Juicing can be a fun and delicious way to get your daily fill of vitamins and antioxidants. A few simple tips can help you choose combinations of fruit and veggies that not only taste good together, but provide your body with essential nutrients. Juicing is so easy that there’s no excuse not to start today.
Drink your juice on an empty stomach, such as first thing in the morning or about half an hour before a meal. This allows your system to better absorb the nutrients in your juice, without the interference of other foods. Juice drunk on an empty stomach can enter your system in as quickly as thirty minutes.
If you want your juice to be a certain texture or thickness, know that the softer the fruit is, the thicker the juice will be. The meat of softer fruits breaks up easily to make a thick nectar. Make sure to add some harder fruits, such as apples and pears, for a thinner juice.
Mix leafy green vegetables with something sweet. Leafy vegetables have a strong taste and may be too much for you to start with, on their own. Luckily, juicing is a great chance to mix your foods; so temper that strong vegetable taste with something sweeter like apples or carrots. Plain water might work as well.
Juicing is a wonderful part of a healthy lifestyle, but you don’t have to be totally strict about what you consume. You should practice excellent health choices at least two-thirds of the time. The other third allows you to go out to a restaurant, have a few potato chips, or indulge in some ice cream.
In clue the whole fruit whenever you can to increase the nutritional punch of the juice you’re making. Apple skin, for example, holds more nutrients than all of the flesh combined! Some peels won’t taste good, like oranges, but you could zest the outside which contains a ton of flavor.
If you can’t afford to juice with organic fruit and vegetables, don’t worry about it. It’s nice to have pesticide-free items, but you can only work with what you have available. Wash your produce in a mixture of 8 cups of water with 3 tablespoons of hydrogen peroxide and 3 tablespoons of baking soda to get all the nasty stuff off. Rinse your produce well before using.
Do not assault your taste buds with crazy blends right away. Take it slow with your flavor blends and stick to what you know you will like at first. Then begin to incorporate items that you do not normally consume as juice, such as spinach or other leafy vegetables. This will prevent you from ruining the pleasure of juicing because you got a bad taste in your mouth.
When looking for a juicer to purchase, check out the additional features it provides. A masticating juicer often comes with attachments to make pasta or grind foods, which can save you money by making other foods from scratch as well. Consider the juicer an investment for your whole kitchen, and pick up a few attachments while you’re out.
Remember that vegetable and fruit remnants left on a juicer after juicing have the potential to grow mold quickly. Cleaning it quickly helps stop the growth of mold. Dismantle the juicer clean the parts and rinse with water until clean. If you must use a detergent use one that is very mild.
If you don’t like the taste of certain vegetables that you should be eating for their nutritional benefit, try mixing them with fruit or vegetables you do like! Use only one disliked vegetable in a recipe and the flavors of the others that you do enjoy will overwhelm your taste buds so you don’t even notice it!
Studies have shown that the optimal intake of fruit and vegetables in a day is 8 or 9 servings per day. Most people are lucky to even get 2 to 3, but by juicing you can meet your minimums easily and tastily! Make sure that the bulk of the servings, preferably 5 to 6, are vegetables.
Don’t just use the same handful of ingredients for all of the juicing you do. There are a lot of great fruits and vegetables out there, and they all have different nutritional profiles, so mixing up your ingredients means that your body will get a wider array of nutrients and enzymes.
Your hair and skin can greatly benefit from cucumber juice. Cucumbers have substantial amounts of silica. Additionally, silica increases the strength of connective tissue and improves the health of bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles.
In regards to juicing, it is important to consider the fact that it is best to drink your home made juice at room temperature. This is important to consider because this temperature provides the best environment for adequate consumption of nutrients into your body. Always store your juice in a cool environment, however.
Think about drinking your juice just before a meal to help you feel full faster, limiting your intake of solid food. The juice will digest quickly, giving you a boost in energy and providing you with the servings of fruit and vegetables you require. You’ll end up eating less solid food, so try to include whole grains as it will increase your fiber intake.
Once people start to get interested in juicing, they many times find it difficult to slow down. There are so many winning fruit and vegetable concoctions that can be thrown together in a juicer, that it can boggle the mind. It’s nice to not have to sacrifice flavor for nutritional goodness.
