The One Green Juice Ingredient Martha Stewart Swears By

With its typical combination of blended green vegetables and fruit, green juice offers a delicious drink with a vibrant green hue that packs lots of nutrition with many health benefits. Green juices can be made with fresh juice that works as a prebiotic to relieve constipation. These drinks can also have antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, and electrolytes to help your body heal faster from sickness. Vegetables also contain lots of water, so drinking green juice can help prevent you from getting dehydrated. Of course, getting these health benefits from your green juice is dependent upon the ingredients that you make it with. And there's one ingredient that Martha Stewart likes to put in her green juice that can increase the nutrition and improve its taste: Two unpeeled orange wedges.

When you add two orange wedges with their rinds still attached to your green juice recipe and blend them with fruit and green vegetables, your drink will get a citrusy boost of vitamins and nutrients that can benefit your overall health. The flesh of the orange wedges will pack some great nutritional value, but the orange peels will give your green juice even more health benefits.

Martha Stewart may include orange wedges in her green juice because it is one way to stay healthy with vitamin C. According to WebMd, a peeled orange has over 100% of the recommended daily vitamin C intake. This means that just the flesh of the orange in your green juice will give the drink a vitamin that can help guard the cells in your body from harm, strengthen your body's immune system, and help your body take in iron more efficiently to protect itself from anemia. And the benefits don't stop there.

Vitamin C can also assist with the production of collagen in your body, which will not only help restore your skin from bruises and injuries but will also give your skin an even surface. Johns Hopkins Medicine says that as you age, especially for those above 50 years old, there is a possibility that you can develop macular degeneration, a disease that catalyzes central vision loss. However, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, vitamin C can interfere with the development of macular degeneration and help preserve your vision. Vitamin C can also protect your body against free radicals that can lead to cancer.

It may seem surprising that Martha Stewart doesn't peel her orange wedges when she blends them with the other ingredients for her green juice. But it might be even more surprising that those rinds actually have more nutritional value than the flesh of the orange. Registered dietitian Amy Gorin told Brightly, "Compared to the orange's flesh ... Orange peel offers four times the fiber, three times the Vitamin C, and nearly twice as much Vitamin A."

Per Healthline, the insoluble fiber in orange peels will help bring water to your stool that will moisten it so it can pass through your system smoothly without making it strenuous on your bowels. Insoluble fiber can also lessen your chances of developing diabetes. Healthline also says that the vitamin A in the orange peel can help protect your vision, bolster a strong immune system, minimize the development of acne on your skin, and help you sustain healthy bones. If you're trying green juice for the first time, you can make a beginner green juice that contains an orange. Or just follow Martha Stewart's lead and cut two unpeeled wedges from the orange and blend them in your green juice.