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Default Green juice: drink your way to five a day

Green juice: drink your way to five a day

Juice made from green leafy vegetables is the latest
health-food trend. Is it really good for you, or just an
expensive fad?

By Katy Salter
The Guardian
September 18, 2013

Green juice: an easy way to add more leafy veg to your
diet. Photograph: Janine Lamontagne/Getty Images

Move over flat whites. A drink with the colour and
consistency of Labyrinth's Bog of Eternal Stench is
stealthily emerging as the nation's must-slurp beverage:
green juice. Drinks made from leafy green vegetables are
popping up on supermarket shelves (Sainsbury's, Waitrose
and Whole Foods all now stock branded green juices), in
juice bars such as Crussh, in recipe books (thanks
Gwyneth Paltrow) and on Instagram, currently clogged with
#greenjuice selfies. Meanwhile, New York is experiencing
a "juice bar brawl" as a flurry of brands each claim
their juice is the healthiest.

While vegetable juice is nothing new, with the likes of
V8 and carrot juice doing the rounds for years, green
juicing uses large quantities of leafy veg and brassicas
such as kale, spinach, chard and broccoli. The other main
difference between (fresh) green juice and traditional
vegetable drinks is the technique - cold-pressing, where
the juice is extracted by a method of crushing and
pressing. Traditional centrifugal juicers, the type
usually sold in Britain, use fast-spinning blades that
heat up as they whir, thus, cold-press converts say,
oxidising and therefore destroying some of the nutrients
in the juice. Clare Neill, co-founder of juice company
Radiance Cleanse, says juice from a centrifugal machine
"oxidises faster because so much air has gone through the
juice while it's being made."

Fresh green juice wins health points over packaged fruit
juice and smoothies on several counts. First, most fruit
juices sold commercially in the UK are pasteurised.
Nutritionist Vicki Edgson says: "They're heat-treated so
they have a longer shelf life and no bacteria, but this
means unfortunately a lot of the nutritional value is
knocked out." Second, green juices contain much less
sugar than their fruity counterparts. Third, there is a
range of nutrients present in those dark green
vegetables, the ones we're always being told to eat more
of – kale is packed with beta-carotene, calcium, vitamin
C and vitamin K.

So is drinking a glass of green juice as good as eating
the vegetables? Not quite. Registered dietician Iona
Taylor says: "You'll get the vitamins and minerals but
not the fibre. And the soluble fibre in vegetables is
really good for your cholesterol and blood pressure."
There is a potential way around this problem. Edgson
suggests avoiding both standard centrifugal AND cold-
press juicers, and using a powerful blender instead:
"When you pulverise or blend with a Vitamix or similar
blender, you get the benefits of the fibre as well. The
blades go through everything."

Both Edgson and Taylor say there are some people who
should approach green juice with a little caution. Edgson
checks clients aren't on anti-depressants or blood-
thinning medication such as Warfarin, and is also "a
little wary when women are in the first trimester of
pregnancy." This is because "many of the ingredients that
go into a green juice speed up detoxification through the
liver," she says. "I don't want to exacerbate the moving
through the system of those medications faster than they
are designed to do."

But for the rest of us, green juice seems an easy way to
add more leafy veg to our diets. "You can put a lot more
in a juice than you could sit and eat," says Edgson. But
how palatable is a big glass of cabbage? I spent a week
finding out.

I kicked off with a mini juice fast from Radiance
Cleanse, with six 500ml bottles for the day. The juices
were delicious. Alka Green – courgette, spinach,
broccoli, fennel, apple and lemon – tastes zesty and
vital, with no hint of broccoli or spinach. I spent the
day hovering between the sofa and loo, though, and missed
lovely, carby, solid food, so for the rest of the week, I
incorporated green juice into my regular diet instead. I
borrowed a Hurom cold-press juicer from Lakeland. It
looks like the Starship Enterprise and costs an eye-
watering £299, but by golly, it juices them brassicas
good. I followed La Paltrow's green juice recipe: kale,
mint and an all-important apple. It's really tasty.

Green juice is also surprisingly filling. I drank it mid-
afternoon and found it alleviated 4pm snack cravings. I
experimented with spinach, spring greens, cavolo nero. In
juice form, none taste like the vegetables in question.
And most likely it was psychological, but I felt
healthier and more energetic, too. The biggest stumbling
block is the cost of the equipment. Is using a standard
£25 juicer worth doing? "Definitely – 100%," says Neill.
Just drink it straight away, rather than storing it in
the fridge, and bear in mind "they're not as good at
juicing leafy greens, so you'll need to juice more to get
the same volume."

So now I've found an affordable compromise, my new green
juicing habit is here to stay. Kale and spinach to go,
please.

More at:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...e-drink-health

Jai Maharaj, Jyotishi
Om Shanti

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.jai-maharaj

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