The Juicy, Grainy Truth
So what is the Juicy, Grainy truth about the last week? I’m not hungry. In the mornings, we have been juicing the “base”: 3 carrots, 1 lemon and 1 apple. We added Kale to the mix. I think I was much more adventurous in adding our new leafy friend than my juicing cohort. What was once a bright orange cheery breakfast drink turned into something that, as Ryan described, looked as if it were drained from the dirty water bin in a Rug Doctor. Aside from appearance, it was still pretty delicious and rated even higher on the satiety scale. Toward the end of the week, we had to add spinach. I think someone from County Market took a trip down the fortune-telling-organic-vitamin aisle and saw that I was coming to purchase Kale for breakfast. Assuming I must be some sort of mad woman, they hid the Kale and tried to offend my juicing senses by replacing it with spinach. At this point, I’d probably juice just about any leafy substance if it had enough vitamins and nutrients in it. I’ve become accustomed to the freshly-mowed grass aroma wafting from my Starbucks Coffee cup in the morning. While driving home from work just the other day, I passed by a field that had been recently mowed and my stomach growled like a Pavlovian response. I think my 7 grain friends have made a “Survivor” type alliance with the breakfast juice. I’m glad we can all be friends.
Over the weekend, I was able to do some reading about juicing. My concern was my instable blood sugar from PCOS and the amount of sugar taken in quite quickly. I learned that the phrase “the internet is a wealth of information” is an incomplete phrase. To be exact, the phrase should appear as “the internet is a wealth of non information”. Every aspect that I attempted to find truth and reasoning was proven and disproved. I decided after that to let my body tell me what was the truth. I was feeling better, more sustained energy through out the day, and my focus was much more clear at work and while studying. I did not have the symptoms of high blood sugar and I didn’t feel the “crash”. While I know I have to watch how much sugar from fruit and junk food I take in over the course of a day, I don’t think that juicing in the morning is adding serious risk. If anything, it is still quite a reduction of “bad sugars” (with PCOS, fruit sugars are just as bad as processed sugars) from my days of fast-food dining.
Through my health insurance company’s website, I also found other information about the benefits of juicing. This was particularly interesting as I recently found out that I have slow stomach emptying which could be the cause for my acid reflux, ulcer type symptoms and -once again – constant pain. My doctor prescribed a drug called Reglan. It is commonly prescribed for this ailment. I checked out the drug online and saw that it can cause drug induced Parkinson’s disease. It even had a “black box warning” from the FDA about this. No thanks! I’ll either keep the stomach pain and grin and bear it OR find an alternative. This article about juicing talked about how the enzymes contained in the fruit and veggies can actually help the stomach muscles start moving and breaking down the food and the enzymes will work to remove the old food-product that stayed behind on the stomach and intestinal lining. I trusted the content of this article as it was science based and not opinion based. I know science can be wrong, but it seems VERY difficult for a scientific journal to write anything in support of healthy, more natural eating even though they say that will prevent most diseases. They just don’t agree on what “healthy, more natural eating habits” are. While on the topic of digestion and poop, Alice – my mother in law – told me a very interesting tidbit about meat. Our bodies don