The Unpopular Juice That Can Lower Blood Pressure And Protect Against Cancer

Juice bars across the country offer many tasty variations packed with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants from healthy fruits and vegetables. You can buy bottled fresh-pressed juices that blend the sweetness of apples and carrots, the earthiness of beets, the tart of lemon, and the fire of ginger.

While some of the fruit-based juices can be downright tasty, the green juices might not be as popular for the mainstream. Spinach juice on its own might make you wince, but you might reconsider adding some spinach juice to your diet if you want to lower your blood pressure and protect yourself from many types of cancer (here are the best and worst foods to put into your juicer).

An 8-ounce glass of spinach juice is keto-friendly, coming in at 8 calories and zero grams of sugar. Few natural drinks can match its low calorie and sugar content while offering 20% of your vitamin A. Spinach juice also powers your body with nitrates and other nutrients to keep your health in check.

Spinach is high in nitrates, which increase the availability of nitric oxide in your body to improve blood flow, muscle contraction, and glucose balance. A 2016 study in the Journal of Nutrition tested the power of nitrates in foods such as spinach juice against a sodium nitrate supplement to lower blood pressure. Spinach juice caused the highest increase in plasma nitrite levels, which indicates an increase in nitric oxide levels. Five hours after drinking spinach juice, people's systolic and diastolic blood pressure had significantly dropped (here's a little more about the benefits and risks of nitrates in food).

Raw foods such as spinach juice help to balance the acidity in your body to reduce your risk of cancer, according to a 2023 review in Cancer Screening and Prevention. Spinach is one of the healthiest for your body because it is more alkaline than foods like fried potatoes and pickled vegetables. Spinach is also one of the highest foods in folate, vitamin B6, magnesium, potassium, and iron to protect your body against cancer.

You might pass on standard orange juice or cranberry juice if you knew that spinach juice might help you lose weight. In a 2019 study in the Journal of Functional Foods, researchers created a chlorophyll-rich spinach extract and fed it to mice on a high-fat diet. The spinach extract reduced weight gain, lowered inflammation, and regulated blood sugar levels. Spinach also helped restore gut bacteria imbalances caused by the high-fat diet.

Including more leafy greens like spinach in your diet can help reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease by almost 16%, according to a 2016 article in the JRSM Cardiovascular Disease. Leafy greens can reduce cholesterol by binding to bile acids in the body. This requires your body to use cholesterol to make more bile acids, resulting in lower cholesterol levels in your blood. Magnesium found in spinach also affects your risk of metabolic syndrome, which is linked to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.