Whether you’re new to juicing or you make fresh juices from your kitchen all the time, knowing what to juice doesn’t always come easily.
Perhaps you’ve mostly stuck to juicing fruits until now, but you want to branch out with some veggie juices. Or maybe you just avoid juicing vegetables because you’re not sure about the best veggies to juice.
Whatever your situation, you’ll find the answers you’re looking for in this guide. I’ve ranked the best veggies for juicing based on juice quantity, flavor, and nutritional value.
- Carrots
- Beets
- Tomatoes
- Cucumbers
- Spinach
- Wheatgrass
- Kale
- Swiss Chard
- Celery
- Parsley
- Broccoli
- Cabbage
🧃 Why Juice Vegetables?
With their savory, often bitter and earthy flavor, veggies aren’t the immediate choice for juicing. Most of us can easily say that we prefer fruits to vegetables. So why should you try juicing with any of the vegetables on this list?
The main reason is that vegetables contain a whole host of nutrients that you just won’t find in fruits. If you juice solely with fruits, you’ll miss out on the benefits that veggies can provide, including improved digestive health, increased blood antioxidant levels, and much more.
Some veggies can even promote heart health and fight cancer. Your immune system can benefit hugely from a combination of both fruit and vegetable juice – so don’t just stick to one kind.
Veggies are also much lower in sugars than fruits, and I recommend adding small amounts of fruit juice to your veggie juice, rather than the other way around. This will give your veggie juices a sweet kick without you ingesting too much sugar. If your goal is to follow a low-sugar diet, veggie juice is the best option.
In short, juicing vegetables is healthy and exciting, and gives you the opportunity to experiment with unique flavors and colors.
1. Carrots
Carrot juice is included in so many juice recipes for a reason: carrots are sweet and juicy, giving a high juice yield and an enjoyable flavor. The thickness and density of carrots also makes these veggies a dream to juice.
Carrots give juices a fun orange color, and they have plenty of health benefits, too, thanks to their beta carotene content. Drinking carrot juice won’t only support your eye health – it’ll also help you maintain a healthy heart, kidneys, and lungs.
Standard orange carrots are the cheapest to add to your veggie juice recipes, but purple carrots are a fun addition, too. You’re likely to find these unique carrots at your local farmer’s market.
2. Beets
Beets are the second-most popular veggie to juice, despite being bitter and difficult to chop. Beets have a superfood status and are bursting with nutrients that boost athletic and mental performance, and can even prevent kidney stones. Nitrate-rich beetroot juice is packed with folate, magnesium, and potassium.
It’s difficult to know how to cook with beets, and they don’t pair with much (there are only so many beet salads you can make, after all). That’s why juicing beets is so popular – in juice form, you can pair beets with almost anything.
Like carrots, beets are affordable to bulk-buy. You can make use out of the whole beet, including beet greens, in your juices. Beets have a bitter, earthy flavor, so they’re usually combined with sweeter fruits and veggies, like carrots and apples, to balance out the taste.
3. Tomatoes
Tomatoes are actually a fruit, and they’re included on my best fruits for juicing guide, too. However, because tomatoes have a vegetable flavor and are eaten like a vegetable, they deserve a spot on this list.
Balancing sweetness and bitterness, tomatoes add a savory flavor to juices. Tomatoes are a soft fruit, which means they’re not ideal for processing in a centrifugal juicer. However, they have a high yield of juice, so they’re great value for money.
Tomatoes give juices a blood-red color, and the flavor isn’t for everyone – especially as tomato juice is usually combined with onions, celery, and even hot sauce. But you can still add tomato juice to sweeter fruit and vegetable juices, like carrot juice and orange juice, if you don’t like the idea of downing a spicy shot with your breakfast.
Tomatoes are affordable in large quantities. Beefsteak tomatoes are best for juicing because they contain a lot of juice.
4. Cucumbers
Cucumber is another of the most nutritious vegetables for juicing thanks to its tasty flavor and health benefits. Cucumber is a nutritious and delicious ingredient in salads, but it doesn’t have many uses in cooked dishes. Adding cucumber to a green juice recipe can help you make the most of this veggie’s many health benefits, including its ability to reduce skin inflammation, control blood sugar, lower blood pressure, and even reduce heart disease risk factors.
Because cucumbers have a high water content, they’re one of the best vegetables to juice – and they’ll help keep you hydrated, too. You can combine cucumber with other refreshing ingredients, like coconut or watermelon, or mix things up with lemon and other citrus fruits.
Cucumbers have a sweet flavor with a bitter aftertaste. They’re readily available year-round, and they don’t cost much, either.
5. Spinach
Perhaps the most popular superfood of this century, spinach is a staple ingredient in green vegetable juice. With its various impressive health benefits, spinach is one of the healthiest vegetables you can add to your diet. Spinach can reduce high blood pressure, help control blood sugar levels, slow age-related mental decline, and even reduce the risk of certain cancers, like prostate cancer.
Spinach adds a fresh, earthy taste to juice. The flavor can be quite intense if you’re not a fan of green juices. I recommend adding apples, lemons, coconut water, and lime to your spinach juice to reduce the earthiness of the juice. You’ll also need a slow masticating juicer to get the juice out of spinach – a centrifugal juicer will just shred spinach and spit it out.
Although spinach is quite affordable, it isn’t the cheapest veggie on this list. That’s why it’s best to combine spinach with other fruits and vegetables to lower the overall cost.
6. Wheatgrass
Wheatgrass isn’t one of the easiest vegetables to juice, which is why it’s not number one on my list. However, wheatgrass contains a host of essential nutrients that you won’t find elsewhere, making it an important juicing ingredient for anyone with a slow juicer.
A key ingredient in wheatgrass is chlorophyll, which can reduce cancer cell growth. Wheatgrass can also reduce blood pressure and lower triglyceride and cholesterol levels, supporting heart health. Other nutrients in wheatgrass include amino acids, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, and copper.
Wheatgrass juice is bitter, and many people drink this juice as a shot. You can also add wheatgrass juice to juices containing pineapples, apples, and ginger, which will mask the wheatgrass flavor. Wheatgrass is more difficult to come across than staple veggies, but you can grow your own wheatgrass with very little maintenance or costs involved.
7. Kale
A close runner-up behind spinach, kale is another popular ingredient to include in veggie juice. Kale is one of the cruciferous vegetables to achieve recent superfood status, and drinking kale juice can supply you with a good amount of vitamin C, vitamin A, and antioxidants like beta carotene. Kale can also benefit heart health by neutralizing free radicals and decreasing blood pressure.
Kale is another ingredient that isn’t the easiest to juice in a centrifugal juicer. You should juice kale with hard, dense fruits and vegetables in a slow juicer to get the most juice from this leafy green vegetable. Kale juice pairs well with fruits and veggies that have a slightly sweet flavor, like carrots and apples. Alternatively, for an earthy, green juice, combine kale with spinach, swiss chard, and cucumber.
Kale is cheap to buy, costing less than $1 per pound. If you don’t enjoy the texture of kale, adding it to your vegetable juices just makes sense.
8. Swiss Chard
Unlike most of the leafy greens featured on this list, swiss chard has a slightly sweet flavor, making it a better choice for people who don’t enjoy bitter, earthy juice. Swiss chard is packed with vitamin C and vitamin A, and contains the antioxidants alpha and beta-carotene.
People with diabetes can especially benefit from swiss chard, because this green veggie can change the behavior of enzymes that control the blood-sugar-regulating hormone, helping to reduce elevated blood sugar levels.
Swiss chard is another green that you probably only use in salads. You’ll be able to enjoy the benefits of this underrated veggie in a healthy juice. Swiss chard is one of the pricier leafy greens, but I recommend swapping out other fruits and vegetables in place of this healthy green to reap swiss chard’s benefits.
9. Celery
When you drink celery juice, you’ll fuel your body with vitamin C, vitamin A, and vitamin K, and antioxidants like caffeic acid and kaempferol. Additionally, research suggests that celery extracts can decrease diastolic blood pressure and cholesterol, supporting heart health. Thanks to celery’s anti-inflammatory properties, celery juice is thought to protect against chronic disease.
Some people drink straight celery juice in the morning, but the flavor can be slightly bitter. I recommend mixing celery with the juice of carrots and tomatoes for a more flavorful, well-rounded juice.
You’ll also need a decent juicer for celery. At the very least, you need a slow juicer, which will squeeze out the most juice from stringy greens like celery. Ideally, you’ll have a horizontal single-auger juicer, which is best for leafy greens, wheatgrass, and celery. Learn more about the best juicer for celery here.
This is one of the best vegetables to use if you are on the keto diet and trying to juice.
10. Parsley
Most people wouldn’t immediately think to juice parsley, but parsley leaves are green vegetables rich in vitamin C, vitamin K, and vitamin A, and there are plenty of benefits to be had from drinking this herb.
For people with diabetes, parsley extract has shown potential to improve blood antioxidant levels and reduce blood sugar levels. The antioxidant qualities of parsley also make it effective in improving brain health and supporting the function of the liver, and parsley may even decrease cancer growth in the skin by fighting disease-causing free radicals.
Again, if you’re juicing parsley, opt for a slow juicer where possible. This will yield more juice and give you the best value for money from your juice.
11. Broccoli
Broccoli is another vegetable that probably doesn’t sound appealing to drink in juice form, but, when added to tasty fruit and veggie juices, broccoli offers its own impressive benefits.
You’ll get plenty of vitamin A, potassium, and vitamin B6 from broccoli. Broccoli also contains an antioxidant that reduces the potential for cancer formation. Rich in magnesium and calcium, broccoli can support and improve blood pressure – and with high blood pressure being a major risk factor for heart disease, this in turn supports heart health.
As a dry vegetable, broccoli certainly isn’t the juiciest ingredient. However, broccoli has a fairly mild flavor, so it won’t overpower juices made from other vegetables. Broccoli is also one of the more affordable veggies on this list.
12. Cabbage
Cabbage is at the bottom of my list because for most people, this veggie reminds them of unappealing cabbage dishes served up at school. But cabbage juice is nowhere near as unpleasant as boiled cabbage in soup form – trust me. Cabbage juice is tasty and provides a nutritional boost when added to other juices.
A single serving of cabbage is bursting with vitamin C and vitamin K, as well as vitamin B6, folate, and manganese. As a cruciferous vegetable, cabbage can reduce inflammation, control high blood sugar, and reduce the risk of diabetes and heart disease.
Cabbage is very affordable, making it a good ingredient to bulk-buy and add to juices every day. If you’ve never tried cabbage juice, don’t be afraid – it’s much tastier than you’d expect.
