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
Bye-Bye, Stimulants — Hello, Green Smoothies Benefits of Green Smoothies Greens You’d Never Otherwise Eat. Who eats a big plate of plain, raw, kale, collards, spinach, and celery? Mustard greens, arugula, turnip greens, dandelion greens, beet greens, and chard don’t end up in too many salads, even for the most health conscious among us. Just the time to chew it would be half an hour—and add chopping time to that. Those unusual but oh-so-good-for-you greens are a regular feature in my green smoothies every day. No Salad Dressings Required. Another benefit of a smoothie versus a salad is that you don’t have to drizzle (or douse!) your greens with fattening, chemical-laden salad dressings to get them down. Many people are not aware that salad dressings you purchase in the store are full of toxic chemicals like monosodium glutamate (which goes by many names you may not recognize on a label); the very worst refined sweetener, high-fructose corn syrup; refined salt; and rancid, refined oils like soybean and other vegetable oils. Lowest Calorie, Highest Nutrition, Least Expensive Meal You Can Eat. A quart of green smoothie is 188 calories, using the template recipe that utilizes water, greens, and fruit. (If you add some flax seeds or flaxseed oil, that will add calories, but good ones! It will add good fats to your diet, the kind that burn the bad fats.) Your stomach will be very full with a quart of green smoothie. Does a protein bar fill you up? No, and it has more calories and fat and lots of refined-food products and salt in it. Simply put, there is no food you can eat that will give you higher micronutrients, for fewer calories, than a green smoothie. (Micronutrients meaning 100 or more different phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes.) I bought retail-priced ingredients and measured how much a quart of green smoothie costs, and it was only $2.50! A Starbucks latte costs more than that and its nutrition isn't even in the same galaxy! You can pay $4 for fat, caffeine, sugar, and aging in your morning coffee. Or you can pay $2.50 for a full stomach, lots of energy, a positive mood, stable blood sugar, weight loss, pretty skin/hair/nails, and excellent digestion. (See my book The Green Smoothies Diet for details on these results in my research.) My smoothies cost much less because I grow organic spinach, kale, collards, chard, and beet greens in my garden, and then in the fall I freeze them for the winter. I also compost peels and other plant waste products to feed the soil that then grows my family’s food. It’s easy and fun, and I teach you much more about this in Chapter 5 (page 119). If you think $2.50 is a lot because you eat ramen noodles and a candy bar for lunch for only $1, consider that you will spend far more than that differential in health care and lost productivity, when you choose inexpensive, toxic food. Not to mention you’ll also be hungry again in about an hour and will likely look for more food to help fill you up…and how much additional money will you spend on that? Predigested Nutrition. Boutenko recommends you try an experiment of chewing your salad up and then right before you would normally swallow it, spit it out and look at it. To be digestible, it needs to be fully broken down into the tiniest particles—“creamed” like wide-palate primates with strong jaws are able to do easily, without any observable “chunks” of green. © Copyright Robyn Openshaw 12 Steps to Whole Foods 35
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Bye-Bye, Stimulants — Hello, Green Smoothies<br />
Remember your primordial cousin, the gorilla. He eats greens all day long, and unless he’s captured and fed an<br />
unnatural diet in captivity, he virtually never gets heart disease, cancer, or au<strong>to</strong>immune diseases.<br />
Believe it or not, kids will drink green smoothies, and you will be surprised that you enjoy them and even learn<br />
<strong>to</strong> crave them. Don’t let the name put you off—I make them look more purple than green, with a magic<br />
ingredient called frozen mixed berries.<br />
Vic<strong>to</strong>ria Boutenko’s book Green for Life is a comprehensive report on why greens are so important and why<br />
even long-time raw foodists like Boutenko, committed <strong>to</strong> good nutrition, find they can be nutrient deficient<br />
without a large amount of dark, leafy greens. Her research of 30 people each drinking a quart of green smoothie<br />
(made every two days and hand delivered by Boutenko and her family) for 30 days yielded 100% positive<br />
reviews. The <strong>to</strong>p three health benefits reported by those involved in the study were better digestion/<br />
elimination, more energy, and weight loss. 2<br />
The results of my own poll of 175 green smoothie drinkers published in my book The Green Smoothies Diet<br />
yielded some interesting results that suggest quite definitively that it’s a 10-min. habit worth adopting! To<br />
participate in the questionnaire, one had <strong>to</strong> be drinking green smoothies for at least 30 days, a pint a day for at<br />
least 4 days a week. Many were drinking more, up <strong>to</strong> my recommended one quart daily.<br />
The vast majority, 95.4%, said green smoothies noticeably improved their health or quality of life. Very<br />
exciting <strong>to</strong> me is the fact that 84% of those drinking green smoothies are so enthusiastic about the positive<br />
health benefits that they’ve <strong>to</strong>ld others about or taught them the habit!<br />
The <strong>to</strong>p health effects people experienced were (in order) more energy, improved digestion, fewer cravings for<br />
sweets, a more positive mood, improvements in skin <strong>to</strong>ne, and weight loss. And, significantly, although not all<br />
the respondents needed <strong>to</strong> lose weight, 50% of them did—nearly the same percentage as the amount of<br />
Americans <strong>to</strong>day who are overweight (66%).<br />
Interestingly, Boutenko’s three benefits coincide with the <strong>to</strong>p three complaints of Americans: we are tired, we<br />
have major digestive problems, and we are overweight. In the green smoothie, you find a triple whammy: three<br />
sickly birds killed with one s<strong>to</strong>ne!<br />
I’ve designed a master template for green smoothies at the end of this chapter that you can adapt <strong>to</strong> a wide<br />
variety of greens and fruit. I also have many more recipes and additional information in my books The Big<br />
Book of Green Smoothies (with 230 recipes) and The Green Smoothies Diet. 3<br />
34 <strong>12</strong> <strong>Steps</strong> <strong>to</strong> <strong>Whole</strong> <strong>Foods</strong><br />
© Copyright Robyn Openshaw
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