Striving4Zen

No, juicing your greens is not nearly as healthy as eating them, provided that you use healthy cooking methods when you eat the greens themselves. If you overcook the greens, you will lose too many of the nutrient they contain, and in that case, you might be worse off than if you used a juicer. But as long as you use the healthy steaming or other cooking methods we describe on the website, you'll get a far greater variety of nutrients in the whole greens than in the juice.

Juicers usually separate the juice from the solids in the leaves or stems or stalks (the pulp), all of which are then discarded. Unfortunately, these portions of the greens often contain a majority - and even a large majority - of the total nutrients, including fiber, and many phytonutrients including certain carotenoids and certain flavonoids. If you added all of the discarded portions back into the juice, you would be getting very close to the same nutritional benefits as the vegetable itself. However, most people would find a juice with all of the processed parts to be unpleasantly thick and displeasing in taste.

We've seen websites promoting the value of live enzymes from freshly juiced greens, and even though we have not seen research to support this claim, there may indeed be some benefit inside of the digestive tract to the consumption of freshly juiced, organic greens. We do know that very fresh (not long from harvest) raw foods that are harvested and handled with care can deliver some functioning enzymes into our digestive tract when we eat those raw foods. However, there is no research showing that we would be able to absorb these enzymes into our body and make use of them outside of the digestive tract.

Many juicers come with a recipe book showing how the vegetable pulp can be used in recipes. This idea makes good sense to us, and would be a way of salvaging some of the nutrients that were lost during the process of juicing.

Blending versus juicing

Blending, however, is somewhat different. We assume that when foods are blended that all of the fruits or vegetables remains in the blender. In this case you are getting virtually all of the nutrients in the food - as well as the fiber- and therefore will not have such an impact on blood sugar levels. There may be a little but of loss from exposure to air and from the mechanical processing, but if you are not heating the foods or discarding any of its components, you are losing very little here - especially in comparison with juicing.

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Labels: beverages, blender, enzymes, greens, juice, juicing, Vitamins