The Power of Juice.

Recently my husband and I have become more aware of the need for increased self-sufficiency, organics and including healthier foods in our lifestyle.  For those of you who may also have an interest in learning more about these issues, these are a few documentary movies I would recommend:

Food, Inc.

Food Matters

The Gerson Miracle

If you have Netflix, these titles are all available for instant streaming.



Among the ways we have put our understanding of these issues into practice, we raise our own chickens and use the fresh eggs they produce, we've been working on building a larger garden, we grind our own wheat for flour, avoiding the processed stuff.  After learning that meat stays in your gut for days because of the difficulty of digestion, we've cut way back on the meat we eat, using beans, soy and other sources for protein, and most recently we've started juicing fruits and vegetables.  We buy organic vegetables and fruits.  They are not sprayed with pesticides, which can inhibit the fruit and vegetables from producing, or absorbing, all possible minerals and macro-nutrients from the soil.  Inorganic produce still contains some vitamins and minerals, but at greatly reduced levels due to the composition changes caused by pesticides and herbicides.  Some of the benefits of extracting juice from fruits and vegetables and drinking it in that form are that the juice requires hardly any digestion, so all its nutritional goodness gets rapidly into your system.  When you juice, you use more fruits and vegetables than you could actually eat. As a result, you are drinking a densely packed amount of vitamins, minerals and other plant-based nutrients.  So ultimately the health benefits drinking the juice regularly include: increased cardiovascular health, rebuilding of red blood cells, increased energy levels, boost in immune system function, and healthier skin, hair, nails and eyes.  I'm sure there are other benefits as well.

So far I have had success getting a couple of my children to willingly drink the juice a couple of times a day.  They get excited about helping pick out which fruits and vegetables should go into the day's juice.  The other kids still have to be coaxed into drinking up, and I usually resort to "hiding" the juice in some way, like adding it to a smoothie that they like and are familiar with.  For the past few years, I have been keeping my freezer stocked with vegetable purees, using them in virtually all my baking and cooking, since my kids are so picky about what they eat, it's sometimes the only veggies they get.  But one of the problems with that being the only source for those nutrients and vitamins is that in order to puree them, I usually cook them in some way - roasting or steaming the vegetables first, to make them soft enough to puree thoroughly.  When they are heated, even just steamed for a short time, it changes the chemical composition of the food, and in some cases, depletes the food of it's nutrients.  With the juice, you get the fruit and vegetables in their rawest form.  The process of extracting the juice simply breaks open the pulp, allowing for easy absorption into the body, and all the minerals, nutrients and vitamins are retained in the juice, not the materials left over after the juicing process.