Vegetable Juice Recipes

Way before it was cool to juice, Jay Cordich was doing it on your TV at two in the morning with his flashy new Power Juicer. He was the original Juice Nut (and was better looking, too). The reason he juiced his veggies is there is simply no way you can eat 10 carrots, a large bag of spinach, 5 celery stalks, a red pepper, two garlic cloves, and half a cucumber—all raw—but you can drink all of those vegetables in five minutes in the form of juice. A juicer does the work of having to chew through all that fiber to get to the nutrients, depositing veggie goodness into a glass as pretty as you please. There is simply no way to get so many nutrients and antioxidants into the cells as effectively as juicing. Multivitamins may look impressive on paper but so does your pretty pee an hour after taking them. Drink all the color-rich veggie juice you can stomach and your pee will run as clear as a mountain stream because all that phytochemical magic is getting where it belongs—into your cells.

Rule of thumb: fruit is high in vitamins; veggies are high in minerals. I know it’s easy to drink more fruit juice than veggie juice, but don’t do that. A balance of both will provide the widest spectrum of nutrients, including cancer-fighting, detoxifying phytochemicals.

As for the greens you will be juicing, you can add as many as you dare, because greens have so few calories they do not even have to be counted. As long as it’s—you guessed it—green, they’re all good. The darker green, the better. Forget about juicing iceberg lettuce; you might as well be juicing styrofoam.  The darker the color, the better.