TO JUICE, OR NOT TO JUICE...

What a question! With all the different choices there are to buy healthful, unadulterated juice in supermarkets today, why would anyone bother to make their own juice?

First let’s examine a couple of labels, ones for apparently healthful juices containing no guar gum, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors or other potentially harmful fillers that can be purchased at the neighborhood supermarket.

Juice #1 contains water, grape juice from concentrate, sugar, blueberry juice from concentrate, blackberry juice from concentrate, black currant juice from concentrate, citric acid, natural flavors, vitamin C, and grape seed extract. Aside from the sugar and the citric acid, there doesn’t appear to be anything they could have done without. So this juice must be as good for you as fresh juice, right?

Juice #2 is PASTEURIZED, like they do milk, and no sugar is added, so this must be optimum nutrition, wouldn’t you say?

The answer to both questions is NO, and here’s why. The process that involves placing a food product on a grocery shelf demands that the food product be as inert as possible, to ensure its shelf life. (The fact that a dead product is needed to ensure shelf life strikes me as an oxymoron, but we’ll let that pass.) So whatever they do to it cannot match the nutritional value of fresh juice. In order to meet the requirement, both of these products are superheated. After all, pasteurization is heating process, and so is concentration. And this heating destroys important nutrients.

You may think that Juice #1 is okay if all they do is concentrate it, but let me explain to you what that process entails. In a commercial concentrator known as a "falling film" evaporator, the juice is loaded into the top, forcing it to pass through a tightly packed field of superheated glass rings known as raschig rings which causes a significant portion of the liquid to be vaporized upon contact, and the result is this concentrated goo you add water to later to create drinkable juice. And it stands to reason that, at that temperature and for that length of time, important nutrients are killed. It is this same process that is used to make jams and jellies commercially. The only thing that is done differently is to increase the "residence time" of the juice, so more liquid is evaporated and the product becomes more substantially solid. So in a way, the product you’re drinking as a result of this process is really a kind of jelly with water added. How healthy can that be?

For full nutritional value, you need a juicer in which you can feed live, fresh vegetables and fruits and drink the product you create immediately afterwards. Try it. You’ll be amazed at the difference!

...and stayed tuned for new information in the next exciting episode of...

THE JUICED AVENGER!