If you need any more reasons to add some vegetable juice into your diet, you can find one here! Here are five more reasons to boost your micronutrient intake with daily juice.
Juice can be an easy way to get kids to get a variety of fruits and vegetables.
Most kids will have a favorite fruit, maybe a favorite vegetable (or maybe not!). The beauty of juicing fruits and veggies together is the fact that you can include a wide range without really noticing what is in there. You can most likely cover up the taste of your kids’ least favorite vegetable with their favorite fruit. A couple of green apples and a lime can easy overpower the taste of kale or chard. Citrus fruits like lemon or lime are great for adding a refreshing taste and, in my experience, it maintains the juice for longer.
Try having your kids help with making the juice. Bottom line is, juicers are fun! They grind and squish whatever you put in them. Kids will probably enjoy helping out. When they invest the time in creating their own juice, they are more likely to enjoy it.
Juice is a great addition to a workout recovery meal.
The whole reason for adding juice to your diet is to give your body everything it needs to operate at its best. Post workout, your body’s metabolism is way higher than normal. This means a lot of your body’s systems are also running faster, requiring more nutrients. You could spend a big chunk of cash on untested, unregulated supplements or juice up some veggies and get a nice cocktail of nutrients to add to your recovery meal. Just be wary of too much fruit as the calories can mount up.
A glass of juice first thing in the morning can energize you much better than coffee.
Where do you normally get your energy and focus from? How does your body produce it? Do you drink coffee all day until you need to sleep and then stop so you run out of energy and fall asleep? Or does your body produce energy itself from carbohydrates, protein, fat? All of those are needed for your body to produce energy.
Juice can help your body detoxify, clearing your body of harmful toxins.
OK, so the juice itself won’t magically cleanse your body of all culinary sins. Your liver and kidneys will do that for you. Here’s the but…your kidneys and liver can do their job much better if you make it easy for them. Give them more of what they need (vitamins & minerals) and less of the stuff they are trying to clean (saturated fats, toxins from processed foods). If you do this, your body will get on top of the constant cleansing work it does everyday.
There are many cases of people with long-term illnesses recovering after juicing or a juice fast.
So this is perhaps the biggest reason for the rise in popularity of juicing over the last few years. Documentaries like Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead and Forks Over Knives have flat out claimed that with good nutrition people can rid themselves of chronic, deadly illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and autoimmune dysfunction. The medical industries’ views range from wholeheartedly agreeing to downright dismissal. There are so many arguments that are brought up now. Pharmaceutical companies’ profit margins, organic vs non-organic farming and the nation’s interest in healthy eating.
Personally, I believe that what we eat is probably the biggest factor in how healthy we are. This thought process has been around for over two centuries. Hippocrates said around 2400 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine” He lived to be 70! Pretty impressive considering the average lifespan at the time is thought to be around 20 – 25 years. I know how different foods make me feel and perform during exercise. It makes perfect sense to me that giving my body everything it needs and restricting the stuff it doesn’t will contribute to greater internal health.
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