Being dense is good

Nutritionally dense, that is. Green leafy things in particular are packing a lot.



1 whole unpeeled organic cucumber (from a friend's garden!)
2 stalks bok choy
2 leaves swiss chard
1 organic granny smith apple
1 whole lemon (rind removed)
1.5-inch chunk fresh ginger root

The above ingredients yielded about 16 ounces of juice, which according to my calculations contains the following "daily values based on a 2,000-calorie diet":

238% Vitamin A
216% Vitamin C
10% Vitamin E
1084% Vitamin K
13% Thiamin
20% Riboflavin
8% Niacin
28% Vitamin B6
34% Folate
25% Calcium
23% Iron
37% Magnesium
37% Potassium
8% Sodium
8% Zinc
18% Copper
43% Manganese
3% Selenium

And it doesn't taste like a liquified salad, thanks to the lemon, ginger and apple.

How could you possibly?

How could you possibly eat all this for breakfast?

2 stalks of bok choy, 2 stalks of celery, 2 swiss chard leaves, a beet, a red bell pepper, 2 carrots and 2 tomatoes.

It's amazing how much you'd have to actually eat to get enough vitamins and minerals in your diet. I don't think it would be possible for most people — you'd be eating all day long!

Another observation is that people have no problem eating a vegetable soup or stew that is this color:


(kinda fun how it came out of the juicer and formed these layers)


(after mixing it all together)

Yet when a juice is this color, it turns people off. When I began juicing my first reaction to these colors was not revulsion, but "is this going to taste okay?" I guess it's because Americans are so conditioned to think that "juice" = bright and only certain colors. I got a green juice to go from Protein Bar last week and as I walked down the street I noticed people looking at it. One guy even nudged his friend and pointed, as if I were drinking a puréed monster. You just don't see a lot of bright green liquids being ingested by humans, so it doesn't look "normal." Think outside the juice box, people!

My V7 is better than your V8

In fact, my V4 and V5 probably are too. But I wanted to get the number closer to the name-brand product just to be more than fair.

People seem to think that drinking store-bought vegetable juices is "good enough" when it comes to nutrition. The truth is, they are better for you than fruit juices or soda, unless you have high blood pressure, as they are typically loaded with sodium — more on that in a bit. But they simply cannot compare to the amount of nutrition you get from freshly juiced raw vegetables. An important word in that statement is "raw" — commercially prepared juices are often pasteurized, a heating process that destroys much of the nutrients.

An 8-ounce serving of regular V8 has a fifth of the recommended daily intake of sodium. The manufacturers recognize how ridiculously high in sodium their normal products are, and have created "low sodium" versions. The good news about these, especially for the blood-pressure-conscious, is that the sodium is replaced with potassium chloride.

Regardless of the sodium or potassium content, processed bottled or canned vegetable juices have a fraction of the nutrients of fresh raw vegetable juice. How big of a difference is there? The combination of seven items pictured above (carrot, plum tomato, beet, bok choy, celery, red pepper and onion) yields about 16 ounces of juice. The "serving size" for store-bought juice is 8 ounces. So for comparison purposes, I halved the data for the fresh juice. Also, when juiced you get about 95% of the nutrients, so I take that into account. The fresh raw juice still beats the processed stuff, by far:



All of the data used in this comparison was sourced from nutritiondata.self.com. The fresh raw juice also includes 1/2 teaspoon of potassium chloride in the 16-ounce total, or 1/4 teaspoon per 8-ounce serving.

The flavor of this fresh raw juice is very similar to the store-bought processed stuff. The texture, however, is much thinner — it isn't "pulpy" at all. As such, it doesn't make a very good base for a bloody mary mix. For that, I'll stick with V8. For nutrition, the raw juice wins.

Ruby Tuesday

The color of this morning's juice was sure to be bright — in fact it was a beautiful ruby red. But I worried it was going to be too sweet for my taste, with a beet, a red pepper AND carrots. So I threw in an apple and a lemon and that was just enough tartness to give the juice some tanginess. It's funny to me how many people say they don't like beets. I've actually "converted" a few people by including beets in other things like roasted vegetables with garlic and herbs. Even if you swear you don't like the taste of beets at all, you wouldn't taste it in this particular recipe. This one was so good, it's going on the recipes page.

Rubylicious

1 red beet, peeled
2 medium-large carrots
1 red bell pepper, seeds/core removed
1 whole lemon, rind removed
1 pink lady apple (any red apple would work, but these are more tart)

I almost felt guilty

I almost felt guilty juicing half of a rather large organic yellow heirloom tomato. But then I realized, this is what tomatoes should be all the time! We're just used to eating crappy boring tomatoes, so these seem extra special.

We ate half of it last night sliced, and I saved the rest. It had almost no seeds and was nearly solid flesh. Wonderful flavor. I didn't want to waste the remainder — far too expensive — so I kept it covered overnight, which is about as long as you can with a fresh ripe tomato that's been cut. (You should never put tomatoes in the refrigerator. It ruins their texture.)

The leftover half was so big, I had to cut it to fit into the juicer's already large feed tube.





2 carrots
2 stalks bok choy
1 red bell pepper
half of large yellow heirloom tomato
1/4 teaspoon potassium chloride

No more pills please!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I would like to get enough potassium in my diet to stop taking pills altogether for my blood pressure. My family seems to have a history of higher-than-normal blood pressure, and I already considered it wonderful that mine is now much lower than it was a few months ago. But when I visited my doctor today, the first thing he wanted to do after measuring it (was 135/100) was add another pill to the one I'm already taking. He said the systolic number (135) was okay considering my age and predisposition to slightly higher pressure, but that the diastolic number (100) was too high.

I flatly refused to take another pill daily, and then explained to him what I was doing to get my blood pressure down so that I wouldn't have to take any medications. Until yesterday I wasn't really getting much exercise, which may be the reason the diastolic number (and to some degree also the systolic) is so high. I need a stronger heart, so it doesn't have to work as hard to do its job. Gotta increase the exercise along with the dietary changes and see if I can make enough of a difference voluntarily to get my BP closer to a "normal" range. He seemed optimistic that it was possible. I'm going to keep doing what I can and continue monitoring the numbers.

Fantastic find

I've been considering doing a juice fast — a cleanse of sorts. I've read that the body uses about 30% of its daily energy on digestion alone. By relieving it of having to burn all this energy processing food, it can spend that 30% on other things like tissue repair and toxin removal. The benefit of using vegetable juice during this period is that you're still getting nutrition, but your body doesn't have to really do anything to but absorb it.

For the ten years that I worked from home, it was easy to do anything I wanted with my diet and or exercise routine. Now however is a different story. I don't want to take time off from work just to do a fast, nor do I want to try to do a fast while vacationing somewhere — it just wouldn't be feasible (or fun). Plus if I'm going to do it, I need more than a weekend. The main problem is what to do in the middle of the day when I'm not at home. I actually live walking distance from where I work, but I don't like the idea of going home to juice. I want to relax and be social during my lunch hour. People have asked me, "why not just make a bigger batch of juice and take some to work?" The answer to that is, the longer fresh juice sits, the nutrients don't last, though this would still be better than anything store-bought. According to a friend of mine, oxidation also starts to occur, which is the opposite of all the wonderful benefits of antioxidants.

The solution to my problem of getting just-prepared vegetable juice in the middle of the day (whether fasting or not) is a place I can quickly walk to from my office in River North, called Protein Bar.

In addition to a selection of healthier wraps (minus the breakfast ones, which are loaded with sodium — grateful that they publish this info, so I know what not to order), salads and such, they have a selection of fresh raw vegetable & fruit juice recipes. I found out today (by asking) that they will substitute or include ingredients from one recipe in another, as long as it's from the stock of ingredients they already use for juicing. That means that because they use parsley in one recipe but not in the one I ordered, they were willing to add some parsley to it. Their juices are not cheap at $6 and some change for a 16-oz. serving, but the combinations are well thought out, taste good and it beats having to go home and do it myself. Time is money.

Beet me up!

I've been using primarily yellow beets in my juices, but this morning I also threw in a regular one. The amount of color in these things is amazing. Unfortunately, so is the amount of sugar, at about 6 grams per beet. I added a quarter teaspoon of potassium chloride (salt substitute) to make it a little more savory versus sweet.

This combination produced about 16 ounces of juice.

Big flavor

Variety is good. It's easier for people to stick with something like juicing when they start noticing the benefits, but it certainly helps if it doesn't get boring. As with cooking, I like to try new things. I hadn't used any citrus yet, and thought it would make an interesting addition to a green juice. So I cut the rind off a whole small lemon, peeled a good-size chunk of ginger root, and combined those two flavor powerhouses with some red kale, cucumber, swiss chard, celery and apple.



It was fantastic. I love both lemon and ginger, and they did not let me down. Since I didn't have any green apples on hand, I had to use a Pink Lady apple. However, the color of the apple's skin, combined with the fact that my kale was "red" (the stems are a purple color), resulted in a rather unappetizing juice color: that of split pea soup. This would be easily remedied by using green kale and a green apple. Fortunately, I can forgive funky color as long as the juice tastes good. If you're picky or squeamish about the color of your juice, a good rule of thumb is not to mix too much red and dark green things together as they tend to result in muddier, swampier colors.

Experiment: a failure of taste

That's what I get for taking the advice of a book that said I should go ahead and use the beet greens, not just the beet. That was the first problem with tonight's experiment. The beet greens made the juice almost unpalatable due to the bitterness they imparted. I drank it anyway because in spite of the fact that it tasted like zombie vomit, I knew it was good for me and didn't want to waste it.



Problem #2 is that I used probably twice the turmeric root as I should have, though too much doesn't apparently have any negative health effects — it just stains everything it touches. Rubber gloves probably would have been a good idea when peeling it. I've read that too much turmeric can also be bitter, but I think the beet greens were responsible for that. I will be using fresh turmeric root frequently, and will be monitoring juice flavor.

Why am I using fresh turmeric root when I could just as easily have mixed in a teaspoon of powdered turmeric? I think whole plant sources of nutrients and phytonutrients are better than dried/ground ones.

Why am I using turmeric at all? It's not just for color, though it certainly adds a lot of that. Turmeric is widely used as an anti-inflammatory. It helps your liver. There's also evidence that it helps thwart cancer, and it may even help prevent Alzheimer's.

Here are some interesting articles I found online if you want to read more:

World's Healthiest Foods: Turmeric

Huffington Post/Dr. Andrew Weil — Turmeric Health Benefits

Sunrise

That's how bright and orange these became when juiced:

Pensive about hypertensive

I checked my blood pressure in May and it was something ridiculous like 180/130, which is dangerously high ("Stage 3" hypertension). At the time I was under a lot of stress, eating poorly and not taking my stupid pills.

I started taking the pills again after that, and at the time thought I was doing myself a big favor by drinking bottled tomato juice or V8 every morning. But I still wasn't really eating many vegetables. I was watching my sodium intake but that was it.

Today I walked to two different pharmacies on my lunch and decided to see what their machines said. They were very different. The first machine put it at 154/103. The next one, about half an hour later, said 135/99. Either reading is an improvement over a few months ago, and the second isn't too bad — but ideally it should be less. Both readings are back down in the Stage 1 hypertension level, which is a lot better than Stage 3. I think I'm going to get a kit of some kind to monitor this at home.

Red vs. green

Wondering what his morning's blend will look like. This mix pits strongly colored red pepper and carrot against green chard. The celery and tomato are nearly neutral, in terms of how much they influence the color. I suspect the juice will still come out mostly reddish-orange. Let's see.



It turned out sort of a rust color, but tasted fine.

Before and after

This morning's breakfast:

• 1 whole baby bok choy
• 3 medium carrots
• 1 red bell pepper
• 3 plum tomatoes
• 1 quarter small yellow onion
• small (2.5-inch) yellow beet

Here's what it looked like after juicing:

Being on the pill

This is the pill I'm supposed to take every day to keep my blood pressure down. Hydrochlorothiazide. I hate it. It's small, so taking it isn't the big deal. It works by preventing your kidneys from reabsorbing sodium back into the bloodstream. That's supposed to help lower blood pressure by removing sodium. Unfortunately it also makes me have to pee a lot as a result. Oddly, it also depletes the body of potassium, which is the mineral that has the opposite effect as sodium on blood pressure. Sort of a catch-22, I think.

I really want to get enough potassium in my diet, that combined with reduction/elimination of excess sodium, I can hopefully stop taking pills.

It only LOOKS like paint water

I usually do a green juice in the evening. At first it was hard to get myself to drink something that looks like I cleaned a paintbrush in it, but the taste makes up for the unusual appearance of juices comprised of mostly green and leafy vegetables. In this case it was kale, cucumber and green apple with a bit of ginger root.

Typical breakfast

Since I started juicing daily on July 15, 2011, this is my typical combination of vegetables that I juice for breakfast: plum tomatoes, red bell pepper, carrot and some sort of green — in this case swiss chard.