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People making their own fresh juices at home is an ever growing health practice. With the inspirational Jack Lalanne touting the virtues of juicing for the past decade or so and the fact that many of us are making healthy changes in our lives has brought the health benefits of juicing into homes across the USA. So lets take a look at the wonderful benefits juicing provide.

Phytochemicals
Phytochemicals are very powerful antioxidants that are found in plants, fruits and vegetables. Many thousands of these phytochemicals have been identified by scientists and they just keep on finding more! This is the reason that supplements (even though they have their place) cannot compare with eating (and especially drinking) fruits and vegetables. Phytochemicals help protect our cells from oxidative damage and inflammation that can lead to many degenerative disease such as cancers, heart disease and premature aging. Even arthritis and diabetes are now being linked in some way to oxidative damage, indicating that phytochemicals may help prevent these diseases too.

Concentrated Nutrition
As important as eating fruits and vegetables are to ensure we have plenty of essential fiber in our diets, juicing also has its advantages. Although the fiber is discarded by juicing machines it increases the amount of other nutrition that we can digest from fruits and vegetables, especially phytochemicals. Many phytochemicals are bound strongly in the fibers of fruits and vegetables and chewing only releases a very small amount of them for digestion. A juicing machine, however, breaks down these fibers extensively releasing a lot more phytochemicals than we can just by chewing. If you combine this with the fact that you need at least several fruits or vegetables to make just one glass of juice, you can see just how rich a concentration of nutrition a fresh juice is!

Bio-availability
Another great thing about the fact that there is no (or very little) fiber in a fresh juice is that the juice is very easy to digest. In fact, juice needs hardly any digesting at all and places minimal burden on the digestive system. For this reason, phytochemicals, as well as vitamins and minerals are free to be absorbed right into the blood stream. This greatly increases the percentage of the nutrients that make it to our cells where they are needed to work they essential functions and protective actions. This creates what we call a high bio-availability and juicing is one of the most bio-available ways known for digesting nutrients.