Blog on the Lillypad
Sunday, October 26, 2003
 | Juicing!
With aches and pains galore, sleeplessness, hot flashes, etc., I have pulled out the Champion Juicer and have started juicing again. I bought 15 pounds of carrots this weekend, as well as several pounds of celery, two bunches of spinach, a bunch of parsley, several cucumbers, a bunch of beets, and two bunches of radishes. Oh, and two bags of cranberries. Juicing has saved my life before, and I'm hoping it will do the job now. But I have less time now, and juicing is time and labor intensive. Today I drank 24 ounces of carrot-spinach juice and 48 ounces of carrot-radish juice. Then I made 24 ounces of carrot-radish juice, another 24 of carrot-celery-radish juice, and a final 24 of carrot-celery juice. Oh, and I juiced the cranberries and got about 15 ounces of very pulpy cranberry juice. It is the most bitter drink in the world, but cranberries are great for a few different ailments, though most people associate them strictly with urinary tract infections (one of the few problems I *don't* have, but cranberries are good for several things.) |
| I rely on Norman Walker's book, FRUITS AND VEGETABLE JUICES, but it's out of print. I lost my first copy and found my second copy on the net, through a used book dealer. Walker lived past 100 and spent his life doing what he liked and staying active, even to the end. And the juicer I use is the workhorse of all juicers, the Champion Juicer. It's a pain in the neck to clean, but most people who own them buy one and it lasts a lifetime. It juices *most* things but cannot handle extremely watery stuff like strawberries. And very fine leafy veggies have to be done slowly. I've gotten into the rhythm of doing spinach and celery (chopping them small helps), but parsley is still a challenge. |  |
My over view of veggie juice for health is that the darker veggies are for liver (beets and spinach, but these are never juiced together in the same formula). Aromatic veggies (radishes) are for lungs and sinuses. Celery for muscle work and fluid balance (also cucumbers for fluid balance), and carrots for everything. Carrots are the base of every juice formula and they go with everything. Parsley, an herb, is juiced as a veggie but can be taken only sparingly, or you go ga-ga with nervous tremors. It helps with menstrual difficulties and is used in other juice formulas as a detoxifier.
If you're wondering why juice and not just eat more veggies: Juicing maximizes the nutrition per ounce of what you consume, providing most of the vitamins and minerals of the raw veggie, but you get more because to get 16 ounces of juice you'll process way more veggies than you could eat in one sitting and throw away the bulk (the fiber and pulp) that contains no nutritional value. (And of course you still need fiber every day, but juicing's purpose is nutritional value.)
Second, juicing is not the same thing as using a blender. With a juicer, the vegetable pulp/fiber comes out the spout as a dense, sawdust-like substance. The juice comes out the bottom sieve, extracted from the fiber. The theory is that digestion alone is not as efficient at getting all the enzymes and perishable nutrients that you get from juicing. Advocates of juicing are hardcore about it. While I hate the trouble and expense of doing it, I agree it did pull me back to good health once before. I'm hoping it will do the same for me again.
