Transforming juice into a probiotic pop
Photo Credit: www.wellnessmama.com
Do you have a few little (or not so little!) juice addicts in your family and you wish you could get them to drink something else? Or, do you withhold juice and pop from your kids and wish that you had a healthy substitution so that they don’t feel deprived at family gatherings and birthday parties?
If this is you, then you will want to know about Kefir Juice! Kefir juice could be your answer, not only in terms of slowly introducing kefir to your family in a way that they enjoy, but also to wean them off empty calories and blood-sugar induced emotional meltdowns and behavioural issues!
While boxed juice is marketed as a healthy option, I am going to suggest that commercial juices are, in fact, more like junk food than health food and here is why:
1) Few people know that 1 cup of juice has 3 Tbsp of sugar in it!! Without the fibre, this sugar is absorbed at the same rate as it would be if you ate 3 Tbsp of sugar right off the spoon!
2) Commercial juices are pasteurized, thus destroying the life giving enzymes that are naturally found in fruit.
3) Water soluble vitamins, such as Vit.C and B-Vitamins are easily destroyed by heat. So while you may be eating the juice of more than one fruit, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you are getting more nutritional value.
4) Pasteurized juice is a processed food and we want to be moving toward a diet made of real food if we want strong healthy bodies with strong immune resiliency.
5) Naturally prepared juice is:
- fresh- not stored
- raw-not pasteurized
- living-not dead
- real-not processed, pasteurized or deaerated (eliminating oxygen to make it shelf stable).
When you kefir “ize” your juice, you essentially take a denatured food product and make it a living probiotic health giving drink!
Now I know that it is not easy to take juice away from a juice addict (concentrated sugar is an addictive substance!), so I am not suggesting that you do that to your hubby or children. What I am suggesting is, that you make an addition to the diet before a subtraction, by serving Kefir Juice, as well.
Then you can slowly substitute more and more of it until the cravings for pasteurized juice subside. Eventually, you can substitute Kefir Water in for Kefir Juice (once you family acquires a taste for Kefir it won’t be hard). In our family, the kids call Kefir Water “pop” because to them it IS pop (it is sweet, tasty and bubbly)! I serve Kefir Juice, every once in a while as a treat because it is typically sweeter and more flavourful than Kefir Water (the fruity taste of Kefir Water is typically more subtle).
Want to learn more about sharing the joy (and health benefits) of other naturally bubbly beverages with your kids? Click here
* This post is part of the Probiotic Food Challenge Linky at Real Food Forager.
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