JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome to Green is Good, and it’s so great to be back here in studio with you again, Mike. MIKE BRADY: Yeah, hard to believe this year is off to a pretty good start, and there’s still a lot of people that are deciding that they want to take better care of themselves. They haven’t made that first step yet, so I think you’re really going to enjoy the first part of today’s show. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We got Jay Kordich coming on. He’s the pioneer of the whole juicing craze for the last 65 years, so listen to this commercial and then come on back to Green is Good. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Welcome back to Green is Good, and we’re so honored today to have the juice man Jay Kordich, who’s on the phone with us from Bellingham, Washington. Jay, welcome to Green is Good. JAY KORDICH: Hey, listen, it’s my honor to be on with you guys. You guys are the motivators, you know? Green is good. Great title. JOHN SHEGERIAN: I just got to tell our audience right now, you are such an inspiration. You’re the man who pioneered juicing. You’re 87 years old. The strength and the vitality in your voice is just amazing. How did you get started with this whole juicing concept years ago, Jay? JAY KORDICH: Well, you know, I’ve been an athlete all my life. I played football for the University of Southern California, of course high school football prior to that, then I played three years in the Navy for All-Star Navy teams during the Second World War because everybody that was going to college, if they were physically fit, were in the Navy or the Army or the Marines or something like that, right? JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. MIKE BRADY: Right. JAY KORDICH: OK. So, I was in the Navy, played football in the wintertime for three different naval teams around the country, and it was really, really fun. I’ve been an athlete all my life, you know? But all during that time, even when I was in the barracks and everything else, I was still making juice because I had my own juicer. Everybody considered me kind of a nut, you know, a cuckoo guy. Look at those carrots he’s bringing in the barracks. Look at that celery. Look at the spinach and the parsley and all that other stuff, you know? But that’s my modus operandi. I take care of my body first and foremost, and what I do, it’s a very simple thing. I’m not a genius, you know? I went to the University of Southern California, played football in the Rose Bowl for them — I might as well say this — when Michigan beat us 49-nothing, you know? But at least I played. The biggest crowd ever in the L.A. Coliseum was when Notre Dame came out to play us, and they tied us 14-14 in about the last six seconds, because we had them beat until that time. JOHN SHEGERIAN: How many people were there? JAY KORDICH: I think 108,000 people or something like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: 108,000 people. JAY KORDICH: Yeah, 108,000 people. They had to put extra bleachers in and everything else, you know? It was a heck of a game. It was a great game. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jay, let’s step back for a second. Obviously you grew up in Southern California, San Diego, then you’re a Trojan, you went to USC. When did you have that epiphany? When did you have that, “Wait a second, I’m not feeling all that great. I got to change my lifestyle. I got to do something different,” and then you got into juicing? How did you get into that whole thing? JAY KORDICH: Well, what happened to me was I’m like any college kid. I was drinking soda pop, I had hamburgers, white bread. Nobody ever told me that white bread was bleached with chlorine dioxide, one of the deadliest gases. So, my body couldn’t live up to that. It couldn’t take that, and it kind of tore down. Where it hit me was in the bladder, the urinary bladder, and — pardon the expression — but I started peeing blood, you know? When that happened, I went back to my medical classes, looked at my medical books and everything else, and it was a urinary infection of some kind. I had read all the books on some of the masters, Dr. Norman Walker and all the other guys that guided me along. So, I said, “Wait a minute, all this information that I have that taught me what to do and how to stay healthy for a long time, I better start studying.” So I went back to Max Gerson’s book on cancer therapy and everything else, and wow, I found out what juices to put into my body. The number one juice basically was carrot juice, and carrot and spinach and parsley, and stuff like that that I never paid attention to. That was way back in 1949, and I’m still here. JOHN SHEGERIAN: And, you’re still here, so you were about 25 back then, and now you’re 87 years old. So now, you’ve been doing this most of your life, so talk a little bit about the journey, how you’ve inspired millions of others to follow you and to get healthy again. When did you start really promoting what you were doing and writing books and selling juicers and all that other kind of great stuff that you do? JAY KORDICH: Yeah. Well, first of all, I had to take care of myself, right? JOHN SHEGERIAN: Right. JAY KORDICH: When you’re in dire straits, you try to recover. So, I start reading, just jumped into it. Read all my whole textbooks, which didn’t talk a lot about juicing. It talked a little bit about foods and things. But then I got together with a couple people that I knew, and they were into natural health and everything else, and I start reading about Pablo Rola and all these other guys that helped train me. Dr. Max Gerson was Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s doctor, and he was my doctor. I went to him first thing when I had that because I knew enough to go to a natural kind of a guy. I figured, hey, if Dr. Albert Schweitzer went to Gerson, man, I’ve got to start thinking about this and be serious about it. So, I went into it, and the Gerson company taught me all about juicing and why juices. They have a slogan, and it’s my slogan too. “It’s the juice of the fiber that feeds you.” Whatever you eat, the body has to convert. I don’t know if you know the physiology of the human body, but the body is a juice machine. Whatever you eat, the body has to churn it through peristaltic action, and all kind of variations of intestinal juices and everything else. All the body is doing to the food you chewed and swallowed is breaking it down to liquid because it’s only the liquid, or if you will, the juices of the food you’ve eaten that go through the intestinal villi, through the portal vein, into your liver. And then from there it’s transposed in the bloodstream, and it circulates all over the body, all these nutrients that are broken down from the food you’ve eaten. So, if it was dead food and food with chemicals, those chemicals are going to be in the cells of your body. I was only natural juices, natural plants, where all life comes from. If you think about it, after we leave the air, you think about it a little bit. If you took a magic wand, or anybody, and waved it over planet Earth, and say, “All plant life be gone,” how would you like to know that every one of us would die in a very short span of time? You’d say, “Wait a minute, I don’t like fruits and vegetables anyway. I like my steak.” Well, where are you going to get the steak from if there’s no vegetation? JOHN SHEGERIAN: Nowhere. JAY KORDICH: You see? Plant life is the power of life on this planet. Without plants or algae and things like that, you wouldn’t be able to breathe. There’d be no oxygen for us to breathe by, right? MIKE BRADY: That is something really to think about. In case you’ve just tuned in, on the phone with us right now from Bellingham, Washington, is Jay Kordich. He is the father of juicing. You’ve got a great website, Jay. In fact, I’m on it right now. JOHN SHEGERIAN: You’re on the website? MIKE BRADY: Yes. It’s jaykordich.com, and you quoted about the juice really being the – give the quote again, because right here on your website, it was perfect. We need to hear that again about the fiber. JAY KORDICH: Well, you know, it’s the juice of the fiber that feeds us. We all know that. And whatever you eat, whatever I eat, I don’t care if it’s a cake or bread pudding, I don’t care if it’s a candy cane for the Christmas season, I don’t care what you eat. The body then has to digest it and break it down. All the body in essence is doing is turning it into liquid. If there’s no liquid in it, you’re only going to get the chemicals out of it anyway. The body is a juice machine, primarily, so the whole purpose of the peristaltic action of 22 beat a minute is to break everything down to liquid. So when all that food gets down to the third part of the small intestines called the ileum, only the juices, only the liquid part of the food you and I have eaten go through the portal vein into the liver, into the villi, to reach our bloodstream to be fed to every one of our hundred trillion cells. It’s amazing. By the way, all of that is in my book that’s out there, Live Foods Live Bodies. It’s being sold all over. I mean, it hit the New York Times bestseller list. If everybody out there listening, if they can’t buy the book or can’t find it in a bookstore, all you have to do is go to jaykordich.com on your computer, and there are beautiful recipes. I mean, I’ve got some of my best recipes on there, and also a little information on how to remove – and this is vital for every one of you listening out there – how to remove poisonous surface sprays that are sprayed on all of our produce. If you guys came down to the valleys in California, you would see crop dusters. You’d be driving your car up Highway 101 and you’d see a crop duster way out there on the right-hand side of the car. Look to the left, there’s another crop duster, and behind you there are crop dusters. All they’re doing is spraying those fields periodically, a couple times a week. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jay, we broadcast our show from Fresno, California. JAY KORDICH: Great place. I just gave a seminar there not too long ago. JOHN SHEGERIAN: We heard you were just here. We missed you, but you’re so right about the crop dusters. Let’s give our listeners a little taste of your juicing genius here. Why don’t we talk a little bit about what kind of juices do you drink on a daily basis, and what’s better for us, fruit or vegetable, and why? JAY KORDICH: Well, they’re two different entities. Fruits are your body cleansers and quick energizers. Vegetables are your body builders. Now, they all build the cells and tissues and glands and organs, but there’s a little overlap there too between fruits and vegetables. I’ve got a great recipe sheet. My wife just handed it to me right now. It’s from my old Juiceman company, and I’ve got recipes like carrot and apple juice, which was my favorite of all time, and I was put on that by Dr. Max Gerson. By the way, do you know who Dr. Max Gerson was? JOHN SHEGERIAN: I’ve heard of him, but share with our listeners. JAY KORDICH: Yeah. He was right out of New York. He had a place right on Park Avenue, and then, of course, right now his daughter is carrying on a lot of his work. People came from all over the world just to be with him, to teach them about juicing. He’s the one that taught me a lot about carrot apple juice and all the rest of it. He’s the guy that put me on juices anyway to begin with. He’s got a great book out, A Cancer Therapy. He was Dr. Albert Schweitzer’s personal physician. I mean, the guy must have had something, you know? I went to him because of that. Anyway, I’m still here, and that was way back in the forties that I went to him, and he put me on juice. And I’ve been drinking juices since ’48, ’49, ’50 or something like that. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, today and yesterday, what kind of juices did you drink? What did you drink this morning? What are you going to drink tonight? What did you drink yesterday? Just so our listeners get a little taste of what someone like you is doing. JAY KORDICH: Well, right now, my wife just placed a small tumbler of juice right in front of me, and she just made it in the kitchen, and all it is is a lot of leafy greens in there. I know there’s parsley — I can see the parsley in there — and spinach, carrot, celery, and probably some apple, too. Now, that’s my favorite drink. It’s called potassium broth — carrots, celery, spinach, parsley. To make it taste better — sometimes these things aren’t the greatest tasting — we add an apple to it. That’s what you do. You kind of temper it down. So, I’m going to take one gulp, and you guys can hear me. Here it comes, right to my mouth. She should have put more apple; this was really strong. There’s a lot of greens in there. But these are the things you live by. Now, you know, later on, it’s Christmastime, you have a cocktail, some guys go watch a ballgame, they have a bottle of beer, and there’s a lot of cakes and pies and Christmas cookies out there right now. Hey, OK, a family tradition. You toast in the holidays right now, but you know what? Right after that’s over with, you start drinking these juices. They’re going to simplify everything. They’re going to take care of the poisons. They’re going to help you eliminate the toxins, and they’re going to bring the nutrients into your bloodstream. Remember, it’s only the liquid part of food that powers the life of plant life, where all life starts come from, that can penetrate through the intestinal villi into the portal vein, into your liver to feed your 50 trillion cells. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So, let’s talk about that, Jay. A lot of people, after the holidays, they regret a little bit of their overindulgence. Can people lose weight while juicing? JAY KORDICH: Absolutely. There are some great juice programs on how to lose weight, of course. Your vegetable juices, in particular. When you’re drinking these juices, folks, if you’re listening, take a mouthful of juice and swirl it around in your mouth for about 30 seconds. That will help you release the saliva from the salivary glands, so that you can break down all these food factors that help break down all the nutrients, especially the proteins, so you can have an absorption factor immediately. Don’t just gulp your juices because a lot of it will go through you real fast. There’s an amylase called ptyalin, and that’s what the body needs to help digest your food and absorb the food value. We manufacture it, so you want to take that first mouthful and the second mouthful, and swish it around. There’s that enzyme called ptyalin, and it’s that ptyalin that breaks the complex carbohydrates down to simple starches and sugars for utilization. It’s not that hard to do. MIKE BRADY: No, and I think one thing, too, when you swirl your juice around in your mouth for 30 seconds, you’re also satisfying your taste buds, aren’t you? JAY KORDICH: That’s what’s happening. Your taste buds are stimulated. The body’s going to say, “Hey, I’ve got all the compliment of nutrients in my body. I don’t have to eat a lot of food. I’ve got most of it right here in this mouthful of food I’m eating now, or that juice I’m consuming now.” It’s so easy. I played football for the University of Southern California a long time ago, my school days. I’m right now the same weight, about 185, same weight, exactly the same weight, and I’m going to be 89 years old right now. The same weight. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Wow. So, let’s talk about that. You played at USC, and a lot of our listeners are athletes or people who like to workout and stuff like that. Is juicing something good for athletes also? JAY KORDICH: I think it’s one of the greatest things you’ll ever have happen to you, especially if you’re a sprinter. I was a 9.7 sprinter, 9.9 usually, 10 flat, you know, for 100, and I’ve got bad football knees from all the wear and tear on my knees, but I became a terrific racquetball player after my college days. That stop and go on the racquetball court really, really put pressure on my knees. All the cartilage was worn out and everything else. But I keep supplementing my body with all these juices. I keep doing pineapple juice. Any of you that have any pains in the shoulders, like the bursas all enflamed, your knees like mine, the ankles, wherever, back in the neck and everything, remember pineapple juice has an enzyme called bromelain that takes the swelling and the pain out of the joints. Isn’t that nice to know? Especially you ex-athletes. It’s so great to know when you’re limping around with pain because you’ve damaged your cartilage. It’s so nice to know there are things you can do, and plant life alleviates that. Pineapple juice. The pineapples grow right out in David Murdoch’s pineapple plants, right out in Hawaii. You just go ahead and start making juice out of pineapple. It tastes totally different than pineapple juice in a can. It’s fresh and alive. I make a combination a lot because of the ptyalin and the quinine in the grapefruit. I make grapefruit and pineapple together in a beautiful combination, about 50-50. Now, orange and pineapple tastes a lot better, but that grapefruit has kind of a bitter taste. Man, is it terrific. It’s quinolinic acid. It will take the pain and the swelling out of your joints, along with the bromelain of the pineapple, which is that digestive enzyme, I may add. MIKE BRADY: Jay, I picked this up years and years ago, but a friend of mine who probably read your book and was a devotee of yours, told me before I went in for some knee surgery that any time you go in before surgery, the week before, drink as much pineapple juice, eat as much raw pineapple, as you can, and then as soon as you can when you get out of surgery, continue. It really helps promote the healing and reduces the swelling. So I know my friend had to be following your advice. JAY KORDICH: He probably did. What you have is an enzyme called ptyalin, and it starts the breakdown of complex carbohydrates into simple starches and sugars. Magnificent for you, you know? These are things that keep us going. I’m still, at my age, just about 90 years old now, I play against guys that are 18, 20, 25 years old at the racquetball courts. Even though I had surgery on my knees from all the football past days, it keeps my pain down to a minimum, if at all. JOHN SHEGERIAN: So it’s fair to say, then, to our listeners out there, that juicing definitely can help a person live longer and better. JAY KORDICH: I think so. Let’s be realistic. Let’s just look at the ways you should look at it. Did you know that the greatest juice machine in the world, better than mine, is your body? JOHN SHEGERIAN: No, I never thought of it that way. JAY KORDICH: Yeah, when you chew your food and swallow it, your body then becomes a juice machine. With the peristaltic action of 22 beats a minute, all the body tries to do is separate the juice from the fiber. So when all that hodgepodge called chyme gets down to the small intestines where you have your villi, it’s only the juice that permeates through the intestinal villi to the portal vein into your liver to reach your bloodstream, and then it’s transferred by the bloodstream from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, all over the body to every one of your hundred trillion cells. That’s the way you’re fed. You are fed by the juices of the food you put into your body. So, if you put something in that has chemicals in it and additives in it and things like that, then you’re going to also have those chemicals delivered to your cells. You, every one of you listening out there, you become the cannery. You make your own juices. You take your foods and you get the pesticides off. I’ve got a recipe sheet that’s sensational that will tell you how to remove 100% of all your chemicals off of food. Nothing ingrown, all surface sprays can be removed easily. Let me mention to you while you’re at it. All your listeners can pick this up. All you have to do to remove poisonous surface sprays — I’ll read it right off my recipe sheet. Fill your sink full of cold water. Put a stopper in there, and get it about halfway full at least. Add four tablespoons of salt, take a lemon, cut it in half, and squeeze the lemon with your hand. Let the lemon juice fall into that saltwater, and that salt and lemon combine together to make a diluted form of hydrochloric acid. Then you soak your fruits and vegetables between 5 and 10 minutes. If it’s leafy greens, five minutes. If it’s things like pineapples or apples, give it 10 minutes. Then you take all that food out of there and rinse it under your cold tap water. You will remove 100% of the DDT, the arsenic, the cyanide, the parathion and malathion and all these chemicals that are sprayed on your produce. This is the way to have pesticide-free foods get into your body. Now you’re a champion. Now you have organic stuff. Now you have food being penetrated to every one of your 100 trillion cells, and you’re built with live foods by the good Lord who put all these foods in the body to feed us all. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jay, I love it. We’re down to about five minutes, and I want our listeners to hear from you directly. Is it expensive to start juicing, and how can they get started? Then I want you to also share the subtlety between juicing and blending, so this way they can get going. They can listen to this show, and they can all start following Jay Kordich, who is the man who pioneered juicing. Go on, share with our listeners how to get going. JAY KORDICH: Let’s put it this way. A blender is terrific to have in your kitchen. My wife has one. She makes all kinds of concoctions with it and everything else, like salad dressings and what have you, purees and whips and dips and peanut butter and all kinds of stuff. But there’s a big difference between a juicer and a blender. With the blender, you have all that food emulsified together, and you haven’t separated the juice from the fiber. So, it’s all in a hodgepodge together, and if you just drop the vegetables or fruit or whatever, and you just drop it in the liquefier or blender, if you will, all you’re going to get is a bunch of mush on the bottom, and it’s going to probably even clog your blender up. When I used to sell liquefiers years and years ago, I always say you have to put one part liquid, one part solid food. The liquid goes in as a base of suspension, but the blades run at about 20,000-25,000 revolutions per minute, and there are usually four cutter blades that are crisscrossed. That’s 100,000 cutting strokes per minute. The friction involved almost kills all the life force. Life force are enzymes. A liquefier isn’t going to do that. It’s great for peanut butter. It’s great for making jams. It’s great for making salad dressings, but you can’t make juice because everything is together. There’s a reason for juicing, and that’s this: to separate the juice from the fiber, so that when you do drink pulp-free juice, you have 100% of the food value predigestively in your bloodstream reaching every one of your 100 trillion cells within minutes. If the pulp and fiber is present, now the body has to digest it. It has to break it down. It has to go through that digestive tract, and it takes days to get it through there, and that’s only a small percentage of the food value. Most of it is still evacuated in the fibrous walls as it goes through you in the toilet. When you juice, this is the precise reason for juicing. The reason for juicing is to separate the juice from the fiber, made fresh, so that when you do drink pulp-free juice, bingo! 100% of the food value is in your bloodstream right now, predigestively, starting to reach every one of your 100 trillion cells, and the vitality and strength and power is there. I’m telling you right now, what a ballgame you’ll be on once you start making these juice fresh. You don’t buy them out of cans and bottles. I don’t care where you’re going. You buy something out of a can or a bottle, it could be the greatest store in the world, all your supermarkets and everything else, everything in a can or a bottle is sterile. It’s a federal law to run it through a cooker to kill the enzymes, so that can or bottle will have shelf life. If they didn’t do that, every single can and bottle that you’d ever buy in a supermarket or a health store, you would be returning after a couple days because it would all be sour and putrid and decayed and toxic and everything emitted from it because it’s live food. You changed it. You made it a toxic food. When you juice, you separate the juice from the fiber. When you drink that pulp-free juice, it’s automatic. 100% of it gets into your bloodstream predigestively in a matter of minutes, and it’s carried to every one of our 100 trillion cells. This is the way you should be fed. JOHN SHEGERIAN: Jay, you’ve been unbelievable today. I mean, you’ve inspired not only Mike and I, but all of our listeners out there. I want all of our listeners to follow Jay’s instructions and either get his book or go to his website, Live Food Live Bodies. You go to www.jaykordich.com and read what he’s talking about, and buy his juicer and buy his book, and get on the program and follow the man who pioneered juicing. Jay Kordich, you are truly living proof that green is good.