- Fruit and vegetable juices: Fruit juices are far worse then vegetable juices and should be avoided as it is far better to have the whole unprocessed fruit. While labels promise the contents are “100 percent juice,” there’s virtually no such thing when you’re buying commercial juice. Not only does the flavor come courtesy of professional flavor and fragrance chemists, fruit juice is also notoriously high in fructose, whether it’s from added high fructose corn syrup or naturally-occurring fructose in the fruit.
You’re better off juicing vegetables at home to boost the nutrition of your overall diet. Raw vegetable juice teems with valuable and sensitive micronutrients that become damaged or destroyed when the juice is pasteurized, so avoid the store-bought versions and juice your own from scratch instead. Raw juice can be likened to a “living broth.” It is the closest transfer of solar energy (biophotons) directly to you that we know of. Additionally, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes can be rapidly absorbed. The benefits of raw organic vegetable juice are numerous. For example, it can help:
- Promote weight loss.
- Boost your immune system by supercharging it with concentrated phytochemicals.
- Increase energy. When your body has an abundance of the nutrients it needs, and your pH is optimally balanced, you feel energized. Since it can be utilized by your body immediately, those who juice report feeling the “kick” of energy almost instantly.
- Support brain health. People who drank juices (fruit and vegetable) more than three times per week, compared to less than once a week, were 76 percent less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, according to the Kame Project.
I have previously written an extensive guide to juicing, which I highly recommend reading to help you get started. One important factor to keep in mind is that, since vegetable juice is very perishable, it’s best to drink all of your juice right after you make it. However, if you’re careful, you can store it for up to 24 hours with only moderate nutritional decline.
Additionally there is the concern that free methanol will be created once you process the juice and store it in a container. Methanol (wood alcohol) has been associated with autoimmune diseases like MS. Fresh fruits and vegetables contain small amounts of naturally-occurring methanol. Normally this is not a problem as the methanol is typically bound to pectin, and since your body has no enzyme to metabolize that bond, it is simply excreted in your stool and none of the methanol is absorbed into your body. However, the problem occurs when you can or bottle fruit or vegetable juice, as the methanol tends to then dissociate from the pectin into free methanol, which you do absorb.
The methanol you absorb readily passes the blood brain barrier where it can be converted to form formaldehyde, which is a potent toxin that actually causes most of the damage. An exciting paper that delves into this topic is food scientist Woody Monte’s “Methanol: A chemical Trojan horse” as the root of the inscrutable U,6 published in the March, 2010 issue of Medical Hypotheses.
Discussion about this post