12 Steps to Whole Foods

Bye-Bye, Stimulants — Hello, Green Smoothies
Remember your primordial cousin, the gorilla. He eats greens all day long, and unless he’s captured and fed an
unnatural diet in captivity, he virtually never gets heart disease, cancer, or autoimmune diseases.
Believe it or not, kids will drink green smoothies, and you will be surprised that you enjoy them and even learn
to crave them. Don’t let the name put you off—I make them look more purple than green, with a magic
ingredient called frozen mixed berries.
Victoria Boutenko’s book Green for Life is a comprehensive report on why greens are so important and why
even long-time raw foodists like Boutenko, committed to good nutrition, find they can be nutrient deficient
without a large amount of dark, leafy greens. Her research of 30 people each drinking a quart of green smoothie
(made every two days and hand delivered by Boutenko and her family) for 30 days yielded 100% positive
reviews. The top three health benefits reported by those involved in the study were better digestion/
elimination, more energy, and weight loss. 2
The results of my own poll of 175 green smoothie drinkers published in my book The Green Smoothies Diet
yielded some interesting results that suggest quite definitively that it’s a 10-min. habit worth adopting! To
participate in the questionnaire, one had to be drinking green smoothies for at least 30 days, a pint a day for at
least 4 days a week. Many were drinking more, up to my recommended one quart daily.
The vast majority, 95.4%, said green smoothies noticeably improved their health or quality of life. Very
exciting to me is the fact that 84% of those drinking green smoothies are so enthusiastic about the positive
health benefits that they’ve told others about or taught them the habit!
The top health effects people experienced were (in order) more energy, improved digestion, fewer cravings for
sweets, a more positive mood, improvements in skin tone, and weight loss. And, significantly, although not all
the respondents needed to lose weight, 50% of them did—nearly the same percentage as the amount of
Americans today who are overweight (66%).
Interestingly, Boutenko’s three benefits coincide with the top three complaints of Americans: we are tired, we
have major digestive problems, and we are overweight. In the green smoothie, you find a triple whammy: three
sickly birds killed with one stone!
I’ve designed a master template for green smoothies at the end of this chapter that you can adapt to a wide
variety of greens and fruit. I also have many more recipes and additional information in my books The Big
Book of Green Smoothies (with 230 recipes) and The Green Smoothies Diet. 3
34 12 Steps to Whole Foods
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw