SUPER GREEN JUICE
Juicing your way to health!
Check out my Guide to Buying a Juicer
Incorporating fresh juices, especially vegetable juices, into your lifestyle is a life-affirming, health-enhancing and mood-boosting ritual. Drinking fresh juices will have such a positive effect on your energy levels, skin and overall health. Juicing is a process which extracts water and nutrients from fruits and vegetables and discards the fibre. It makes the nutrients more readily available to the body in much larger quantities than if you were to eat the fruits and vegetables whole.
Freshly squeezed vegetable juices form part of most healing and detoxification programs because they are so nutrient rich and nourish and restore the body at a cellular level. Many of us have impaired digestion which reduces our body's ability to absorb nutrients from vegetables. Fresh juices go directly into your bloodstream and are therefore considered a 15 minute nutrient express to health. However, store-bought juices contain virtually no nutrients due to the pasteurisation process.
Another great reason to juice is that many of us eat the same vegetables and fruits every day or worse, don't eat any on a regular basis! With juicing, you can enjoy a wide variety of vegetables that you perhaps don't enjoy eating whole. For example, beetroot and celery aren't my best friends when it comes to eating them whole, but when juiced they are absolutely delicious! Juicing is also the perfect way to consume the recommended daily serving of vegetables in a glass.
An important warning here: when you remove fibre, the liquid juice is absorbed into your blood stream quickly. If you are only juicing fruits, this would cause a rapid spike in blood sugar and unstable blood sugar levels can lead to mood swings, energy loss and memory problems. So focus on vegetable juices! There are several sweeter vegetables such as beetroots and carrots that help to sweeten the juice and make it delicious!
Also, It’s best not to combine fruits with starchy vegetables like carrots, beetroots, broccoli and courgette (unless it's apple). This can affect how well your digestive enzymes function. In his book Food Combining Made Easy, Dr. Herbert Shelton explains that starchy foods have to be eaten alone because starches are digested with enzymes different from those used for any other food group. Combining starchy foods with fruit may cause fermentation and gas. However, Dr. Shelton found that green leafy vegetables combine well with pretty much everything. So keep adding berries and just about any fruit with kale and spinach in your green smoothies.
After regularly consuming freshly pressed vegetable juices, which are highly alkalising, you will experience improved energy levels, digestion and mental clarity, clearer skin, and an overall sense of wellbeing. See my recipe below for my favourite super green juice made up of kale, celery, broccoli, cucumber, ginger and lemon. If this is too green (not sweet enough) for you, either add a dash of raw honey to the mix or juice an apple (ideally a green one) for the added sweetness.
Super Green Juice
15 minutes
Serves 2
Ingredients
1 handful of kale
3 celery stalks
half a head of broccoli
half a cucumber
an inch of ginger
quarter of a lemon
Instructions
1. Wash all your vegetables. No need to peel anything. Chop your ingredients to the size you need for them to fit in your juicer.
2. Juice away.
3. Enjoy!
4. If it's too green (not sweet enough), add a dash of raw honey. Or you can juice an apple and/or pear (ideally a green apple) to the juicing mix for a sweeter taste.