Quick Guide to Juicing

Juicing is growing in popularity these days. Those who want to add more fruits and vegetables to their diet are turning to juicing as an option. Many who are busy and don’t have time to cook and eat properly are finding that juicing is a tasty alternative to over-the-counter vitamins.

People involved in all forms of dieting enjoy juicing as well. It doesn’t matter if they consider themselves Paleo dieters, Vegetarians and even hard-core meat eaters – juicing is fun, tasty and healthy.

In this quick guide you will learn:

The benefits and risks of juicing
The tools you need to begin juicing at home
Tips for making healthy juices
How to select the right juicer for your needs
Is there such as thing as too much juicing?

Without further delay, let’s get started….

Introduction to Juicing

There is a lot of buzz these days about juicing. With the showing of popular movies like “Sick, Fat, and Nearly Dead” getting the attention of the masses, and the success of famous people like Jack LaLanne who sold his famous juicer for years before dying at the ripe old age of 96, more and more people want to experience the health benefits of juicing.

What is Juicing?

Juicing is the process of separating pulp and fiber from fruit or vegetables. Usually, you need to use special equipment such as a juicer. You can also use a high speed blender along with special filtering bags to remove the pulp from the blended fruit or vegetables.

There are benefits of both types of juicing but the first kind; pushing it through a juicer, is a lot faster but you may also end up with more waste.

Benefits & Risks of Juicing

Juicing is both loved and hated by medical professionals and nutritionists. You can find as many different opinions on juicing as you can on the big political questions of the day.

Like with most things, it’s important that you consider your special health circumstances, talk to your doctor, do your research and make your own decisions about whether or not juicing is something that will help you.

Some of the claimed benefits of juicing are:

Increased Energy – Due to the high concentration of nutrition in each vitamin packed juice that you make your energy has nowhere to go but up. It would be impossible to get that much nutrition from the whole fruit and vegetable because you would get full first.
Weight Loss – If you drink juice along with a low-fat and low calorie diet, you can lose weight very fast while still getting a lot of nutrition inside of you.
Strengthened Immunity – The high nutrition involved with juices that you make at home will make your immune system very strong.
Clear Skin – Many people who go on “juice feasts” meaning, they do nothing but ingest juice for 3 to 21 days end a lot of their skin problems. To keep the results it requires careful re-feeding to avoid the food that caused the problem to start with.
Increases Disease Resistance – Juicing can lower the c – reactive protein found in the blood that is considered to be a marker for higher levels of cancer, stroke and heart disease – juicing lowers that marker.

Some of the potential risks of juicing are:

Poor Blood Sugar Effects – Using high sugar fruits too often can cause some people to react poorly in terms of blood sugar. Start slowly to see how you will react. If you have diabetes or other blood sugar related conditions talk to your doctor before doing any type of juicing.
Foodborne Illness – It’s very important to wash your produce very well before juicing it. If you buy juice in the store it is pasteurized which helps prevent foodborne illnesses such as E. coli, salmonella and even hepatitis. When making fresh juice at home or going to a raw juice bar there is a risk if the produce is not washed well.
Upset Stomach – Sorbitol, a non-digestible sugar found in some fruits can cause diarrhea, gas, and other stomach troubles when eaten in high quantities. While sorbitol can be found in other foods as well, people who are susceptible to it may experience problems when adding too many fruits like prunes, cherries, apples and pears to their juicing regimen.
Weight Gain – This might be surprising, since so many people lose weight when juicing. However, when some people combine juicing with eating, they gain weight. This is especially true when juicing fruit. Fruit juice is a highly concentrated form of calories and can cause weight gain.
Carotenemia – This is not dangerous but is the name of the condition given to people who eat too many veggies that contain beta-carotenes and describes the orange skin appearance they often experience.

To experience the benefits and not the risks, check with your doctor before engaging in long-term juice “feasting”, otherwise adding some juice to your day such as for breakfast, lunch or dinner should help you reap the benefits that juicing and the massive addition of nutrition to your day can provide.

Tools Needed for Juicing

Juicing can be done with a juicer or a blender and a strainer; it just depends on how much money you want to invest. Juicer prices start around $100 dollars and increase up into the thousands of dollars, again depending on how much you want to invest and what type of results you hope to get.

Let’s go over the various tools you need to get started juicing as well as the various choices between like items:

Cutting Board

The best cutting board is a plastic cutting board because it won’t ruin the knives and it won’t collect bacteria or other contaminates and is easy to clean. One of the issues with juicing is the risk of contamination from unwashed produce and this can cut down on the problem.

Sharp Knifes

Invest in a good cutlery set if you’re going to get involved in juicing. You’ll need to be able to quickly prepare the produce and the better set of knives you invest in, the faster the work will be. Also, the better the knives, the safer the work is because you are more likely to cut yourself with dull knives.

Juicer

There are five main types of juicers to consider, all of which have benefits, issues and ranges of prices all their own.

Citrus Juicer – These come in a few varieties in both manual and electric versions. It’s always nice to have a small citrus juicer on the countertop so that you don’t have to get out the big juicer just to squeeze a few oranges or a lemon.
Wheatgrass Juicer – Many regular juicers have a hard time juicing grasses and leaves. This is where a wheat grass juicer can come in handy. This can be used for juicing any leafy greens as well as wheatgrass.
Masticating Juicer – A slow juicer that essentially chops up and then strains the produce to make a very healthy juice. Most people say the pulp with these types of juices is very dry and cannot be used for cooking or baking afterwards since all nutritional value has been removed.
Cold-Press Juicer — This type of juicer is often recommended because of the superior quality of the results. However, they are quite expensive and many require a two-step process to produce the juice.
Centrifugal Juicer – The easiest to use of all the juicers, this is what you’re probably used to seeing on those “seen on TV” advertisements. These juicers spin the produce down and grind it up, filter it, shooting the pulp into a collector, and the juice in a container for juicer. The pulp from these types of juicers can often be used in other recipes.

There is one more choice to use for juicing and that is the good old high speed blender. Just put the produce in the blender, add some water, and blend on high until liquefied. Then, using a mesh strainer or milk bags, drain the juice out of the pulp.

Investing in the right tools to start your juicing adventure is important. It’s always a good idea to start with a less expensive option first to make sure juicing is right for you before shelling out thousands of dollars on one of the more expensive choices. While the benefits of juicing are clear, try it out before spending a lot of money.

Tips for Making Healthy Juice with Plenty of Vitamins and Nutrition

Making healthy juices isn’t hard when you are making homemade juice from scratch. The vitamin and mineral components of the juice are dependent on which produce you use, and how much of it you use. You can increase your chances of making healthy, nutrition packed juice by giving it some thought prior to getting started.

What is Your Current Health Like?

It is always important to access what your current health situation is today. Do you suffer from any type of illness such as diabetes that would make taking in high quantities of fruit juice dangerous? It’s important to talk to your doctor before drinking a lot of juice.

Oftentimes, people with illnesses can still enjoy the health benefits of juicing by choosing the right produce.

What Conditions Do You Want to Treat?

Many people use juicing as a form of detox or addiction recovery. Some people find that it helps with starting over, or resetting their body chemistry to a healthier baseline before going back to a healthy diet. They might juice for as long as 90 days to treat some conditions.

This type of juicing should be done under medical supervision. Shorter juice feasts of a couple of days are probably okay for healthy people.

Taking these things into consideration can increase your chances of success and help you create juices that are particularly healthy for you and your own conditions.

For the Best Results and Most Flavorful Juices

In order to ensure that you make the best juices possible, those that are healthy, free of contamination and so forth follow these tips.

Buy Organic Produce – While you don’t need to always buy organic when it comes to eating produce whole, it is very important that you buy organic produce for juicing. You will be ingesting a high concentration of produce so this step is essential.
Chill Produce in Advance – Juice tastes better cold, but you want to drink the juice immediately rather than refrigerating it because of the enzymes. So, the best way to get great taste is to chill the produce prior to juicing it.
Clean Juicing Area – Always clean the area in advance to ensure that you start with clean surfaces, knives & juicers to cut down on any chance of contamination that could make you sick.
Prepare Your Produce – It’s important to carefully wash and prepare all of your produce, including peeling, seeding and chopping when needed to fit into your juicer. Getting everything ready in advance will make the process go faster.
Get Containers Ready – Chill your containers while you prepare the juice. Juice tastes better cold, so chilling the serving vessels will help a lot. Plus, it’s fun.
Juice Produce – Run the produce through your juicer according to the manufacturer’s instructions and / or your recipe.

The final step to ensuring that you have healthy juices with plenty vitamins and minerals is to choose from three different categories of ingredients.

Choose a Base:

Celery
Cucumber
Carrot

Choose a Flavor:

Berry
Apple
Citrus

Add a Green:

Kale
Spinach
Lettuce

Being sure not to overload on any one flavor will make the most nutritious and flavorful juices. Learn about the vitamins and minerals in the produce you like to eat, as well as which vitamins and minerals can help treat illnesses you want to treat or avoid.

Finally. the most nutritious juice is the one you’ll actually drink, so make sure it tastes good.

Selecting the Best Juicer for You

A lot goes into ensuring that you get the right juicer that will work for you. But first, you need to understand that there are essentially two types of juicers.

Cold press juicers, and centrifugal juicers. A cold-press juicer has a process that grinds up the produce, and then presses it through a filter of some kind to separate the juice from the pulp.

A centrifugal juicer pulls the produce through a higher powered center whereby it grinds it and forces it through a filter where the pulp and juice are separated.

A cold-press juicer is said to produce the most flavorful and best textured juices, while a centrifugal juicer offers a less expensive option that most people are perfectly happy with. Within those two types of juicer categories are several juicers to choose from.

Citrus Juicer – Either a manual or electric countertop juicer is something that you can use every day without pulling out the often hard to clean cold-press or centrifugal juicer.
Wheatgrass Juicer – If you plan to do a lot of green juices, you will want to invest in a special wheatgrass juicer. It’s really difficult to juice leafy vegetables and herbs but not with a wheatgrass juicer.
Cold-Press Juicer – Sometimes called a masticating juicer, there are many different ranges of prices for these juicers. Choose one within your budget, and you’ll be sure to love it. Choose one that’s outside of your budget and you may not be happy with it. In the case of juicers, more expensive varieties don’t always mean they are better.
Centrifugal Juicer – One of the least expensive and most popular juicers, these juicers are easy to use, and easy to find at prices you can afford. With these you can also make use of the pulp in recipes.

If you don’t feel like buying multiple products you can also use your blender as a juicer. Just blend the produce with some water until liquefied, then strain with a mesh strainer, cheese cloth or a nut-milk bag into a serving container then wash the strainer immediately.

There is no reason why you can’t get started today with juicing. You don’t need special equipment. Everything you want can be found at local department stores like Walmart and Target. Read online reviews of various juicers, watch YouTube.com videos about what it takes to clean and use the different types of juicers mentioned.

The thing to pay close attention to is how hard it is to use and clean. If any equipment takes a long time to use and clean it’s less likely that you’ll actually follow through. Juicers are particularly unforgiving if you don’t clean them right away.

Therefore, leave no stone unturned when checking out the different types of juicers available so that you can ensure you get the right one for you.

How Much Juicing is Too Much?

If you watched the movie “Sick, Fat & Nearly Dead”, you probably noticed that Joe Cross and Phil Staples went on 90 day juice only “feasts” in order to each drop roughly 100 or more pounds each. While it may seem like completing juice feasts of this duration length is safe for everyone, remember that they were under medical supervision the entire time.

Before embarking on juicing keep the following in mind…

What is Your Current Health?

Many people think that juicing is very extreme but you have to consider your overall health and what you are facing in the near and distant future. If you are considerably over weight, on many medications and suffering from food related illnesses, a long term juice feast might save your life. Sound extreme? Perhaps, but so is open heart surgery and the side effects of multiple medications.

On the flip side, if you have cancer and are going through chemotherapy, juicing might not be a good idea due to the increased risk of illness from raw, unpasteurized produced.

What Does Your Doctor Believe?

Always check with your doctor. If your doctor is completely against natural health alternatives, you might want to choose a more supportive physician. But, do make sure you find a doctor who is certified and trained in your particular needs.

Someone who can monitor your juicing regimen and health during a particularly long juicing feast is an important way to ensure that you stay healthy.

How Much Weight Do You Want to Lose?

How long you participate in juicing depends on how sick you are, how much weight you want to drop, and how healthy you remain while juicing. With juicing, you get all the calories and nutrition that you need while giving your digestive tract and system a break.

Fasting has been done for centuries as a way to reset the body and cure illnesses. This is just a healthier take on fasting since you’re not depriving your body of vital nutrients.

What Other Goals Do You Have that You Believe Juicing will Assist You With?

Juicing has been shown to drastically improve weight, migraine, digestive conditions and more. People report being relieved of many different medications and conditions including eczema, heartburn, high cholesterol levels and other dangerous illnesses.

Understand what your goals are before you even get started and that will help you identify which juices you want to ingest, how often, and for how long.

To Juice Properly You Don’t Have to Make Juice Your Meal

It’s important to drink juice on an empty stomach to get the most benefit from the nutrients, but unless you are fasting, juicing should not be considered a meal replacement. Instead, drink a small juice before a meal or perhaps as a morning or evening snack.

Drinking juice as an added benefit to other good nutrition choices is smart. Just 8 ounces of juice can boost your daily vitamin and nutrition intake quite well.

Juicing regularly can make you feel awesome, improve your mood and overall health, but it’s imperative that you are always aware of any medical conditions that might affect your efforts and results before getting started.

Juicing as a way to get your health under control, or to simply add a little extra boost of nutrition to your day is simple and fun. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different combinations of juice, add spices, herbs and out of the ordinary ingredients to your juices.

The better they taste, the more likely you are to drink them. The more you drink them the better you will feel.