What’s juice got to do with it? Well, everything!
Over the next few weeks, Montauk Juice Factory will be authoring a series of blog posts with tips and tricks on juicing from the juice pro’s. Why juice? What to juice? When to juice? How to juice? We’ll cover it all.
Like the folks at InsideTracker, Montauk Juice Factory is on a mission to help people take control of their health by understanding the fuel each individual body needs to transform into its most optimal version of itself.
We’re supremely excited to partner with InsideTracker to bring you another powerful tool in your quest for optimal wellness. Keep an eye out for our upcoming partner page with goodies galore.
Juicing 101: Why Juice?
Not all juices are created equal. Remember the juice box that was tucked into your lunch bag as a kid? The carton of OJ on your local supermarket shelf? That’s not the type of juice we’re suggesting you consume. Montauk Juice Factory is devoted to a different world of juicing: we create raw, cold-pressed juices that are chock-full of enzymes, phytonutrients, vitamins, and minerals, and we want to share what we know so that you can do it, too.
When we discovered cold-pressed juicing it was love at first sip. As athletes and health-conscious individuals, we found it to be a helpful tool for staying in balance. Consuming juice helps us to meet our nutritional requirements every day, while serving as a delicious alternative to less healthy snack foods. When applied as part of a controlled fasting protocol, juicing can give our bodies a break from digestion and excessive caloric indulgence.
Cold-pressed juices can serve as a tool that jumpstarts a shift in your nutrition habits.. Increasing your daily dose of fresh fruits and veggies consumption is usually a good thing. By consuming fresh pressed juices, you can triple or quadruple your daily dose of fresh vegetables and fruits in one sitting. The cold-pressed method helps to extract the most juice out of produce while not losing micronutrients to heat as in the traditional, centrifugal process.
Concentrated plant nutrition is among nature’s best medicines. Juicing can help us to take charge of our health by flooding our body with nature’s plant-based goodness, rather than with the fillers in processed snack foods. Juicing is not about deprivation, denial or dieting; it’s about adding more to your life in the way of high-integrity, nutrient-rich foods, no matter how slammed your schedule is. It’s also a neat way to add a variety of delicious new foods to your diet that you may not otherwise consume.
Purpose-Driven Juice
Of course, just because it's cold-pressed, doesn't mean it's perfect. Some common pitfalls of juicing include using ingredients with too much sugar, not using enough variety and not using organic produce. Certain ingredients have synergistic effects, meaning that consuming them in combination rather than in isolation, may have additional benefits. Juices should not be haphazardly thrown together. We like to think of juices as ‘purpose-driven.'
Each juice recipe should have a goal in mind: some may contain higher quantities of magnesium, while others may contain greater amounts of antioxidants. At Montauk Juice factory, we use a carefully researched variety of greens, fruits, seeds, and citruses. We also source seasonal produce and local, whenever possible. We add super-foods, tonic herbs, functional roots and healing spices, some of which have been used throughout traditional cultures for centuries.
When juicing in your own home, these are things to take into consideration: a variety of fresh, local, nutrient-dense ingredients work best in juicing, just as they work best on your plate.
Deliver a Powerful Punch
Diets lacking vitamins, minerals and micronutrients can negatively impact daily performance and any fitness or health goals you are trying to achieve. Minerals, for example, are often an underestimated micronutrient. In addition to the main minerals like calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, and sodium, you need trace amounts of manganese, selenium, zinc, iodine, chromium, and copper to operate at your fullest potential. Your body uses these minerals to make proteins, enzymes, hormones, neurotransmitters, and everything else needed to run clean and mean.
There are two problems, however: your body can’t produce these minerals on its own and they are often sweat out during regular exercise. Minerals must be replenished via your diet. Juicing is one alternative to taking a pill or powder.
So, if your InsideTracker results come back with a serious deficiency in magnesium what are you to do? A green juice that is low in sugar is one way to ensure you’re getting heaping amounts of it without the added junk. A glass of dark, leafy green juice provides a mega-dose of the ingredients that are naturally rich in magnesium and other nutrients.
Our ‘Green Mama’ juice, for example, contains a variety of greens: organic kale, spinach, Swiss Chard, dandelion greens, cucumber, celery and liquid chlorophyll. These ingredients provide a wide range in benefits as they are rich in alkaline minerals, such as calcium, magnesium and potassium.
Dark, green leafy vegetables, especially Swiss chard and spinach, are some of nature’s most nutrient-dense plant sources of magnesium. One 16 ounce glass of a juice made with these ingredients can contain up to 7-8 pounds of greens. By starting your day with a juice like that, you’ll nourish your body with a powerhouse dose of magnesium before you’re even out the door! It’s simple to make this juice in your very own kitchen using high quality, local ingredients and a good juice press.
This is just one example of what purpose-driven, raw food nutrition can do for your health. While InsideTracker uses your very own blood to provide valuable insights into your nutrient needs, we hope to help take the guesswork out of how to use juicing to supply those nutrients. Choosing kale over that donut is a no-brainer, but it’s a whole lot more enticing when the kale tastes delicious!
by Madeleine Murphy, co-founder of Montauk Juice Factory
Blogs on the InsideTracker website are for educational purposes only. Content shared are strictly for readers to be viewed as information, not a replacement for professional guidance from a healthcare professional.