed into the colon for elimination after excess water and remaining minerals are absorbed. In other words, fresh juice provides pure nutrients that require little digestive effort for optimal utilization. The juicer does the digestive work in separating out the fiber and we receive a treasure chest of nutrients in a form that is readily assimilated.

Today’s commercial farming practices, topsoil erosion and failure to let the land rest periodically mean lower nutrient density of our vegetables and fruits. Even eating the best raw fruits and vegetables may not be enough to insure an optimal level of health. In general, our bodies are malnourished, overfed and dealing with a heavy load of internal toxicity. Our bodies are designed to be self-healing, self-renewing and self-rejuvenating if we just give them the right ingredients, including nutrients from raw, living foods. Juicing is a simple and efficacious way to maximize our nutrient intake without putting a heavy digestive burden on the body. It also helps the body eliminate toxins.

In The Juicing Book, by Stephen Blauer, I found this passage by the late Bernard Jensen, PhD, “... by adding fresh juices to a balanced food regimen, you will help accelerate and enhance the process of restoring nutrients to chemically-starved tissues. It is on these tissues that disease and illness thrive. In terms of prevention, therefore, the importance of juices cannot be overstated.” In Live Food Juices, H.E. Kirschner, MD, says that if modern research is correct, the power to break down the cellular structure of raw vegetables and assimilate the precious elements they contain, even in the healthiest individual, is only fractional – not more than 35 percent and in the less healthy, down to 1 percent. In the form of juices, he adds, these same individuals assimilate up to 92 percent of these elements. Blauer corroborates this recommendation of fresh juices. He writes: “Fresh juice is more than an excellent source of vitamins, minerals, enzymes, purified water, proteins, carbohydrates and chlorophyll. Because it is in liquid form, fresh juice supplies nutrition that is not wasted to fuel its own digestion as it is with whole fruits, vegetables and grasses. As a result, the body can quickly and easily make maximum use of all the nutrition that fresh juice offers.”

Because of the higher sugar content of fresh fruit, I generally advocate eating whole fruit and juicing vegetables (in addition to eating lots of whole vegetables). I’ve been an avid juicer for 35 years and teach juicing in my healthy food preparation classes and in workshops around the world. In addition to making fresh vegetable juice every day, I do an exclusive day of juice fasting once every two weeks and 2-3 consecutive days a month, consuming nothing but fresh vegetable juices, water and my favorite teas. It’s easy, fun and provides the stamina I need to engage in my daily activities without necessitating much alteration of lifestyle. You just need a good juicer to take advantage of this superb health-promoting practice, as I write about below.

It takes a pound of carrots to make about a 10-ounce drink of carrot juice. But could you enjoy consuming that many carrots? Probably not. Yet all the enzymes, water soluble vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and trace elements in those carrots are extracted and condensed into the glass of juice. The same thing applies to vegetables. You might have a hard time eating 4-7 servings of vegetables each day, but it’s easy to consume the nutritional value of a variety of vegetables by juicing them.

In light of all the research on the benefits of fresh vegetable juices, it’s difficult to understand why anyone would not favor the addition of fresh vegetable juices to their diet unless there is a misunderstanding about how efficiently the body handles the natural sugars in vegetable juices. Michael Donaldson, PhD, head of the Hallelujah Acres Foundation, conducted a study to determine the effect of carrot juice on the blood glucose levels. He found, contrary to popular thinking, that the body actually handles the raw carrot juice very efficiently, with much less impact on the blood glucose than eating whole grain bread. You can review the study at www.hacres.com. For people with blood sugar issues, adding a teaspoon of fresh flaxseed oil or ground flaxseed meal to the juice can further lower the glucose response to carrot juice.

Another option is to make the juice a combination of 50 percent carrot and 50 percent green leafy lettuce or other dark green vegetables. Here are just a few of the vegetables I juice: spinach, celery, beets, romaine lettuce, Swiss chard, kale, collards, cauliflower, green onions, mustard greens, broccoli and broccoli sprouts, bell peppers, cabbage and carrots. I also sometimes add parsley, lemon, apple, tomato, garlic and ginger.

You can find juices at your local natural food stores, although it’s always best, if possible, to make them fresh. As a culinary instructor, whole foods chef and a holistic health coach for over 30 years, one of my passions is helping my clients and friends create healthy kitchens—from the refrigerator, cupboards and pantry to the best and most efficacious appliances. For starters, I always encourage purchasing a top quality juicer. The one I’ve used and recommended for 37 years is the Champion 2000+ Juicer. One of the best known and most popular worldwide, it includes a number of features that bring the power and durability of commercial juicers directly to your kitchen countertop. Fresh, wholesome fruit and vegetable juices of the highest quality have never been easier to prepare. It is a quality you can see in the color of the juice itself; darker, richer colors contain more of the pigments – and nutrients – you desire, while the extracted pulp is pale in color.

Two more of the many reasons that I choose to use the Champion 2000+ Juicer  (www.championjuicer.com) is because it is easy to clean and it does so much more than juicing. In fact, it’s the ultimate multitask, culinary machine. I also use it to make fruit sauces and purees; sorbets, sherbets and ice cream (from frozen fruit); baby foods; creamy nut butters. The Champion also functions as a grain mill, allowing you to quickly and easily prepare healthy, hearty whole grains.

© Susan Smith Jones, MS, PhD, is an internationally renowned motivational speaker, frequent radio/TV talk show guest, culinary instructor, holistic lifestyle coach and author of hundreds of magazine articles and 17 books, including her latest, “Unleash the Power of NatureFoods: 50 Revitalizing Foods & Lifestyle Choices to Promote Radiant Health.” To order NatureFoods (autographed copies available upon request ) call (888) 606-4599, ext. 0 (M-F, 9-4 MT) or visit: www.SusanSmithJones.com.