Does your body feel healthy, but not quite on the next level? Are you energetic, but not so energetic that actually sitting down requires effort? Do you wish that your thinking was lightning fast and your memory as accurate as a book? Then juicing may be for you.
When done with expertise, juicing is the perfect way to target any area of your health you see fit. You can flood your body with nutrition in an instant, and bypass the cumbersome steaming of spinach, or a boring meal of carrots. Then there’s the fun of creating endless different combinations, and comparing their subtle differences like a mad scientist.
As long as you don’t consider juicing to be a meal replacement, which it isn’t, and avoid a sugar overdose, investing in a juicer is a great decision, particularly given that our first machine has a 15 year warranty.
Today’s guide will cover masticating, AKA cold-press juicers, which are infinitely better than centrifugal juicers. Why? They operate at a fraction of the speed, less than 1% in some cases. The low speed preserves the vitamins and antioxidants much better as it allows less oxygen pockets to form, and less froth and foam.
Masticating juicers slowly grind and chew the produce, releasing nutrients down to the cell membrane level. In fact, for certain health giving antioxidants, juice made with a masticating juicer can be 20 times more nutritious.
Masticating juicers also result in drier leftover pulp, which 1) gives you a clean juice which won’t need to be strained, and 2) squeezes out every last drop of nutritional goodness. The added nutritional density also means that masticated juice tastes much better, and they’re even dramatically quieter.
For a shortcut, Omega NC900HDC is the best mid-range masticating juicer, while the Tribest GSE-5000 is the perfect higher priced machine.
Let’s get started:
One – Omega NC900HDC
The most well rounded, affordable yet feature-filled masticating juicer on the market today.
The Omega NC900HDC is beaten by other machines in a couple of respects, but overall, it meets the most requirements for amazing juice without being completely out of reach price-wise.
Firstly, and most importantly, the Omega NC900HDC operates at an ideal 47 revolutions per minutes, close to the perfect speed for extracting maximum juice and maximum nutrition within that juice. The vital compounds of the produce are exposed to far less oxygen compared to juices made at higher speeds, and consequently, this juicer makes some of the most antioxidant-filled, enzyme rich juice you’ll find anywhere.
The Omega NC900HDC uses dual stage masticating juicing, squeezing so much juice that the leftover pulp is as dry as a bone. Speaking of which, this machine comes with automatic pulp ejection, compared to cheaper machines where pulp is stored in an interior container.
The really special feature of this machine, however, is the adjustable pressure settings.
The Omega NC900HDC features 5 different pressure levels, to tighten the pressure on harder produce, or loosen it for softer plants like fruits. This gives you total control over your juicing, allowing you to squeeze as much juice out as you want. On this list, the Tribest Green Star is the only other machine with this feature; the Omega J8006 lacks it.
Next, we have the sturdy materials, with a stainless steel exterior and cutting blades of hard plastic, which are 100% BPA free. Conveniently, the Omega NC900HDC comes equipped with a reverse function, which is simple to operate, meaning that if the juicer gets jammed with stringy green fibers or harder pineapple flesh, you can easily reverse the blockage.
Also convenient is the 2.5 by 1.5 inch feed chute. While the Tribest Green Star’s chute is slightly bigger, the NC900HDC’s is 82% larger than Omega’s alternative J8006 brand and makes feeding in produce much easier, reducing the time spent cutting. The low RPM has a side benefit too, making Omega a quieter than average juicer, according to most reviewers.
There’s no risk with the NC900HDC, as its warranty is 15 years, the longest out of the big juicer brands. It’s lighter than some juicers, weighing 13 pounds.
This juicer can also cope with a huge variety of produce, including beets, apples, asparagus, carrots, pears, strawberries, melon, tomatoes and peppers. It’s even able to grind coffee beans, convert whole nuts into spreadable nut butter, and change whole foods into soft baby food as if by magic.
With other juicing brands, you have to buy green vegetable attachments separately, for example, but with the Omega NC900HDC, you have everything you need in one glorious package. The package also contains a juice bowl and a cleaning brush.
That’s another advantage too: the Omega NC900HDC is a quick juicer to clean. Dissembling the machine will take approximately one minute, and cleaning the stainless steel exterior requires nothing more than a damp cloth. The strainer, auger and other parts are easy to clean in about five minutes.
A few juicers have strangely designed bodies with recesses that increase the surface area, and filter styles which make cleaning a nightmare, but the Omega NC900HDC isn’t one of them. In reviews, most customers have been delighted with the ease of the cleaning operation.
The only significant problem with this juicer is that some users have reported fragile juicing screens. The filter which separates the liquid and pulp sometimes breaks within a month. This forces you to obtain a replacement, but luckily, Omega’s customer service is excellent and the replacement is free.
The final verdict: the Omega NC900HDC is the perfect mid-range masticating juicer.
Amazon link: Omega NC900HDC Masticating Juicer.
Two – Tribest Green Star Elite GSE-5000
The best juicer if price is no barrier and you want to leave no stone unturned.
The Tribest GSE-5000 is the most expensive juicer on this list, but for a good reason: it features twin juicing gears. Compared to single auger juicers, the Tribest GSE-5000 is able to squeeze much more juice out of raw produce, while maximising the flavour and nutrition.
These gears are designed to mimic chewing human teeth, cutting, slicing and triturating the produce. The gap between the twin gears is a minuscule 0.1mm, smaller than a human hair. The Tribest GSE-5000 breaks apart produce at the cell membrane level, and consequently, the Tribest GSE-5000 achieves an amazing 4/1000 juice clearance rate. The pulp is so dry that you’ll get thirsty by touching it.
If juice efficiency is your ultimate goal, the Tribest GSE-5000 is your ultimate machine.
Its other specifications are almost flawless, beginning with the slow RPM rate of 110, which is higher than the Omega NC900HDC, but still allows the bare minimum of oxygen to spoil the juice. The cutting blades feature magnetic, bio-ceramic materials, which reportedly generate a magnetic field as they turn to stabilise the nutrients and antioxidants.
The blades feature two cutting edges per revolution, and the blades’ material is sturdy, with hard plastic which is 8 times stronger than the plastic used in some juicers. This makes slicing through fibrous green vegetables a breeze. For example, juicing celery is a big problem with many machines, due to the stringy nature of its fibers, but the Tribest GSE-5000 performs amazingly.
The Tribest GSE-5000 also features a mixing stage, allowing for supreme juice consistency. The high diversity of juiceable produce is another advantage. The Tribest GSE-5000 is equipped to juice soft produce like tomatoes, strawberries, and melons, and hard produce like asparagus, apples and carrots alike. It can even convert whole almond nuts into almond milk, with a little added water.
Like the Omega NC900HDC, the Tribest GSE-5000 has adjustable pressure settings so that no produce can escape. There’s a simple adjustable knob to increase the pressure on hard produce and lower it for soft foods, giving you total control.
Every component of the Tribest GSE-5000 is dishwasher friendly. Cleaning by hand is also a quick job, according to reviews, and each package contains a free cleaning brush and scraper. The warranty of the whole machine is 10 years.
Are there any flaws? A tiny one is the small feed chute, which is circular with a 1.5 inch diameter. That’s smaller than the Omega NC900HDC and therefore you’ll have to cut your produce into smaller sizes.
It’s also much heavier than the Omega NC900HDC, weighing 21 pounds vs 13 pounds, and its outer casing consists of hardened plastic rather than stainless steel, which will make cleaning slightly harder. However, like the Omega NC900HDC, the plastics are all BPA-free.
This juicer has a reverse function as well, to swiftly put any clogs and jams to bed. According to reviews, the Tribest GSE-5000 is a quiet juicer, matching the Omega NC900HDC.
While the Omega NC900HDC is the best all round masticating juicer, the Tribest GSE-5000 rules the higher priced realm. Compared to a cheap 100 dollar centrifugal juicer, the difference in juice quality will be unbelievable.
Amazon link: Tribest Green Star Elite GSE-5000.
Three – SKG’S Anti-Oxidation Slow Masticating Juicer
Not quite the greatest masticating juicer around, but one with a special feature. The SKG Masticating Juicer is made from special, food-grade tritan anti-oxidation materials, which act to prevent spoilage of the juice within.
For two specific areas, the SKG is actually the best masticating juicer available. Firstly, the rotations per minute rate is 43, compared to 110 for the Tribest GSE-5000. Instead of shredding the produce in a whirlwind like centrifugal juicers, the SKG slowly but diligently grinds and chews the produce. The slow speed simply doesn’t allow air pockets to form and that prevents oxygen from making inroads. If low RPM is your heart’s desire, the SKG is the juicer for you.
Secondly, the SKG has the largest feed chute size of this list, measuring 3 inches in diameter, making feeding in produce a simple task. You can even shove in medium sized carrots although there’s still a risk of clogging the machine. The feed chute is significantly bigger than both Omega machines and both Tribest machines.
Outside of the hard specifications, reviews of the juice itself are also excellent. With SKG, the juice tends to be thick in a delicious way, with a rich flavour, with only a couple of customers annoyed with the quantity of pulp.
SKG themselves have performed tests on various produce, and apparently the juice yields are as follows: 85-90% for oranges, 78-83% for pears. Apples, 65-75%, celery, 65-70%, and carrots, 42-47%.
Unlike the Tribest GSE-5000, the SKG isn’t fully dishwasher safe. However, another feature is the easiness to clean, with almost all customers delighted with how fast it is to dissemble the juicer and clean the parts within. There are few nooks and crannies and recesses where fibers collect unnecessarily.
The warranty of this machine is divided, but decent, with ten years for the motor and main body and 2 years for all other parts, making SKG a fairly safe purchase.
The SKG comes with all the important freebies, including a cleaning brush, juicing cap, 2 cups and a pusher. The pusher is exactly as it sounds: a tool to shove produce further into the machine, since unlike the very best juicers, the SKG is non-self feeding, although still simple to operate.
The SKG is equipped with an easy to operate reverse function, a feature which no masticating juicer should be without. As a company, SKG also has swift and efficient customer service, responding to any rare problems within days.
The SKG comes with two colour options, silver and champagne, if you’d rather be homeless than have a kitchen colour scheme which is uncoordinated. All parts, including the stainless steel exterior and silicone components, are BPA free. The SKG masticating juicer weighs in at 16 pounds, in the middle of the pack.
The machine automatically ejects dry pulp to make the process extra convenient. The biggest “failure” of this top quality juicer is its lack of adjustable pressure settings, unlike our first two machines, but most reviews suggest that the SKG juices hard and soft produce extremely well regardless. Also, there’s been some reports of low usage time, that the machine begins to stall after ten continuous minutes of juicing, which is fairly short.
The SKG Masticating Juicer isn’t perfect, but easily covers the fundamental features for tasty and nutritious juice.
Four – Omega J8006
Part of Omega’s endless series of juicers, with Omega being among the biggest home juicing companies in the world.
The Omega J8006 is inferior to the NC900HDC in all aspects, but it’s also cheaper, which is why it has its own role to play. If you’ve decided to start juicing to flood your body with antioxidants and nutrition, for your health, eyesight, brain health or longevity, the J8006 is still superior to almost every machine out there.
The juicing process is as perfectly crafted as ever, starting with 47RPM juicing speed to prevent oxygen spoilage, and continuing with a 2 horsepower motor that grinds its way through even the toughest plants. Keeping oxygen outside where it belongs doesn’t just preserve the nutrients: it keeps the flavour intact. The J8006 is specifically designed to minimise froth and foam formation, which create bubbles that allow oxygen to thrive.
The J8006 can still juice a massive variety of produce including green vegetables, citrus fruits, asparagus, garlic, strawberries and tomatoes. It’s able to grind coffee beans, unlike the more expensive Champion model lower down, and it keeps the sorbet, baby food and nut butter functions. If you wanted, you could even create a 5 nut special by funnelling in different types of nuts; there’s nothing stopping you.
The juicer comes with four stabilising feet to prevent it from shuffling off your counter while in action. The warranty is identical, at 15 years.
The materials are similarly sturdy, featuring stainless steel housing and casing and durable plastic for the blades. The J8 also retains the NC900HDC’s automatic pulp ejection, saving time spent emptying and making the juicer just a little bit more convenient to use.
The feed chute is also too small, measuring 1 by 1 and a half inches. The NC900HDC is 82% larger. Beyond a certain size, like 3 inches, the extra benefits of large feed chutes taper off, but the J8006 small sizes means that you’ll have to cut up celery or broccoli or pineapple much more than usual.
As for downsides, it’s unclear whether this juicer contains any BPA or not. In years gone, by the juicer contained BPA in its interior poly-carbonate housing, with more expensive Omega models featuring cleaner plastic. With the widespread negative publicity about BPA, it’s possible that Omega has changed the materials by now, but our stance is that the J8006 does contain BPA.
The J8006 also lacks any adjustable pressure settings. This could have two implications: 1) you may love the extra control and dislike a machine doing the work for you, or 2) you might prefer to let the process be automatic. If you’re not confident enough to control the pressure yourself, then the J8006 is actually better than NC900HDC.
Like the NC900HDC, the machine isn’t dishwasher friendly. There are virtually identical reports of the juicing screens bursting and cracking, again redeemed by the top of the line customer service. The Omega J8006 is slightly louder than its cousin because of its higher RPM rate, but still a quiet machine next to centrifugal juicers, which sound like a banned outtake from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
You have two choices of colour, silver and metallic, while the juicer’s weight is 18 pounds, 5 pounds heavier than the NC900HDC.
The all important reverse function for unclogging is in place, and so is the free cleaning brush. Also included is a juice catch cup, a pulp catch cup and blank plate.
The J8006 fails to beat its cousin outright in any respect. However, the cheapness is a huge advantage, and the biggest problems only relate to convenience: the juice landing in the cup will be as nutritious as ever.
Five – Kuvings NJE-3580U Masticating Slow Juicer
The second cheapest masticating juicer on our list. The Kuvings NJE-3580U has some weak features but also some high end features, meaning that like the J8006, it’s perfect for anybody who can’t scrape out an extra hundred dollars.
Firstly, the all important 80RPM is in the ideal range for efficient juice extraction, yet low oxygen formation. Foam and froth will struggle to survive, providing an estimated juice shelf life of 72 hours.
The Kuvings NJE-3580U features a heavy duty juicing screw which is able to juice a wide variety of produce such as carrots, beets, celery, leafy greens, wheatgrass, and soft plants like tomatoes. There’s no need for extra attachments for juicing spinach or celery, as with the Champion juicer.
In fact, Kuvings comes with seven different nozzles, beating even the Omega models with six. They include a juicing nozzle, a rice cake nozzle, a mincing nozzle and 4 different pasta nozzles. With its homogenising capabilities the Kuving’s can create nut butter and baby food, and grinds coffee beans and spices with ease.
Next on the list is a downside, however: the small feed chute. The chute is circular and measures only 1.5 inches in diameter, matching the Omega J8006 as the smallest, meaning that you’ll waste slightly more time slicing produce compared to the Omega HDC900.
Kuvings also takes longer to clean than other models, due to quirks of its design. Firstly, the juicer actually dissembles into more individual parts which require cleaning. Secondly, the juicing screen consists of a plastic outside which holds the metallic filter on the inside, and with Kuvings NJE-3580U, the gaps between the metal and plastic tend to accumulate more pulp than usual.
Additionally, some of the parts are top rack dishwasher friendly, but not all of them like the Tribest GSE-5000. However, the cleaning process should still only take 5 minutes maximum, and the more you practise, the more seconds you’ll shave off.
The Kuvings NJE-3580U also has a feature which both Omega juicer models lack – a self feeding mechanism which automatically sucks down fruits and vegetables. The package comes with a free juicing plunger to force down ingredients, but you probably won’t need to use it.
Another advantage is the reverse function, to undo any clogs if you drop in a whole bunch of bananas in a moment of madness, and a light weight of 15.4 pounds. Freebies are plentiful: there’s a free cleaning brush, a juice collecting cup, and a pulp collecting cup.
One problem is similar to the Omega J8006: the lack of clarity over BPA. There’s little new information and old responses to customer questions indicate that the interior plastic contains it. Also, a minority of customers were displeased with the wetness of the pulp, particularly compared to the bone dry leftovers of the Tribest GSE-5000. That said, the clearance rate is still impressive, and you’d never expect this cheaper model to be as amazingly efficient.
The Kuvings NJE-3580U also lacks adjustable pressure settings, a feature which is only found in the Omega J8006 and Tribest GSE-5000. The warranty is also much shorter than its low priced brethren the Omega J8006, at 5 years vs 15 years. However, it does feature automatic pulp ejection, shaving precious minutes off the operation time.
The Kuvings NJE-3580U is the direct rival of the Omega J8006, so how do they compare? Overall, Omega wins the battle, but both models are miles head of even the best centrifugal juicers.
Six – Tribest Slowstar
This juicer is essentially Tribest’s version of the Omega NC900HDC, deliberately weaker than the GSE-5000, but deliberately more affordable too.
Firstly, the reason for the cheaper price is the lack of twin gears. The Slow Star lacks this bonus mashing power, and the hairline gap between those twin gears which is so effective at squeezing every last drop from produce. The Tribest Slowstar won’t match the incredible 4/1000 clearance rate of the GSE-5000…
…but nevertheless, the Slowstar is still an amazing juicer, despite featuring a single auger. Firstly, the Tribest Slowstar has brute crushing power, with a powerful 200 watt motor that creates torque 2 to 3 times greater than other masticating juicers, stronger than the fist of the Incredible Hulk (claim not officially verified).
Compared to the GSE-5000, it’s a significantly slower juicer, at 47RPM, keeping pesky oxygen at bay. However, the two are similar in some respects: both models have blades with double cutting edges per rotation, meaning that the Tribest Slowstar does twice as much work as inferior masticating juicers.
Another advantage is that the blades are made from super-strength Ultem plastic, just like the GSE-5000’s. It probably isn’t intelligent for any company to put the word “slow” in their product’s name, but these special blades mean that the juice will be in your mouth within minutes.
How does it compare directly to its price range rival? The Omega NC900HDC has a clear victory with its adjustable pressure settings, which the Slowstar Tribest lacks. However, the latter has the double slicing blades.
The warranty is less at 10 years, and the weight is higher at 19 pounds, but both figures are still excellent.
Coincidentally, the feed chute sizes are exactly the same, and both beaten by the 3 inch chute of SKG; the Slowstar’s feed chute is 1.5 by 2.5 inches. You won’t be throwing whole oranges down the chute, but pouring in raspberries or peas should be pretty easy. The Tribest Slowstar also has a similarly easy to operate reverse function, while neither the Omega NC900HDC nor the Slowstar are dishwasher safe.
One significant flaw is the unclear stance on BPA. Reading the description, you’ll quickly see that the outer casing and housing are “100% BPA free”, which is a reassuring claim. However, on closer inspection, the ultem auger and screen are described as “virtually BPA free”. It’s pretty obvious that those components contain traces of BPA if the descriptions differ, compared to the Green Star GSE-5000 where there’s no BPA at all. The levels may be minuscule, and they may be safe, but if you want to be extra cautious, these BPA traces are another downside.
Then there’s the reviews, where the Tribest Slowstar has a slight disadvantage, with more customers complaining of cumbersome cleaning. One even complained about the lid of the juicer blowing off and launching ten feet into the air, while others found that the juice contained too much pulp. The cleaning complaint makes sense as well, since the Slowstar’s design contains more recesses and the strainer contains a certain pattern which are both hard to clean.
That said, most of the reviews are delighted with the juice quality and convenience; the difference to Omega is only slight. Also, the two are equally quiet during operation according to their customers.
The Tribest Slowstar is inferior to the Omega HDC900 in both its reviews and its specifications, but it’s still a high quality juicer.
Seven – HUROM’S HU-100 Masticating Slow Juicer
With the Hurom HU-100 we arrive at our first vertical masticating juicer. Being vertical isn’t just a stylistic feature: it allows you to let gravity pull the produce in, making Hurom self feeding without an actual self feeding function.
Price-wise, this is around average, and its juicing ability is correspondingly high. The Hurom HU-100 operates at 43 rotations per minute, matching SKG with the slowest rate on this list. Like Omega, the cutting blades themselves are made from Ultem, an amber coloured plastic which is 8 times harder and tougher than regular plastic.
This allows Hurom to grind through the toughest vegetable like asparagus, but this juicers also features Hurom’s patented Slow Squeezing Technology (SST). According to Hurom, this allows their juicer to extract 35% more juice compared to other masticating juicers, and do the reviews bear this out? Maybe not with the exact percentage, but tales of bone dry pulp are very common with this machine, with only a few exceptions where people had to filter the juice.
In short: the juicing power of this machine is immense. The other specifications are generally high quality too, beginning with the Hurom HU-100’s 100% BPA free materials. The juicer consists of hard plastic interior parts and a stainless steel exterior, sturdy with an added bonus of being easy to clean.
The Hurom HU-100 features automatic pulp ejection, rather than storing the pulp in an internal basket, and non-skid feet to stop the machine from fleeing your kitchen counter. According to testimonials, the Hurom HU-100 is a quiet juicer, with nothing making noise but the slow spinning of the blades.
This juicer has a wider feed chute than the Omega J8006 or Kuvings, measuring 1.5 by 2.5 inches, reducing the need for slicing. The Hurom HU-100 has an easy to operate reverse function to remove clogs, with a few seconds doing the trick, and comes with all the important freebies, including a juice bowl, plunger and free cleaning brush.
Speaking of cleaning, this juicer is not dishwasher safe, unlike the Tribest GSE-5000. However, dissembling the components isn’t complicated in the slightest and the parts are easier to clean than Kuvings. Most customers are delighted with how easy it is to clean, as with the quiet operation.
One occasional complaint from customers is that the Hurom HU-100 is poor at juicing celery, saying that celery clogs the juicer even when they cut it into bite sized chunks. However, the Hurom HU-100 is able to juice the full range of produce, including cruciferous vegetables, pomegranates, citrus fruits, berries, and nuts like almonds. There’s no need to buy extra attachments separately.
The Hurom HU-100 is also the lightest juicer on this list, weighing just 12 pounds. If the reason you’re juicing is to build up weak muscles, then Hurom is the juicer for you.
In fact, one of the few features the Hurom HU-100 lacks is adjustable pressure settings, and that’s expected for a lower priced model. This juicer even looks snazzy and it won’t destroy the carefully crafted image of your kitchen.
The Hurom HU-100 is an amazing masticating juicer in its specifications, its reviews and its appearance.
Honourable mention – Champion Juicer G5-PG710
A bonus juicer, one with many great features, but which is ultimately inferior to our first seven juicers.
So why did the Champion Juicer G5-PG710 fail to make the list? A few reasons which aren’t up for debate: firstly, the Champion juicer isn’t equipped to juice a wide enough range of produce. To juice green vegetables (including the widely loved wheatgrass) you have to buy a separate attachment, and to shred and grind coffee beans you’ll need the grainmill attachment, which is also needed for corn and barley.
Secondly, the Champion Juicer has an extremely high rotations per minute rate of 1725 per minute. This juicer is still a masticating juicer; it still chews and grinds the produce in a manner designed to replicate human teeth and squeeze as much nutritional goodness out as physically possible, but the high speed will allow more bubbles, more froth and more oxygen to form.
Thirdly, its motor is weak, with just 1/3 horsepower compared to the two-horsepower motor of the Omega J8006. The Champion juicer also runs on 540 watts, much more than any other juicer here, and has a high weight of 25 pounds, versus 15.4 pounds for Kuving. Finally, the high RPM rate makes the Champion much louder than its competitors. It’s easily the loudest juice on this list.
That said, if you’ve previously been using a centrifugal juicer, the Champion G5-PG710 will still be a huge upgrade.
The special chewing mechanism of the gears is always going to be more effective than a simple whirlwind of shredding. Additionally, the Champion company was formed in the 1950s and the longevity of their juicers is amazing. Some people have perfectly operational Champion juicers which they bought in the 1970s.
The outer housing and casing are also made with durable food grade 6 nylon and surgical grade stainless steel. There isn’t a trace of BPA anywhere in this machine, while the feed chute is larger than the Omega J8006 at 1.75 by 1.75 inches.
This is NOT a dishwasher friendly juicer, but neither are most of the juicers here and the Champion G5-PG710 is very easy to clean manually, easier than Kuvings and similar to the Omega models. There are very few frustrated reviews on the internet (although there’s always going to be a couple).
Despite the high RPM, most are pleased with the juice quality, indicating that plenty of the nutrition and unique compounds are left over. The feet are rubberised, preventing the juicer from moving while in operation. There’s also a free cleaning brush and pitcher which can store 33.8 ounces of juice.
Another flaw though is the weak warranty: 5 years for extras with the machine, 3 years for the motor, and just 1 year for the cutters. The Omega models easily score the victory here.
While its reviews are very positive, the Champion Juicer G5-PG710 is easily beaten by other masticating juicers for its raw specifications. At the end of the day though, it will still create a tasty and nutritious glass of juice, and probably last for years.
Sugar is still a threat
Despite juicing’s huge opportunities for achieving a level of vitality you never believed possible, there’s one pitfall of doom you must always avoid: overdosing on sugar.
Just as a carton of orange juice drunk at breakfast is swimming with rapidly absorbed sugar, so too is a combination of plants you make yourself. It doesn’t matter how many antioxidants and enzymes there are; combining apples, cherries and pineapple will still create sugar levels as high as 50 grams per glass.
Like commercial fruit juice, there’s little fiber to slow down the absorption. Manipulating the leftover pulp levels won’t work, because the sugar has been separated at a cellular level.
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So what you have to do is simple. Always monitor the sugar levels of the ingredients you use, and always monitor its context in your daily diet, just as you would for any other food.
There’s also several other natural problems in plants which juicing doesn’t eliminate, including FODMAPs, short chain carbohydrates like polyols which trigger digestive problems and acne. There’s also oxalates found in spinach and rhubarb, and inflammatory glycoalkaloids like tomatine in tomatoes.
The same rules apply to everything: juicing doesn’t bypass all of the strategies and secrets we discuss on this website and make them irrelevant.
People are constantly getting persuaded by the juicing movement that juicing is the elixir of life itself. Juicing is reportedly the fountain of youth, the bane of cancer cells, and the cleanser of pimples rolled into one. One interesting belief is that juicing can give you the energy of a superhuman, since juicing eliminates digestion and digestion is the number one sink of all human energy.
Now, some of the claims are true, and some of the claims are false. Most are significantly exaggerated but fundamentally true. The point is that you should never get persuaded by these pronouncements that juicing can never possibly hurt you.
Don’t get scared and put off by this warning either; it’s pretty clear that the average man and woman needs more juice and not less. Just be careful, and if you’ve noticed any sensitivity to sugar, whether it’s in your skin, your mood or your energy levels, shift your juicing recipes towards vegetables instead. Also make sure that it is the sugar which you’re sensitive to and not FODMAPs, or unrelated coincidental factors. You can become a juicing maniac to your heart’s content, but always be in control, no matter how crazy you may look.
Juicing is a huge opportunity, but never let it backfire!
Tips and tricks for glorious juicing success
Here is what should do if you want your skills with a juicer to pass into legend:
Never swallow your juice instantly – despite the convenience of juicing, human beings are designed to chew fruits and vegetables, not swallow them instantly. Consequently, our saliva has evolved to begin the digestion process before our stomach comes into play, and that’s why you should swish the juice around in your mouth for at least ten seconds before swallowing it.
One example is the enzyme amylase, which kicks off the digestion of carbohydrates. The more work your mouth does, the more your stomach can extract the all important antioxidants and vitamins. A few juicing fanatics even recommend sipping your juice like wine.
Don’t leave your juice to degenerate – because if you do, the vulnerable antioxidants and phytonutrients will deteriorate, and it won’t matter how slow the RPM rate was. You should NEVER leave your juice in the sun to warm it.
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You can either drink your juice within 15 minutes, or refrigerate it. The good news is that compared to centrifugal juicers, you don’t have to gulp down the juice as quickly, because less oxygen is introduced during the process.
For example, it isn’t smart to juice in bulk just once per week, in an attempt to build a stock which you drink from daily: with each passing day, there’ll be less antioxidants.
Remember that the juicer itself doesn’t fully determine the nutrition. There are three factors: the ingredients you choose, the style of juicer, and what you do with the juice.
Always include one antioxidant-rich food – a scheme to increase the juice’s longevity. It can be sugary fruit like pomegranate, a berry like raspberries, ginger root, or even coffee beans. Follow this strategy and resistance to oxygen will make your juice deteriorate much less quickly, and it’ll be much healthier for you as a bonus.
Don’t shut the juicer down immediately – when juicing, the most obvious sign that the job is done is when the last plant solids have been ground up and the noise quietens down. However, if you leave the juicer running for another twenty seconds, you’ll squeeze every last drop of juice out.
Exploit the laws of gravity – never become a maniac and shove your produce further into the juicer impatiently, or you’ll probably jam it. It should be more of a gentle prod (with the plunger of course), and if you own a vertical juicer like the Hurom HU-100, simply let the produce get sucked in.
Mix hard and soft produce – if you funnel too much hard produce like kale or broccoli into your juicer, there’s a chance the machine will jam. If you pour in endless soft plants like tomatoes and strawberries, pressure will build up in the machine and the juicing spout may clog. The glorious solution? Mix the two.
There’s no need for precise scientific ratios, just have a healthy balance. People will wonder why your juicer never gets jammed while there’s does; little will they know that the great secret is basic as can be. Even better, following this strategy will automatically increase your variety.
Vary your produce – speaking of which, never get stuck with your old favourites! The appeal of juicing is that unlike meals where you spend ten minutes breaking apart pomegranate seeds, or ten minutes boiling spinach, juicing allows you to flood your body with a variety of nutrition in a short space of time. That’s why you should vary the fruit and vegetables you use.
Almost all fruits contain vitamin C, but not all contain resveratrol (red grapes), pterostilbene (blueberries), or 3-p-Coumaroylquinic acid (cherries). Having your favourite ingredients is okay, but a smart strategy is to develop 5 default recipes which each have decent variety.
Juicing articles constantly talk about kale, blueberries, wheatgrass, and asparagus. Never forget the dozens of other plants.
The top 5 juicing ingredients for youthful skin
The great thing about juicing is its flexibility, the opportunity it gives you to really supercharge certain areas of your health like energy, brain function or testosterone levels. There’s no consideration of your daily staples for basic health, like steamed broccoli or sweet potatoes; you can just blast whatever area of health you see fit, in a few minutes work.
Making yourself look younger is one area which is ripe for exploration. If you want to look so youthful that the police accuse you of being a vampire, here are the ingredients to include:
Carrots – a mainstay of juicing recipes. Carrots are extremely rich in beta-carotene, with 335% of the RDI per 100 grams. This carotenoid antioxidant is best known for being the plant form of vitamin A, once your body has converted it to active vitamin A, but like other carotenoids, beta-carotenoid travels to your skin and accumulates there, providing the same orange pigment it provides to the vegetable.
That’s why people say that carrots make you orange, but the result is really much more subtle than that. A healthy, youthful glow is what you will acquire, which you can then add extra layers of colour to with other fruits and vegetables. Carrots have a diverse range of carotenoids too, including lutein, zeaxanthin, and cryptoxanthin.
Pomegranate – the popular fruit which is richest in normal antioxidants, beating even berries. With its flavanoids and anthocyanins, pomegranate can deactivate the free radicals which attack your skin cells, weaken them and create a dull and dead skin tone.
Beetroot – one of the best vegetables for enhancing blood flow. Beetroot is rich in natural nitrates, which increase circulating bloodstream nitric oxide. This causes vasodilation, and increases blood flow to the skin, flooding it with the vibrancy and colour which older people seem to lack. Beetroot is proven to increase blood flow, and proven to increase blood flow to the brain specifically.
A dull skin tone isn’t guaranteed with ageing, as you occasionally see 60 year olds with brighter and healthier skin than most 25 year olds, but people’s poor lifestyle choices tend to take their toll. Shove some beetroot into your juicer and this won’t happen to you. Beetroot also contains a unique antioxidant class called betaines, which provide the purple pigment in beetroot.
Broccoli/Brussels sprouts – I’ve lumped these two vegetables together as one because they’re similarly amazing. Both broccoli and beetroot are rich in sulphur compounds, such as sulforaphane in broccoli. The two contain 148% and 141% of the RDI for vitamin C respectively.
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What do vitamin C and sulphur achieve? Vitamin C is vital for producing collagen, your skin’s main structural protein. An 80 year old’s skin has a fraction of the collagen of a 25 year old’s. Get started today and you can lessen the decline. Sulphur is an important ingredient of glutathione, the most important antioxidant made by your body itself. Recently, studies have linked glutathione levels directly to ageing.
Watermelon – similarly to beetroot, watermelon triggers a surge in bloodstream nitric oxide by supplying citrulline, an amino acid which quickly converts into NO’s main ingredient arginine. Watermelon is amazing for blood flow, but it’s also rich in lycopene, a carotenoid antioxidant which is proven to migrate to your skin cells and breathe new life into them.
Follow those steps, and you may be imprisoned as a test subject in a research facility for eternal youth, but at least you’ll be the youngest looking person in the neighbourhood.
Masticating vs centrifugal juicers – the definitive conclusion
Back in March, we reviewed the 6 best twin gear juicer brands, and we also discussed exactly why a low rotations per minute rate creates the best juice. The degradation has much less to do with higher temperatures than some claim, as the interior temperature only increases by 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit in centrifugal machines.
It’s the oxygen which is important, the fact that the rapidly spinning blades allow more air pockets to appear, and that more bubbles and foam can form. Whether it’s strawberries or broccoli, masticating juicers preserve nutrition better. In fact, the difference is just as huge as the masticating juicer diehards suggest…
...and today, you will discover definitive evidence that the best juicing method is slow speed extraction
. In this 2013 study, scientists gathered some broccoli from a south Korean market, and created fresh broccoli juice using three different machines: 1) a masticating juicer from our old friend Kuvings, 2) a centrifugal juicer, and 3) an NUC electronics hand blender.
For juicing research, this comparison was as clear as day. Juicer 1 operated at 80RPM, just like the Kuvings model we’ve reviewed, while juicer 2 operated at 15000RPM. It doesn’t get more definitive than this. 100 grams of broccoli were cut up, juiced, and tested for various parameters…
The broccoli juice prepared using the masticating juicer easily had the highest antioxidant levels. Levels of polyphenols and flavonoids, two diverse and endlessly researched antioxidant families, were both higher.
The differences were huge: the polyphenol content was 1226.24mg in broccoli juice 1 compared to 724.37mg in broccoli juice 2, a colossal 169.3% increase. The flavonoid levels were 165.1% higher, a curiously similar percentage, at 1018.32mg versus 616.64mg. The hand blender fared vary similarly to the centrifugal juicer.
Broccoli juice version 1 was also much more active against actual free radicals. Both were tested on DPPH, a laboratory formulation of stable free radicals used for exactly these kinds of tests. Broccoli juice 1 scavenged 52% of free radicals, while broccoli juice 2 scavenged a mere 17%, proving that the higher concentrations of antioxidants had a real world effect.
The differences were also shown in real world health benefits, as broccoli juice version 1 “showed the highest growth inhibitory effects against HeLa, A549, AGS, and HT-29 cancer cells“. Broccoli is known for preventing cancer and more of those properties survived when a masticating juicer was used.
It’s clear that the masticated broccoli juice was more nutritious in every single way. It doesn’t end there either, for scientists are more interested in comparing juicing techniques than ever…
Study two – a 2017 study in which a low-speed masticating, a high-speed centrifugal juicer, and a blender were compared. Green grapes were fed into each machine and the resulting juice was thoroughly tested.
The results were a blowout, with the masticating juice (LSM) easily containing the most vitamin C, at 0.8mg per 100ml compared to 0.2ml in the centrifugal juicer. The scientists actually declared that the vitamin C was damaged by “oxidation… due to grinding with high-speed rotating blades“. It was a similar story for antioxidant content as measured by SOD-like activity and the ORAC scale, where the masticated juicer destroyed the centrifugal juicer.
For polyphenols, the masticated grape juice contained 361.9% higher levels, and the scientists discovered lower levels of the oxidation byproduct polyphenol oxidase (PPO), proving that reduced oxygen exposure was to thank. For flavonoids, the figure was 283.5%. Incredibly, the low speed masticating (LSM) grape juice had 20 times higher levels of anthocyanins.
Unsurprisingly, the scientists concluded that “an LSM juicer is strongly recommended for making healthy grape juice, rich in antioxidants“.
Study three – this study compared a low speed masticating juicer to a blender, in the case of juicing apples. The blended apple juice was much browner, and you know what that means! It’s the same as when you bite into the flesh and leave it on the windowsill: the apple has oxidised, and an analysis of polyphenol oxidase levels proved it. The blended apple juice contained 4.5 times more of this oxidation byproduct, with the masticated apple juice containing twice as many antioxidants, including flavanols and polyphenols.
After seeing these studies, I am more convinced than ever that masticating juicers are the way forward.
The old claims about oxidation, which have been debated endlessly and even decried as propaganda by opponents of cold press juicers, have basically been proven. If you want your juicing adventures to be a success, then a low speed masticating juicer is a must, whether it’s single or twin gear.
Conclusion
There you have it. The greatest masticating juicers available are the Omega J8006 for people with less money, the Omega NC900HDC for a medium price range, and the Tribest GSE-5000 if it’s all out juicing war.
After all this discussion of technical specifications, you might get the impression that some brands are significantly inferior, but that’s just an illusion. Never forget that for the most important features, a slow speed and chewing and grinding mechanisms, none of our top 7 fall short.
Any masticating juicer will create a huge leap forward in your health, as long as you minimise sugar. The small feed chute of the J8006 doesn’t counteract the massive advantage in nutrition compared to a centrifugal juicer.
From now on, its up you. What you will get out of juicer depends on how smart you are with your ingredients. Always think the ingredients through, never randomly shove grapes and melons into your juicer, hoping for the best. The section on youth above will show you exactly what is possible.
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Thanks for reading!