When you think of vegetable juice what comes to mind? For many people, it is the memory of V8 juices which were characteristically made of tomato and carrots, but in reality vegetable juice can be made from an infinite array of your favorite veggies.
You can combine several of them, or make a dedicated juice, the choice is yours. One thing that is universally accepted about vegetable juice is that it is extremely nutrient rich and chock full of health benefits.
If you haven’t taken advantage of drinking vegetable juice, we are sure you will want to after seeing the number of ways it can benefit your body.
What Is Vegetable Juice?
Vegetable juice is simply the liquid obtained after processing solid vegetables either by use of a juicer, or from blending, boiling, or sometimes even compressing the whole vegetable. There are an endless number of different vegetable juices that you can make depending on preference, but the more your experiment with the better it is since you will be getting a range of nutrients.
1. Improves Energy Levels
Vegetable juice can help improve your energy levels thanks to presence of many different B vitamins. The primary function of the B vitamins is to improve the metabolism of fats, proteins and carbohydrates, turning them into usable substrates for energy production.
Vegetable juice does not provide a rapid sugar powered energy burst, but over time makes your body more efficient at making use of available nutrients.
2. Promotes Heart Health
Vegetable juice positively benefits heart health thanks to the numerous amounts of antioxidants it contains. In fact, the density of antioxidants is just one of the ways it helps to support the health of your heart, as a reduction in cholesterol levels is also achieved thanks to the presence of fiber and many phytocompounds that actively increase the utilization of fatty acids for fuel.
The antioxidant nutrients help to prevent the deposition of atherosclerotic plaques on blood vessel walls, and also decrease the likelihood of cholesterol becoming oxidized in the first place.
3. Helps Control Blood Pressure
Many people mistakenly believe that vegetable juice is high in sodium, when in reality the vast majority of vegetables are extremely low in sodium, but rich in potassium. This makes vegetable juices ideal for controlling blood pressure, as potassium benefits blood vessel flexibility, help to modulate fluid and electrolyte balance, and promote the removal of excessive sodium ions via the urine.
Potassium also exerts mild vasodilatory actions to increase blood vessel lumen size.
4. Helps Preserve Cognition
Brain health cognition in general frequently decline as we age, commonly because of the impact of oxidative and inflammatory processes. Vegetable juices are especially rich in antioxidants, which help to neutralize the damaging effects of free radicals on healthy cells. Oxidation may subsequently trigger inflammatory responses that have been positively implicated as a contributory factor to many neurodegenerative disorders.
Helping to reduce the burden of oxidation, you stand safeguard brain health well into old age.
5. Supports Skin Health
The skin is the body’s primary barrier against many environmental hazards, including bacteria and other pathogens. As such, it is important to support the integrity of your skin, or you risk open it up yourself the many hidden dangers. Vegetable juices are an excellent tool to help support the health of your skin.
Not only this, but your skin can experience premature aging and functional loss from excessive exposure to ultraviolet light. Vegetable juices thanks in large part to high concentrations of vitamin A and C can help to mitigate the effect of sun damage to an extent, and stimulate natural collagen production to maintain skin’s appearance.
6. Enhances Immune Function
The immune system is extremely efficient at identifying and resolving threats to our health, but to do this effectively it needs to be supplied with nutrients. In particular are the antioxidant vitamins and trace minerals, which can help to safeguard cells of the immune system from damage, or stimulate their activity against foreign bodies.
Trace minerals also play an important role in immunity as they are involved in a number of biochemical reactions occurring in the body at any given time.
7. Supports Detoxification
The chances are extremely high that you have heard of or even used vegetable juices as part of a detox weight loss program, and while the overall safety of these uses for weight loss is not advocated, they still remain very effective for assisting with actual detoxification of waste material.
Vegetable juices can help to stimulate enzymes involved in breakdown of food into simpler substances, and can also help promote the excretion of trouble some residual matter.
8. Can Support Healthy Hormone Levels
Although not widely known, vegetable juices can help you deal with conditions that have an underlying hormonal component. For instance, cauliflower, broccoli or cabbage juice can help reduce the conversion of the male hormone testosterone into estrogen, making it very useful for athletes or anyone that may possess a very high estrogen load.
In similar fashion, certain juices may also help to reduce the secretion of sebum by the skin, in turn reducing the frequency of pimples or acne flare-ups.
Fun fact: did you know that some of the most commonly used medications, the retinoids, are synthetic versions based on the carotenoids? This shows the potential of vegetable juice on hormonal homeostasis.
9. Supports Optimal Body pH
The human body ideally functions best at a pH range that is neutral to very slightly alkaline. However, and dietary practices tend to move us away from this ideal, and towards a pH that is slightly more acidic. While this may not seem important, acidic pH is associated with greater likelihood of cancers, pathogenic infections such as the fungi, or even making you more predisposed to experiencing inflammatory disorders.
Vegetable juices are known as alkaline forming, in the sense that once they are consumed they act as mild bases. They can help alleviate many of the most common, chronic illnesses we grapple with today that have an inflammatory or pH related trigger.
10. Promotes Gut Health
The health of our gut tells a lot about the entire health of our body. Nowhere is this more evident than our probiotic bacteria. Large, thriving colonies of probiotic bacteria indicates an excellent diet and in turn you are less likely to experience digestive disorders including constipation, frequent diarrhea, inflammatory bowel disease, cancers of the intestine and digestive tract and even benefit from superior immunity.
Vegetable juice, even though much of the fiber might have been removed during extraction, still retain a large amount of soluble fiber which probiotic bacteria use for nourishment.
11. Enhanced Nutrient Absorption
All of this is not a universal truth, certain vegetables are better absorbed when they are heated or consumed as liquids. Owing to the fact that most people do not consume their vegetables as juice, it would serve you well the combine using both juices and solid vegetables to reap the benefits of both worlds.
Conclusion
We are sure there are multiple varieties of vegetable juices that you are bound to love. Yes, it is always better to consume as many differently colored vegetables as you can, but in the event that there are some you do not love (and we all have them), be sure to make up for it having more of the ones you do enjoy.
You will see the difference it makes a few years down the line when you look and feel better than you ever did.
[james]https://www.livestrong.com/article/481565-is-juicing-raw-vegetables-good-for-you/
https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-healthy-eating/expert-answers/vegetable-juice/faq-20058178
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/juicing-good-or-bad
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/09/08/vegetable-health-benefits.aspx[/james]
