What are the Best Vegetables for Good Health?

My Recommended List of Vegetables provides a guide to the most nutritious vegetables, and those to limit due to their high carbohydrate content. Remember: the greener the vegetable, the more nutritious it will be. Ideally, you'll want to juice vegetables that are appropriate for your particular nutritional type, which I'll summarize below. There is a basic test you can take to find out your nutritional type, which is detailed in my book, Take Control of Your Health. Alternatively, you can take the free online Nutritional Typing test. As a general guide, the following list of vegetables details some of the best and worst vegetables for your health. Highly Recommended Vegetables Asparagus Escarole Avocado (actually a fruit) Fennel Beet greens Green and red cabbage Bok Choy Kale Broccoli Kohlrabi Brussels sprouts Lettuce: romaine, red leaf, green leaf Cauliflower Mustard greens Celery Onions Chicory Parsley Chinese cabbage Peppers: red, green, yellow and hot Chives Tomatoes Collard greens Turnips Cucumbers Spinach Dandelion greens Zucchini Endive Use sparingly due to high carbohydrate levels Beets Jicama Carrots Winter Squashes Eggplant Vegetables to Avoid Potatoes Tips to Make Your Juice Taste Better If you would like to make your juice taste a bit more palatable, especially in the beginning, you can add these elements: Coconut: This is one of my favorites! You can purchase the whole coconut or use unsweetened shredded coconut. It adds a delightful flavor and is an excellent source of fat to balance your meal. Coconut has medium chain triglycerides, which have many health benefits. You can even add coconut water to your juice, which is an excellent natural source of electrolytes, especially potassium. Lemons and Limes: You can add half a lemon or lime (leaving much of the white rind on), which really brightens up the flavor of your juice. Cranberries: Researchers have discovered that cranberries have five times the antioxidant content of broccoli, which means they may help protect against cancer, stroke and heart disease. Limit the cranberries to about 4 ounces per pint of juice. Fresh ginger: This is an excellent addition if you can tolerate it. It gives your juice a little "kick"! And, as an added boon, researchers have found ginger can have dramatic benefits for cardiovascular health, including preventing atherosclerosis, lowering cholesterol levels, and preventing the oxidation of low-density lipoprotein (LDL). Nutritional Typing and Juicing Vegetables According to Nutritional Typing principles, if you are a carb type, vegetable juicing is STRONGLY recommended. With patients in our clinic, we strongly encourage carbohydrate types to juice if they expect to regain their health. If you are a mixed type, it is certainly useful to juice. However, protein types need to follow some specific guidelines to make it work for them, which I'll review below. Do you know your nutritional type? If not, you can easily determine this by taking my free online nutritional type test. Protein Types and Juicing Vegetables If you are a protein type, juicing needs to be done cautiously. The only vegetables you should juice are your prime protein type vegetables, which are celery, spinach, asparagus, string beans and cauliflower (including the base). Also, to make drinking vegetable juice compatible with protein type metabolism (which needs high amounts of fat), it is important to blend a source of raw fat into the juice. Raw cream, raw butter, raw eggs, avocado, coconut butter, or freshly ground flax seed are the sources of raw fat I most recommend. In addition to adding a source of raw fat to your juice, you may also find that adding some, or even all, of the vegetable pulp back into your juice helps make it more satisfying Final Thoughts about Vegetables The truth is, scientists really don't know all that much about nutrients, and taking isolated nutrients through supplements is not always a good idea. A much better way to get the vital nutrients your body needs is through eating whole, fresh organic vegetables. I recommend at least one third of your total diet be eaten raw, and a great way to do this is through incorporating juicing into your eating plan. Personally, I aim for consuming about 80 percent of my food raw, including raw eggs, dairy, and meat. I want to emphasize that eating any vegetable is better than eating no vegetables at all, so don't get down on yourself if you're able to juice organic fresh vegetables only a few times a week. Even if you have to start slowly, I think you'll soon begin to notice positive changes to your health when you increase your fresh vegetable intake. Also, please review my complete nutrition plan, which can help you take a comprehensive look at your health as it relates to food, and may even help you change the way you think about eating.