Posted by Juicing
Why a blog entry on juicing? Another word for juicing is “hypernutrition”. Juicing goes very well with the Seignalet diet and will speed up your recovery. It will help heal your gut, a key aim of the Seignalet diet. The idea of juicing is to get all the cell nutrients out of vegetables and fruits while discarding the hard to digest cellulose fibres. It is of course important to have enough fibre in your diet and this you can get in your normal meals (Don’t try keeping the pulp and mixing it into soup. Yuk! Chuck it away for god’s sake.). Juice is digested very quickly – in about 20 minutes.
By juicing, you can easily get all the nutrients from two kilos of carrots and two kilos of apples in a day, without taxing your digestive system in the slightest. Just don’t drink any juice 20 minutes either side of a meal. You don’t have to juice 4 kilos of produce a day of course although you can if you want and are able to structure your priorities to do so. For real therapeutic effect you will need to drink at least a pint of juice a day. I suggest half a pint in the morning and half a pint pm. The best proof of juicing’s fantastic therapeutic effectiveness is the Gerson Therapy for Cancer. (A big subject which I will cover in a later blog). Part of the Gerson Therapy is to drink 8 fluid ounces (just under half a pint) of fresh raw carrot and apple juice on the hour every hour. (It adds up to those 4 kilos).
There are thousands of books on juicing. Most of them are rubbish. The original, written in the 30’s (!) and best is “Fresh vegetable and fruit juices” by Norman Walker. Walker invented juicing to restore his health after becoming ill from overwork. It is said that he lived to be 111 although some dispute this. If you are going to be drinking a lot of juice, it’s best to use organic produce, otherwise you will be ingesting way too much pesticide.
The best juices in my opinion, both therapeutic and taste wise are:
- Carrot on its own. Get organic carrots.
- Carrot and apple. The best apples for juicing are granny smiths. Other apples are too sweet and too soft. To make a superb tasting juice make carrot/apple/ginger. (If you are making large quantities of juice for therapeutic reasons you would probably want to leave out the ginger).
- Carrot and spinach. With a centrifugal juicer or a Green Power or Green Star Elite triturating juicer or Champion masticating juicer , the spinach may tend to block the basket or screen. Juice carrots to unblock it.
- Carrot and kale. This will make a very strong tasting juice. You won’t want to use too much kale because of the strong taste. (See underneath for possible dangers of drinking juice with kale in it).
Notes on produce:
Carrots: Get organic carrots. In the UK not all supermarkets do them regularly. Some do them sporadically which is of course no use, because you want a dependable supply. Also, the same supermarket company will sell them in some branches but not others. So you will have to snoop around to find your regular supplier. Carrots juice really well in all kinds of juicer. Some juicers cope less well with other kinds of produce. In such cases, carrots will usually unblock the juicer. You can also chop your carrots up and mix them up with the stuff that’s difficult to juice.
Apples: The best apples for juicing are granny smiths. From a nutritional, therapeutic, point of view, bramleys are even better. Even less sugar and the most polyphenols of all the apples. Unfortunately, unless you use a Gerson approved, two stage process with triturator and hydraulic press, bramleys, unless extremely fresh and just out of the fridge, will just turn to apple sauce in other kinds of juicers and block them up.
Which brings me on to another of the problems with sourcing apples. Apples are ripe in the autumn and winter. If you buy apples at any other time of year they come out of a cold store where they are kept in a low or no oxygen atmosphere at zero degrees C. That’s fine. I have no problem with that. I want to be able juice apples all year round. The trouble is, I believe that some apples are staying far too long in the cold store and are no longer fresh enough. Sure, they are edible if you are not too fussy, but if a granny smith turns to apple sauce in my juicer right after the apple season, I think there is a fair chance that it is at least a year old.
The other problem with sourcing apples is that none of the supermarkets in the UK sell organic granny smiths. I make a lot of juice. My apples need to be organic. I have found organic suppliers online but too often their apples make apple sauce instead of juice. If you find a good source of organic apples, post up the details on the forum.
Get your apples and pears for free!
Here is my tip for a source of really fresh, free, or nearly free apples or pears. Many people have an old apple or pear tree in their garden and the apples or pears are often ancient varieties not available in commerce which makes them much more interesting. This fruit often does not make particularly good eating but juices perfectly well. The odds are that if your neighbour has such a tree, they just let the fruit fall to the ground and rot every year. They may be all to happy for you to collect the fruit either for free or for a small charge. So during the summer, stake out your trees and butter up your neighbours, order one of those long fruit picking tools from Amazon and in the autumn, go and harvest your fruit. Pick the apples or pears off the tree just before they are due to fall because hitting the ground bruises them and they start to rot. If your neighbour does not mind, put down a tarpaulin as well so that any windfalls remain clean. Gather the windfalls up quickly before they start to rot.
Vitamin A
Carrots contain large amounts of beta carotene. This is a precursor for vitamin A. However it can only be converted by the body into vitamin A if there are bile salts present during digestion. Oils and fats stimulate bile which emulsifies them so that they can be digested. A very small amount of olive oil is all that is needed to stimulate bile so that the beta carotene is converted into vitamin A. Mix around a teaspoonful into a pint of carrot juice to get the effect. Note: the animal form of vitamin A: retinol, (found in liver) can be toxic if taken in too large quantities. It’s impossible to take too much vitamin A from carrot juice however because once the body has the optimum amount, if simply stops converting. Instead of olive oil, you could juice black radishes if you are lucky enough to find any because black radish also stimulates bile. If you find a source of black radishes, please post up the details on the forum. They are delicious grated up with some Thai fish sauce and some good oil in a salad.
Brassicas, “goitrogens” and iodine
Kale, like cabbage, brocolli, cauliflower and all the other brassicas contains substances (“goitrogens”) which block the uptake of iodine by the thyroid. Buy Lugol’s iodine on ebay or amazon and put a couple of drops in your juice or a couple of drops in a tall glass of water. I recommend at least 4 drops of Lugol’s per day (two in the morning and two in the afternoon) whether you are juicing or not. If you are drinking juice with cabbage or kale in it, this could be upped to 8 per day. Warning: do not use tincture of iodine. It’s a poison! Your doctor may warn you that supplementing with Lugol’s iodine can be toxic to the thyroid. This is what they are taught in medical school and it’s wrong! It comes from a phoney baloney study on rats in the US in the ’50’s. If the medical profession wants to take me to court over this, go ahead, make my day.
Spinach and oxylates
Dr. (of science) Norman Walker gives as the two main therapeutic juices, carrots on their own and carrot and spinach. Spinach contains high levels of oxylates. Oxylates in food may or may not be linked to kidney stones according to who you believe. Norman Walker says that the oxylates in raw spinach are not a problem, but they are in cooked spinach. Fallon and Ewig (without referring to Walker) say it’s the other way round. Go figure. I thought I’d better do some research on the subject but the first search result google gave me was a blog on smoothies. I read the article and decided I could spend a day doing research to write something or I could give a link to Tracy’s blog. As the blog is very well researched and written, I decided I could not do better. So here is the link:
Spinach does not juice all that well in a centrifugal, triturating or masticating juicer. You will want to chop up some carrots and mix them in with the spinach, particularly in a centrifugal. If the screen gets blocked up, juice a couple of large carrots.
Personally, when I’m doing a lot of juicing I will try to have some carrot and spinach juice two or three times a week. I would do more if spinach was easier to juice. I may just splash out on the wheat grass machine I link to underneath. I had one before but lost it in a move.
This manual machine for wheatgrass will do a brilliant job on spinach or lettuce or any other leafy veg.
Strain your juice
You can use a tea strainer to strain any remaining particles of pulp out of the juice. It’s important to do this because otherwise your digestive system will process these particles like food and you will get small “accidents”. To save time, you can use a large, very fine sieve and push on the pulp with a spoon to get the remaining juice out of the pulp particles.
Start slowly and work up
When you first start to juice, it will have the effect of getting rid of impacted faeces in your colon. Nice! This is because juicing stimulates peristalsis, the involuntary little wave like contractions of your digestive tract designed to keep food moving along until it reaches the final exit point. To avoid getting a loose bowel, don’t drink too much juice in the first few days. Start with a third of a pint per day for the first few days and gradually increase. It’s impossible to drink too much juice by the way. The more juice you drink the healthier you will become. To get real therapeutic benefit, ie, restore and maintain vitality, lose weight etc. you will need to drink at least a pint a day. I suggest half a pint in the morning and half a pint later in the day. By the way, if you drink a pint of carrot juice or carrot and apple juice or carrot and spinach a day it is impossible to carry any excess weight. It will just fall off. You will hear scare stories about people who turned an orange or yellow colour from drinking too much carrot juice. This is called carrotenemia. Firstly it is perfectly harmless and secondly I really doubt whether anyone has ever really developed it from drinking carrot juice. You would have to drink gallons per day and thirdly, it would save money on fake tan!
The cabbage juice miracle!
Cabbage juice has a miraculous healing effect. The ideal cabbage is savoy. It juices well in more expensive juicers but may not juice well with a centrifugal juicer so use white or green cabbage. It is medically proven to beat any drug for the healing of peptic ulcers by a very long chalk. Type “pubmed + cabbage juice” into google and you will see what I mean. Cabbage juice heals the whole digestive tract. Make a third of a pint of cabbage juice in the morning and a third in the afternoon or evening. You can add carrot to make it taste a bit better. To heal gum disease, dental infections, mouth ulcers or dental abscess, make some cabbage juice and hold the juice in your mouth for half an hour or an hour before spitting it out. Then rinse your mouth thoroughly with water and spit that out. Just so you know, the water will sting your mouth after the juice – oh don’t be such a cry baby, it soon goes. The juice will remove any and all poisons. You can do this once or twice a day and as many days as the problem persists. This has a radical effect and you probably won’t need to do it very many times. Be careful, if pain from an abscess stops it can mean that the root has died, in which case the tooth is dead and can silently infect any part of your body at random without you realising it. It’s called focal infection. But in my opinion and in my experience trying to heal my cavitations, the cabbage juice in the mouth trick can suck out and heal the infection.
If you have gum disease, you really need to see a dental hygienist. From my experience of trying to find one, in the UK, independent dental hygienists are only found in London. Dentistry and health are a very big subject by the way. One which I will be covering in my book.
Cleaning the machine – (or not!)
Particularly with a centrifugal juicer – always clean the machine straight away after making juice. Once the juice pulp dries on the basket, it takes ages to clean. If the basket becomes clogged after a lot of use, soak it in a solution of caustic soda overnight. (Caustic soda burns! Handle very carefully.)
But here’s a trick if you are a lazy sod and want to make juice more than once in the day and only want to clean the machine once. Put one of those lifetime shopping backs over the machine to keep fruit flies out. To waken your dirty machine up ready for a fresh batch of juice, put one or two large carrots through it and chuck the resultant juice away before making your fresh batch. Now you know what a slob I am. The machine does need to be cleaned at least once a day though.
Types of juicer
The test of a juicer is how dry the pulp is. If it’s as dry as sawdust (possible with a two stage system), that means all the nutrients have been extracted. This is important because if your pulp is too wet, it means of course you are getting less juice, but also, more importantly, you will not be getting the full range of nutrients that the produce provides. It will always be the same, narrow range of nutrients that get left behind with a less than dry pulp so you are not getting the full spectrum. Also, Dr. Max Gerson, who looked into this very closely together with a physicist, said that the high speed of a centrifugal juicer sets up an electrical current which damages the all important enzymes in the juice. It can also damage the juice through heat generated by friction. This last can be prevented of course by using your produce straight out of the fridge. Tip: put the screen basket and cutting blade in the fridge or even the freezer before using.
A centrifugal juicer gets you started. If you are on a budget, do a trawl of your local charity shops. You are almost sure to find one going for a fiver or even less. New, they cost anything from £20 to £100. There are dozens of makes of centrifugal. I don’t think there is much difference in quality between them although having said that I picked up a Lalanne juicer the other day for a tenner to make a youtube video for you and it feels like a very heavy, powerful machine with a butch motor.
If you want to carry on juicing seriously, you will want to buy a Korean Green Power triturating juicer (what I use), a Green Star Elite (uses exactly the same sort of twin gears as the Green Power only bigger) or an American Champion masticating juicer. These machines cost around £350. If you keep an eye on ebay they come up occasionally second hand. They are very long lasting so it’s safe to buy second hand. I have had my Green Power for ten years and it works as good as new. The Rolls Royce of juicers is the Norwalk at around $2,000 dollars and you would probably have to import it from the states if you live outside them. They are very rare in the UK. They can be bought second hand from guys in the US who specialise in servicing them. You will always find several for sale on American ebay. It has a triturater and an electric motor powered hydraulic press. They look a million dollars and you will definitely impress your friends if you have one on your counter top. A new, would be challenger to the Norwalk is an all stainless triturating juicer called the Angel from California which is cheaper at around £1,000. You can see loads of juicers demonstrated and compared on youtube. If you are doing Gerson therapy, you must use two stages, trituration then hydraulic press. There are cheaper ways of doing it than buying a Norwalk. You can use a Green Power or Champion with the triturating only screen and put the resultant puree into a bag and press it with a manual hydraulic press (Welles press) powered by a car bottle jack. This method is approved by the Gerson organisation. (See youtube demos beneath). Always take advice from the Gerson organisation on how to juice if you are doing their therapy. Do not follow advice you find on this subject on the websites of juicer dealers.
Quantities
One kilo of carrots makes around ¾ of a pint of juice. From 1 ½ kilos of carrots and 12 apples I make two litres of juice with my Green Power. (Other types of juicer may make less or more).
Sources
It’s important to use organic produce because of the large quantities you ingest with juicing. You don’t want to be swallowing massive doses of pesticide etc on a daily basis.
Does Juice keep?
Ideally, the juice should be drunk as soon as it is juiced. This is especially the case with apple juice which oxidises very quickly. (It turns brown). If you are very careful you can make juice for later in the day (but no longer than 24 hours in my opinion) and store it in the fridge. Pour the juice into a bottle. Get vacuum wine saver stoppers (available on amazon). Use one of the stoppers in your bottle but make sure you get as much air out as possible. There are several makes of stopper and the different pumps work with all of them. Avoid the brightly coloured ones, they don’t work well. As an alternative to my bottle with vacuum wine stopper technique you could use jars and overfill the jar before carefully putting the lid on. I think you are still going to get a bit of air in though.
Bottles and equipment for storing your juice in the fridge (up to 24 hours only):
The swing tops are ideal for rinsing out the bottle. Pour some water into the bottle, put on the stopper and give it a good shake up and down to rinse the juice out. Don’t use the stopper with your juice though. Use one of these to get all the air out:
Vacuum wine saver pump with 2 stoppers
Use these also to keep your flax seed oil, cod liver oil and virgin olive oil fresh. Keep your nut and seed oils (but not olive oil) in the fridge.
There are other makes of stoppers. These are the ones I recommend. Note to supplier: email me to find out where to send the cheque to. (Just kidding).
This is the most effective and hygienic brush I’ve found. Unfortunately it can’t reach the bottom two inches of the bottle. Every 10 days or so you will need to pour some caustic soda solution into the bottle and leave it overnight.
Juicer Demos on youtube. (google auto generated subtitles talk about “jews in liquid form” which is a little disturbing!)
Here is a good web page with reviews of all types and makes of juicer apart from centrifugals. It’s very detailed and gives prices.
centrifugal vs masticating juicer
Way too long at 19 minutes and really for beginners. Very well shot. The two guys know nothing about juicing. Putting an orange through a juicer. Please! Use a citrus press.
Green Star Elite vs Green Power
15 minutes. The two triturating juicers using the same patented South Korean technology. Well shot video. Auto generated subtitles. A shame he is on his own because with one person on each juicer he could have shot the video in half the time and it would have been less boring. Interesting to me because I have a Green Power and it looks like a bought the wrong one. Damn!
This guy (John from Discount Juicers) is a juicer dealer and really knows his stuff. He looks very healthy, like he does a lot of juicing himself.
There is a whole raft of videos on his channel. The videos are well shot with good sound quality and accurate subtitles (not google auto generated). The best videos on all the various machines. He is very, very long winded but believe me if you can watch all his videos without falling into a deep coma, you will know everything there is to know about how to use every single make and style of machine. He does a lot of comparisons. In this video he demonstrates how to use a two stage juicer set up if you can’t afford a Norwalk.
If you want to become a real juice bore and learn a lot about how the different machines work, check out the comments section under his videos as well. He is very conscientious about answering any questions you might have.
A comparison of the Norwalk vs. the Super Angel (twin gear triturating) by some Czech juicer dealers (EU juicers). The Superangel appears to come out ahead. I have read some criticism saying that they did not use the Norwalk correctly. You are supposed to put two “parcels” in the press to get best results. Watch closely. They say that they did. 24 minutes. Click here
Now the same comparison carried out by a long established Norwalk dealer. Surprise, surprise, the Norwalk comes out ahead but there is a lot of editing in the video. You get a good look at the innards of the Angel when he is washing it. (It looks like he is deliberately making heavy weather of cleaning it). 7 minutes. Click here:
Here is a good demo of the Angel range by the Czech outfit. (Native English speaker demonstrator). He makes almond milk in this demo. The angel works the same way as the Green Star Elite and the Green Power. It’s Unique Selling Proposition is of course that it is stainless and the body of the Korean juicer and some parts of the gears are plastic. Does it matter? Most of the gears and screen in the Korean machines are stainless so not a lot of the juice comes in contact with plastic anyway. The Angel is also at least twice the price. It appears to produce very good juice, but as the next video shows, only about on a par with the Korean juicer. It looks to me as though the Angel is also quite a bit slower with a very narrow chute. (Speed of juicing is something no-one seems to address in these videos but believe me when you are spending an hour a day making 2 litres of juice it matters!)
Here at 10 minutes is the Angel vs Green Star Elite comparison demo’d by the Czech guys. The video quality is not great and there are no subtitles. They demo grapes, tomatoes and apples. Interestingly, the Angel is better on grapes and tomatoes but the Green Star is better on apples.
Here is the superangel website.
These opinions are the author’s own (Chris Parkinson’s) and are not necessarily shared by the Seignalet family.
SUPPORT CHRIS