If you have read about juicers you might have heard how they can help us absorb and digest our food so we get more nutrients. Have you ever stopped to think about how this actually works? I mean how does a machine that crushes and squeezes our food make it easier for us to digest it?
To start, let's go back to a bit of biology here. Don't worry this won't be a boring lesson like in school. It will apply some simple knowledge about our bodies so we can see how juicers work.
Like us, plants are made up of thousands of tiny cells. Inside these cells are the nutrients we need like water, protein, carbohydrates, and vitamins. When we eat a vegetable we are using several processes, both mechanical and chemical, to break down these cells and extract the nutrients. The mechanical processes crush the cells and rupture the cell walls, like biting into a grape. The chemical processes dissolve the cells and release the nutrients, like how bleach can eat through cloth. Once the nutrients are separated from the cells our bodies are able to absorb them in our digestive system. The more efficiently these processes extract the nutrients, the more nutrients our body will be able to absorb.
One of the most powerful mechanical processes is done in our mouth when we chew. Our teeth and jaws combines to exert a crushing and grinding force that breaks apart our food. This separates the cells in the plant into smaller groups and will actually break open a few cells in our mouth. If you ever bit into a ripe apple and spilled juice on your shirt, this is because you broke apart some of the apple's cells and they spilled out of our mouth.
Now that we know that our mouth is grinding and crushing our food, lets apply that to juicers. Juicers are a machine that uses a mechanical process (like our mouths) to process whole food by slicing it with tiny blades, crushing it between gears, and squeezing it through tiny screens. At the end of this process the juice pours out of one section of the juicer and the rest of the food is released into another section (called the pulp). This mechanical process is almost identical to what happens in our mouth but it all happens without us putting in the work. You can think of juicers as a second mouth, one that pre-chews the food for you.
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