Last year a friend of mine was selling one of her juicers, a Breville Juice Fountain, and I jumped on the chance to bring juicing back into my life! My mom had a juicer when I was a child, she’d buy a 20 lb bag of carrots and we’d have fresh carrot juice every day until we used it up. I knew I was going to love having a juicer in the house. Now, I juice with a lot more than carrots – broccoli, apples, beets, cucumbers and celery are among my favorites, with fresh ginger and turmeric to add extra flavor and health benefits.
As our household prepares to stay home for, who knows how long really, in response to COVID-19 I’m thinking about ways we can stay healthy and boost our immune systems. Staying as healthy as we can now is taking on a whole new importance, to put it lightly. Juicing offers a way to add more vitamins to our diets, an extra jolt of goodness in a balanced whole-foods diet as our body uses vitamins from fresh whole foods more efficiently than through supplements.
I thought I’d share a handful of juicing recipes to inspire people to drag out their juicers, or invest in a juicer (I love the Breville Juice Fountain Elite) if they’ve wanted to try juicing, at this moment when our collective health is so important!
What is Juicing?
Juicing is the process of extracting the liquid from fresh fruits, vegetables and roots (like turmeric and ginger) to make juice. In his book The Complete Book of Juicing, Michael Murray explains that “Juicing is an effective and easy way to meet your daily quota for all essential vitamins, minerals, carotene and other valuable cancer-fighting nutrients.”. Antioxidants are another key benefit from consuming concentrated vegetable/fruit juice, which protect the body against free radicals and pro-oxidants. Juicing also empowers the body with energy and improves the functions of the immune system. “Juicing increases the amount of raw food we consume and supplies the body with more energy, which boosts the immune system and aids the body’s cleansing process”. The Mayo Clinic cautions that juicing does not provide us with the fiber found in fruits and vegetables that we need, and that’s an important point. I don’t propose replacing food with fresh juice. Juicing for me is not about fasting but about supplementing our diet with more vitamins and anti-oxidants, a booster or supplement, not a replacement.
Juicing Tips
- Use organic produce – it’s the easiest, don’t-have-to-worry-about-it way to insure that we’re not drinking pesticides. Commonly used pesticides like Glyphosate, Chlorpyrifos and Atrazine are used in conventional agriculture in the United States and scientific studies (and law suits) have shown that ingesting pesticides carries serious health risks (see above pesticides which are hyperlinked for more information on risks).
- Drink your juice as soon as you make it! Otherwise it starts to separate and becomes less sweet the longer you wait to drink it.
- There is no need to peel or even cut your fruit and vegetables before putting them in the juicer. You should wash your produce before juicing and trim the root ends of carrots, beets and like-produce.
- Rinse out the strainer inside your juicer immediately (even before drinking your juice, it will just take a minute). The pulp dries quickly and will be much more difficult to clean out of your strainer thoroughly if you wait. Eventually you’ll need to replace your strainer if you consistently wait too long before cleaning it because dried pulp will accumulate with each use.
Juicing Recipes
5 organic pears, 2 large organic cucumbers, 1 entire head of organic celery, one-inch of organic fresh ginger. Just put it all, whole and unpeeled in your juicer and drink immediately! This juice offers anti-inflammatory antioxidants from the ginger
plus Vitamins A, C, K, B-6, Calcium, Iron, Magnesium, Riboflavin, Folate and Molybdenum . The celery and cucumber make this juice super refreshing, this recipe yields about 36 oz of fresh juice.
A full head of organic broccoli, 1 organic red bell-pepper, 6 organic radishes, 2 organic green apples,4 organic carrots one inch of organic fresh ginger. Trim carrots and radishes, add everything to the juicer and drink immediately. This flavorful juice packs in Vitamins A, B-6 and C, plus
Folic acid, Potassium, Iron, Calcium and anti-inflammatory antioxidants from the ginger. This recipes yields about 24 oz of fresh juice.
6 organic carrots, 3 small Asian cucumbers, 3 organic radishes, 1 inch organic fresh ginger. Trim carrots and radishes and add everything into the juicer. This recipe yields about 16 oz of fresh juice and offers a jolt of Vitamins A C, B-6, Folate and anti-inflammatory anti-oxidants.
Get Creative and Colorful with your Juicing!
If your fruits and vegetables don’t have a peel, or are peeled by you, and are full of color and flavor, they will be great juiced! So, use your imagination and your taste-buds to design your own delicious and nutritious juices. I don’t have beets in the fridge to use and photograph at the moment but they’re wonderful for juicing. Turmeric is also a great juicing ingredient for it’s anti-inflammatory antioxidants, but it’s bitter, so use sparingly. Here’s another recipe I’ve used that offers a nice balance between sweetness from beets, carrots and apple, bitter from the turmeric and refreshing cucumbers which provides Vitamins A, B-6 and C; Folic Acid, Iron, Calcium, Potassium and anti-inflammatory antioxidants:
- 2 organic beets (trimmed and scrubbed)
- 1 organic apple,
- 6 organic carrots (trimmed and scrubbed)
- 2 large organic cucumbers
- 1/2 inch fresh organic turmeric
Maintain Your Own Health & Help Protect Your Community
We are hopefully all following the advice of the experts – wash hands often, don’t shake hands, practice social distance with at least a meter of space between people in public places, stay at home if we can and wear a mask when you’re in public ( you can check out my blog on how to make your own hospital approved mask at:
And don’t forget to take good care of your selves – eat well, take vitamins, exercise..and why not add more fresh vitamins and antioxidants to your diet with fresh juicing! Stay healthy everyone!
Breville Juice Fountain Elite
