Juliet White asked:


We all know the benefits of eating a healthy balanced diet and consuming more fruit and vegetables, but what many people don’t know is that vegetable juice helps to maintain the critical pH balance of the body.

But what’s so important about maintaining the body’s pH balance?

The Body’s pH

For the body to function properly and survive, it should be slightly alkaline (between 7 and 7.5) and have a balanced pH value. A balanced pH:

?Protects the body against damage from free radicals and prevents premature aging

?Helps the body maintain healthy cholesterol levels

?Keeps blood pressure at a healthy level

?Keeps insulin levels normal and prevents unhealthy weight gain

?Allows the heart to function properly

?Promotes energy production

?Keeps our immune system, digestive system, organs and bones healthy

As we get older, our bodies are affected by our busy and stressful lives, exposure to environmental toxins and the food we eat, all of which cause our bodies to become more acidic. Gradually, our bodies become less able to deal with this acidity and are no longer able to neutralize it properly. Suddenly, our bodies change from a childhood state of alkalinity to being excessively acidic.

An imbalanced and acidic pH level affects everything in the body because it affects cellular activity and can cause acidosis (toxic acid waste), which, in turn, can lead to health problems and disease.

Having an imbalanced, acidic body can cause:

?Low energy levels and fatigue

?Weight gain

?Premature and accelerated aging

?Heart disease – due to cardiovascular damage.

?Cancer

?Diabetes and insulin disorders

?Hormonal problems and imbalances
?Kidney, bladder and liver problems

?Digestive problems

?High blood pressure

?Immune problems

?Osteoporosis

?Osteoarthritis

?Neurological diseases

?Problems sleeping

How to Combat Excess Acidity

One easy way to combat this excess acidity and to restore a healthy, balanced pH level is to consume more alkaline foods, like vegetable juices.

As a guide, 75-80% of our diet should be made up of alkaline foods such as vegetables, fruit, quinoa, millet, buckwheat, almonds, soybeans, yogurt and whey. The average western diet of meat, pasta, rice, junk food, coffee, candies and cakes, is highly acidic and does not tend to be rich in alkaline foods, but you can change this dramatically by adding just a few glasses of vegetable juice to your daily diet. Vegetable juicing will allow you to make your diet, and your body, more alkaline and so protect you from the health problems associated with high acidity.

Vegetable Juicing Benefits

Not only will drinking raw vegetable juices reduce your body’s acidity and restore a healthy pH balance, you will also reap many other health benefits:

?A more nutritious diet – Raw vegetables are higher in nutrients than cooked vegetables and vegetable juice is a concentrated source of essential nutrients. These nutrients boost the immune system and help the body to function properly and stay healthy.

?Detoxification – Vegetable juice will help to detoxify your body, allowing the body to get rid of harmful waste products and toxins.

?Better digestion – The enzymes found in vegetable juices will aid digestion, by replenishing enzyme levels.

?A more varied diet – Juicing vegetables allows you to combine many different types of vegetables and to consume them in one drink.

?Quick use of nutrients – Vegetable juices are easy to digest and the nutrients from the vegetables can be used by the body’s cells within 10 minutes of drinking.

?A healthy digestive system – Research has shown that consuming up to one liter of vegetable juice per day can treat all manner of digestive problems.

To be able to juice a wide range of vegetables, you will need a top-quality, professional juicer such as the Omega 8005. A juicer like this will enable you to experiment with different vegetable combinations, enjoy delicious vegetable and fruit juices, and lead a healthy life.

Gray Rollins asked:


The Benefits of Raw Vegetables

We’ve been told since birth to eat our vegetables and yet far too few of us actually do it. Even when we do get around to eating our vegetables it’s only after we’ve cooked out most of the natural nutrients that our body is desperately craving.

Keep in mind, as you proceed, that while all raw vegetables are incredibly beneficial, raw green vegetables actually serve as the basis of nearly all life on this planet. That may sound a bit extreme to you, but stop and consider for a moment that almost every organism on this planet survives by either eating raw green vegetables or by eating an animal that eats raw green vegetables…they really are that important.

I know, you’ve probably eaten most of your vegetables cooked since you can remember. Simply put, just because something has “always” been done a certain way doesn’t mean that it’s the best way to do it. You will get a lot more out of your vegetables if you consume them raw.

I specifically used the word “consume” because, in reality, you get the same benefits from raw green vegetable juice as you do from eating them whole and usually you get it faster. This is because raw vegetable juice takes less internal work to digest and is absorbed into the body almost instantly.

It seems that most people only know that they should eat vegetables because they remember mom telling them to; very few people seem to have a grasp on the amazing nutritional value of vegetables.

Raw vegetables are extremely rich in minerals, vitamins, trace elements, enzymes and natural sugars. All of these are things that your body needs to function properly and the raw veggies will help stabilize and normalize your natural bodily functions. They actually help pretty much ALL of your natural bodily functions operate.

You’ve probably heard about the necessity of vitamins and nutrients to your overall health your entire life, but the concept of enzymes may be new to you. Basically, the enzymes in raw vegetables help your body digest food. This is one of the reasons that green vegetables are sometimes considered “nature’s laxative,” because they get your stomach working properly.

The average American diet is actually comprised of quite a few foods that are incredibly difficult for our bodies to digest properly. When we aren’t digesting properly, the food sits in our stomach longer than it should and we miss out on any nutritional value it did possess.

Okay, so at this point, you may have started to become convinced about the necessity of vegetables…but why raw?

All of our cooking methods have been shown in scientific studies to reduce the amount of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes in vegetables. Of the cooking methods, steaming has been shown to retain the largest amount of vitamin content although it still reduces it.

Vegetables begin losing their valuable nutritional elements as soon as they are plucked, pulled or picked from the ground. For this reason, the additional loss of nutrients during cooking would be a smaller problem if we grew our own vegetables and cooked them the same day we harvested them.

However, most of us don’t live that way. The largest majority of us purchase our vegetables at the grocery store after they’ve been shipped hundreds or thousands of miles. During that time, the nutritional value has been seeping out of them.

Finally, to make matters worse, repeated studies have shown that commercially grown vegetables, right out of the ground, aren’t as rich in nutrients as they were 50 years ago. One large contributing factor to this is that farmers have found so many ways to make their crops grow faster that we aren’t receiving the full benefit of naturally mature vegetables.

It is admittedly extreme, but not that extreme, to state that any vegetable you get from the grocery store and then cook at home probably has the nutritional value of cardboard by the time it hits your stomach.

Start eating (or drinking) raw vegetables as soon as you can. Whenever possible, grow them yourself or purchase them from local farmer’s markets.