Juicing

Juicing is the process of extracting the liquid found in fruits and vegetables. Juicing can be achieved by hand or through the use of a juicing machine. Juicing removes the juice from a fruit’s or vegetable’s plant tissue, usually leaving behind the fibrous pulp of the whole food. Juicing can be done on a large scale for industrial purposes or on a small scale in the home setting. Since the late twentieth century, juicing at home has become a popular dieting fad. Proponents of juicing claim that the juices of raw fruits and vegetables are the best way for the body to synthesize the juiced food’s vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Other health claims related to juicing hold that the practice can boost a person’s immune system, reduce one’s cancer risk, aid in toxin removal from the body, and help with digestion and weight loss. Although many of these claims are not substantiated with clear evidence, millions of people engage in juicing as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Background

People have been juicing fruits and vegetables for thousands of years. Ancient texts indicate that people juiced pomegranate and figs for their supposed strength and form-boosting properties during the second century BCE. Throughout the centuries, herbalists and other medically inclined individuals extracted the juices of fruits and vegetables to aid in various healing processes.

By the twentieth century, the medical community began to more openly recognize the influence a person’s diet had on his or her overall health. The majority of the scientific community agreed that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables was especially important. Fruits and vegetables contained important vitamins and minerals that kept the human body healthy. These foods also contained nutritious phytochemicals, or chemical compounds found only in plants, that further maintained bodily health. Studies later showed that these nutrients were most abundant when the fruit or vegetable was consumed raw.

In 1936, British businessman Norman W. Walker published a book titled Raw Vegetable Juices: What’s Missing in Your Body? Walker believed the juice from raw fruits and vegetables provided the most potent source of dietary nutrients. Although he had no scientific basis for this assertion, he claimed to have first discovered the benefits of juicing in France, where he created juice from the rinds of raw carrots using a feed grinder. He eventually moved to California, where he began touting the benefits of juicing under the pretense of the Norwalk Laboratory of Nutritional Chemistry and Scientific Research.

Dissatisfied with the juicing methods available at the time, Walker invented a mechanical juicer. The device ground fruits and vegetables into tiny pieces, which were then pressed against a linen cloth to extract the juices. He called this device the Norwalk juicer. It was the first of its kind and remained available in various incarnations over the next several decades. Juicing had become popular enough by the 1950s that other home goods companies began to produce their own juicers. The Champion machine, which emerged in the mid-1950s, was the first high-speed masticating juicer on the market. Although the juicer produced fruit and vegetable juices at a fast pace, users were concerned that the heat generated during the process would kill the active enzymes and nutrients within the juice. New methods of juicing emerged over the next few decades, such as cold pressing and twin gear. Although these processes were slower, they produced less heat and ideally preserved the enzymes and nutrients extracted from the fruits and vegetables.

Overview

Juicing can be undertaken through several mechanisms. The simplest form of juicing is that done by hand. This involves removing the juices of fruits and vegetables by crushing them with the hands. Small devices called juice squeezers exist to aid the hand-juicing process of fruits. These squeezers are designed to be the inverted shape of the fruit being squeezed. For example, with orange and lemon juice squeezers, individuals press one half of an orange down onto a protruding, dome-shaped piece of metal or plastic and then twist and squeeze the orange rind against the device until the juice is removed from the fruit. Lever-operated hand-press juicers also aid in the manual pressing of juices. These devices are primarily used to juice citrus fruits and involve placing the fruit beneath a metal press and then pulling on a lever to push the press into the fruit, releasing the juice into a container below.

Manual juicing became less appealing with the invention of electric juicers. Electric juicers are available in several types. High-speed juicers, also known as centrifugal juicers, process the juice of fruits and vegetables by using a spinning shredder to grind the food as a person presses the food against a mesh filter. This results in the fruit or vegetable juice emptying into a container, while the leftover pulp of the fruit remains behind. High-speed juicers are the less expensive option for juicing, but these devices produce more heat within the extraction process, which purportedly reduces the amount of healthy enzymes and nutrients in the juice.

Unheated juicing processes became available to those looking to optimally preserve the nutrients available within fruit and vegetable juices. The two main types of cold-pressed juicers include masticating juicers and twin-gear, or triturating, juicers. Masticating juicers utilize a single gear to grind and press the fruit or vegetable as it is fed into a tube. The juice is slowly extracted into a container as the remaining pulp is discarded into a separate bin. Twin-gear juicers have two gears that process the fruits and vegetables in two stages. Stage one involves crushing the food. Stage two presses the juice out of the crushed food. This type of juicer extracts the most nutrients from fruits and vegetables.

Health experts recommend eating whole options of fruits and vegetables to obtain the greatest amount of nutrients and overall health benefits. Juicing removes the healthy fiber from fruits and vegetables. Fiber aids in digestion and helps keep people feeling full. Medical professionals also caution people from using juices for weight loss.

Dieting fads known as juice cleanses became popular in the twenty-first century. Although a juice-only diet does lead to rapid weight loss, such a calorie-restricted diet can negatively affect a person’s metabolism and make it more difficult to lose weight in the future. Claims centering on a juice cleanse’s detoxification benefits are unfounded. Little research demonstrating juicing’s effect on health is available, but numerous studies show a diet rich in fruits and vegetables has been linked to a lower risk of heart disease and cancer as well as better immunity.

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