The World Health Organization recommends that everyone gets at least 3-5 servings of fruit and vegetables every day. Unfortunately less than 33% of Americans are barely getting two servings of fruit each day. One great way to add more fruits to your diet is to start juicing them.
Juicing fruit is a mechanical process where the fruit is smashed, crushed, squeezed, and beat up by hand or with a machine. This process is similar to what happens when you chew the fruit in your mouth but without all of the jaw ache. It doesn’t matter that much which process your juicer uses, the end result is a juice that contains many of the nutritious compounds from the fruit.
Good fruits to use in a juicer are the ones with soft flesh like apples, pears, and melons. These fruits are mostly water so they work really good as a base ingredient. With most juicers you might need to core, peel, and cut the fruits into smaller pieces. The size of the piece depends on how large the mouth opening of your juicer is and if it is completely processing each piece. There is no harm putting a piece through the juicer a few times, it’s just messy and slow. The better juicers can take the entire fruit including the seeds and peels, which can really reduce the amount of prep work you need to do.
When juicing citrus fruit like lemons, limes, grapefruit, and oranges the outer peel needs to be removed. Not only are the peels tough and bitter but some of them contain compounds that can hurt your or prevent your body from absorbing the other nutrients in the fruit. You will also need to be careful with citrus fruit because they have a lot of citric acid in them. Citric acid is the thing that makes you pucker and gives the fruit its bite. Too much citric acid can upset your stomach and cause other gastronomical problems. I found that I can have one medium sized orange per day without any problems but you will need to experiment with what you can tolerate. If you want to be on the safe side but still get all of the vitamin C in citrus fruit you can just add a little but of pre-made juice each day. Either use store bought juice or run a few fruits by themselves through the juicer and store the pure juice in the refrigerator. Then you can control how much is added to your daily juicer, a few tablespoons should be plenty.
There are a lot of other flavors you can add by including fruits like berries, kiwi, or grapes. Just watch out that small berries don’t get caught in the mechanical parts of the juicer and not get completely juiced. One tip is to run an apple or large fruit after you do your berries so the large fruit knocks the smaller fruits loose.