Drinking aloe vera juice.

We all know we ought to eat enough fruit and vegetables (and other foods too!) in order to get our daily needed amount of nutrients. To give myself a little nutritional extra I tried drinking aloe vera juice.

Why aloe vera?

Aloe vera contains a great many different minerals (calcium, chlorine, chromium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, potassium, phosphorous, sodium, and zinc), vitamins (B1, B2, B6, C, E, and folic acid) and amino acids (alanine, arginine, aspartic acid, glutamic acid, glycine, histidine, hydroxyproline, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, proline, threonine, tyrosine, and valine). For a full list of compounds found in aloe vera check out this table. Among other things, aloe vera has anti-inflammatory effects, it contains compounds that aid in wound healing, and compounds that help lower cholesterol levels in your blood plasma - which by the way is the liquid of your blood or blood without blood cells.

As for intake, there are different parts of the aloe vera plant which are used: aloe sap is comes from near the green skin of the leaves and is yellow, whereas aloe vera gel is clear and comes from the centre of the leaves and is more clear. You should be careful with using aloe vera since the sap for it acts as a laxative. If you use it on the long term you may risk dehydration and electrolyte imbalance.


My experience

The stuff I've got is a store bought bottle of aloe vera juice. It's 99.5% aloe vera juice, citric acid, 0.15 % is added vitamin C and it has got Potassium sorbate and Potassium benzoate as preservatives. The instructions say you should drink 20 ml or one cap of the juice before breakfast. This contains 50% of the daily recommended amount of vitamin C. Unfortunately I cannot know how many of all the nutrients of the aloe vera plant actually make it into the bottle. So perhaps it'd be better to get a plant and drink the gel fresh. 






But anyhow, for about a month or so I've been religiously drinking a shot of aloe juice before breakfast. The smell of it reminds me of apple juice, and luckily it doesn't taste bad at all. I don't feel different than I did before I started drinking it. But then again I don't feel any different from normal when I take multivitamins or when I have a period in which I eat more healthily than usual.

Apart from drinking the juice I once applied it to a small burn wound (I had burnt the back of my finger on the oven). I soaked a tissue in a bit of juice and wrapped this around my finger. At first it didn't seem to do more than cooling the burn down, but it has healed more nicely than the one I had had a few weeks earlier. The older burn remained a deep purple colour for several weeks before gradually disappearing, whereas this more recent one went pink and is barely visible.

Before you start drinking aloe vera sap, gel or juice, I recommend you do a bit of research on it, especially if you may have an allergy, if you're pregnant, if you have kidney or heart disease or if you take any medication.
Source used for information can be found here.

I hope this was informative!
Sincerely,
R.