Raw and Fresh :: Holistic Healing

Raw and Fresh
by author Susan Safyan

Raw, fresh, and juicy&that’s the best way to get vitamins, minerals, and enzymes into your body. Freshly juiced vegetables and fruits are more easily digested by the body than whole ones and are, overall, nutritionally superior to cooked.

The Raw and the Cooked

Raw fruits and vegetables retain their natural, synergistic complex of vitamins, minerals, phyto-hormones, and enzymes. These elements provide detoxifying as well as nutritional benefits to the body. Many vitamins are eliminated or diminished by cooking, and enzymes are killed at temperatures above 48 C (118 F). Raw foods supply potent nutrients to the body in their natural, uncooked form.

Juicing raw fruits and vegetables releases the nutrients from the plants’ cellulose fibres, making them easier to digest than solid foods. Whole, solid fruits and vegetables may take the body several hours to digest, while juices are more quickly digested and assimilated. Juicing also concentrates the nutrients: to get the nutrients found in one litre of carrot juice, for example, you’d need to eat almost two kilograms of raw carrots.

Freshly made juices, unlike store-bought canned, bottled, or frozen juices, haven’t begun to oxidize and lose their nutritional value. When making juice at home, process only enough for one day. Use organically grown produce, or, before juicing, wash fruits and vegetables well to detoxify them of pesticide residues.

Buy a Good Juicer

To have freshly made juices every day, invest in a good juicer. Experts agree that the best kind to get is the masticating juicer, which chews or “masticates” the plant pulp to extract the juice. Electric centrifugal juicers are also good; a pulp-ejecting model makes processing easier. These juicers are popular and affordable; be sure to buy one with a steel cutting-blade and a sieve that isn’t made from aluminum, which can react with fruit acids.

Juice Therapy

“Juice therapy” is the use of fruit and vegetable juices in the treatment of conditions and diseases from colds to cancer. The juices are used in healing by detoxifying the body and providing easily assimilated live nutrients and enzymes. Juice fasting is an important component in many alternative therapeutic programs. Some practitioners of juice therapy, such as Paavo Airola in his 1974 classic text, How to Get Well, recommend that fruit and vegetable juices should never be combined, while others advocate therapeutic combinations of fruits, vegetables, and herbs.

Read Up On It

Siegfried Gursche, well-known Canadian health expert and editor of the Encyclopedia of Natural Healing (alive Publishing, 2000) offers more than 45 recipes for freshly made raw food juices in Juicing–For the Health of It (alive Publishing, 2000). These juices are beneficial for conditions from arteriosclerosis to weight loss and are a flavourful way to get a juicy start each day.

Immune-Boosting Pomegranate Cocktail

Susan Safyan, freelance researcher and writer, is an assistant editor at alive. Sheâ€™s been juicing for more than two decades.

Source: alive #263, September 2004

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