Like all things, how you do it can be the difference between stacking the odds in your favor, or stacking all the odds against you. “Eating healthier.” can be defined a number of ways – some realistic and beneficial, and yet others define eating healthier as eating only 2 candy bars a day rather than their usual THREE.
Well, as is no secret about me, I believe if you are going to do something anyway, you might as well get the maximum benefit from it. 
This is how I think when I share juicing recipes via the Juicing Tips and Natural Health Newsletter. It’s important for me to tell you about how to choose not only the right ingredients for a recipe, but also the best ingredients. For example, if you are looking at a display of Gala Apples, say maybe a hundred or so in your grocery store, how do you ensure the one you pick is the best one, that will provide the most bang for your buck?
Should you simply assume, one apple is the same as the other 99? Absolutely not. And so is true with all fruits, vegetables and herbs you buy to add to your juice recipe. The selection of said ingredients can make all the difference in the world.
SuperFoods (A word used originally in marketing, but more commonly: Super Foods) stack odds in your favor, naturally. Some of you are probably familiar with superfoods, such as broccoli, which has been on the top ten list of foods to eat to prevent disease for over a decade when it comes to disease prevention and optimizing your health.
Side note: Originally, I was going to put a link here, to the American Cancer Society website, but frankly, their navigation and search feature of their site produces more questions than answer, and I was disappointed and disagree with what they promote as “healthy” to their audience. Because it’s wrong, bluntly.
Superfoods (or super foods) share a few distinct benefits: 1. They pack a wallop of nutrition ounce for ounce, sometimes despite a shockingly small package (and of course, I mean their all-natural self). In this case, a “wallop” is defined by a worthy high concentration of vitamins, minerals, “good carbs”, protein and healthy fats. 2. They usually have the added benefit of fiber – and just as you can choose the worst apple at a grocery store if you don’t know what to look for, you should not assume all fiber is the same.
For example, you could eat an entire loaf of bread in one sitting (actually, I hope that you really couldn’t, but I digress…), and be certain you are going to get things moving – and avoiding all uncomfortable to some “code talk” I MEAN you will be in the bathroom with bm after bm (bowel movement). So, yes, that’s fiber, but it is virtually deplete of nutrition, and in my book does more harm than good, not to mention worth the trouble, time, nor would I hope there’s that much justified pleasure eating that much bread, for such a result.
3. They are often loaded with Antioxidants (or some people say anti-oxidants, but the first way is the correct way). The short definition of an antioxidant is this: Antioxidants combat “free radicals” which in a
nut shell have the potential to damage your DNA and make the cells within you vulnerable. Free radicals put your immune system at risk and can multiply against you rapidly. Free radicals can be produced by external forces as well: such as the sun, pollution, stress and toxins to name a few.
And in the same breath of antioxidants, I should also mention Phytochemicals – which despite the name is a natural occurrence. Phytochemicals basically are an embedded component of Superfoods which gives the fruits and vegetables their color, taste and ability to stand up against disease.
There are natural ways already incorporated into the human body to combat some of the free radicals, but Antioxidant-rich foods (like Superfoods – duh!) give your body more of the “good” chemistry to fight the “bad” chemistry possibly brewing within. I’ll cover Antioxidants much more deeply in a later post.
Free radicals work against your health – breaking you down, making you weaker, aging you, triggering disease and making you susceptible. Antioxidants fight free radicals, thus fighting all that can harm you as stated above. The more antioxidants you have working for you, the less free radicals working against you.
And depending on the foods and drinks you consume, you’ll have one or the other. Thus..
YOU CONTROL YOUR OWN FATE!
You can decide to eat food and drink that trigger the production of either free radicals, or antioxidants. You want more antioxidants is the point, here. But, contrary to much of what has been published online, antioxidants are not a “cure-all” for all things.
You know – - because I sound like a broken record sometimes saying it so often – - that I will never tell you to do something that I don’t personally do and incorporate into my own healthy life. Thus, here’s what I do. Living by my mantra: (repeat it with me – or go the too much fresh juice in your system and repeat it 30 times as fast as you can without stumbling!…) Food Is Fuel: I don’t rely on juicing alone. Eating whole food that is nutritionally packed, fresh and tastes good to me is what I eat.
And don’t think for a minute, that’s all I eat. As I have often said, ice cream is a favorite sweet of mine, despite knowing that it includes junk that is bad for me. Or if I go to a cook out, I’ll sometimes eat potato chips with my meal – - again, empty in nutrition usually, but why in the world would I do that?
Simple; I like them. I don’t like such foods enough to finish them in one sitting, or eat them every day, or eat them as a substitute for the good foods that make up my diet. But, I know my BODY well. I have mastered what I can eat, how it will make me FEEL, what will result from eating such foods, and what RESULTS I’ll be rewarded with in the end.
Healthy Eating
See, here’s my take on healthy eating, and it swims upstream and against the grain of most people who talk about healthy eating. Most people who preach (health books, gurus, health and wellness magazines, the so-called authorities out there by the tens of thousands) about having an optimal diet, don’t actually live by the words. In other words, if we were to follow them around, more often than not we would find them breaking their own rules, cheating and living their life by a completely different definition.
You already know that I am a vegetarian. It’s no secret, sometimes I go more strict and go vegan, sometimes, usually in the summer, I go raw foodist (eating raw food, or “living food”, nothing processed or cooked). And I did have my YEARS (literally) of testing my blood (etc.) every 3 months, sometimes once a month, with full blood works, specifically looking for what changes in my diet, and how I lived my life, affected my health down to the most inner level. I kept journals, and daily references for years. And what resulted was the true discoveries of what was RIGHT for me.
See, I do believe the majority of people within my reach should be eating better. In fact, less than 12% of people in America alone, eat less than the bare minimums of fruits and vegetables each day. And while healthy eating is a completely different beast within itself, (I’ll cover that in depth later too), I certainly don’t think and have learned through experience, that you don’t have to sacrifice all things (food) you love / maybe even crave in order to maintain and keep a healthy body and lifestyle.
And this is NOT theory. It is what has resulted in years, DECADES of hands on research. Experience that can drop 50-60 points in one’s cholesterol, eating well, homemade, filling and delicious food. Natural health experience that got a Mom – mine! – OFF of Diabetic prescription drugs by regulating what she ate and how she ate it. Look, an analogy of this put into practice would be to tell you that there are many ways to move a mountain. You can CHOOSE to move it with a teaspoon, one teaspoon at a time…which, sure, “works”, but is not at all effective or a smart use of your time. You could however CHOOSE to move mountains with a bulldozer and ACHIEVE much more effective results.
The Short List of SuperFoods
So, if you are going to juice anyway – - and you should be both juicing as well as eating raw fruits and vegetables, rather than simply substituting your normally consumed fruits and vegetables with their juiced versions, for example – - reach for SuperFoods, such as these:
Berries: blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, cranberries, acai berries, goji berries (also called wolfberries. Fruit such as: pomegranate, pineapple, mango, passionfruit. Super Greens such as : spirulina, blue green algae, chorella. Sea vegetables like: dulse, kelp, nori, wakame, and kombu. Even tea such as: green tea you are familiar with I’d bet, but also black tea, white tea or have you tried my favorite (even more than green tea – by a long shot), yerba mate tea?
Other Greens, commonly referred to as “leafy greens”, such as: green leaf and romaine lettuces, spinach, chard, kale, mustard greens, turnips, beats and collards. Grasses and sprouts that include: barley, wheat, alfalfa, broccoli (sprouts) – not the same as broccoli the typical vegetable, oats and radish sprouts. Vegetables that include, but are not limited to: cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, brussles sprouts.
Each should be bought fresh, preferrably at a local farmer’s market, not from a can!
If you have questions, comments, opinion, or otherwise, leave a comment for me below this post, and speak out, so I can hear you.
Take care of yourself,
Big Joe Boone, Editor
