Juice Bags, What Are They, and Where Do You Get Them?

One of the dietary practices I have assimilated into my routine is juicing. Not shooting steroids and becoming some meat head, but rather the process of extracting juicing from raw fruits and vegetables and consuming those in place of meals. In some cases I will do this as a fast, and do nothing but juice for a week or more, but for the most part I just replace a meal out of each day with it.

While I will save the topic of which juicers to consider buying, and believe me, I have and use a lot of juicers, from the Breville Juice Fountain, to the Omega Juicer, and on the low end the Juiceman Jr. This discussion is around juice bags.

Juice bags are basically serve as a filter for manual juicing of fruits, by either squeezing by hand, running through a blender, or using an old fashion citrus juicer. Once done, you run the sludge through a juice bag, filtering out the pulp and just getting the nutrient rich juice in its place. You can get an idea of the process by watching this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCd_H8xn7VA

This process works very well when juicing watermelon, grapes, oranges, lemons and limes.

So the next question is, which juice bags are the best. I have a wide range of bags, from the nylon nets, to hemp fiber bags. You can even substitute a juice bag for the kind of bag they use in home made beer making. Each one has its advantages. For citrus, I prefer the hemp fiber bags available from Vermont Fiddleheads. They do make smaller bags if the 12x12 is too expensive for you. I also use the nylon bags for watermelons and grapes, which is available also from Vermont Fiddleheads, as well as the Gracie Diet Store. If your a jiu-jitsu person, the Gracie Store also offers discounts on the bags if you buy their other products, such as gi's or tshirt's.

Plenty of good recipes come with these types of juices. Any citrus juice needs to be done alone since it is acidic. If you juice grapes, you can mix with acai and you get a really nice, wine tasting type shake. With watermelons, you can mix with bananas and acai for one of my all time favorites mixes. My wife is pretty fond of drinking the watermelons juices straight with meals.

Keep in mind, its better to drink the juices right away, do not juice then store them in the fridge, as they lose potency pretty quickly, and spoil really fast since there are no preservatives in them. But you wouldn't want preservatives anyway since you want maximum potency of nutrients.