12 Steps to Whole Foods

GreenSmoothieGirl Resource Library
For Anyone Wanting to Read the World’s Most Important
Books on Nutrition
Mike Anderson: The RAVE Diet & Lifestyle
This is a fun book that’s fairly quick to read because it pulls no punches. It’s hard hitting and unapologetic in its
promotion of the plant-based diet. It’s jam-packed with information (that duplicates Robbins, Fuhrman, and
Campbell), is well written, and contains lots of easy recipes at the end. My only slight quibble with Anderson
(and Fuhrman) is that I don’t think people in normal weight ranges need to be afraid of fats—the kind found in
nuts, seeds, and unprocessed oils.
Steven Arlin: Raw Power
This book is for anyone who wants to build muscle mass or compete athletically while eating a raw, vegan diet.
I’m just a girl who’s not a true bodybuilder, but I love weight training, and this book long ago helped me let go
of protein powders and bars and hold my own, strength-wise, with much-younger and carnivorous
weightlifting friends. Arlin has eaten a 100% raw vegan diet for 20 years and would be the biggest guy in most
gyms’ free-weight rooms. His recipes are interesting and unique.
Victoria Boutenko: Green for Life
This book documents how Boutenko, a long-time raw foodist, felt there was a missing link in her family’s
nutrition, even as good as it was. (They eliminated many chronic diseases from their lives when they went all
raw 15 years ago.) She undertook to study the diet of primates, since we humans share 99.4% of our DNA with
primates. Of course, what she found is that they eat copiously of greens, and a wide variety of them.
Boutenko asks the reader to undertake an experiment: to chew a mouthful of greens and then spit it out right
before swallowing. You’ll find it is simply torn up, not creamed and ready for digestion like it needs to be. This
is because over several generations of eating increasingly more refined foods, the human body has adapted by
developing ever-narrower palates. We no longer chew food to the extent that we need to in order to extract
nutrition from denser foods like raw green vegetables, as primates with wide palates do. The Blendtec Total
Blender does that breakdown for you, in the green smoothie: all you have to do is “chew” as you drink it, to
create saliva for digestion.
Greens like kale, collards, mustard greens, arugula, turnip greens, celery, spinach, dandelion greens, beet
greens, and chard don’t end up on too many salad plates. But they’re easy in green smoothies. And you don’t
have to drizzle them with fattening, chemical-laden salad dressings to get them down in a smoothie.
Best of all, in addition to the superior nutrition of dark leafy greens, Boutenko points out that kale fiber, for
instance, can remove many times its own weight in toxins from the body. She undertook to study a group of 30
people ranging from the morbidly obese in wheelchairs to people who already ate a fairly healthful diet: every
one of the 30 reported excellent improvements in health, some of them very dramatic. Many said they just
wished they had more than a quart a day! The top three health benefits were better digestion/elimination, more
energy, and weight loss.
342 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw