Not far from where we lived there was, in my early teenage years, a car that was the subject of much ridicule in our household. It was not the vehicle’s vital statistics that caused this derision by top-trumps obsessed youngsters. It was the colour.
Beige.
Hearing-aid beige is not a colour we usually associate with health and vitality. It was, as far as we were concerned, an old people’s colour. Sorry if you like beige; that’s just the way it is.
It should come as no surprise that the colours of the food we eat give us an indication of their nutritional content. Bright foods are rammed full of all manner of life-giving nutrients. Beige foods are, well, dead.
If you want to get the maximum amount of vitamins, minerals, enzymes and phytonutrients from fresh fruits veg into your body you have two options:
- Take a big plateful of your favourite, and not so favourite, fruit and veg then start chewing. And keep chewing. Use your internal juicer (teeth) to crush every cell of every mouthful to ensure you extract all the juice.
- Chuck your fresh produce through a juicer (not a blender), add a couple of ice-cubes, and viola, you have a super-nutritious drink.
Juicing is great because it removes the insoluble fibre from your food; you get way more of the good stuff into your body than simply chomping on a raw carrot or two. In fact, fruit and veg are SO good for you that stories abound from people that claim to have cured their cancer simply by drinking several glasses of carrot juice every day(1). You’d be chewing a LONG time to eat that amount of carrots!
On a side note here, some people are vehemently against juicing because of the amount of sugar they assume you’ll be consuming by juicing so much fruit. In reality the proponents of juicing recommend that you juice way more veg than fruit. Oh, and shop-bought juices are no substitute; they’ve been pasteurised and often have added sugar too.
In my UC book I referred to my disappointment when I discovered juicing years after I’d had intestinal surgery. I wished someone had told me about its benefits when I was in recovery. But it was actually worse than that.
Recently I found the leaflets the NHS dietitian gave me shortly after my bowel surgery. In order to aid my recovery I was advised to eat a low-residue diet. Top of the recommendations were plenty of refined foods and NO fruit and veg juices.
There in black and white was the explicit instruction to AVOID freshly pressed fruit and vegetable juices, packed with the nutrition my body so desperately needed. Instead I was recommended to eat inflammatory gluten-laden, refined products sparse in nutrition. Incredible!
Even if you’re not combating chronic illness, a regular glass of freshly pressed fruit and veg juice is an excellent way to give your health a boost.
