12 Steps to Whole Foods

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