The Benefits of Juicers

Though I recommend blenders for starting out in raw food because it is easier and more convenient, virtually all long-term, serious raw foodists use juicers as well. As your diet becomes more and more raw-food based, you will need more and more sources of densely packed nutrition because your body will start to assimilate more nutrition from a smaller volume of food. To support this you need to periodically enjoy fresh raw juices both just for fun as well as for the occasional cleanse or detox.
Fresh juices are the fastest shortcut to dense, easily absorbed nutrition. Fresh, raw juice gives you all the nutrients without requiring work by the digestive system, ideal for cleanses or detox as well as for people who have digestion problems and who need to heal themselves before they can properly absorb nutrients from raw foods. Though the fiber in smoothies helps “sweep” the colon, juice is also a great way to cleanse other systems in your body while giving the digestive system a rest.

Juice is ideal for cleansing, detoxifying and healing. I have seen numerous people heal all kinds of chronic health problems by following a supervised juice fast or juice feast. The idea is to drink only fresh, organic raw juice for a period of time, allowing your digestive system to take a break while your excretory system can work on deeper detoxifying.  When your body is eating cooked food you are consuming toxins faster than you can eliminate them so they build up in your tissues, eventually causing health problems and disease. But if you stop consuming new toxins and let your digestive system rest, your excretory or elimination systems no longer have to deal with incoming toxins and start working on eliminating older, built-up toxins in your tissues.

Juice vegetables but consume fruits whole or avoid them altogether. Fruits need all their original fiber in order to slow down the absorption of sugar in your blood. Most vegetables contain less sugar and therefore don’t need as much fiber to slow down absorption (with the exception of carrots and beets).

Juicing gives you a quick burst of energy since it takes so little time for your body to absorb the dense nutrition in juice.
Whenever you are juicing for more than a day it is a good idea to help your system detoxify all the toxins your excretory system will be flushing from your body. For that, always drink plenty of pure water. Also, since there is little or nothing passing through a major excretory organ – the colon – you should help flush the toxins that are usually removed by the colon using enemas or colonics.

Cleaning a juicer is a bit more work than cleaning a blender. Personally, I don’t think the time difference is significant – a matter of a handful of minutes.

Juices are less satisfying than smoothies. With a smoothie you can feel like you just had a regular meal afterwards. After a juice, since there is no fiber, you usually don’t feel as satisfied. However, that feeling of satisfaction is a bit of “programming” based on old habits – not on what your body actually needs nutritionally. I have found that I quickly get used to juicing even during a juice fast. When fasting I always drink plenty of water, which helps make me feel more satisfied (of course, I drink high pH alkaline mineral water from my water ionizer). I also carry a thermos filled with fresh juice that I can sip on throughout the day during fasts just in case I do getting a little overwhelmed by hunger.

A juicer lets you juice almost anything. You might never put beets, carrots or ginger in one of your smoothies, but you can juice them easily. Dark leafy green like kale are easier to drink in juice, but even in a green smoothie you can only add one or two large leaves of kale without messing up the taste.rawfoodlife