The Knowhow
Whether making yourself a glass of juice with from a citrus blender to producing an exotic fruit smoothie from a premium machine, you'll be spoiled for choice with the varying levels of blending, extracting and whole food processing devices around to suit your budget and requirements.
Blending or juicing, what's the difference?
There's nothing like a smoothie or shake made in a blender to fill you up and get your day off to a healthy start. It's also easy to add protein into your smoothie, making it a great meal replacement.
Unlike juicing, blending gives you the option to include the skin of your fruit and veg in your smoothie to retain the fibre. Blending enthusiasts argue that this is critical since there are vital nutrients in the skins of fruit and veg. Keeping the fibre intact allows your body to regulate the pace at which the sugars are released into the bloodstream, avoiding sugar spikes that the juice that some of the sweeter fruits produce.
What are advantages of juicing?
Juicing breaks down fruit and vegetables, leaving you with their liquid and a high potency vitamins and minerals. Many believe that extracting juice can help ward off degenerative diseases, depression and illness. Juicing also extracts much of the fibre so you're left with pure liquid that can be absorbed more quickly into your bloodstream for a quick boost.
It can take a lot of veg and fruit to make one glass of juice, so without a doubt you will be getting more of these into your diet in one go. This can be very helpful especially if you don't really enjoy eating fruit and vegetables.
What's new?
Juicer/blender enthusiasts with deep pockets can take a look at high end devices. These machines are capable of juicing, cooking, grinding and freezing! They can carry out tasks from making nut butters, wholegrain flours, frozen desserts and sorbets, pâtés, baby food and can even make steaming hot soup - right in the blender container itself!
These high-end juicers are often used by those juicing whole foods daily. Their heavy duty action can also process tougher greens like wheatgrass which other types of lower grade juicers can't easily handle.
