The Cold Pressed, High Pressured Truth

     When perusing the beverage aisle, it’s easy to feel daunted by the inundation of products staring back at you! Drink me, Drink me! - They say with their enticing labels and marketing buzzwords like “Non-GMO” & “All Natural”. But, before you down more sugar than a chocolate bar, read the fine print and understand the difference.

     First, whether you make juice at home, venture to a juice bar, or purchase a prepackaged juice, know whether it is made with the “cold pressed” or “centrifugal” method of juice extraction. The centrifugal method is equivalent to your at-home Vitamix, Nutrient Bullet, or normal blender. It is great for smoothies and juices when you want pulp retention.

     The cold pressed method, which Lumi uses, takes a masticating grinder that spins at 4,500 rotations per second to shred the ingredients immediately upon impact with the blade. This exposes as little heat and oxygen to the produce as possible. The ground produce is put into mesh bags and pressed between hydraulic press plates at roughly 180 pounds per square inch of pressure. The hydraulic press slowly extracts as much juice as possible with maximum retention of vitamins and minerals and minimal oxidation of the produce. The finish product is pure juice.

     Next, you should read on the label whether the juice is raw, High Pressure Processed (HPP) or heat pasteurized. Decoding the difference between these three is essential to picking your juice. Raw juice is potentially harmful for the elderly, sick, young children and people with weakened immune systems. Women who are pregnant or breastfeeding are advised against drinking raw juice. Typically, raw juice bottles have FDA labels warnings at-risk individuals about the potential hazards of raw juice consumption.

    Heat Pasteurization heats or “cooks” the juice, which destroys many of the vitamins, enzymes and nutrients in the juice, leaving a product with a different flavor and fewer nutrients. It also caramelizes the natural sugars, making it harder for your body to turn the juice into energy. Most conventional juices found in stores are heat pasteurized.

     At Lumi, we use High Pressure Processing to preserve our juice. Once the bottles are capped, the HPP machine applies extreme water pressure, more water pressure than 5 times the deepest part of the ocean, to inactivate harmful bacteria. Rather than using heat, we make our juice safe for everyone using extreme water pressure that preserves the nutritional integrity and flavor of the juice. We have even completed nutritional analysis that demonstrates Lumi juice has the exact same nutritional composition before and after High Pressure Processing.
      Third, read the ingredient list on the nutrition panel. Make sure your green juice isn’t just Apple and Romaine, unless that’s what you want for breakfast! Make sure there aren’t any added components in your drink or added water. Come back next week to see our post on how to read nutrition labels!
Love yoU, Mean It! From our kitchen to yours!
Lumi,
XOXO