The Essential GreenSmoothieGirl Library: Part 4

Two more of my favorite books, with links to  obtain them.   As you can afford to own these books, you’re building your arsenal of tools to quit or massively reduce refined foods and animal products forever:

James and Colleen Simmons’ Original Fast Foods is so pure in its intent, to help others experience the profound health improvements that the formerly very ill Jim Simmons achieved when he undertook a whole-foods, plant-based diet.   The book is  intelligently written, and it contains tons of information and lots of good recipes at the end, all of them easy.  Self published and therefore more expensive than most books, you can occasionally get used copies on Amazon, but the author sells them at www.originalfastfoods.com.

Victoria Boutenko’s Green for Life 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 humans share 99.4% of our DNA with primates.   Of course, what she found is that they eat copiously of greens, a wide variety of them.

Boutenko asks the reader to undertake an experiment: to chew a mouthful of greens, and 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 to extract nutrition from denser foods like raw green vegetables, like 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.

Posted in: 12 Steps To Whole Food, Tools & Products, Whole Food