There are so many ways to eat well and drink well, and juicing is one option that I have taken up daily! I personally don't eat breakfast, i know, its the most important meal of the day and all that.. but i just don't want to eat until lunch time.. The thing is that once lunch time arrives I often end up eating late and get over hungry very quickly after 2pm. So juicing is a way to add a bounty of nutrients, vitamins, minerals, and some natural sugars to keep me going until lunch. If you drink healthy juices before you eat it also gives the body a chance to digest it and integrate more of the nutrients. That means that when you do eat, your body will be ready to absorb even more nutrients from the food you eat. There are many examples of this such as eating vitamin C with foods containing Iron is a very good idea and can improve the uptake of Iron by the body. I have recently started adding celery to my juices, which to me tastes awful but I can feel the medicinal value of it.. my body thanks me but my tongue revolts!

Whilst there are a zillion ways and additives you can use to make a juice, I like to keep things simple, natural, and whole as possible, e.g. i juice the WHOLE apple seeds n all! I am also steering clear of adding too many power foods and incredible seeds and potions and going with whole fruits and vegetables that are juiced using a slow masticating juicer. This juicer is my best friend, and there is a lot to say about them! Top of the list is that the masticating juicer REALLY helps to preserve the nutrients and vitamins than a normal high speed cutting blender. A masticating juicer simply grinds the food into a pulp very slowly until it is squeezed through a strainer and separated from the fibre. There are two benefits to this method.. note that it mimics the way that the body eats and digests food which is by grinding rather than cutting. The first benefit is that since the there is almost no heat produced by a slow juicer. A high speed blender can get quite warm and even hot if you blend enough, and that doesn’t help the delicate vitamins to stay in shape. More importantly though, since a masticating juicer doesn’t cut the cells, they are not damaged during the process. Cutting cells releases all sorts of enzymes and chemicals that do no good for the nutrients, such as polyphenol oxidase which is a powerful oxisider and will knock out polyphenols and other beneficial nutrients. It also effects the taste as these enzymes taste bitter, ask any good sushi chef! TO give you a sense of the difference between the two, Dr Brian Clement has said that Blending food kills about 90% of the nutrition within about a minute and a half to two minutes compared to a masticating juicier which process the food around 600x less! So a masticating juicer produces juice that is healthier, more vibrant in colour, and overall way better than a normal high speed juicer! And to cap it all the masticating juicer delivers much more juice per kg of of fruits or vegetables! If you have been juicing using one of these nutri-bullets, maybe think about how much you are just wasting using them, for me that is enough!

Green juice has up to twice the concentration of key nutrients (Vitamin C, Beta Carotene, then the same juice blended to make a green smoothie.

Following is a comparison of the juicer that I use and a normal juicer. and I LOVE IT! It also has different attachments for pulping rather than juicing. With that attachment i can make pesto, and grind peanuts and even coffee beans into a nice powder! It cleans in a few seconds and is GREAT for those of you living on Solar power as it only uses 200 Watts as opposed to at least 800 Watts for a normal high speed blender.

A Bit of Chemistry! Oxidation?

Since this is chemistry we are talking about here, and I have a strong background in the sciences I will explain a little bit about oxidation in the most simple terms that you need. We all know oxygen, that molecule that we extract from the air in our lungs as we breath and respire. This oxygen stuff is powerful and it want to bind to anything it can. When oxygen sticks to something it is a chemical reaction and we are very familiar with it sticking to or reacting with gasoline.. which as you know is a very explosive liquid. The extreme reaction we see is testimony to the oxidative powers of oxygen and its desire to become stable, which is what happens when it binds to hydrogen to produce water when we add heat and burn it. If we leave food exposed to the air, since it contains oxygen, the food will oxidise. which we can see as it turns brown and starts to look bad. We Don't want oxidation and we don't want to expose delicate nutrients to oxygen.

Now here is the clincher. There are many other chemicals that oxidise and some of them even more powerful than oxygen. Our cells use these chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide to kill bugs and foreign things and keep up health. If however we cut open cells and release them all and mix them up with the nutrients we end up with a huge, as much as 90% drop in nutrients. It is this oxidation process that is what a lot of our health and diet is related to. We know about antioxidants, and that is why we need them. They mop up oxygen and stop oxidisers from acting on the nutrients in our body and blood.

FANTASTIC INFORMATIVE VIDEO!
Juicing vs Blending - Blending Nutrients

I hope this has been useful to you! It is quite a science to understand the real details of all of this, and thankfully others have done the hard work for us! The bottom line is, go get yourself a masticating juicer and keep that blender on the side for when you really need to blend a smooth pastes such as hummus or peanut butter. You can literally see the difference when you grind things like pesto, tomatoes and if you are juicing for health and spending money on fresh organic fruits and veggies then it makes a LOT of sense to at least double your benefits of them!