Drink Up!
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Be creative about your health. After all, your vitamins don’t always have to come in the form of steamed broccoli or a big salad. You can drink yourself to good health. The right juice is a quick and easy way to get your vitamins and antioxidants. And when you’re on the run, it’s a lot easier to drink your greens than to eat them.
Why Juice?
“Juice provides your body with an abundance of water, easily absorbed protein, carbohydrates, essential fatty acids, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, and phytonutrients,” says Cherie Calbom, MS, author of The Juice Lady’s Guide to Juicing for Health. Sure, whole vegetables contain the same nutrients as their juice form, but blending enables you to combine a number of veggies for maximum health benefits. Fresh juice is salad in a glass. Calbom adds that juices are also more easily absorbed by our bodies because the produce is broken down to a form the body can easily assimilate and utilize. “It’s estimated that the nutrients are at work in the body in about 30 minutes, whereas the vegetables and fruits take about two hours to digest,” she explains.
You can even tailor your juice to help ease a certain ailment and energize the body.
Drinking citrus juices two or three times a week can help prevent kidney stones. Cabbage juice is effective in treating peptic ulcers, while cherry juice eases gout attacks and gouty arthritis. Cranberry juice has been proven effective in the treatment and prevention of urinary tract infections, and tomato juice contains the cancer-fighting antioxidant, lycopene.
Juicing is also convenient and makes it easier to get your daily recommendation of five to 10 servings of fruits and vegetables. “People are eating less produce,” says Calbom, who estimates that 80 percent of Americans aren’t getting enough fruits and veggies. “This is dangerous because antioxidants found in fresh produce are our body’s front line defense against free radicals.” Diseases such as heart disease, cancer, age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and accelerated aging have all been linked to free radical damage. “We don’t take the time to prepare the vegetables needed for salads and such,” says Calbom. And we’re going to start paying for that with our health. That’s where juicing can help. It’s so time efficient. And tasty. So, what are you waiting for?