Juicing: The Benefits and Getting Started

Juicing has been a topic I've heard about for quite a long time. During high school I worked in the produce department at a local grocery store. A few people would ask me about juicing and juicers, but I didn't know much at the time. One day, an older woman came up to me and explained how raw juicing saved her life. She was dying from cancer and claimed that after going on a juice only diet, she was cured and her doctors were absolutely baffled. My co-workers and I thought she was crazy, but what she said stuck in my head nonetheless.

I went quite a few years not interested in juicing because it seemed costly and time consuming. I had tried it a few times after finding a juicer at a garage sale for $15 and thought the cleanup wasn't worth the effort. Then, after graduating chiropractic school, I was reintroduced to it by a colleague I worked with in Chicago. The ingredients he used figured to make a nasty tasting concoction, but to my surprise it always tasted excellent. At that point I was hooked. I found the old garage sale juicer and began making my own juices 4-6x a week. 

Dr. Oz writes this about juicing: "There are many health benefits of drinking freshly juiced fruits and vegetables, and it’s a great way to add nutrients from the fruits or vegetables that you normally wouldn’t eat. Fruit and vegetable juices retain most of of the vitamins, minerals and plant chemicals (phytonutrients) that would be found in the whole versions of those foods. These nutrients can help protect against cardiovascular disease, cancer and various inflammatory diseases, like rheumatoid arthritis. Valuable compounds called flavonoids and anthocyanins are abundant in a variety of fruits and vegetables and guard against oxidative cellular damage, which comes from everyday cellular maintenance and is exacerbated by exposure to chemicals and pollution."

Dr. Mercola from Mercola.com writes that there are three main reasons to juice:

1. Juicing helps you absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables. This is important because most of us have impaired digestion as a result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years. This limits your body's ability to absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables. Juicing will help to "pre-digest" them for you, so you will receive most of the nutrition, rather than having it go down the toilet.
2. Juicing allows you to consume an optimal amount of vegetables in an efficient manner. If you are a carb type, you should eat one pound of raw vegetables per 50 pounds of body weight per day. Some people may find eating that many vegetables difficult, but it can be easily accomplished with a quick glass of vegetable juice.
3. You can add a wider variety of vegetables in your diet. Many people eat the same vegetable salads every day. This violates the principle of regular food rotation and increases your chance of developing an allergy to a certain food. But with juicing, you can juice a wide variety of vegetables that you may not normally enjoy eating whole.

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Getting Started

There are a wide variety of juicers on the market. I've used a handful and have done quite a bit of research to find the perfect moderately priced juicer. Firstly, there are two main kinds of juicers - masticating and centrifugal. Masticating use slow speed and normally employ an auger to crush whole foods into juice while expelling out most of the fiber into a separate container.  Centrifugal juicers usually operate at high speeds and use a form of grater that spins, releasing the juices and spitting fibers into a rear receptacle. The main benefit of each is that masticating supposedly introduces less oxygen, lower temperatures and leaves the healthy enzymes and nutrients more intact in your juice. Centrifugal normally have bigger feeding tubes which require less cutting up of foods and juice almost as fast as you can shove things down the tube for it to eat. Normally for people just getting started or in a hurry, centrifugal works just fine. If you have more time and want a "better quality" juice, then masticating might be your option. 

My favorite juicers

Centrifugal
The Breville Juice Fountain Plus always receives high reviews on Amazon.com and is recommended highly by most consumer reviews sites. This, along with just about all high speed juicers, are quite noisy to operate. I've tried the Jack LaLanne juicers and a few others but the ease of cleaning and juicing power make the Breville a better choice.

Masticating
The Omega 8006 is a great option here. They offer a 10 year warranty on parts and the motor. Its a dual-stage system which increases juicing efficiency compared to others that are singe stage. Its very quiet and features attachments for making pasta, sorbet and nut butters. 

My Choice
The Hurom HU-100 is a bit of a hybrid juicer. It masticates food at slow RPM and is built in a vertical fashion allowing food to be dropped in and juiced at a faster rate than the Omega 8006. Being a vertical unit, it occupies less space than the Omega and offers a nice carrying handle for portability. The Hurom HU-100 and Omega VRT-350HD are basically the same juicer. The Omega has a 10 year warranty on the whole machine while the Hurom has 1yr on parts and 10 years on the motor. The Hurom is at least $100 cheaper online and even more if you can find a coupon. The savings outweigh the extra price for the Omega with a longer warranty in my opinion, but the choice is yours.


Thanks for reading and check back soon for some great juicing recipes!


Yours in Health,


Dr. Thomas Pellatt, DC