Unless you are already eating three-quarters of your diet raw, we suggest you eat more raw foods. We know that on most days, if you’re like the average American, you don’t come close to getting even to bowls of raw food. One recent study revealed that most Americans eat no more than one to three salads a week. So here’s the crucial question: How are you going to make every meal at least one-half to three-quarters raw food? Sit down and plan out a day Plan out a week. Can you manage this high raw-food regimen every meal of every day? If you’re like the nutrition patients, it will seem impossible. You’ve got to get a juicer you’ll use, and you’ve got to use it every day. This is the only way we know that busy people can consume all the fresh fruits and vegetables they need to achieve optimal health.
And there’s another reason to juice your produce. Juices make some of the very best dietary supplements available today. They’re chock-full of nutrients. We call our drinks “vitamin and mineral cocktails.” And if you think you don’t need supplements, think again. The American Holistic Medical Association says, “Even if you eat a balanced diet, featuring fresh, whole fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins, you can still benefit from vitamin and mineral supplements, even if they are not ‘necessary’ for life. That’s because even the best diet from North American farmlands will rarely contain an optimum of nutrients, particularly trace minerals.”
But most Americans don’t eat a balanced diet. The Standard American Diet (SAD) consists of large amounts of animal products like cheeseburgers, fried chicken, steaks, pizza, and meat-filled sandwiches. We have our favorite snack foods, too, like chocolate chip cookies, pretzels, potato chips and corn chips with dip, cheese and crackers, and bowls of ice cream. We feel lucky to eat anything for breakfast, and at best, it’s apt to be a weight-loss breakfast shake consisting mainly of milk and a sweetened protein powder. We try to compensate for our rushed breakfast by eating something healthful at noon from the salad bar, if we’re lucky. (But, of course, we cover our salad with heavy, fat-rich dressing.)
All this junk food, excess protein, and fat are hard for the body to digest. For example, the dyes and chemicals used to flavor and preserve that junk food require a lot of extra vitamins and minerals just for the body to metabolize and detoxify them. Junk food is very deficient in nutrients, when it has any at all. So where does the body get the nutrients that are needed for detoxification? From tissues in your body, and most of those tissues have precious few stores. Those chemicals that can’t be detoxified get stored in your liver, bones, fat, and other tissues. Also the more junk you eat, the more deficient you can become in some nutrients. For example, have you ever wondered why so many people crave sweets? The mineral chromium is involved in the metabolism of sugars. The more sugars you eat, the more chromium you need, but probably you are getting much less than you need because chromium is found mainly in plant foods. Then symptoms of a chromium deficiency develop. One symptom is a craving for sweets, and so the more sweets you eat, the more you crave, until one day you have a full-blown, uncontrollable sugar addiction and possibly an alarming chromium deficit. The digestion of proteins and fats also requires a lot of work. Let’s look at fat digestion. In the stomach, enzymes mix with fat to break it down into smaller products as it is churned with water and acid. Bile flows from the liver to emulsify the fat mixture in the small intestine. Enzymes flow from the pancreas to further emulsify the fat. Finally, smaller molecules of fatty acids are ready for absorption. The process of protein digestion is equally involved. These processes can take many hours to complete. But it is estimated that fresh fruit and vegetable juices, which are already separated from the fiber, can be assimilated in twenty to thirty minutes because they are so easy to digest and absorb.