The cold-buster

I hate being sick. Almost as much as I hate being sick, I hate it when people tell me to drink orange juice. Orange juice usually makes me feel worse, and it doesn't even have that much vitamin C in it — just a lot of sugar.

I made a typical combination juice with beet, red bell pepper, carrot and apple and a couple other things, but added twice as much ginger root and lemon as I normally would. Lemons are a decent source of vitamin C, and ginger root is a natural antiseptic: perfect for my throat after my sinuses/drained down it all night long.



This combination has approximately 494% of the recommended daily amount of vitamin C. Way more than a glass of orange juice. It's also readily absorbed and put to use by the body and therefore better than a vitamin C supplement, in my opinion.

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.

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.

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:

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.