A juice craze exploded in New York City in 2011. It seemed that everyone in the city wanted to do juice cleanses and buy a bottle of juice.
Something was wrong in most people’s understanding of the subject and the products. It would be difficult for one company or one man to be the sole teacher of the truth about it. But I’m still going to try, all these years after the craze began.
One thing good to know about juice is that it’s beautifully filtered water. The water in juice came from the produce and it was filtered through the fibers. We need water from our food for a number of reasons.
Another thing to consider is that in the West, or really in the modern world in general, we are not getting enough of the material that we were optimally designed to consume: Plants. We get too many calories from things that have been adulterated and processed. That “tampering” of the food makes it so that the food loses its original value. Worse, the alterations make the food such that it is detrimental to our health. There’s no longer any doubt about this whatsoever.
Drinking juice is much like giving ourselves a very potent salad, and we’re taking in the salad’s “essence” when drinking it in juice form. That essence consists of carbohydrates, a small amount of fats, and a small amount of protein (depending on the juice).
Carbohydrates are very valuable to human chemistry. Carbohydrates convert easily into fuel and leave behind very clean waste byproducts. They do not synthetically spike blood sugar levels, even for the most susceptible blood types. Even if blood sugar levels seem to rise very high because of the carbohydrates’ sources, those blood sugar levels come down quickly.
If a person is reliant on insulin, what they will find is they will become less reliant on it if they remove a little protein from their diet and get rid of all processed food. This is to some extent dependent upon the type and degree of diabetes that they have.
The problem for the diabetic isn’t fruit and vegetables. Their problem is processed food and particularly processed sugar. But all people, not only diabetics and others with blood sugar issues, should avoid processed sugar like the plague. Processed sugar is completely different from fruit sugars and the sugars that occur naturally in starchy vegetables.
Many vitamins and minerals are present in abundance in produce and particularly in juice. Some of them are compounds that in a sense operate “under the radar” of typical lists of standard nutrients. Such compounds include antioxidants, phytochemicals, and flavonoids. These are all immune system building, tissue building, chemical reaction stimulating compounds that are very crucial in keeping us alive and healthy.
Dollar for dollar and pound for pound there are more of these important nutrients and compounds in juice than there are in a flesh-based diet of a similar quality. Another value of high-quality juice is that it is not processed in a way that is unhealthy to you or that will cause cravings.
“What about fiber?,” some people ask. You more than likely cannot live on a juice-only diet indefinitely. The juice that I make has trace amounts of fiber in it. Fiber is beneficial to the body, serving as a “broom that cleans the digestive system. Fiber is also important because it serves as food for the healthy bacteria that live inside of our gut, and it aids other important processes in our body chemistry as well. But you don’t need to have fiber in every meal.
If you eat salads on a daily basis and drink healthy smoothies you are likely getting sufficient fiber. You don’t have to have any particular macro- and micro-nutrient with every meal. If you’re getting enough of those compounds overall throughout the course of (for example) a seven-day period of time, you will likely not be depleted. At times it may be beneficial to eliminate certain nutrients to allow the body to cycle through waste material accumulated over the previous six days.
Certain people may disagree regarding specific benefits pertaining to a diet focused on juicing, but there is no scientific evidence that refutes it. Science regarding human body chemistry is still very much in its infancy stage, and there is much that we have no understanding of yet.
The worlds of science and academia are such that they are hesitant to embrace concepts that don’t have double blind studies and peer reviewed papers associated with them. Even the evidence of people having lived thousands of years successfully encompassing dietary practices with success is often considered to be anecdotal. This constitutes academic snobbery.
That doesn’t mean that we should believe in every quack theory that arises. And a lot of misinformation and even false information comes from health industry sources. Some of that is driven by profit motivation and can be corrupt, as is also sometimes the case with pharmaceutical industry practices. So, buyer beware.
In a nutshell, juice is of great value because it is a nutrient-dense source of food with a low calorie count that is incorporated with clean water. By drinking juice we can ensure that we are not consuming food that was cooked or handled improperly. Also, we’ll experience its benefits within a short period of time after we begin a regimen of drinking quality juices regularly.
Being afraid of juice is a bit different than being afraid of a substance like fire. Fire is dangerous and potentially it could burn something, but it is a critical part of our survival. History bears out the fact that people have been drinking juices in connection with healthy lifestyle practices for a very long time. They did so even without the benefits of the technology we now have that enables us to create a much wider variety of juices, and juices of considerably higher quality, much more easily.
Another thing to consider is that juicing was never as much a necessary practice for healthy living as it is today. This is the case because of the amount of toxicity that we’ve introduced into our food system through our waterways, soil, and polluted air. It’s likely a very beneficial thing to do a juice fast once a week to give the chemistry a break from dietary mistakes made during the previous six days.
You can drink juice cold if your immune system is strong and it doesn’t make you feel tired or make you feel as if you’re forcing your body to deviate from its ideal temperature. But if you’re fighting an illness it’s best to drink juice that’s close to room temperature—this is so that you don’t rob yourself of any vital healing energy as your body tries to maintain an appropriate temperature for its healing processes. There’s nothing dangerous about cold juice, though. Sometimes cold juice will be beneficial to you if you feel a bit overheated and want to make yourself feel cooler or if your taste buds prefer cold items.
How much juice you can drink is a tricky question. I never heard of any person overdosing on juice, even after selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of juice in my first company. I never heard of even one person ever getting sick. When I left the company we had 85 stores serving juice raw. We were selling juices in several states and had a huge number of customers with a wide range of dietary practices. So statistically it’s very noteworthy that we didn’t have a single report of negative side effects emerging from juice consumption.
I make my juices in such a manner that they are not altered or perverted in any way. My juice of such quality that it will “talk to” the other components of your body and tell you when you are full and when you are better (should you have a mild sickness of some kind. It will dictate to you how much you need or when you’ve had too much. It’s self-regulating, in much the same way that a salad is, or in much the same way that it’s unlikely that you’ll have a craving to eat three apples in a row.
You will notice that even when you have a very low calorie diet, most of your diet comes from fruit, and you’re extremely active, you only eat as much fruit as you need by default. It’s very difficult to binge on produce because the produce is communicating via its nutrients to the chemistry of your body.
Processed foods and flesh foods do not do this. This is because the information in the food compounds has been altered to a degree such that a body’s chemistry doesn’t recognize it. That is one of the reasons that eating processed foods is a dietary mistake. And it’s a valid logical assumption that ceasing to make dietary mistakes will improve your overall body chemistry.
Start juicing as a regular dietary practice. You’ll be glad you did. Start with greens and include ginger. Greens are rich in minerals. And include plenty of fruits, as they provide us with lots of vitamins and lots of energy.