Many of us would like to have more vegetables in our diet, but it isn’t always easy to get them into your meals.
Juicing at home offers a simple and effective way to get the vitamins, minerals, enzymes, antioxidants and other nutrition in healthy vegetables as delicious and energizing fresh juices.
This page looks at some of the best vegetables for juicing, whether you are on the juice diet, or just want to have health and energy boosting homemade juice regularly.
Unfortunately, many of the nutrients found in freshly made juices have a very short shelf life as they degrade easily.
There’s a special tip ahead to delay this degradation, but even then it’s best to drink your vegetable juice as soon as you make it for the most health benefits.
Especially on the juice diet, but even if you’re just having vegetable juices occasionally, you really want to be making them up yourself.
Store-bought vegetable juice, even the expensive stuff from health food stores, simply isn’t anywhere near as good.
Juice bars are a possibility, but they are very expensive compared to making your own. They also usually use high-speed centrifugal juices, which increases oxidization and reduces the nutritional benefits of your vegetable juice.
Particularly for highly nutritious and disease preventing greens, but also for most other kinds of vegetables, a high quality masticating juicer is a good investment.
These kinds of juicers crush out as much juice as possible with their ‘teeth’, leaving the pulp dry. It’s not only a healthier way of juicing, it’s also a more cost effective approach in the long run as you get extra out of every juicing session and need less produce each time you shop.
If you want to experience the health benefits of juicing on the juice diet, here are some of the best vegetables to get started with.
8 Healthy Vegetables for Juicing
1. Carrots
Carrot juice is delicious and an excellent way to fill your body up on nutrition for disease prevention and healthy skin and eyes.
The high levels of beta-carotene in carrot juice make it a great source of pro-vitamin A, while other carotenoids like alpha-carotene for cancer protection and xanthophylls for enhancing your vision increase its health credentials.
Carrots are also a good source of vitamin C, with some vitamin K and B vitamins thrown in for good measure.
Rich in potassium for healthy heart and muscle function, carrots also contain magnesium, calcium and phosphorus, along with important trace minerals like manganese, molybdenum and copper for maintaining hair color.
2. Celery
Fresh celery juice is full of health benefits and is especially healthy for your blood pressure and cardiovascular system, for reducing inflammation in your body, cleansing and detoxifying and even protecting your cells against cancerous changes.
Read about the 7 reasons it’s worth juicing celery coming up soon.
3. Cabbage
Raw cabbage is a powerful healer for the digestive system and is particularly good for preventing and even treating gastric ulcers.
Like many cruciferous vegetables it is full of sulphur based compounds that show promise for reducing your risk of cancer.
Fresh cabbage juice has a strong taste and potency and is best mixed in with several of the other vegetable juices here.
4. Beets
Due to their potency, it’s best to drink only a small amount of fresh beet juice when you’re beginning with the juice diet. Perhaps just half of a regular size beet, working up to a whole one once you’ve experienced how cleansing they can be.
Deep red beets, also known as beetroot, are a premier detoxifier for your liver. Full of betaine, a substance that helps reduce fatty deposits in the liver and benefits your cardiovascular system, beets are an especially powerful vegetable juice.
5. Parsley
Much more than just a garnish, parsley is another excellent detoxifying vegetable, most notably for your liver and kidneys. Parsley is so good for your kidneys that its juice is often recommended for kidney stone prevention and even treatment.
Considered even more powerful than beet juice, parsley juice should be avoided by pregnant women and those on blood thinning medication. It is also best in small doses, with around an ounce (roughly half a dozen good sized parsley branches) generally a good starting amount.
Like most high nutrient green vegetables, you won’t get much juice out of parsley without a masticating juicer so it might be better eaten until you get one.
6. Cucumber
Fresh cucumber juice is another excellent tonic for your kidneys and large amounts are recommended to help dissolve kidney stones.
Cucumbers are also an excellent source of the mineral silica, which is used in the connective tissues throughout your body, including the skin on your face. Extra silica in the diet may help to firm up and improve your skin tone and many people in online health forums comment on the beautifying effects of fresh cucumber juice.
7. Tomatoes
Great tasting tomatoes make for a wonderful vegetable juice, rich in vitamins and full of antioxidant lycopene for a healthy cardiovascular system.
Juicing tomatoes makes their health nutrients highly bioavailable and mixed with some of the other juices here (like a personal favorite of carrot, celery and parsley for instance) they make for a concentrated shot of health and energy.
8. Kale
Nutritional superstar kale is a big green vitamin pill with excellent levels of pro-vitamin A, vitamin C, B vitamins and particularly the hard to get vitamin K. It is also full of minerals like calcium, potassium, manganese and copper.
Other health benefits of fresh kale juice include a high concentration of organosulfur compounds that are being studied for their anticarcinogenic effects, particularly against stomach cancer, colon cancer, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
Extra Juicing Tips
Organic produce is recommended for vegetable juicing to avoid pesticides, especially on the juice diet where you are detoxifying with the raw juices.
If you can’t get organic, then soak and scrub your veggies with warm water and a dash of vinegar to remove waxes and sprays. This is particularly important with celery, kale and cucumber, but if there was just one vegetable for juicing that you could buy organic, I’d make it carrots.
Organic carrots usually aren’t that much more at a good fruit and vegetable market. Since they can absorb toxins from the ground they are grown in they are much better to buy organically whenever you can.
An extra tip for healthy juicing is to add an ice cube or two and some fresh lemon juice to the bottom of your collection jar. This helps delay oxidization and degradation of the juice, but it’s still best to drink fresh vegetable juice as soon as you make it up.
Coming up next are some simple raw juice recipes for better health and energy, using different blends of all of the vegetables here.
Have you tried the juice diet before or would you like to suggest some other good vegetables for juicing? There are certainly many more that could be added, but these are some of my favorites.
can i add beetroot also in your given recipe?