Juicing offers a good answer. Not only can you achieve your daily allowance through juicing, it is easier to drink juice with all the nutrition than to physically eat the bulk of the same amount of vegetables. This is not to say that you should not eat the pulp of fruit or veggie, because some of the fibre contained in the flesh is also important for our diets.

Almost every fruit and vegetable can be juiced. But the green leafy vegetables are probably the most important to consume. You can include spinach and kale, cabbage and broccoli leaves. You can also include wheatgrass which contains many essential vitamins and enzymes. If you need a sweetener in all that green juice, then try adding carrot juice rather than sugar.

Here are three reasons why juicing is good for your health:-

1. Juicing allows us to absorb more nutrients. Many of todays vegetables and fruits contain less nutrients than they did years ago. This is because the soil has been overworked with modern production methods. Use organic veggies if possible.

2. Juicing is an efficient way get our nutrients. WE may need to consume large amounts of raw vegetables to get enough nutrients and this is just not practical. But is easy to do by consuming the juice from the same quantity of vegetables.

3. You can add a wider variety of vegetables in your diet. Again this would be difficult to achieve by eating the raw vegetables. Having variety is good for us too. Eating the same foods each day sometimes sets up intolerance in our bodies and this can lead to allergies. Also eating a variety of foods via juicing is more fun and we can start to enjoy all the different flavours and tasted.

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Healthy Veggies

Other may lead busy lifestyles and preparing a full blown meal is too much to handle at the end of a busy day. How then do you make sure that you are taking in the right amount of vitimins and minerals? Supplementing your meals with multivitimins and other tablets may be some of the answer, but somehow it just is not the same as eating and drinking good quality food and juice. There are some good supplements around so be sure to have supplements with good organic or natural ingredients.

Strawberries are great for juicing

Spinach and broccoli contain high levels of protein and super green food such as chlorella and spirulina have more protein than wheat, soy, or meat. One half cup of broccoli has three grams of protein. Moreover, protein in green vegetables is easier to digest compared to protein meat. Plant protein is also good for your heart.

Green vegetables are rich in powerful antioxidants such as lutein, beta-carotene, and zeaxanthin. Antioxidants are responsible for neutralization of damaging effects caused by free radical activity in your body’s molecular structure. These antioxidants also support eye health.

Just about every fruit and vegetable can be juiced. How about making your own great combinations? Beetroot and carrot juice, or spinach and orage? Sounds a bit unusual but you may discover some new tastes in the process.

Maintaining good health is a long term strategy for you and your family. You may find that your children love the strange exotic juices where they will not eat the actual veggies. So healthy living can be fun, give it a try.

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Firstly, do you want a manual or an electric juicer? A manual juicer is more environmentally friendly and saves on electricity costs. You may spend a bit more time doing the juicing, but this could be part of the attraction. If you need to save time, then go for the automatic juicing approach.

The quality of the machine is also important. A better auger action will extract more juice. A slower action is better for wheatgrass. This is because the juice needs to be gently crushed from the grass, it retains more vitimins and enzymes that way.

You may also want to juice more than just wheatgrass juice. Maybe vegetables and fruit juice are also part of your diet. Will your juicer need to work at different speeds for the carrots and spinach?

Will your juicer need to be portable, or can it stay in one place on your kitchen surface? There are times when will will want to store it away to have more kitchen space. Or, you may be a travelling salesman and like to have your juice each morning when you wake up in your hotel room. If that is the case then size does matter.

Of course, there are other factors to consider when you are trying to lead a healthy lifestyle. Getting the right juicer is just one practical step to help you on your way. Happy juicing!

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But that’s not all wheatgrass can do.

Over the years, many women have asked me whether wheatgrass could improve the quality of their skin. Being male, medically oriented and presuming they had beauty on their minds I tended to avoid the question.

But I should have been more open-minded because the wheatgrass extract I use for my patients must be one of the best cosmetics ever. After all, I’ve been using it as an aftershave for years. Smooth skin, never a rash or bloodstained collar. Perhaps we males don’t see that as being cosmetic!

Wheatgrass appears to work by activating growth factors, the cell messengers that accelerate cell growth and whole body skin tissue renewal. Therefore, in time it can only improve skin quality. Indeed, I am aware of many examples of this such as immediate softening and smoothing of face and hands; elimination of blackheads; effective soothing and rash prevention post-waxing and as a moisturiser after sun and wind exposure. Also, as one lady noted, wheatgrass is an “awesome” toner.

So whenever you think “wheatgrass”, think “skin recovery”. You shouldn’t have to pay a small fortune for an effective eye moisturiser.

Dr. Chris Reynolds. M.B.,B.S.

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Governments are continuously searching for other sources of fuel in the light of the proven harmful effects of petroleum to the environment, and one of these sources they are looking at is wheatgrass and biomass reserves. Wheatgrass comes from the cotyledons of a common wheat plant named Triticum aestivum, and is believed to have curing and health benefits. It can be grown easily in home gardens and backyards, which is why more people are cultivating it for personal or commercial purposes.

Agricultural scientists have discovered the other benefits of wheatgrass aside from those in the curative side. It can be a source of alternative fuel like ethanol and methanol. In fact, not only wheatgrass, but also other crops can be processed to produce biomass energy. Ethanol and methanol can be derived from biomass and fossil fuels. The ability of wheatgrass and other crops and woody sources in providing biomass energy for fuel is one hopeful step in the reduction of the amount of greenhouse gases in the environment. All waste by-products have the potential be become biomass energy sources, and the list can range from corn stalks and kernels, soybean, canola oil, animal fats and waste, prairie grasses and hardwood, and even algae.

There are sundry advantages in using biomass fuel. First, it does not contribute to the build-up of greenhouse gases. Also, biomass absorbs carbon when it is grown that is equal to the carbon it releases when used as a fuel, so it hardly contributes to global warming. Biomass does not release a high amount of sulfur oxide unlike coal, and it has a high octane rating that can give a better burning efficiency to vehicles. Including corn and plant and animals wastes, wheatgrass does not have to end up straight to landfill if it is processed for fuel.

Here are other benefits that we can get from using biomass fuel: It is evenly distributed throughout the world unlike finite energy sources; it is cheaper to convert these potential sources to fuel; it gives opportunities for local, regional, national, and international levels a more sustainable energy source; it is a technologically and economically friendly means of solving the problem of fast-depleting fuel reserves; it contributes to greenhouse reduction; it gives an opportunity for local farmers and entrepreneurs for a sustainable development.

In some western countries like Brazil and Western America, the use of ethanol and methanol as a replacement to gasoline has already been started. Only a simpler kind of technology is used in the production of these biomass alcohols compared to that of gasoline processing. To create fuel from biomass, the feedstock is first ground to reveal the starch from the plant. Then, water and enzymes are mixed with the ground feedstock before heating the mixture to produce sugar. To ferment this sugar, yeast is added. Once ethanol is produced, it will undergo distillation to remove the alcohol content, which then ends up with vehicle-efficient fuel.

Wheatgrass, like other potential sources of biomass energy, offers a promising, eco-friendly source of income for the rural population throughout the world.

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Cody Winchester • cwincheste@argusleader.com • December 7, 2010

U.S. Department of Agriculture research has pinpointed why the corn rootworm is such a tenacious pest, and it suggests that more natural pest-management systems also might be more economical.

The secret to the rootworm’s success is its sticky, foul-smelling blood, which coagulates in a predator’s mouth and temporarily glues it shut. Its smell and taste also repel would-be attackers.

Jonathan Lundgren, an entomologist at the USDA lab in Brookings, made the discovery in collaboration with colleagues in Switzerland and Hungary.

“It turns out that even though we’ve been studying this pest for 100 years, and hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent researching it, nobody has ever discovered that this thing has the stickiest blood we’ve seen in insects so far,” Lundgren said.

Lundgren and his team devised a test to detect rootworm DNA in predators’ stomachs. To test their model, they tried to feed rootworm larvae to different predators.

What they found surprised them. Most of the predators shied away or flopped on their backs, repelled by chemicals in the blood. The ones that tried to take a bite found their mouths cemented shut.

But not all of them were put off. Predators that suck fluids rather than chew tissue, such as the wolf spider, ate the rootworm larvae with gusto.

The implication, Lundgren said, is that rootworm infestations might be prevented simply by encouraging a large and diverse population of natural predators.

Dr. Scott Fausti, an agricultural economist at South Dakota State University, is working with Lundgren to see whether planting a winter cover crop such as slender wheatgrass would attract more predators to feed on rootworm larvae.

“The preliminary work shows that there is an effect, but we don’t have the economic analysis yet,” Fausti said.

The second part of their research is to see whether this method is economically feasible, compared with the use of insecticides and genetically modified seed. That research is ongoing, but “it’s looking good so far,” Lundgren said.

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