Juice Master Keeping It Simple: Over 100 Delicious Juices and Smoothies. Jason Vale
None of us are perfect on the food and drink front, but one thing is for sure, every time you pour the liquid fuel contained within the fruits and vegetables into your body, you are replenishing your enzyme (‘life’) bank account. This is probably the most important account you will ever hold and it’s worth knowing that when you eat and drink the wrong things, you are effectively dipping into this precious account. The ‘life’ bank manager often sends ‘warning statements’ to say you are slowly but surely using up your account and at this rate the account may be closed much earlier than expected. These ‘warning statements’ come in the form of headaches, weight gain, skin disorders, arthritis, etc. We often ignore such warnings and just carry on as normal, popping a few aspirin along the way (the equivalent of tearing up the statement and putting it in the bin). This is one account you really don’t want to overspend on – once it is spent, so are you!
By simply having even just one freshly extracted fruit/veggie combo juice a day, you are doing more to top up your life account than the average Briton does in a whole week (we haven’t just been voted ‘The Fattest Nation In Europe’ for nothing!).
So before the ‘bank manager comes knocking’ GET JUICED! There is a quote I used in one of my previous books, Turbo Charge Your Life In 14 Days, which sums up the importance of keeping ourselves healthy. It came from an 87-year- old man who, when asked what his secret was – he looked much younger, had all his own hair (not a grey one in sight), all his own teeth and was fit as a fiddle – he replied that he never ate junk food. When they asked ‘but why’ (as in ‘life is too short’), he simply replied: ‘The reason I don’t eat junk food is because un- less I look after my body I’ll have nowhere to live.’ The biggest irony is that this 87-year-old man lived on the streets and got all his fresh produce from the local market – the guys down there gave him a load at the end of each day.
So, unless you look after your body you will have nowhere to live – somewhere to survive perhaps, but nowhere to truly live. The good news is, no matter how much you have dipped into your life account, it’s never too late to top it up. The even better news is that no matter how many years you have been withdrawing, the minute you start to replenish it, it starts showing on your account extremely quickly. Make a point of having a fresh juice a day and the compound interest will bring you health benefits which are nothing short of magical.
There is nothing more important to living a juicy lifestyle than getting the right juicer. Let’s be real, juicing has been seen as a bit of a pain in the proverbial for years. The shopping and chopping of the fruit and veg were always seen as a juicing bugbear, but the biggest juice ‘put me off’ by a mile was always the cleaning.
The good news is that juice extractors have come a long way in the last few years, and technology has now made carrying heavy fruit and veg a breeze; one click of a mouse and a couple of bags of nature’s finest can be at your door within the hour.
When I first started juicing I could never understand why they didn’t make a wide chute so that fruits like apples could go in whole. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, yet all the juicers that were on the market when I started had very tiny chutes. This always meant spending an enormous amount of time cutting up the produce for it to fit into the feeder. Not only that, but all the juicers had small ‘pulp containers’, which meant that after making just one or two small glasses you would have to stop the machine, take it apart and put it back together before continuing. Worst of all, though, was the cleaning. There were so many parts to the average juicer, so many nooks and crannies where the pulp could get caught up in and the machines were so small and fiddly that it just took forever to clean them properly. The words ‘dishwasher safe’ were never found on a juicer as the plastic parts would warp and melt from the heat of the washer.
Despite all of that, the benefits of juicing far outweighed the hassle of making the juice and cleaning the machine – but I did long for the day where juicing would become easy.
21st–century Juicing
Luckily, that day has arrived. Twenty-first-century juicing is here and with it comes wide-chute juicers, more extraction, large pulp containers for continuous juicing and dishwasher safe machines! Even as I write there are even efforts underway to produce a self-cleaning juicer. Imagine that, a juicer that cleans itself automatically after you make a juice. OK, stop dreaming, that day isn’t here yet, but the day of super-fast juicing is. In fact, with some of the best models on the market today you can make juice for four people and quickly clean the machine in less than 10 minutes. Even though many machines are now dishwasher safe, there are so few parts to them that it’s almost as fast to clean them as it is to rinse them ready for the dishwasher.
Get the right juicer … for you!
Getting the right juicer is crucial to whether juicing makes a regular appear- ance in your life, or whether the machine stays in your cupboard for good! It is extremely important to get the right juicer for your needs. For our purposes, up until now, there have been just two basic types of juicer:
Masticating (slow juicers) Centrifugal (fast juicers)
They both have their pros and cons. The main difference is that ‘slow’ juicers tend to live by their name: they are slow to use, slow to clean and tend to cost more; however, the quality of the juice tends to be superior. Whereas ‘fast’ juicers are exactly that: fast to use, fast to clean and tend to be cheaper than masticating juicers. The problem with fast juicers is about the quality of the juice: Most have powerful motors that cause the cutting blades to move at incredibly high speeds in order to juice super-fast. This creates ‘heat friction’ and heat affects nutrients. It is well documented that the longer you cook something, the more nutrients you lose. This means the juice oxidises and separates much faster than with a slow juicer and tends to be of inferior quality in comparison. This doesn’t mean the juice from fast juicers is void of nutrients; you are just encouraged to drink the juice as soon as possible after making it. The best fast juicers on the market as I write this page are the Philips range of juicers.
The Game Changer In The Juicing World!
Up until now these have been the main choices of juicer to get. Both are really good and I have been recommending a whole fruit fast juicer for the past ten years and I have also talked about the virtues of slow juicing. The vast majority of people choose a fast juicer because of time restraints, but ideally want the quality of a slow juicer. The good news is that every now and then a game changer comes into the market. The iPod did it, and so did companies like Dyson; they completely changed the game in their field and I am pleased to say we have a game changer in the juicing world too. It’s a juicer that’s almost combines the best of both worlds in juicing: ‘slow’ and ‘fast’.
The Fusion of Technologies
From now on when people ask what juicer you have, it will be a case of ‘fast, slow or FUSION’. The Fusion Juicer is just that: a fusion of both juicing worlds. You can fit a whole apple in it like a fast juicer, but the low-induction motor means it extracts the juice without anywhere near as much heat fric- tion. This means the quality of the juice is comparable to an expensive slow juicer. It’s also easy to clean (everything goes in the dishwasher), it’s whisper quiet, it looks good and it’s VERY affordable. My mission since I started on my own health journey has been to JUICE THE WORLD and one of the most important aspects of making sure that mission is achieved is to a get a juicer into every household in the world. That can only happen if the juicer is incredible value and affordable by all. But usually the best value juicers aren’t the best juicers, and I have, until now, always recommended more expensive juicers. The Fusion Juicer is not quite as fast as a super-fast juicer and not quite the quality of a £400 slow juicer, but it’s a beautiful combination of the two. With