Are you trying to lose weight, increase your overall energy and zest for life, and eliminate sickness in your life? Or perhaps your family is suffering from sickness, depression and weight problems? Did you know that Nature has provided the perfect solution to all our health issues? It’s as simple as fresh green vegetables and fruits. But if you are following a healthy diet, did you know that you are still missing essential vitamins and minerals from your diet? Welcome to the benefits of Green Smoothies!

I’ve been a health ‘fanatic’ all my life and was raised on fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and minimal animal products. But as I grew older, I began to feel that essential minerals and vitamins were missing from my diet. Good quality vitamins from the health food store were expensive, and exactly how much was my body actually absorbing?

So I started researching about every single food that existed for humans. After following many wrong roads, I finally found the answer I’d been looking for. There is one specific food group that matched ALL human nutritional needs: GREENS.

We were not eating enough greens in my family. In fact, we didn’t really like a lot of them, except in our salad, covered with salad dressing. But we knew that greens were important since they have all the vital nutrients our bodies need.

I remember being told frequently by my grandparents to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, and to especially eat our spinach. In other words, people knew greens were important a hundred years ago. It’s only within the last hundred years, that the overall consumption of greens has decreased significantly. Most people rarely eat a salad everyday, and spinach is a popular food that many people actually dislike.

I began to read about other animals in the wild, especially gorillas and chimpanzees. They are biologically the closest creatures to human beings, and are almost 98% vegetarian, even though, technically, they are omnivores (eat both plants and animals), yet their diet is more vegan than omnivore. Only during certain times of the year when some plants are not available they’ll need to compensate by eating insects, etc.

Human beings and chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of our DNA sequence, making us more closely related to each other than either is to any other animal species. Yet, do chimpanzees in the wild suffer from heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes or weight issues? Have you ever seen an obese chimpanzee? Hmmm, think about that for a moment. Yet, despite all the scientific research, human health is continuously declining. It’s pretty easy to conclude that human health problems are related to nutritional deficiencies in the standard American diet. Examining and understanding chimpanzees’ eating habits may help us learn exactly what our own human dietary needs are.

Chimpanzees primarily consume fruits and greens, and sometimes insects, termites, etc. Greens are not the same thing as root vegetables like carrots, beets, or potatoes. And greens are not the same thing as non-sweet fruits like cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers.

According to Jane Goodall, a world famous researcher of chimpanzees, the percentage of time that chimpanzees spend eating greens in relation to the rest of their diet varies from 25-50% depending on the season.

Two to seven percent of their diet is pith and bark. (Piths are the stems and more fibrous parts of plants.) When the trees are blooming, in March and April, chimpanzees consume blossoms, up to 10% of their [diet] ratio.

Chimpanzees do not eat very many nuts, but their diet could be up to 5% seeds. Also, particularly in November, they consume small amounts of insects and even small animals, however, Goodall says this part of their diet is irregular and insignificant, as they could go months and months without consuming any animals, and seem to have no ill effects.

So when you begin to compare the standard American diet with that of chimpanzees, there is a huge difference. There is nothing in common between the two diets. Most humans eat things that chimpanzees don’t eat at all, like cooked starchy foods, oils, candy, yogurt, cheese, hamburgers, chips, ice cream, etc.

Chimpanzees almost never eat root vegetables, unless there is a drought and fruits and greens are unavailable. As I mentioned earlier, the intake of greens has declined significantly within the past 100 years in the human diet. Most people’s idea of a serving of greens is two wilted iceberg lettuce leaves on a sandwich!

When you begin to compare the standard American diet with an average diet of a typical vegan, you’ll see that a vegan diet is significantly healthier and provides more nutrients than the regular diet.

For a raw diet, it goes without saying that all ingredients are uncooked, which allows them to provide all the necessary enzymes and vitamins our bodies need; consequently, the raw food diet is like a revolution compared to the standard American diet (often referred to as SAD).

This can account for why many people state that they immediately feel better on a raw diet. Most raw foodists eat a large quantity of fruit, which includes bell-peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes as they are also fruits. Nevertheless, even though raw-foodists generally consume significantly more greens than people on an average mainstream diet, greens rarely comprise 45 percent of their food. [As in the typical chimpanzee diet.]

So how can we obtain the missing greens? To compensate, most people on a raw food diet consume large amounts of fruits, nuts and seeds. Nuts are used as a substitute for carbohydrates, particularly when trying to mimic cooked dishes with raw ingredients, even though nuts are 70-80% fat.

Additionally, raw foodists will increase their consumption of oils and avocados because the most common way of eating salads, their main staple, is to have it mixed with dressing, sauce or guacamole. Keep in mind, there is nothing wrong with certain oils, especially avocados. Many raw food experts consider avocados to be a perfect food.

Also, raw foodists frequently will increase their consumption of root vegetables through juicing, such as carrots, and beets, especially since roots taste sweeter than greens and thus comprise a large portion of raw salads.

When looking at the two diets, standard human diet and the chimpanzee diet, it’s easy to see that in order to improve our health it is necessary to increase our consumption of greens, and to keep our intake of nuts, seeds, and oils to a minimum.

It’s also interesting to note that chimpanzees never eat late in the afternoon or evening. It’s quite possible that they were plenty satisfied with the greens and fruits they consumed during the day, that they had no more need for food. Upon further research, I determined that greens are the most important food that humans can eat. And eating more salads was not the answer.

I used to juice a combination of carrots, beets, wheatgrass, and apples on a regular basis, almost daily. I had learned that our body absorbed the nutrients quickly and I actually felt a kind of ‘high’ after drinking the juice. But I also wondered about all the fiber that was expelled during the process. There wasn’t much you could do with it, unless you maintained a compost. But I didn’t like throwing the fiber away, after all, isn’t fiber important for us? Other than the pulp from wheatgrass, which our stomachs cannot digest (we don’t have two stomachs like cows do!), I really wished there was a way to consume the fiber. Mix it back into the processed juice? Nope, that wouldn’t work.

In my research, I came up Dr. Christopher’s mucus-less diet program, and in he talks about a blended salad. Basically, it’s like taking your green salad loaded with healthy vegetables and dumping it into the blender. Then drink or eat it like a soup. I tried it, and it wasn’t too bad, needed a lot of seasoning though.

It was about that time I came upon a book by Victoria Boutenko titled:
Green For Life. In her book she discusses how important it is for our bodies to consume greens, her personal testimony with her family about adding greens to their diet, and recipes that she came up with that are actually very delicious. They were similar to the blended salad recipes with one difference; she adds fruits, like apples, bananas, pears, peach, etc.

So I started creating my own recipes using fruits and greens, and fell in love with green smoothies! I have been making them everyday for several months, and have never felt better! It really is the missing link in our diet!

If you are interested in learning more about Victoria Boutenko’s family, their journey into raw foods and how it cured them all of their diseases, you will want to get her book. Even her kids have written a couple of books!
One is Eating Without Heating. They were teenagers at the time it was published, now they are 21 and 22. It is one of my favorite books.

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Til next time!
In Joy!
Lauren