Last week we talked about the benefits, drawbacks, and misconceptions about juicing. Just to be entirely clear, I’m not advocating for a 100% raw or liquid diet whatsoever.

However, adding a fresh juice into your daily regimen can potentially significantly augment your health by flooding your body with powerful nutrients. Joe Cross from the film Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead calls it “freebasing nature.”

So you want to get going and start experimenting with juices, but you don’t know where to start? There are two ways to go – buying a juicer and making your own juices or buying freshly-made juice from a grocery store or juice bar.

Making Your Own Juice

In the long run, this is by far the most economically feasible way to go. Relying on pre-made juices can get extremely expensive. Moreover, you have more control of the proportions of different fruits and vegetables that satisfy your tastes and goals.

But what juicer should you buy and why? There are a million of them on the market and every time you turn on the TV it seems like there’s a different infomercial advertising the latest and greatest. The bottom line is you really can’t go wrong with any of them, but there are two machines in particular that I really like. 

Option 1: The Breville Multi-Speed Juice Fountain

Pros:

• It’s incredibly easy to use and to clean up.
• The feed tube where you put the food in is huge, so you don’t even have to cut anything up most of the time. You can fit whole cucumbers, celery, carrots, and even medium-sized apples in there, which makes the actual juicing process ridiculously fast.
• The five speeds make it better with soft veggies than most centrifugal juicers.
• It looks pretty nice on your countertop.

Cons:

• It’s a centrifugal juicer, which means the food is cut and then spun in a circle in a strainer. This isn’t the ideal way to juice vegetables as you do end up losing a fair amount of useable material and the juice oxidizes rather quickly.
• It doesn’t juice leafy greens like spinach, kale, dandelion greens, or beet greens all that well.
• It’s pretty big so if you’re short on counter space, it may not be the best option for you.

The Bottom Line: If you’re just getting started with juicing and want to pick up a nice-looking, easy-to-use machine, this is your best bet.

Option 2: The Hurom Slow Juicer

Pros:

• It’s a masticating juicer, which means it actually squeezes the foods with an “auger” or gear, and then pushes the juice through a screen. The process makes higher-quality juice than the centrifugal juicers that doesn’t spoil as quickly, and it’s much more effective at extracting the juice out of just about everything, leaving you with less waste.
• It works great with leafy greens, unlike the Breville.
• You can actually make almond milk with it, using simply almonds and water (other kinds of nuts will work too).

Cons:

• The feed tube is pretty small, so you’ll need to spend more time chopping the produce into smaller pieces.
• The juice it produces is a little pulpy, so if you want your juice pulp-free, you’ll have to strain it.
• It’s a bit pricier than the Breville, or most other juicers for that matter.

Bottom Line: If you’re serious about getting as many greens as possible in your juice and are okay with spending a bit more time with it, you really can’t get much better than the Hurom. It lists for $329.99 at Amazon.com.

Buying Juices

If you don’t have any kitchen space, don’t think you have the time, or just don’t want to put the effort into making juice on a regular basis, you can always pay someone or some company to make the juice for you. Whole Foods Markets will make juice pretty much any way you want, as will many juice bars at health food stores. 

There are also some good juice chains popping up in various parts of the country. In Los Angeles, there are tons, but Pressed Juicery is definitely the best. They have multiple locations from Downtown, to the Valley, to the Westside.

They also have juice subscriptions where they will deliver to you anywhere in the country.

In Austin, I’ve heard Skinny Limits is a great company. If you live in New York City, you’re pretty much inundated with juice bars on every other corner. Organic Avenue and Juice Press are my personal favorites.

It’s pretty easy these days to find somewhere to buy a juicer or find someone to make it for you, so try incorporating it into your daily regimen. And if you give it a shot, let us know how it goes by leaving a comment below!

Photos 1 & 4 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Getting Started With Juicing: Make Your Own or Pre-Made? And Which Juicer Is Best? appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Juicing has become incredibly popular over the past few years, in part due to the popularity of the 2010 documentary Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. In it, overweight Australian Joe Cross filmed his transition to health by going on a sixty-day juice fast and traveling across the United States inspiring people with his story. If you haven’t seen it, you can check it out via Neflix Instant or on YouTube. The Wall Street Journal even reported in 2012 that sales of home juicers were up 71% over the year.

So the question is, should you jump on the bandwagon? In a word, yes, but there are many misconceptions about juicing and how to go about it. Here are some of the most important things you need to know to do it properly:

The Benefits of Bioavailability

Why should we drink juice in addition to eating raw vegetables and fruits? Whereas solid food requires several hours to digest, juicing separates the water and nutrients from the fiber of fruits and veggies, which enables the body to assimilate the micronutrients (vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals) contained within the plant in minutes with minimum effort from the digestive system. This helps the body conserve vital energy and allows for maximum nutrient bioavailability (absorption).

Many vegetables contain incredibly powerful compounds that are only activated when their cell walls are sufficiently broken down, and juicing is one of the most effective ways of doing that. For example, breaking down the cell walls of cruciferous vegetables like kale, cabbage, and broccoli activates their potent cancer-fighting phytochemicals known as isothiocyanates. While you can certainly create these chemical reactions by chewing whole foods, most people don’t chew their food nearly enough to be effective at it.

Go Raw or Go Home

Not all juice is created equal. The only juice you should consider healthy is freshly made unpasteurized (aka raw) juice made primarily from vegetables. The bottled fruit and vegetable juices you typically find in the aisles of your grocery store have been boiled to oblivion and have lost all of their beneficial enzymes and almost all of their nutrients, basically leaving you with just sugar water.

Detoxing for Weight Loss

It’s not a quick fix weight loss solution, but it may help you get leaner over time. Juice fast crash diets are pretty popular right now, but they can be problematic if they’re used incorrectly. Most people use them as a detox from their unhealthy lifestyles and after they’re done with the fast, they go right back to eating and drinking unhealthy foods, which negates the whole concept of the fast. However, a short juice fast can be worthwhile if it’s used to jumpstart a transition to a healthy whole foods plant-based diet. If you’re very overweight, a longer juice fast may be beneficial, but make sure you don’t do anything that serious without supervision from a doctor.

In my experience, it’s much better to consider juicing as a high-powered supplement to an already healthy diet. Drinking a fresh juice before eating a meal will help you feel full more quickly, since the receptors in your stomach will recognize the large amount of micronutrients present in your system. The reason why you can feel hungry shortly after eating a big unhealthy meal is because your body realizes you haven’t consumed enough micronutrients for it to function on an optimal level. Over time, flooding your system with high amounts of micronutrients may help you feel more satisfied and reduce food cravings or what Dr. Joel Fuhrman, author of Eat to Live, calls “toxic hunger.”

Performance Enhancing Juice

Juicing may help increase athletic performance. Many plant-based athletes incorporate juicing into their diets, including endurance athlete Rich Roll and fitness model and bodybuilder Chad Byers. In addition, several scientific studies have suggested certain fruits and vegetables (beets in particular), when juiced, actually increase the oxygen-carrying capacity within your bloodstream. Exercise also creates a lot of oxidative stress in your system, and since you can drink five times the amount of veggies you would be able to get if you ate them whole, you end up getting that much more in the way of protective and restorative vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and antioxidants rushing through your system.

Watch Out for Sugar

Don’t overdo it on the high-sugar vegetables and fruits. One thing to be careful of when making or buying juice is the sugar content. The same principle that allows nutrients from juice to be absorbed so easily into your system also applies to sugar, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. So when in doubt, limit the amount of carrots, beets, and fruit in your juices. Try to make the overwhelming majority of your juice from leafy greens, other veggies such as cucumber, celery, and peppers, and add a bit of low-sugar fruit such as lemon, pear, or apple to sweeten it up if need be.

Making juice isn’t just for cold drinking. One of the best uses for fresh juice is in soup bases. A combination of celery juice, carrot juice, and filtered water makes a fantastic substitute for salty vegetable broth. In this case, since you’re consuming it within a pot of fibrous veggies and beans, the sugar content of the carrot juice isn’t such a big deal.

Make sense? I know it’s a lot to take in, but if you start simply by drinking a juice once or twice a week, it won’t be overwhelming. In my next post, I’ll go over the different kinds of juicers on the market and which ones you should consider buying, some of the best places around the country to buy pre-made juices, and my favorite recipes.

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Getting Started With Juicing: What You Need to Know appeared first on Breaking Muscle.