Get Juicing!

Juicing has become one of my favourite topics. This is quite an ironic turnaround as commercially bottled juices have long turned me off drinking any form of vegetable juice in particular, for a couple of decades. Like many kids, I didn’t really like or appreciate my vegetables at dinner time when I was much younger. Why on earth would I want to start consuming vegetable juice then? It must surely be horrible? Fruit juice can be nice if fresh, but the bottled stuff is too often laced with sugar, artificial sweeteners and preservatives.

Recently my wife and I bought our first juicer; the centrifugal type. This was relatively cheap and we got right into it juicing everything we could get our hands on. The results were great. We have a wonderful garden and even as I write we have beautiful self-sown bok choy and silver beet growing abundantly in the cold Tasmanian winter. It’s not hard to come up with great tasting combinations. Although I thought the veggie juice would taste awful, we quickly realised that if you simply add a small amount of apple or carrot to the mix it tastes beautiful!

We had to take our juicing to another level. Even though we were composting all the waste from our exploits, it seemed to be too much in volume for too small an amount of juice. This can be costly. We also noticed very early on that the juice oxidised quickly (heat from the centrifugal model), turned brown and didn’t taste fresh for very long. Lastly, the really leafy stuff like the bok choy and silver beet mentioned was virtually all churned out into the waste bucket for almost nil return in juice. Then it happened, we discovered the cold press juicer!

The cold press model cost us around 4 times the price of the centrifugal one ($219 versus about $50). But as I always respectfully say to people, what price do you put on your health? The new machine overcomes the negatives of the old one. There is much less heat so whilst there must still be some oxidisation, you certainly can’t notice by eye or by taste. Our juice does not last that long (as in we consume it quickly) but even after 5 days it still tastes like we have just made it. There is much less waste and incredible gains in juice volume, particularly with the leafy veggies. The new unit whilst clever in design is no harder to clean than the other one either.

So why do we do this? As mentioned in my first post, Chlorophyll is one of the important elements lacking in modern diets. You can pick it up quickly en mass in your juice while still eating what you normally would. This is like drinking liquid sunlight! It’s incredibly healthy when sourced from organic produce, and if you are like us you can source much of it that might otherwise be excess from your own garden.

Natural fruit and vegetable juices are highly alkaline so are wonderful for people with acidic diets. Juicing thus not only restores pH to healthy levels, but in so doing restores deposits of critical minerals and trace elements lacking in those who eat a lot of processed food. Start your juicing today! Not only will you enjoy the health benefits, but you can also have fun if you collaborate in the kitchen with your partner, children or willing other, on the interesting combinations you can manifest. Our favourite is often tagged on other forums as “miracle juice” which is roughly equal parts apple, beetroot and carrot. It’s quite sweet, has a magical colour and an amazing array of nutrients.

Chlorophyll is awesome!

Young collard plants growing in a container (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Chlorophyll is not just for plants!  This amazing substance is very important for our diet.  This wonderful green pigment allows plants to take up light from the sun and convert it to energy (fuel) for the plant.    Chlorophyll has a chemical structure that is quite similar to heme (component of haemoglobin) found within our red blood cells. Think about that one…  A basic difference is the fact that this structure (called a porphyrin ring) contains an atom of iron at its centre when it is found in our red blood cells, but when it is found in plants, it contains an atom of magnesium at the centre.

Why is this so useful to our health?  Apart from having anti-carcinogenic, anti-oxidant, and anti-inflammatory properties, chlorophyll is also a Chelate. The process of chelation is that the chelate can easily combine with heavy metals such as lead and mercury (remember those fillings in your teeth) and remove them from your organs and bloodstream.  This can help alleviate one of the most powerful yet hidden syndromes in the world today – fatty liver.  If your liver is clogged full of toxins such as heavy metals, it starts to retain fats and once it cannot cope with them it assists in sending excess fat out to other parts of the body.  This chemical makeup of chlorophyll is also very important in helping us maintain the optimum pH level in our bodies, another overlooked health issue.

All of the green vegetables – asparagus, bell peppers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, green cabbage, celery, collard greens, green beans, green peas, kale, leeks, green olives, parsley, romaine lettuce, sea vegetables, spinach, Swiss chard, and turnip greens are concentrated sources of chlorophyll.  A little known fact is also that certain blue-green algae contain concentrated sources of chlorophyll.  Blue-green algal blooms in our waterways get a bad rap from the media and rightly so as generally they can contain harmful toxins.  But when harvested from a reliable source, these cyanobacteria can offer a potent source of chlorophyll.

So there are more reasons to eat lots of green vegetables!  It’s hard with a modern lifestyle to consume copious amounts of greens everyday so I highly recommend buying in bulk and juicing your greens with some apple to add some balance and sweetness.  Eat and snack on greens (uncooked when suitable) during the day and consider a blue-green algae supplement if you think you need a real liver lift.