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Juice – The best fast food money can buy

Drinking fresh raw organic vegetable juice is one of the fastest and easiest ways to stay in tip-top shape while vacationing. It also happens to be one of the best ways to “Eat With Your Dollars.” It’s something I do no matter where I am in the world (including here in Thailand) and do almost daily back home. And I’m not talking about opening a can of V8 or buying a ready-made juice like Naked that has been pasteurized. I’m talking about drinking the juice of this many vegetables (see photo below) at one sitting – raw, fresh and straight out of a juicer.

The reasons to drink vegetable juice seem endless to me, but here are just three reasons why adding this habit to your repertoire is the key to ultimate health.

1. It’s really hard to get the amount of vegetables required by most experts (6-8 servings) in a typical day. I don’t know about you, but when I wake up, I don’t crave a big bowl of collard greens or broccoli. It’s rare to see Americans eating vegetables for breakfast, and at lunch it could be as small as a piece of lettuce and tomato on a sandwich, leaving very little room in the day to get that 6-8 servings. It takes a few pounds of vegetables to get a 12-ounce glass of juice – which gives you the whole day’s worth of servings in one class. Additionally, juicing allows you to get a wide variety of vegetables you would probably not otherwise consume in your diet, giving your body the variety of vitamins and minerals it needs to repair damaged cells, prevent disease, and keep you looking and feeling younger.

2. Drinking juice gives you a ton of energy. When juice is separated from the fiber of fruits and vegetables, it is easier for your body to absorb all the nutrients, giving you an instant boost of energy. Consuming the abundance of live enzymes, vitamins and minerals in juice is like drinking a natural version Red Bull. There’s nothing wrong with a little organic coffee, but my daily habit was eliminated after I started having fresh juice daily. I simply didn’t need it anymore to feel awake and alive.

3. Our soil is depleted. Due to the use of pesticides, genetically modified seeds, and conventional farming practices, several vitamins and minerals have become depleted from our soil. Eating a piece of broccoli now vs. 20 years ago does not yield the same amount of nutrition. It’s crucial that we try to overcompensate this fact by consuming as many whole plant foods as possible. Juicing allows you to get the extra boost you need much more efficiently than trying to chew vegetables all day. When I started drinking carrot juice, my eye lashes immediately started to grow longer within just a couple of weeks. Feeling the extra energy boost is one thing, but seeing the results in the mirror can be quite dramatic and make you a firm believer of the powers of drinking juice.

Obviously, you don’t have to travel all the way to Thailand to get fresh organic juice. My favorite way to get juice is through my juicer at home. (There are some easy and fast recipes on my blog. I like to flavor my juice with lemon, ginger and garlic. If you have never tried fresh raw vegetable juice before or are new to juicing, I recommend starting off with an 80 percent vegetable to 20 percent fruit ratio and slowly migrate over time to 100 percent vegetable juice with fresh lemon or lime juice as the only fruit-based flavor enhancer. It’s really important to slowly drink your juice, almost chewing it, so the juice will mix with your saliva. This action stimulates your digestive enzymes allowing you to absorb all the nutrients.

If you don’t have a juicer of your own, no worries, there are several fantastic juice bars in town that can make you a fresh raw juice in no time! Here are some of my favorites:

Berry Brook Farms: Great recipes, fast service, call in orders and take away.

Luna’s Living Kitchen: Innovative combinations, the “Kale Lemonade” is perfect for those just starting out and need a little apple and lemon to help that kale go down.

Home Healthy Market and Earth Fare: I love combining my juicing and shopping! Sipping on juice while shopping keeps my will power in check and prevents me from loading my cart with junk food.

And if you are too lazy to make your own juice or can’t get your butt off the couch, you can always call Viva Raw, who delivers fresh raw juice straight to your door. They just upgraded their equipment with a Norwalk Juicer – the best juicer on the market that cold-presses the juice, preserving many of the raw enzymes longer than other traditional juicers.

See! Fresh juice is the most nutritious “fast food” money can buy. Now, how’s that for Eating With Your Dollars?

I’m off to drink juice with the elephants. Until next time …

A management consultant by day and food activist blogger by night, Vani Hari has been featured here on CL’s 2012 Lust List, the Charlotte Observer, and the New York Times. She has made it her mission to spread as much information about what is in food as well as how to make the right purchasing decisions at the grocery store and how to live an organic lifestyle on her blog Foodbabe.com.

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Thinking About a Juice Cleanse?

Whether it’s to improve energy, clear acne, Spring clean the digestive system, or shed a few pounds, juice cleansing is all the rage now. Even celebs like Gwyneth Paltrow and Nicole Richie are buzzing about the benefits of liquid detoxing. Before you splurge on a juicer or lay down the dough for a liquid detox program, learn how a juice cleanse may lead to weight gain.

• Hard-to-measure liquid calories: Since all the calories you’re consuming are liquid, if you’re not watching your intake, it’s easy to consume well over the daily limit. (A pressed juice averages between 100-350 calories per 16-ounce bottle.) Make sure you have a plan to follow and an accurate way to determine how many calories are in each glass or bottle you’re drinking. Most retail juicing programs provide calorie counts, but are also pricey to join.
• Messes with metabolism: A typical juice cleanse lasts anywhere from three to seven days (or sometimes longer), where you drink 32 to 64 ounces of freshly pressed fruit and vegetable juice each day. When your body doesn’t get the all the nutrients (or the amount of calories) it’s used to, it stresses out because it thinks it’s starving. Often the body reacts to this by slowing down its metabolism, which can make losing weight harder in the future. And while juicing is an easy way to deliver phytonutrients to the body, the fruit-based juices tend to be high in sugar, which can negatively affect insulin levels in the body.

Continue reading for more ways a juice cleanse can cause weight gain.

• Less exercise: Since you’re consuming less calories than you’re used to (especially in protein, fiber, and fat), many juicing programs encourage conserving your energy by doing less or lower-impact exercise, or even no exercise at all. Less exercise means less calories burned, which may cause extra weight to creep on, especially if you have trouble getting back to the gym after the cleanse ends.
• Feeling deprived: Sipping on celery-kale-pear juice might be doable the first day, but you may start to crave all the foods you know you can’t eat. Even if you make it through the entire cleanse without cheating, the feeling of deprivation may be so strong that as soon as the cleanse is over, you can’t help but grab nachos, a burger, fries, and a brownie sundae, consuming more calories in one meal than you normally would have in an entire day before you embarked on the cleanse.

Source: Flickr User skampy

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Getting juice with Jason Vale

Described as the ‘Jamie Oliver of juicing’, Juice Master Jason Vale is on a mission to Juice The World!

Jason’s best selling book, 7lbs in 7days; Super Juice Diet has sold over 1 million copies worldwide and he is an advisor to some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, helping others to improve their health and well-being through juicing.

NinetoFive’s Laura Percy caught up with the Philips Juicer ambassador while he was in Sydney to spread the juicy word and launch the revolutionary new Philips QuickClean Juicer.

In your quest to juice the world, how are us Aussies shaping up?

I was surprised to read that Australia has higher rates of obesity than the UK, especially as we have the unenviable title of ‘the fattest nation in Europe’. Australians already consume large quantities of juice, but mostly it’s either pasteurised or loaded with added sugar, even the smoothies at your most popular juice bars here have added refined sugar. My aim is to get Aussies juicing at home, so they are in full control of their nutrition and the quality of the fruits and vegetables they use and to get Aussies juicing the things they wouldn’t usually eat in their raw state, such as broccoli and beetroot.

How does the 7lbs in 7days Super Juice Diet work?

For one week the ‘diet’ removes all processed food and is made up of pure freshly extracted fruit and vegetable juices five times a day. The reason I believe the 7lbs in 7days Juice Diet (3.5kilos in 7 days) has been so successful, is due to the explanation of ‘why’ to juice as opposed to ‘how’ to juice. How to juice is easy, but why we should be doing it and why it has the success it does I believe is the main reason for its worldwide success. I also ran an addiction clinic for many years and a section of the book concentrates on removing someone from a ‘diet mentality’ to one of what I describe as a ‘freedom mentality.’

What are the main health benefits of juicing?

Juicing retains 95 per cent of the nutrients of the whole fruit or vegetable but because the insoluble fibre has been removed, it is often a more ‘bio available’ form of nutrition – meaning the nutrients get to where they are needed. It is not so much ‘you are what you eat’ but you are what you manage to absorb. The other major benefit of fresh juicing is that people who aren’t keen on eating raw vegetables (and not many people are) can drink them. Once things like broccoli juice, beet juice, sprout juice, celery juice, etc are mixed with a little apple and maybe a chunk of ginger and lime, it tastes wonderful. My catch phrase is a simple one; if you can’t eat it – drink it!

What’s your favourite juice combo?

That’s like asking what is your favourite film, all depends on the mood! I now prefer vegetable juices and my main juice I have most often is apple, cucumber, celery, beet, ginger, mint, broccoli, spinach, lime and pineapple all juiced and then blended with half a ripe avocado – beautiful, creamy and very satisfying.

? For more information on Jason Vale visit www.juicemaster.com.
? For further information on the Philips QuickClean Juicer visit www.philips.com.au/kitchen.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Laura Percy is a freelance journalist who loves championing a fit and healthy lifestyle. A lover of the outdoors, she can be found pounding the pavement along the Bondi to Bronte coastal walk, practicing yoga and volunteering in her free time as a surf lifesaver.

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To juice or not to juice

One of the most recognizable proverbs regarding health is “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Eating fruits and vegetables is undoubtedly nutritious for the human body, but drinking them, especially as part of prolonged restrictive juice cleanses, may not provide the same benefits.

“Clearly, there is an abundance of medical evidence that the uneducated use of any type of severely restrictive diet can be ineffective, and very dangerous at worst,” says Santa Monica College health professor Denise Rees. “A brief change in diet—one to two days—may be acceptable for individuals without health conditions.”

On recent episodes of Dr. Oz, as well as The Oprah Winfrey Show, it has been said that, while juicing can provide the benefit of consuming a significantly greater amount of fruits and vegetables, there are concerns about the absence of fiber in juices.

Fiber is found in the pulp of fruits and vegetables, and juice extractors that remove the pulp remove the fiber as well.

Juicing fruits and vegetables, rather than eating them, can also increase sugar intake.

“Fresh juice may contain more sugar than a bottled beverage,” says Rees.

When making a cup of juice, more of the product is required, which means more sugar is consumed. The United States Department of Agriculture’s website illustrates these differences.

One cup of raw strawberries has seven grams of sugar, whereas a cup pureed berries yields a little over 11 grams. The same concept holds true for vegetables, as a cup of carrots contains five grams of sugar, and a cup of carrot juice contains nine grams.

Sugar and fiber are not the only concerns regarding juice diets. If juice is continuously substituted for meals, it can potentially be harmful.

“You’ve got to do it for a couple of days; not longer,” Dr. Oz told viewers on Oprah. He explained that other nutrients that come from meat, fish or soy must be accounted for, and living solely on juice cleanses can lead to malnutrition.

“Maintaining adequate intake of nutrition is difficult on a restricted diet of any kind,” says Rees. “The long-term outcome of restrictive diets [like juicing] is malnutrition, and may result in nasty side effects. Mild-to-moderate side effects may be poor sleep, hair loss, bone fragility, and dried, cracked nails.”

In order to attain their full nutritional value, entire fruits and vegetables have to be consumed, which includes seeds, skin and stem, if edible. According to Livestrong’s website, the outside layers of oranges and bananas should not be eaten, but the inside white layers carry the most nutrients, mainly vitamins and fiber.

“It is best to have foods whole, closest to nature, with the least amount of processing,” says SMC nutrition professor and registered dietitian Yvonne Ortega. “Juicing is a way of processing our plant foods.”

The use of juicers, mixers or blenders powerful enough to finely puree or chop entire fruits and vegetables would produce juices that are more nutrient-dense.

“Fresh juice will contribute fiber from the pulp, however not as much fiber as the whole fruit or vegetable could contribute,” says Ortega.

Pressed Juicery, located on San Vicente Boulevard, sells bottles of freshly pressed juices, each designed for a specific purpose. The store uses a hydraulic press that minimizes oxidation and releases vitamins, minerals and enzymes that are typically not yielded from traditional juicers.

“Our juices are raw, unpasteurized and produced on a hydraulic press which extracts the finest produce straight from the pulp,” says Cissy Huang, an employee at Pressed Juicery.

According to Huang, the possible health benefits of cleansing include weight loss, increased energy and stamina, healthy hair and nails, strengthened immune system and a regulated, cleansed colon.

“Juice cleansing is an optimal way give our bodies the break they deserve, while keeping ourselves energized and nutritionally satisfied,” Huang says.

But the merits of juice cleanses are still debated among health professionals.

“I would not recommend a juice detox diet to anyone,” says Ortega.

“We seem to believe that offsetting the balance of too much of a food group could actually lead to deficiency diseases, even if the food groups are fruits and vegetables that we deem as healthy. The key to a healthy diet is moderation, even with our healthy foods.”

 

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juice fasting hits the get-thin-quick stage

Thanks to her husband, Juli Alvarez is a dedicated liquid dieter.

“I’m very conscious about what goes in my mouth, but then you get caught up in things, get lazy and eat one too many cupcakes,” says the New Yorker whose husband is a pastry chef. “I wish I could say I never gain weight but I have gone up and down.”

“Cleaning out” or detoxing your body with juices is completely unnecessary, says Madelyn Fernstrom, TODAY’s nutrition editor. “Fiber is the body’s Roto-Rooter.”

To maintain her weight, Alvarez (who declined to give her age) has endured the intense 10-day liquid fast, the Master Cleanse (a diet of water, lemon juice, organic maple syrup and cayenne pepper), three separate times, losing and then gaining back between 5 and 10 pounds each time.

More recently, though, she and others looking for a dramatic diet fix have turned to a new contender in the get-thin-quick field: juice fasting.

The practice of juice fasting has been given the slurp of approval by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Sarah Jessica Parker. Starbucks has even climbed on board the juice train, opening its first juice bar chain, Evolution Fresh, in March.

Juicy dieters either squeeze fruits and vegetables themselves or buy commercial products such as the organic Love Deep Cleanse or the trendy Blue Print Juice Cleanse, which helped Alvarez drop six pounds in just six days.

“One of the downsides of any juice cleanse is that you constantly go to the bathroom,” says Alvarez of her recent juicing regime. “But you do have more energy on the Blue Print cleanse than on something like the Master Cleanse.”

The first day, she says, is always the easiest — while the second and third are the hardest. After that, you just “bide your time until the end.”

“The only thing I didn’t like about this cleanse is that they recommend doing colonics with the juice,” she says. “You’re cleansing all the way through; not just to lose weight but also to clean out.”

Sorting fact from fiction can be difficult when you’re trying to find the best way to lose weight. TODAY diet and nutrition editor Madelyn Fernstrom has authoritative answers to common diet questions.

According to Dr. Madelyn Fernstom, TODAY’s diet and nutrition editor, “cleaning out” or “detoxing” your digestive system — a current preoccupation among the weight and health conscious — is completely unnecessary.

“A normal healthy digestive system does not need a rest,” she says. “Fiber is nature’s Roto-Rooter.”

According to the Mayo Clinic website (and Fernstrom), there’s no scientific evidence that juice fasting provides any of the other benefits that its proponents claim it does: it won’t reduce the risk of cancer, boost the immune system, aid digestion or promote any kind of permanent weight loss. 

Juice fasts aren’t easy, either.

Peg Rosen, a 48-year-old health writer who lives in Montclair, New Jersey, says she has few fond memories of the three-day juice fast she completed at a spa in 2010.

“I felt like I was starving to death and found myself eating the weird seasonings set out on the tables in the dining room, hoping for something — anything — to chew on,” she says. “I felt like I was in prison. And I paid for that! I ate so much when I got home that I probably ended up putrefying myself doubly.”

Because of the regime’s difficulties, some people almost see juice fasting as a new competitive sport.

“I wanted to test my willpower, just see if I could do it,” says Abby Gardner, a 36-year-old web editor in New York. “And I did, twice, without cheating. It gave me a weird sense of accomplishment.”

Despite the ultra-competitive rewards (and the mixed results), Fernstrom cautions that using juice as a meal replacement can cause fatigue after a few days due to the lack of dietary protein. A steady diet of juice can also cause a decline in muscle mass as well as thinning hair and nails (ill effects that seem counterproductive to those who fast in the pursuit of beauty).

Juicing fasts can also produce the dreaded yo-yo diet effect.

“With weight loss, when it comes off quickly, it comes back on quickly,” she says. “If you stay under 1,000 calories a day with liquids or solids, you’ll lose weight at the same rate.”

But it’s not all bad news for juicers.

“No one eats enough fruits and vegetables and one way to get them is to drink them,” says Fernstrom, who says a glass of vegetable juice daily, along with a healthy diet of actual solid food, can actually be a good idea for some. 

For weight loss, though, Fernstrom suggests sticking to green juices, or to mix vegetables and fruits, since fruit can add a lot of calories.

“One glass of fruit juice has the calories of two pieces of whole fruit,” she says. 

One last pitfall: fresh-squeezed juice needs to be consumed right away to avoid fast-growing harmful bacteria.

“To avoid food-borne illnesses, make your own juice, and drink it immediately, because harmful bacteria can grow in juice quickly,” says Fernstrom. “And if you’re buying a commercial juice, get one that is pasteurized.”

TODAY’s diet and nutrition editor Madelyn Fernstrom answers viewer questions about diet and nutrition, addressing misconceptions about natural sugar versus low-calorie sweeteners and frozen yogurt.

Christina Kelly is a freelance writer who lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

More from TODAY Health:

Can Miley Cyrus’ gluten-free diet help you lose weight?

6 smarter ways to smash your stress

Recipes for juicing with Bill & Sheila

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