Tips for Juicing

These tips for juicing come from my personal experiences in incorporating juicing into my lifestyle over the last few years. The health benefits of juicing far outweigh the time it takes to juice fresh vegetables and fruit, and these juicing tips are provided to help you try juicing for yourself with ease and simplicity.

First of these juicing tips answers the question: What do you need for juicing? You need a juicer and fresh vegetables and fruit.

A juicer is simply a machine that extracts the juice from vegetables and fruit. There are 3 types of juicers that are categorized by the method they extract juice and separate the pulp. The most popular juicers available on the market are centrifugal juicers. A centrifugal juicer first grinds the fruit and vegetables, then pushes them through the strainer by spinning at a very fast speed (similar to your washing machine on the spin cycle).

When you're just starting with juicing, one of the most sensible tips for juicing is that you do not need a high-end, expensive juicer. I started with the "Juiceman Jr.", which cost less than $100.00 and I'm still using it several years after I got it! If you ever shop at Amazon.com, they have quite a variety of inexpensive juicers. In the U.S., stores like Wal-Mart carry inexpensive juicers as well. The whole idea is to get started!

Next of these tips for juicing has to do with the vegetables and fruits to juice - which ones? Where do you get them? Because it takes about a pound of produce to make a cup of juice, you need a good quantity of fresh vegetables or fruit on hand to juice. It's best to buy enough produce in order to juice for a week; that could be every day or a few times a week. Fresh produce doesn't stay very fresh for much more than a week, and you also get the best flavor and the most nutritional benefit from the freshest produce.

I recommend juicing vegetables versus fruit as one of these tips for juicing for a couple of reasons. One, vegetables are far lower in carbohydrate - which is key for weight loss and also for blood sugar management - than fruit. Vegetables have similar amounts of micronutrients (vitamins and minerals) and enzymes that are essential to a healthy body as fruits do. Also, vegetables are far less expensive than fruit, and you can get a lot more vegetables for your dollar than fruit. Apples, however, are excellent for juicing and a bit of apple added to primarily vegetable juice sweetens the juice up nicely.

What vegetables should you juice? Well, you can juice just about anything, but when you're just starting with juicing and you want to keep it simple, an important juicing tip is to first pick the vegetable that is going to be your "base" or the greatest portion of your juice. I use cucumbers, celery and romaine lettuce as my base as they have a lot of water content and blend well with other vegetables. Then pick a couple other vegetables that you like the flavor of – carrots are excellent and mild tasting, tomatoes, bell peppers, green onions, you name it. Just pick a couple that you know you like and get enough for juicing a couple of times in a week. (One vegetable that I juiced once and that I do not recommend is zucchini. I wouldn't juice any sort of squash.)

If you have any local farmer's markets in your area, another of my juicing tips is to get your juicing produce there. You're going to be buying a lot of fresh veggies and using them up, and farmer's markets prices are the best. The quality is usually quite high and local farmers general use far less, if any, pesticides or synthetic fertilizer in growing their produce. Local produce is most likely organic in many cases, it's just usually too expensive for a small farmers to get it officially certified as organic. And you can be sure that local produce is fresh!

Another of my tips for juicing is preparation. Get your juicer out and plugged in, and take the veggies and fruit out that you're going to juice, rinse them and put any extra away before you start. If you're adding fresh garlic or ginger root, prepare them before you start juicing. The idea is to be able to turn on the juicer and juice everything quickly without having to start and stop a bunch of times.

You can find a nice variety of juicing guides and recipes to assist you in getting the most enjoyment from your juicing at Amazon.com.

Drink your juice right away as that is when the enzymes are most potent. The longer you let the juice sit, the less nutritional benefit you'll get from it.

Also, clean your juicer right away. It's far easier to clean after you've just used it, plus, even if cleaning your juicer might seem like a lot of trouble at first, after you've done it a few times it becomes a habit - and knowing the health benefits of juicing vegetables makes it worth it.

Last of these tips for juicing: Keep it up and give it time to work! You'll reap the rewards of improved health by incorporating regular juicing into your lifestyle as part of getting the nutrition your body needs!

Cheers,
BB

Return to Food, Nutrition, Health from Tips for Juicing

[Return to the top of the page]