Hi there, Patti!
Vegetable and fruit juices were _the_ staple of my diet for years. To put it mildly, I ran into difficulties.
After following the Type O ER4YT guidelines for about 3 weeks, I wanted to run up a flag over the Empire State Building: “THE TRUTH IS AT YOUR BOOKSTORE, AND IT WILL SET YOU FREE.” [Not too original, but I was in a tizzy.] Just the sight of my juicer would stimulate in me the desire to crush, to melt, to destroy -- accompanied by real Stone Age snarls.
By investigation on this site and others, and experimentation on myself, I have very nearly formulated the specific diet that will serve me best for the rest of my life. An essential tool for doing it is my juicer.
Here’s why. (1) Our Stone Age ancestors are supposed to have eaten 30 or 40 different foods during the course of a day. (2) Studies show that the vegetable foods produced using “modern” farming techniques contain lower than potential levels of nutrients due to myriad environmental factors. (3) We now require more of these nutrients, anutrients and the whole shebang, due to myriad environmental factors! (4) A (roughly) 1/2-raw-food/1/2-animal-protein diet seems to serve me extremely well; and (5) Just TRY to eat all those vegetables in a day!!
My current habit is to eat salads, raw nuts, and some alkaline fruits and the occasional rye Manna slice, and to consume the rest of my vegetables and fruits in juice form. My little old cells positively sing with this treatment. Depending on what I’ve managed to eat whole during the day (sounds ogrish, eh?), I make up a batch of a simple- or many-ingredient juice from all kinds of (allowed) vegetables or fruits, This I drink at dinner & breakfast.
Caveat #1: Make sure your diet provides adequate fiber on its own; most juicers remove some or all of the fiber in order to make the phytochemicals more easily available to the body. Or, a VitaMix may be a good choice, as it chews up everything into a soup!
Caveat #2: Endeavor to use organically grown produce, especially for juicing. With few exceptions, you’re using the whole raw fruit or vegetable, so it’s smart to strictly avoid possible chemical and other contamination, since....
JEEZE! Won’t ANYBODY stop me?!! Patti, if that wasn’t enough for you, let me know and I’ll *really* swamp ya -- via e-mail.
still nattering away,
heidi
