HEALTH BENEFITS OF CELERY (AND CELERY JUICE)
Celery is one of the many good vegetables that nature could give humanity. Below are some health benefits of this wonderful vegetable.
Benefits of Celery
As a
weight loss aid, whole celery is an excellent choice, as it takes more calories to digest than the food itself
contains. This doesn’t take much, since there are only 7 calories per rib.
In
addition to the caloric content (or lack thereof), celery is perhaps best known
for its anti-hypertensive properties. This study was performed not with the
food itself, but with a celery seed extract. Nevertheless, 75 mg twice daily
for 6 weeks resulted in a significant decrease in blood pressure for
participants. This is, however, one of few human studies performed with celery.
Most others were performed on animals, as we will see below.
Beneficial antioxidants in celery called apigenin and
luteolin have been shown to offer a variety of health
benefits. This study shows that the antioxidant
luteolin helps to reduce an allergic response in animals exposed to allergens.
This makes sense, as allergies are an inflammatory
response. Similarly, this study demonstrates apigenin’s
ability to mitigate the inflammation of arthritis.
The
anti-inflammatory benefits of luteolin also extend to cognition, as well: this study shows that it can protect
against neurodegeneration, improving memory and learning, and this study specifically shows
apigenin’s ability to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Luteolin
has even been postulated as an anti-metastatic compound to
prevent the spread of existing cancer cells.
This
study also shows that celery extract (not the food itself)
can be effective in animal models for lowering LDL cholesterol.
How
Juicing Changes Celery’s Properties
But
what about juicing, versus eating the food whole?
There
are benefits and drawbacks to juicing in general. The primary benefit is that,
stripped of the rest of the food, the micronutrients become far more
bioavailable. This is because the body doesn’t have to do much to digest
them—the effort has been done already.
The
primary negative is that stripping the plant from its fiber source means 1) you
lose the digestive benefits of the fiber (which can greatly help with
constipation and IBS in some cases), and 2) the sugar hits the bloodstream all
at once, rather than little by little as it is released from the rest of the
macronutrients.
This
isn’t a huge deal if you’re consuming pure celery juice, as an 8-ounce serving
contains only about 70 calories and 11 grams of sugar. But the flavor of
celery juice is rather bitter and salty, so most of the time it’s mixed with
other juices to render it more palatable. This significantly increases the
sugar content (and in general I’m not an enormous fan of fruit juices, because
they do deliver such a sugar punch!)
On the up
side with celery in particular, though, one is far more likely to consume the
contents of the leaves in juice format than in eating it straight. And the leaves are where the bulk of the antioxidants can be
found.
DR. APPIAH
Dr. Appiah is a Natural Health Therapist (Naturopath) who engages the natural healing agents given by God to save lives. EAT FOOD AS MEDICINE! EAT TO LIVE, DON'T LIVE TO EAT!! FOR BOOKINGS AND MORE: WANT TO ADVERTISE YOUR PRODUCTS? WANT A PERSONAL(CERTIFIED) NATURAL MEDICINE PRACTITIONER? REACH ME DIRECTLY ON WHATSAPP +233245643615 appiahinok@gmail.com
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