The Most Overlooked Plant for Juicing? 7 + Health Miracles That Stinging Nettle Delivers
Lately I’ve been exploring a variety of plants that you can add to your juicing routine that will give a hefty boost to the nutritional value of your drinks.
Today I wanted to tell you about the often passed-over stinging nettle plant. Nettle is a virtual storehouse of miraculous properties that I can’t wait to tell you about, so let’s get started.
What is Stinging Nettle?
Stinging nettle is one of the plants known as “greens”, like collard greens and dandelion greens. Both the root and the plant have healing properties, and you can use both in your juicing recipes.
Nettle is bountiful in vitamins, amino acids and minerals, and a little bit of it packs a powerful nutritional punch. You can juice it and drink it all by itself, or to make it more enjoyable, add it to your juicing recipes with fruits, other leafy greens and vegetables.
Note: Don’t confuse stinging nettle with white dead nettle, which is a different plant altogether.
The Healing Sting
Now, notice that I’ve been calling this green “stinging” nettle. Yes, there is a reason for this. Nettle has a little bite, and will sting when touched. Tiny stinger hairs covering the leaves and stems cause burning and itching if they come into contact with human skin. The good news is that nettle does lose it’s sting once it is in your juice.
And interestingly, this sting has healing properties. The little stinger hairs contain a histamine and formic acid, making nettle useful in reducing the symptoms of inflammatory skin conditions and allergies.
Where Can I Get Stinging Nettle?
A lot of people harvest nettle in the wild because it grows abundantly in North America and Europe. If this is an adventure you decide to undertake, just be sure that you wear a good pair of gloves, preferably covering the wrists and some of the upper arms.
You can also grow and harvest your own nettle, and if you do, the nettle will bring helpful insects into your garden. So there is a double benefit for gardeners who add nettle to their nursery. But if you don’t want to grow your own or look for it in the wild, you might be able to find nettle at your local farmer’s market or health food store.
The Benefits That Nettle Can Bring To Your Juicing Regime
Okay, I have to confess, nettle has more than 7 miraculous healing powers. But I did add a + to the title of this article! Stay with me, you are going to be wonderstruck at how much this one plant can do for a person.
Stated very basically, nettle helps with the perpetual chemical reactions, millions of them, happening moment to moment inside of your body. And historically speaking, stinging nettle has been well used all the way back to ancient Greece as a healing agent because of it’s diuretic and laxative properties.
Nettle contains miraculous properties for blood cleansing and colon health. This makes it highly valuable in treating conditions like diarrhea, kidney stones and bladder infection. It’s also a good healing agent for anemia and rickets, or vitamin D deficiency.
It can also both cleanse and fortify the kidneys, the lungs, the liver, the stomach, the intestinal track and the arteries. If you are thinking about doing a juice cleanse, place nettle at the top of your list of purifying plants.
Also because of it’s potent affect on the bloodstream, nettle can help with fatigue in the cases of persons with disease such as AIDS or cancer. And it’s used as a remedy for afflictions like internal bleeding (including uterine bleeding), nosebleeds, and bowel bleeding. There is even evidence that nettle can lower blood pressure. For people with diabetes or symptoms of diabetes, nettle can stabilize and even lower blood sugar levels.
Here is a great stinging nettle juice. (Just a warning… this guy likes to talk 6:24 is where he actually gets juicing!)
Is There Even More That Nettle Can Do For Me?
Yes. Nettle can be used topically, and is excellent for the skin, hair and nails. In fact, nettle extracts are often seen as an ingredient in shampoo, conditioner and skin care treatments. It’s miraculous properties also make it an excellent topical treatment for achy muscles, oily hair and scalp, and hair loss.
Nettle also has been used topically to treat eczema and skin rashes and to relieve arthritic and rheumatic joints. In fact, the nettle plant is most often acknowledged for its potency as a remedy for arthritis and gout. It has great abilities for reducing inflammation, and can even be used as stimulant in the healing of wounds and broken bones.
Just a Few More Things, I Promise
Here are several attributes that I’ve rarely found in researching plants that can be used to juice for health.
Nettle can multiply a specific protein in the blood that binds with hormones. In lay terms this means that afflictions such as polycystic ovarian syndrome in women or benign prostatic hyperplasia in men can be aided by taking nettle. Both of these disorders are caused by excessive hormonal stimulation brought about by hormones that are not bound to blood cells.
Stinging nettle root can also have healing properties for men with enlarged prostrate, also known as BPH, or benign prostatic hyperplasia. Urination problems can arise with this condition, such as frequent urination and painful urination, and nettle can relieve these symptoms.
Is There Any Time That I Should Not Use Nettle?
The answer again is yes. If you are a woman who is pregnant, stinging nettle could potentially bring about uterine contractions that result in miscarriage. In addition, if you’ve given birth to a baby and are breast feeding, you may want to avoid stinging nettle. There haven’t really been any potential side effects found for breast feeding mothers and babies, but on the other hand there is no real research to qualify the plant as safe during that time either. Best to wait until science tells us more.
What Other Plants Should I Combine with Nettle?
Nettle is really good when combined with other fresh plants, like
orange, banana, apple, carrot, celery, dandelion, ginger, lemon, celery, lime, spinach, cucumber, beetroot, zucchini and kale.
Is That All?
Sorry for the tome. But this article has been long-winded only because of the many miraculous properties that stinging nettle delivers to those who would add it to their juicing regimen. I thought you might want to know all of them.
Once again we come to a close, and I would like to invite you to visit me over at Coffee and Juicers, where we provide the best best juicing machine reviews out there. And if you also love coffee or espresso, we also provide great coffee maker reviews and espresso machine reviews.âEUR¨
Happy juicing!
