Green Juices

Green Juices are excellent ways of getting extra nutrition, both for those who follow the raw food diet and those who just want to make their lifestyle healthier. For those who follow the raw food diet it's even more vital, as I'll explain later in this article.

Green Juices For Extra Nutrition

It's a well known fact that it's easy to overload on calories when you drink them in the form of juice or soda, as they don't really feel like food or fill you up. This same principle can be taken advantage of to add extra vitamins and minerals to your diet.

Green juices are packed with nutrients, most of all minerals and chlorophyll (which is an antioxidant and is said to be extremely beneficial to the body). It also contains plant water, which is an excellent way of hydrating yourself as it has been filtered through the best purification system in the world – a plant! This gives it minerals in just the right proportion for the body to absorb it. That way it doesn't have to spend much energy filtering it through the kidneys.

In general it's said that greens are one of the healthiest foods around, and making a juice out of them can make it easy to consume lots of them in little time.

If you think about it, our primate cousins spend almost all day eating! They eat leaf after leaf, absolutely huge amounts of greens. The volume of fruit they eat, too, would stagger most humans, who have gotten used to extremely concentrated calories with little fibre, minerals, or vitamins.

We have different needs to our primate cousins, so it's good for us to find ways of getting back to our natural diet without using up so much time on just eating. When we don't want to spend a long afternoon eating a massive salad with friends (which can be a very enjoyable activity, by the way), we can concentrate that salad into a pitcher of juice and sip at it while we're working.

By the way, you may also want to check out green smoothies for a concentrated way of getting fruit and greens into you.

When To Have Green Juices

It's good to have green juices at almost any time of day! As I mentioned you can make on and sip at it while working, and it also makes an excellent morning drink as well. As it contains almost no calories and doesn’t seem to activate the digestion in the same way as normal food, I often down a pitcher of green juice before doing sport. My morning ritual, when I can manage it, is green juice and swimming. That makes me feel amazing.

Green Juices For Raw Foodists

Green juices are even more important for raw foodists. When eating the raw diet, there seems to be a bodily necessity to get enough greens in. Lots of raw foodists give up the diet after a few years if they don’t get enough greens.

Victoria Boutenko explained in “Green Smoothie Revolution” her personal method for getting in enough greens – the green smoothie. This is a smoothie made of fruit with 40-60% of greens blended in.

This is a good way of eating, but unfortunately I’m not a big fan of smoothies, and I also prefer to use lettuce for my greens as it’s cheaper than e.g. spinach. (This isn’t a problem with a vitamix blender – see sidebar – but with a normal blender lettuce in smoothies comes out very un-smooth).

I much preferred Natalia Rose’s tip from “The Raw Food Detox Diet”. She suggested having “green lemonade” every day in the morning, before you eat anything else. She made the claim (which I doubt slightly, but we get the point) that she hadn’t known a single successful long term raw fooder who hadn’t used some version of this recipe. I would imagine that successful raw fooders either drink green juice, have green smoothies or just feel OK spending a lot of time chewing monster salads.

So, I’ll leave you with my own version of the “Green Lemonade” juice. I have this, with minor tweaks, almost every day. If you want to learn more, I recommend you check out “The Raw Food Detox Diet” or find a good book on green juices.

Green Juice Recipe

1 head of lettuce (a head will make about 500ml / a pint. I often double this recipe)

1 lemon, the skin cut off

1 stick of celery

A fistful of parsley

Optional: an apple for sweetness

Put all of these ingredients into the juicer and juice them. :)

The secret of this green juice recipe is that the lemon cuts through the strong flavour of the greens, making something that would be otherwise difficult to drink quite tasty. It really is kind of like lemonade.

On that note, be generous with the lemon. If you have small lemons, try one and a half. You can also add apple to make the “green” taste even more moderate.

I hope you enjoyed this article! If you want to read more health tips and other awesome stuff, check out my site on conscious living. You can also read more from me on this site by clicking on my author profile. Finally, take a moment to check out the recommended books below. Thanks for reading!