What Juices Are Best For You

StayHealthy2009

You may drink those juices that appeal to you the most. To find out your favorites, try each of them!

CARROT JUICE is tasty and popular, and two glasses of carrot juice per day are highly beneficial. There is no need to peel your carrots if you first scrub them well with a tough brush. I recommend a vegetable brush with nylon bristles for this purpose. Brush the daylights out of the carrots while rinsing them under water. This is quicker than peeling, and is less wasteful.

Carrot juice is very high in vitamin A. The vitamin A in carrots is actually "provitamin A" or carotene. Carotene is completely non-toxic, no matter how much you consume. The worst thing that can happen if you drink a huge amount of carrot juice is that you will turn orange. This condition is called "carotenosis" and is harmless. Naturally, you don't have to turn orange to enjoy the goodness of carrot juice. You can drink just enough to feel great ...without looking like a pumpkin!

Some folks have tried canned or bottled carrot juice and they didn't like it. No wonder! Fresh juice tastes SO much better that there isn't really any comparison.

CELERY JUICE is very tasty, but a bit high in sodium. Use small amounts of this juice to flavor the others. Juice celery leaves and all for the most benefit.

CUCUMBER juice is remarkably tasty. It tastes rather different than a cucumber itself. Perhaps you will find that the taste reminds you of watermelon. Peel cucumbers before juicing to avoid the waxes applied to their skins to enhance their shelf life in supermarkets.

ROMAINE LETTUCE or BEAN SPROUTS JUICE will make an especially nutritious juice with a taste that is well worth acquiring. This "green drink" is loaded with minerals and chlorophyll.

ZUCCHINI SQUASH JUICE juiced up tastes better than you'd ever imagine. Peel first, and enjoy. You may well be the first on your block to be a zucchini-juice fan. It also keeps the juicer from clogging on higher-fiber vegetables.

BEET JUICE is, traditionally, a blood-builder. In days past, herbalists looked at the blood-red beet as a tonic more so because it worked, rather than any color similarity. Beets must be peeled before juicing. Beet skins are very bitter. The beets, on the other hand, are quite sweet and make great juice. They will also permanently stain your juicer, so don't try to remove that color by washing. More important, beet juice will color your bowel movements.

That lovely red color of fresh beets can cause genuine alarm when it is seen in the toilet water. I know someone who had forgotten that he'd had beet juice the day before. He could only figure that he had a terrible case of hemorrhoids when he looked into the toilet and saw that red, red water. It was the beets, of course. When you have beet juice, remember not to be alarmed. Beet juice is widely used in the food industry as a natural coloring agent. You can (literally) see why!

A hint: you will save time if you first carefully dip beets in boiling water before peeling them.

CABBAGE juice was used by Garnett Cheney, M.D. to cure bleeding peptic ulcers back in the 1950's. (Cheney, G. (1952) "Vitamin U therapy of peptic ulcer." California Medicine, 77:4, 248-252) Dr. Cheney's patients drank a quart of cabbage juice a day and were cured in less than half the usual time... with no drugs whatsoever. Since then, cabbage juice has successfully been used for a variety of gastrointestinal illnesses. Colitis, spastic colon, indigestion, chronic constipation, certain forms of rectal bleeding and other conditions seem to respond well to the nutrients in cabbage juice. Dr. Cheney called its healing factor "Vitamin U" (for unknown). More recently, the American Cancer Society has urged people to eat more of the cabbage/broccoli family of vegetables because of their protective effects against cancer. There may be something to this cabbage juice idea. It certainly couldn't hurt to try it.

TOMATOES are easily juiced. Do not juice the leaves, vines, or green tomatoes. Only the red, ripened fruit is good for you. Yes, the tomato is a fruit. A fruit of a plant is essentially a seed-containing structure that can be picked without killing the plant.

Happy juicing!

Cheers,