Juicing For Autism- The Power of Fruit and Vegetable Juice

Many children with autism do not really like eating fruits and even less so, vegetables. However, it is important that you, as a parent, understand the importance of a healthy and balanced diet. These reasons include ensuring healthy growth and development, energy, enthusiasm, concentration and vitality. You will have to set a good example by consuming these foods yourself and at the same time, find creative ways to introduce them to your child’s diet. One of the best ways is through fruit and vegetable juicing.

Your child may be very picky about what he/she eats.  Begin slowly…your child may take a while to transition to enjoying the taste of fresh juices.  But the rewards will pay off!

You may think that a multi-vitamin would be the answer, but it is not. Fresh fruits and vegetables provide more than just vitamins and minerals. They also provide a lot of other things that you cannot get from a powdered capsule. For instance, there are enzymes that help your body to absorb, digest and put all those vitamins and minerals to use. These enzymes are the keys to the many chemical processes that take place in our digestive system.

Fruit and vegetable juicing for kids is a great idea as the consumption process breaks down the fiber and allows the nutrients to be released from within the indigestible fibers so that a lot more of the vitamins, minerals and enzymes can be used by the body.

Juicing is also a lot more popular with kids because many fruits and vegetables have a sweet taste that appeals to children. It is also true that children tend to find it easier to drink a half pint of juice than to eat 3 or 4 pieces of fruit. This is especially true whenever your child has been running around and is thirsty.

Highly nutritional juices such as yellow bell pepper and green vegetable juices can be made more appealing to your child when you disguise its taste with sweeter juices such as apple or grape juice.

Here are a couple of important points that you need to consider before giving your child fresh juice:

1. A lot of packaged fruit juices, and even some vegetable juices, have a lot of sugar in them. So you should try to make fruit and vegetable juices yourself.

2. Even the fruits that you juice may contain a lot of natural sugars themselves. You should still make sure that your child cleans their teeth after drinking juice.

3. This high sugar content also has to be taken into account because a lot of it will be absorbed into your child’s bloodstream. So, you may want to limit the amount of juice that they drink each day. If you intend to give plenty of juices to your child, do ask your doctor or health professional.

Look for Steve Prussack’s Juicing For Autism, to be released in early 2009.