Benefits of Drinking Green Juice: Fast-Track to Radiant Health

One of the best things you can do to achieve radiant health and wellbeing is by using food as preventative medicine and fuel for your body. The average person's diet is typically void of significant nutrients, so we have to mindfully make choices about how to add nutritious foods into our daily life and what to take out of our diets. Doing a complete overhaul on your diet might be a daunting task, so I always advocate for making small changes and slowly stacking on more health changes. Simply adding in a daily green smoothie or green juice makes a massive difference for your health and natural beauty.

While I personally think a green smoothie has more overall benefits than green juice due to the fiber content, there's not really a downside with choosing either. Some people find juice is easier to consume than a smoothie, so go with the option that's easiest and best for you. Let's dive into some of the incredible benefits of drinking green:

Benefits of Drinking Green Juice: Fast-Track to Radiant Health

1. Quick nutrient absorption (particularly on an empty stomach): green juice provides a huge boost of nutrients. Dark green plants are rich in vitamin A, K, D, and E, which support cellular repair, skin health, and the immune system. Juice is easy to digest, so the body quickly absorbs and synthesizes all those fantastic nutrients.

2. Detoxifies + heals the body: The chlorophyll in leafy greens acts as a powerful detoxifier to pull heavy metals, toxins, and waste from your cells. The vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients in green juice ingredients like kale, spinach, parsley, and celery also help alkalize the body. This neutralizes harmful free radicals and reduces inflammation linked to chronic disease.

3. Easy to get a high quantity of vitamins, minerals, and enzymes in one go: Since you can pack a ton of produce into one glass, drinking green juice helps you consume far more nutrients than you would typically eat in a day. Cold press juice keeps enzymes and amino acids intact, unlike overly processed store-bought juices. 

4. Significant health + anti-aging benefits: Consistently drinking green juice has incredible total body wellness benefits, and better hair, skin, and nails are on that list. Green juice and smoothies help with cellular repair, which is fantastic from an internal health perspective, but also externally as well.

5. Increased energy: we ask our bodies to do a lot for us, and often requiring our bodies to run on poor nutrition. The quality of your food=the quality of your fuel, and you can't get a better fuel source than green drinks.

6. Weight loss + weight management: countless studies have proven green juice significantly aids in weight loss and weight management. Green juice can help stabilize blood sugar levels, but it also is a powerful appetite suppressant and cravings annihilator. Often, when we’re craving junk food, it’s because our body is starved of vital nutrients. You might have eaten a huge meal, but if what was on your plate lacked substantial nutrients, your body will still feel “hunger”.  

The absolute best solution is always going to be make your own green juice, but that can be a bit time consuming. There are a couple things that are important to consider when purchasing green juice (for a full dive into the hidden hazards of purchasing ready-made juice, check out this post).

If you're purchasing ready-made juice, make sure it's cold-press, using a mastication machine. Centrifugal juicers creates heat that denatures and destroys plant proteins and enzymes. The mass-produced green juice that you can buy in a grocery store is usually pasteurized, which is a heating process that kills bacteria. As mentioned already, heat denatures the delicate plant proteins and oxidizes beneficial enzymes.

Additionally, check when the juice was made. Green juice only has a shelf-life of around 3-5 days max, so unless your bottle of juice shows when it was made, there's a good chance it's way past it's shelf-life and you're just drinking empty calories.