Lemons are very high in Vitamin C, which is essential for a healthy human body. Vitamin C helps improve your immune system’s functioning and digestion, while also promoting healthy skin and more. Lemons have been recognized as having anti-cancer properties, purifying the liver, reducing inflammation in the body, and helping increase weight loss.
How to Get Your Lemons
While often called “golden apples,” likely because they grow on trees like apples and are also nutritionally awesome. However, unlike apples, you will not want to eat lemons whole. The pulp and rind of lemons are often used in baking, but the lemon juice is what we are focusing on.
The easiest way to get the health benefits of lemon juice is to dilute the lemon juice in a cup of warm water. The easiest way to do this is cut a lemon in half and squeeze the juice from the lemon into a cup of water (I use a small coffee mug) that has been microwaved to a lukewarm temperature.
Nutritional Value of Lemon Juice
Nutritionally speaking, the amount of lemon juice I will be recommending is not high enough in calories to even worry about counting. But, to give an idea, a fluid ounce of lemon juice contains contains about 8 calories.
10 Benefits of Lemon Juice in Warm Water
- Improve Digestion: Bloating, heartburn, and even burping can all be helped by drinking warm lemon water. Lemon juice causes the liver to produce more bile, which aids in the digestive process.
- Rejuvenate Skin: Warm lemon water can help rejuvenate your skin from the inside out. The Vitamin C from lemons will help reduce the appearance of wrinkles and also help acne.
- Support Immune Function: Vitamin C (ascorbic acid) is an anti-inflammatory, which can lessen respiratory problems, help you recover more quickly from colds, and help relieve asthma symptoms.
- Help Heal: Ascorbic acid which is abundant in lemons, is essential to the body for keeping cartilage, connective tissue, and bones healthy. Vitamin C also allows the body to recover from injury more quickly and reduces stress rates in the body.
- Help Maintain Blood Pressure Levels: Lemons are also high in potassium, which is tbelieved to help control blood pressure and reduce mental stress.
- Blood Purifier – lemon water is known as a blood purifier as it helps clean the kidneys of waste products.
- Balance pH: Lemons are an alkaline food, which help reduce the overall acidity in the body. A highly acidic body can lead to a host of bodily function problems.
- Faster Weight Loss: Warm lemon water has long been touted for its ability to help the body reduce weight faster, likely due to its ability to help the body function more efficiently.
- Promote Healthy Gums: Lemon juice kills harmful mouth bacteria and also dissolves plaque, a leading contributor to tooth disease.
- Fever Reducer: Lemon juice can increase the rate of sweat production that can help reduce flu and fever symptoms
How Lemon Juice in Warm Water Works
When warm lemon water is consumed, it has an immediate effect on the digestive system. The combination of warm water and lemon juice flushes toxins from the body, but also increases your body’s absorption rate of vital nutrients.
When and How Much Lemon Water to Drink
There are all sorts of theories pertaining to the best time to consume lemon water and how much lemon water to drink. Some people say morning or nighttime is better to help flush toxins from the body, while others say just before a meal is best to help digestion. Here is how I do it:
- Twice a day, I have a cup of warm water with a quarter of an organic lemon squeezed. I have one cup immediately upon waking (flush toxins) and the second cup a half-hour before my main meal (to aid digestion)
If you weigh more than 200 pounds, I would recommend a whole organic lemon for maximum benefits sliced in two.
