Sunday, January 3, 2010

Kathy: Clarification on Vegetable Juice

Thanks for the great comments and suggestions about including 8 oz of vegetable juice in my daily menu plan! Several of your comments raised some questions.

Q: How do you tell if a juice is healthy? What if it has a lot of calories?
A: Check the ingredients to see if it's truly a vegetable juice, or if it has fruit juice or a sugar (sugar, fructose, corn syrup, etc.) added. The fruit/sugar additions add too many calories.

Q: What's in the juices? Where can I buy them?
A: "V-8" stands for 8 vegetable juices. They include tomato, carrot, celery, beet, parsley, lettuce, watercress, and spinach. Both the V-8 and the carrot juice I bought have a little bit of lemon juice added as a preservative; not the same as having a lot of fruit juice in the recipe.
I bought low-sodium V-8 in the regular grocery section. The only place I could find carrot juice was in the health food section.

Q: Have you tried freshly made vegetable juice?
A: Not yet! Thanks, Trish, for the suggestion. When I did a little looking online, the fresh-juice enthusiasts are pretty scornful of processed, store-bought juices. All of the juices in V-8 are reconstituted; the carrot juice I bought is straight juice, but it still had to be bottled/processed. So I believe that fresh-juiced would be really wonderful...I don't have a juicer, but I did notice the other day that Jamba Juice has carrot juice. Does anyone know if it's freshly made? Where else can one find freshly made vegetable juice? (Of course, a Jamba isn't going to be in my "daily" plan - but it could be a nice treat!)

3 comments:

Katie Lewis said...

This helps a lot. Thank you! And thanks to everyone who left helpful comments. :)

JuliaKoponick said...

I looked on Craigslist here in Portland, and you can find a used juicer for somewhere between $20 and $50, if you want to try out fresh juice.

kati said...

Thanks- I am going to check Craigslist out. I have wanted a juicer for long time.

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