Why Only Freshly Made Juice is Really Suitable for Children

Once upon a time, I took my beautiful, healthy son to a dentist. It wasn’t his first time but it was the first time I had had to take him because of a toothache. He was five years old. We had always taught him good oral hygiene, stood over his shoulder and brushed his teeth for him twice a day then showed him how to do it himself. We thought we were great parents who had taught their son valuable lessons in health. That is, until the dentist made us feel two inches tall.

“What does your son drink?” she asked.

“Mostly water and milk,” I replied. “But sometimes juice.”

The dentist grew to ten feet tall and bore down upon me baring her own perfectly straight, artificially whitened fangs. “Juice???????” she scowled. “What kind of juice?”

I shrank and cowered. “Sometimes orange,” I mumbled, wondering what on earth I had done wrong in serving up nature’s own vitamin C pill to my offspring. “And sometimes blackcurrant.”

The evil dentist tut-tutted me and waved a finger back and forth before my eyes. “Juice is one of the prime culprits in auger teeth decay today,” she admonished, as though I’d been feeding my child cubes of sugar, one by one. “You let your son have juice on a regular basis and before you know it, it’ll be root canal for him!”

Sadly, her words proved prophetic, even before we left her room that day. My beautiful boy had indeed developed decay in one of his baby molars and did need a root canal treatment. So much for brushing twice a day.

Fast forward a couple of years and I found myself selling juicing machines. The Juice Nazi dentist’s words echoed through my head so I set about educating myself on the pros and cons of administering juice to children. Here’s what I learned:

Never give processed juice to children. By the time it has been produced in a factory, transported to a store, bought and carried home, then opened, allowed to sit in the fridge for a couple of days and consumed bit by bit, there is virtually no point in serving it up. All the nutrients have been compromised. That’s why vitamins have to be added to lovely fruit juice that was once fresh. Fruit juices that you buy often contain reconstituted juice, water, sugar and who knows what else. You are not getting what you pay for; therefore you’re wasting money and not obtaining much benefit anyway. Fruit juice is no substitute for a piece of fruit. It contains very little fibre, fills a child’s tummy thereby spoiling his or her appetite and can make them adverse to drinking water. Vegetable juice is far preferable to fruit juice, if it can be made palatable to the child. It has very low sugar content yet offers vitamins and other elements such as betacarotene. Fresh is best. Without a doubt, making fresh juice is the best way to ensure you squeeze every last drop of nutritional goodness from your produce.

If your child is a fussy eater and won’t have a bar of vegetables, and perhaps doesn’t even like fruit, then juice can be a valuable way of pouring essential vitamins into his or her digestive system.  Obviously, as drinks go, water is best and milk comes a close second, but fruit and vegetable juices play a part too.

The easiest way to incorporate vegetable juices into your child’s diet is to sneak a couple of similarly coloured veggies into a fruit juice drink.

- Add carrot or pumpkin to orange juice.

- Add celery, lettuce or brocoli to apple juice.

- Add beetroot to watermelon juice.

You’d be surprised how cleverly you can disguise the flavour of a vegetable when you mix it with a fruit!

Importantly, dental care should be remembered at all times. Juice should be given after a meal and followed with water, if possible. If it’s not convenient to brush your child’s teeth after a meal because you’re out and about, visiting or not near bathroom facilities, simply have him or her swish some clean water in the mouth and spit. This removes sugars from the surfaces of the teeth.

One more thing; if you’re going to get stuck into home juicing, then please consider a living juice extractor. Regular juicers that you buy from electrical or department stores work by chopping and cutting the produce in a process known as mastication. This compromises the nutrient content of the fruit or vegetable and allows oxidation to take place rapidly. Oxidisation is what happens, for instance, when you cut an apple and expose it to air, and it turns brown. It is the breaking down of the nutrients.

A living juice extractor works by the cold press method. It applies no heat to the produce by way of fast-moving parts because it works on a single auger system that operates at a low 80 revolutions per minute. Masticating juicers operate at around 10,000rpm! Living juice retains most of the fruit or vegetable’s nutritional content and oxidisation is minimal, meaning that if you must, you can store your juice for two days without it breaking down.

As well as producing top quality, vitamin-boosting juices, a living juice extractor does other brilliant and clever things. Make your own 100% fruit sorbets in seconds, extrude spaghetti and fettuccine that you make yourself, mince meat, fill sausages, produce 100% natural and sugar/salt-free nut butters and so much more.