© Huffington Post
It sounds like a tall order. It takes time to get a bounty of fresh vegetables together and eat them every day.
The good news is, it's easier than you think. For example, one way to maximize your intake of veggies is to juice them - something I highly recommend to patients in our health clinic who are working to restore or improve their health. I'll discuss juicing a little later in this article, but first, let's explore what makes vegetables "high quality," so you will be prepared to make the best choices possible in any situation.
The Importance Of Choosing Organic
The best quality produce means organic, because USDA Organic farmers (and many small, local organic farms working without certification) must use different standards than conventional commercial farmers. These standards include never using:
- Pesticides
- Synthetic Fertilizers
- Sewage sludge
- Genetically modified organisms
- Ionizing radiation
Did you know the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers 60 percent of herbicides, 90 percent of fungicides and 30 percent of insecticides to be carcinogenic? Most pesticides can damage your nervous system and are associated with numerous health problems such as neurotoxicity, endocrine dysfunction, immunosuppression, impaired reproductive function, miscarriage, and even Parkinson's disease.
This information alone should be an impetus for buying local, organic produce. But there is another important factor to consider: Organic vegetables are more nutritious than conventionally farmed vegetables.
But what if you can't find everything you want organic? How do you tell which conventional veggies may be safe? An investigation of 43 different fruit and vegetable categories by the Environmental Working Group showed sweet bell peppers, celery, lettuce, spinach and potatoes had the highest residual pesticide loads, making them the most important to buy organic.
In contrast, broccoli, eggplant, cabbage, asparagus, sweet peas, sweet corn (frozen) and onions had the lowest residual pesticide load, making them the safest bet among conventionally grown vegetables.
The next step in ensuring your vegetables are high quality is to purchase locally grown produce whenever possible. This increases the chances they are fresh and not wilted.
Now, on to juicing - another way to help your body absorb more nutrients from a wide variety of vegetables.
Juicing Your Way To Extraordinary Health
First of all, juice only vegetables you enjoy eating whole. That way, your juice will have a familiar flavor that appeals to you. Once you are used to that you can gradually incorporate healthy deep green vegetables like kale and collard greens and moderate their bitterness by juicing some fresh limes.
Also, juice foods you know your body can tolerate - your stomach should feel good all morning long. If it is churning or growling or generally making its presence known, you probably juiced something you shouldn't be eating.
You can also add certain foods to make your juice more palatable, like fresh or unsweetened shredded coconut, cranberries, lemons and limes - or even a little fresh ginger root, which has fantastic cardiovascular benefits.
But, whether you're munching them raw or juicing them, some vegetables contain more health building nutrients than others. The following tables detail some of the best and worst vegetables for your health.
© Huffington Post
Finally, I'd like to encourage you to obtain as much nutrition as possible from whole food sources, rather than relying on supplements, which can actually have negative health consequences.
A reasonable starter goal is to shoot for eating at least one-third of your foods raw. But I want to emphasize that eating any vegetable is better than eating none at all, so don't get discouraged if you're able to juice only a few times a week.
Even if you need to start slowly, soon you'll begin noticing increased feelings of well being and a new spring in your step! When you begin flooding your body with the nutrients it craves, you might just be amazed at how chronic ailments and aches and pains begin fading away.
About the author
Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder and director of Mercola.com.
"Carbs are bad?" We've heard that before. It was called the Atkins diet. We've also heard fats are bad, and that protein is bad. And that meat is bad, pesticides are bad, and if you dig deep enough, you'll even find out organic is bad. Not really bad, of course, but it has its flaws. What you have is a list of vegetables to avoid if you want to starve yourself. Their worthiness of being deemed a healthy food is dependent on how many carbs it contains. Why is eggplant, composed of 5-7% carbs by weight, half of which are indigestible, is too high in carbohydrates to eat? Bullshit. If you study anything food long enough time you are going to discover benefits and problems associated with it. In fact, if you study watermelon long enough your dick will get hard. I've seen what happens when people stop eating carbs for any real length of time: they turn weak, pale, lazy and miserable. I challenge the author of this article to stand and defend his position against scrutiny simply because I don't think he'll have the energy too without potatoes.
Take anything you see written about food with a grain of salt, including what I'm writing. I'm not a doctor. Eat your fruits, eat your vegetables, eat your colours, eat your carbs and your meats and your fats. Avoid pesticides when you can and recognize that's not always an option and that's not going to kill you. Eat food with with a culinary tradition behind it. That strategy will keep the good stuff in, the bad stuff out and won't make you go crazy trying to research what the fuck 'guar gum' is and why you should avoid it.