Juicing is a great way to load your kids’ bodies with vitamins, minerals and antioxidants that he or she may be short on or need for to help with their ADHD symptoms.

Getting your kids to eat some vegetables is a chore of its own, not to mention the amount they need to consume to get the most benefits out of the fresh produce.

In my practice, I frequently explain to parents the reason why children dislike fruits and vegetables is more about the look than the taste.

Eating is a very sensory-involved process. It involves all five senses – look, touch, smell, taste and hearing.

Fruits and vegetables by nature have very sharp colors and everyone of them have very different shapes. For some children, the shape/color can be overwhelming.

Have you notice your picky eater’s preferred foods that are all bland colors? –white, brown, beige, yellow.

Related: 7 Steps to Get Your Picky Eater to Eat Healthy Food

This is where juicing comes in handy to solve your problem. You make fruits and vegetables juice, you solve the problem of vision, touch and hearing. If you mix the new fruits or vegetables with their favorite juice, you solve the other problem of taste and smell.

If they generally don’t prefer vegetables in their diet, juicing is a great way to include vegetables in the diet.

Parents would always say, “But I want Junior to eat a real fruit or vegetable.”

Well, that will come later.

By introducing new fruits/vegetables in a subtle way, you child is also subtly exposed to the smell and taste of that new fruits or vegetables without the usual big ordeal at the dinner table.

One more important tip is your picky eater has to help with making the juice so they see what goes into the juice even if it’s something they don’t like. Just tell them, “you don’t have to like it, it’s for mommy” or “it’s for daddy”.

By saying that the juice is for someone else, it takes the pressure off your kids that they have to try. Picky kids can sense your intention if you’re going to make them try something. And that’s is stressful for them, and that’s how mealtime battles start.

For some kids, the noise of the juicer can be very overwhelming. In that case, let your child help with taking fruits and vegetables out of refrigerator, wash and cut (with plastic knife).Then, have them watch from far where they can tolerate the noise.

If the noise is not a problem, let them press the button. Which kid does not like to press button and turn things on and off.

I still like pressing buttons for fun.

By actively participating, your child is exposed to every element and have been exposed to looking, smelling, touching, hearing and, hopefully, tasting at the end.

Over time, he/she will associate the taste/smell of the new fruits/vegetable in a more pleasant way. One day, he/she may ask for a piece of broccoli from your plate.

I’m not joking…that’s how I get many of my picky eaters, even those with autism, to start eating vegetables on their own without asking.

1. You gotta make it fun to keep your child’s attention. To make it more fun to drink juice, have your child help pick the ingredients, and help in the process of juicing. Kids with ADHD love touch and doing things. Let them help in the kitchen. You’ll also help them build self-esteem by helping out.

If you made too much juice, make popsicles that your kids can eat for snack later.

2. Start with fruits and vegetables that your child already enjoy, and add new ones in small amount to the mix, so it does not change the taste too much. Make it into a fun experiment.

One day, my daughter asked if she could bring a jar to Nutella to school. Out of curiosity I asked why because she does not eat Nutella or anything with nuts or nut-flavor. She told me she and a bunch of her friends at school are going to sample a “homemade” concoction of theirs. They are going to each contribute a food to the mixture.

When I picked her up from school that day, I asked her what they made. The girls basically mixed all kinds of food that each brought, and they mixed Nutella, rice soup, fish, ginger, avocado, lemonade. Sounds nasty, right? Well, they all tried it and all agreed that it tasted “disgusting”.

My point here is: if it’s fun, they’ll try anything even if they know it does not taste good.

3. Avoid bananas and strawberry as these fruits do not have much juice. Fruits, likes apples, pears, beets, oranges, carrots are juicier, so start with these.

4. Combining different fruits and vegetables are great way to maximize nutritional value of the juice. I love adding beet and carrot to the juice mix because of their rich alpha lipoid acid content.

Beet root is also beneficial in increasing blood flow to the brain and boosting memory.

5. Use fresh citrus and pineapple juice during an illness, such as cold or flu. Now you can skip the doctor.

Whenever my daughter is sick from whatever bugs she gets from school, and she would not want to eat. So I would give her lots of fresh squeezed orange juice and rice soup, just to keep her hydrated. You can try different kind of citrus juice, such as orange, lemon, lime, Satsuma, grapefruit, tangerine, and pineapple.

These are ideal choices to get some calories in her sick little body, but also load her body up with immune boosting power of vitamin C.

6. Once your child turns 1 year old, you may offer undiluted juice. Generally, children can tolerate undiluted juice in very small amount. I would prefer that you keep your child’s juice consumption to no more than 4-8oz a day, along with consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables as main source of micronutrients.

7. Start with these basic juicing recipes for kids. I know parents can go crazy with making GREEN JUICE, but your kids may not be as adventurous as you might want him/her to be.

Vegetable juices such as those made from spinach, watercress, parsley, celery, tomato and beets may not be palatable to your child initially.

So start easy, and go slow.

You can simply mix a small amount of vegetables with sweet fruit in a 1 to 3 ratio.

All these recipes yields about 8-12 ounces of juice. These freshly squeezed juice should be consumed within 20 minutes of extracting to get the maximum antioxidant effects.

• 3 spears of pineapple
• 1 medium carrots.

• 1 handful of Swiss chard, kale, spinach or a combination
• 1 pear
• 1 cup strawberries
• 1/2 lemon, unpeeled
• 1 apple, cut into chunks

• 2 apples
• 1 beet
• 2 carrots

• 1 pear
• 1 handful kale
• 1 apple
• 2 spears of pineapple

• 1 orange
• 3 carrots
• 1 apple

• 2 stalks celery
• 1 handful kale
• 2 apples

• 1 apple
• 1 orange
• 2 carrots
• 2 celery stalks
• 1/2 lemon

As always use organic produce as much as possible to minimize exposure to toxic pesticides and GMO.

These fresh juice are best to drink within 20 minutes of juicing to maximize the benefits of the live enzymes still in the plants.

If you made a lot of juice, freeze extra into popsicle to enjoy later.

These juicing recipes are really simple ones to start getting a taste of use juicing as part of ADHD treatment. If you want juices that have more potent antioxidants for detoxification, check out my Juicing Recipes board on Pinterest for beet juice recipes and other green juice recipes.

Ok, there you have it…

I hope you find this information helpful. Let me know what you think and comment below.

Remember ADHD does not doom your child to a life of under-achievement. You know your child is bright, full of potential and deserve the best. In fact, many of the world’s greatest discoveries and inventions were made by people with ADHD.

I helped my crazy wild child who could not read or write when she was little with the 4 steps I laid out in the Eat to Focus book. She’s now a merit scholarship student studying premed in Loyola Chicago University.

So stay strong and keep believing in your child. 

Check out the Eat to Focus book at amazon.com to learn about my story and the 4 steps that I used to transform my daughter and help her reach her full potential. This information may change your child’s future.

Download your free gift before you leave. I have put together 15 clean and brain-nourishing school day breakfast ideas for you. I don’t like to spend my life in the kitchen either, so I make sure these are super simple and quick recipes, and some you can even prepare the night before. Knowing your child goes to school fully prepared and well-fed is satisfying.

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