Cold-pressed juicing is one of the best ways to ensure your body gets all the vitamins and minerals it can. The cold-press method of juice extraction helps to preserve the majority of the vitamin, mineral, and fiber content, delivering them to the body in the most efficient, bioavailable way possible.
These days, the benefits of juicing are pretty well known; millions of people are making regular juicing part of their diets, as the increasing number of juice bars and the popularity of home juicer machines demonstrates. This makes perfect sense because there are plenty of health claims associated with fresh juice, including their purported ability to help with weight loss and even potentially fight diseases such as cancer.
While the science behind juicing is still a work in progress, the benefits should still be common sense: the body requires vitamins, minerals, and fiber, and a well made juice will deliver all of these. Not all juices are created equal, however: the method of extraction actually matters a great deal. Vitamins and minerals are easily destroyed by the extraction process, and the fiber content of a juice is equally dependent upon the method by which it is made.
Read on to learn more about what’s so special about cold-pressed juice:
What Is Cold-Pressed Juice?
There are many different methods of extracting juice from fruits and vegetables: a common method is through the use of a centrifugal juicer. This method utilizes a mesh chamber to shred the fruits and vegetables at a very high speed. The speed of centrifugal juicers is responsible for their popularity; they can churn out juices at a very high rate. However, it’s precisely because of this speed that they are an imperfect method of extracting juice; fast moving machinery parts tend to generate a lot of heat, and that heat is known to destroy the vitamin content of juice.
The other method of extracting juice is by way of a masticating juicer, also known as a cold press. This method makes use of an auger that slowly crushes fruits and vegetables to produce juice. Because it moves more slowly, it doesn’t generate the nutrient-destroying heat that other types of juicers do.
The Benefits Of Cold Pressed Juice
Americans these days are often chronically malnourished; today’s high-sugar, high-fat, fast food heavy diets don’t provide nearly the amount of nutrients the human body requires. In addition, the modern lifestyle exposes your body to many different toxins; pollution, unhealthy foods, alcohol, and medicines will all do a number on your physical and emotional health. Regularly including good-quality juice in your diet can go a long way towards flushing out all of these damaging toxins; it will also serve as a booster to your immune system, helping your body to fight off illnesses and recover from long work days and heavy exercise.
What About The Taste?
Cold-pressed juice tastes significantly better, according to most consumers, than other juices. The human body is actually quite good at distinguishing healthy foods from unhealthy ones, and it seems that the additional vitamins and minerals that a fresh cold-pressed juice has add a great deal to the taste as well. If you don’t believe it, try it for yourself: get a fresh cold-pressed juice and compare it to a store-bought one.
Why Juice Instead Of Other Methods?
What is it about juicing that makes it better than other methods of consuming nutrients? Can’t you simply eat raw vegetables, or consume smoothies? What about nutritional supplements?
Well, you should be eating raw vegetables, and an occasional smoothie can be a great idea as well. Juicing isn’t a substitute for those things, but it does provide benefits that they cannot.
As far as nutritional supplements, such as a multivitamin, the jury is still out. While it can’t hurt to get some extra vitamins into your body, supplements simply aren’t a substitute for more natural methods of consuming vitamins and minerals. This is because greens and vegetables contain all sorts of micronutrients that a supplement simply won’t have; they’ll also be easier for your body to absorb. Often, the vitamins in a nutritional supplement aren’t absorbed well and are simply flushed out of the body, unused.
Why juice at all, though? Isn’t it easier and cheaper to just eat raw vegetables? Well, once again, you should be eating lots of raw foods. Juicing isn’t meant to be a substitute for that, but the fact is you can only eat so many fruits and vegetables before your body is simply too full to continue. A healthy cold-pressed juice can contain many, many servings worth of vitamins and minerals; it’s also free of the fiber that will slow down the absorption of these vitamins. By drinking an occasional cold-pressed juice, you can send a great deal of healthy, detoxifying vitamins directly into your bloodstream in a safe and highly efficient manner.
Finding The Right Juice
It’s not enough, however, to simply buy cold-pressed juice. You will have to do a bit of searching to find the right one; many juices carry the “cold-pressed” label but don’t offer the same health benefits of a well made juice from a reputable juice bar.
You will want to look for a juice that doesn’t have any added sugar; too often, additives are put in the juice that offset its health benefits, and extra sugar is one of these. Pasteurization is also harmful to cold-pressed juice. Juices are pasteurized to prevent the growth of bacteria; this is done by quickly superheating them. This is effective but also destroys the nutrient content of the juice.
A high-quality, cold-pressed juice will not have been pasteurized. This means it will be significantly healthier, but also won’t have much of a shelf life; cold-pressed juices should be consumed quickly after being made. They should not sit on a shelf for days, but many brands do: these simply don’t have the benefits of real, freshly cold-pressed juice. Come any try Mother’s Juice Bars cold-pressed juices and experience the difference for yourself.
