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.