This is a great article that comes from Dr. Mercola. That you Doc Fran for passing it along. This is another great reason why NatraBurst is a great product to help you stay fit and healthy.
Here, Cherie Calbom, also known as “The Juice Lady,” shares her insights on juicing and how it can help improve your health. She’s authored two books on the subject: Juicing for Life, and The Juice Lady’s Turbo Diet.
Juicing is a very powerful tool that you can use to accelerate your progress towards optimal health. Virtually every health authority, even conventional doctors, recommend 6-8 servings of vegetables and fruits per day but very few of us actually get that.
In my life I have found that juicing is a simple and easy way to virtually guarantee that you will reach your daily target for vegetables.
I first became excited about juicing when I was in practice and treated a patient who was in her 60s or maybe even 70s but looked like she was in her 40s. She attributed most of her youthful appearance to juicing. I decided to try it and have been juicing more or less regularly ever since. I typically juice every day and consume from a pint to a quart of green juice daily.
Reasons to Juice
There are three main reasons why you will want to consider incorporating vegetable juicing into your optimal health program:
Juicing helps you absorb most of the nutrients from the vegetables. This is important because most of us have impaired digestion as a result of making less-than-optimal food choices over many years. This limits your body’s ability to absorb all the nutrients from the vegetables. Juicing will help to “pre-digest” them for you, so you will receive most of the nutrition, rather than having it go down the toilet.
Juicing allows you to consume an optimal amount of vegetables in an efficient manner. If you are a carb type, you should eat one pound of raw vegetables per 50 pounds of body weight per day. Some people may find eating that many vegetables difficult, but it can be easily accomplished with a quick glass of vegetable juice.
You can add a wider variety of vegetables in your diet. Many people eat the same vegetable salads every day. This violates the principle of regular food rotation and increases your chance of developing an allergy to a certain food. But with juicing, you can juice a wide variety of vegetables that you may not normally enjoy eating whole.
Healing Through Juicing—The Juice Lady’s Story
Cherie Calbom earned her nickname “The Juice Lady” back in 1991, when she worked for the Juiceman company. But she’s been passionate about juicing far longer. She also has a Masters Degree in Whole Foods Nutrition from Bastyr University.
“I got into juicing way back, long before I got into school in Whole Foods Nutrition. I, years ago, had chronic fatigue syndrome; fibromyalgia in my late 20s; hypoglycemia; allergies; candidiasis—a long list of problems and no hope to get well,” Cherie says.
“I decided I was going to find a way; there had to be a way to get well. So I started going to health food stores and reading. I found an old Norman Walker book…
So I thought, okay I’m going to design my own program. I got my first juicer and I embarked on this five day vegetable juice cleanse, and continued that through three months of juicing. I changed my diet completely.
One morning, I woke up and thought somebody gave me a new body in the middle of the night. It was like WOW! I felt completely healed.”
However, it bears mentioning that it wasn’t an entirely smooth ride.
“Along the way, I felt worse before I felt better. No one had talked about the detox reactions. My dad kept saying, “I think you’re killing yourself with this juice program.”…I was definitely detoxing.”
In Cherie’s case, it took three months before she finally, and then suddenly, felt completely renewed. Another big clue that her health problems were due to toxic overload came when she slowly started adding some of the junk food back in. Her symptoms then reappeared.
Interestingly, three months is also the average lifespan of red blood cells. So in three months you should have renewed most all of your red blood cells. In Cherie’s experience, this is the typical time frame for most people before they see any dramatic improvement in their health.
Juicing for Weight Management and Diabetes
Cherie’s second book, The Juice Lady’s Turbo Diet, is in large part oriented towards obesity, which is one of the primary health challenges here in the US. Technically, more than a third of American adults are obese, and nearly 80 percent of Americans are overweight!
These are staggering statistics.
Excessive fructose consumption is a major contributing factor. Most processed foods and beverages contain high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and the number one source of calories in the US is soda… Then of course there’s obviously a lack of exercise.
“I wrote The Turbo Diet because of that,” Cherie says. ”Because I started noticing when people got on this program they were losing weight, even though people often came to me for other issues… So I started looking at what is going on.
And then there were two studies last year, I believe it was, Baylor College of Medicine UC Davis, Vegetable Juicing and Weight Loss, and they found that the people who included two glasses of vegetable juice a day lost four times the weight of the non-juice drinkers. So I thought that was rather interesting and significant…
In one of the studies, the majority of the people in it had metabolic syndrome; insulin resistance. I found that very interesting because that’s a tougher one to work with and still see weight loss results… Then I really got excited and that’s when I put this book together, giving people the whole program of how to integrate it into your lifestyle, menu plan, shopping list, recipes and what’s going on.
Since that time, I’ve heard from people all across the country who have said, they’ve given this a try and they’re losing weight where nothing was working for them before.”
Important Dietary Factors: Low Glycemic Foods and Coconut Oil
An important part of the diet Cherie recommends in her book is the focus on low glycemic foods. Cherie essentially combined the diabetic diet with vegetable juicing. According to Cherie, this combination has been the most effective for people with insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, or diabetes.
She also recommends including coconut oil, as it too can help with weight loss. You could do as much as three tablespoons of coconut oil a day as a therapeutic dose to kill excessive yeast, although you may need to work your way up to that amount. Your level of tolerance depends on how well your liver functions as it is a fat. But it may be too many calories for some people, as three tablespoons would give you about 400 calories just from coconut oil.
Additionally, many individuals who chose to be a vegetarian or vegan will have dangerously low cholesterol levels and coconut oil can be very effectively used to increase cholesterol levels. If you already have high cholesterol levels though it is not dangerous unless you take very large quantities.
Cherie recommends using about one teaspoon to one tablespoon a day, and to also use it for cooking, in lieu of other cooking oils or butter.
Last but not least, the program calls for juicing twice a day. If you’re diabetic, hypoglycemic or insulin resistant, focus on dark greens. Cherie also recommends diluting all your juices, but not with water. Instead, use cucumbers to increase the water content of your juice because it also contains some nutrients. You’ll also avoid any and all potential toxins, such as fluoride, in your tap water.
Juicing for Your Nutritional Type
According to Nutritional Typing principles, if you are a carb type, vegetable juicing is STRONGLY recommended. With patients in our clinic, we strongly encourage it if they expect to regain their health. If you are a mixed type, it is certainly useful to juice.
However, protein t
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