PRESENTER (American Male): Good afternoon. My name is Andrew Mulligan and I’m here from the Juice for Life Foundation as part of the monthly health and nutrition lecture series. Today, I’d like to talk about the health benefits of juicing and, uh, basically why it’s a good choice for people who want to get more fruits and vegetables into their diets. There will be a fifteen minute, or, actually, no, twenty minute question and answer period after my lecture during which I’ll take questions from the audience and do my best to answer them.
So, let me start by defining the practice of juicing. Juicing involves consuming the juice that can be extracted from raw fruits and vegetables. It’s important that they’re not fried or grilled. This is because raw fruits and vegetables retain more of their nutrients than if they’ve been heated up. This liquid which is squeezed from the fruits and vegetables is then mixed together for a highly nutritious drink that is packed with minerals, vitamins and antioxidants. Just to be clear, antioxidants remove damaging agents in a person’s body that might lead to illnesses such as cancer. It’s also important to point out that none of the skin or pulp is used with juicing. It’s only the liquid that is taken out which is consumed.
One of the most popular health benefits of juicing is that it’s an easy way to incorporate fruits and vegetables into your diet. For example, if you don’t typically like the taste of fruits and vegetables or if you’re just not in the habit of cooking them, well, juicing makes it easy. A juicer usually runs from about $100 for the cheapest brand to about $600 for top of the line one. Of course, these are for personal use and juice bars often have industrial strength juicers which can cost up to $2000. It’s common for 16 ounces of juice from a juicer to contain about 350 calories. Of course, larger amounts will have more calories, and it’s perfectly healthy to replace a meal such as breakfast or lunch with a large juice that will contain close to 500 calories or even 700, depending on the ingredients.
For those of you who are looking to lose weight, I personally recommend a 10-day juice fast. This involves cutting out all solid meals and only drinking juice. If 10-days is too much, a 3-day juice fast will work as well to help flush out your system and kick-start some weight loss. A 10-day fast can result in the loss of up to 10 pounds. A 3-day fast can result in six to eight pounds. It’s not recommended that you exercise during the fast because your body is receiving a significantly smaller amount of calories per day.
Now, there are some drawbacks to juicing which I think are important to discuss. One of the main drawbacks is that there is very little fiber in juice. Most of the fiber is in the pulp of the fruits and vegetables, which gets discarded. Therefore, if you’re juicing too much or too often, you’ll need to supplement your fiber intake in some other way. Fiber also makes people feel full, so you’ll feel hungry and need a lot more juice if you don’t get fiber from another source. Additionally, it takes a lot of fruits and vegetables to create a drink that can replace a meal. So, your monthly food costs may` actually increase since the amount of fruits and vegetables that you’re buying will dramatically increase. There is also the risk of getting food poisoning from eating raw fruits and vegetables, so it is important that people with weak immune systems do not start juicing.