Juicer Recipes – 3 Great Vegetables To Juice for a Healthy Heart.

A great way to get the healthy nutrients you need from vegetables is to juice them. Here are three vegetables that have been researched and shown to have heart healthy benefits. What are they you might ask?

SPINACH

Spinach contains vitamin C and vitamin A (beta-carotene). These are two important antioxidants that disarm free radicals that can attack artery walls. Vitamin C is a water soluble nutrient and beta-carotene is fat soluble. Together they provide a powerful combination that can prevent cholesterol from oxidation. When oxidized, cholesterol becomes sticky and can attach itself to artery walls, leading to blocked arteries. This can cause heart attacks and strokes.

The muscles of the heart will not function properly with out magnesium and potassium. If our potassium and magnesium levels get too low, this can cause irregular heart beats and even a possible heart attack. The good news is that spinach contains potassium and magnesium in abundance. Further more, these two minerals also help lower blood pressure.

Spinach also contains other blood lowering components – peptides. Research has found that blood pressure levels in animals was lowered in as little as two to four hours. The animals consumed just 20 – 30mg of peptides for each kg of body weight each day

Juicer recipes idea: You will need a good amount of spinach to get enough juice. I recommend four to five cups or even more. You can also add an apple juice to sweeten. Spinach juice alone isn’t very palatable and apple also has heart healthy benefits.

BROCCOLI

Just like its fellow vegetable spinach, broccoli is high in both vitamins C and A and therefore has all the benefits for the heart as explained for spinach.

In addition to this, broccoli is also abundant in vitamins A and C, which carries the heart health benefits described above for spinach.

Juicer recipes idea: Juice the florets and the stalks to get maximun nutrition benefits. Also the stalk contains more juice than the florets.

TOMATOES

Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable? Either way way its great for your heart! It’s high levels of a phytochemical known as lycopene that makes tomatoes an awesome vegetable for a healthy heart. Research at Harvard discovered that giving women lycopene over a period of five years reduced their risk of developing heart disease by 50%. Lycopene has also been shown to lower blood pressure

Juicer recipes idea: You can use the left over pulp from your tomato juice to make soups or salsa.

Darren Haynes enjoys writing about health subjects and especially about food and its healing qualities. Check out my juicer recipes blog Juicer Recipes

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