All Kinds of Greens

Hi,

Greens. What does that make you think of? I hear the words, "eat your greens" in my head but I don't know from where. I don't think it is my mother's voice. Maybe the words are "eat plenty of greens" coming from a doctor. I don't ever remember hearing why, other than, "they're good for you." So my response was similar to "whatever."

I remember figuring "greens" meant salad, or cooked spinach, or something. Salad meant iceberg lettuce. When I got older and went to a salad bar, I usually skipped the iceberg lettuce because it was my very least favorite item. It was boring and tasteless and kept falling off of the plate so it was hard to control. Ha! Not that I never ate it. It was just a really boring substitute for food and when I had the chance to skip it, I did.

I have been changing what I eat with an eye to improving my health. I am eating a lot of raw food in the form of salads which I am learning to love. But still no iceberg lettuce. Sorry. Salads made with other lettuces and greens really are quite satisfying as a meal.  I have been juggling learning and practicing how to control my blood sugars with my diet and am discovering that this raw food thing seems to be producing good results (as noted in my morning blood sugars list from yesterday's post.) So I am getting more excited to find out more about "greens."

What I am first noticing is the importance of them. I listened to a video done by a lady named Victoria Boutenko who was the lady who invented green smoothies. In the film she shares how she healed her family of some pretty major illnesses (juvenile diabetes, obesity, hyper thyroid, chronic fatigue, arrhythmia, arthritis, asthma, and allergies) by starting to eat raw foods. She later came to the conclusion that she and her family, although eating raw for seven years, were missing something in their diets and starting to feel ill in small ways, again. She set out to find out what the missing link or ingredient was. Oddly enough, she found it by studying chimpanzees which she settled on because of their 99.4 percent match with human genes. I think God did that so we would have a living example of what to eat, since we have gone so far afield. And the ingredient was green leafy vegetables. (Here is a link to her story which includes the chart that I saw: http://www.rawfamily.com/green-smoothie)

I knew that my knowledge about greens was very limited so I started to look around to see if I could find more information about them. I ended up finding exactly what I needed in a book that I had sitting on my shelf called, "The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition" by Sheldon Margen, M.D., printed by the Wellness Letter out of Berkeley California. If you want to know about a particular natural food, this is the place to look and it has wonderful pictures, too. Mine is a copy that I have had on hand for a few years. You can still find it at Amazon.com if you are interested.

I was pleased to find an entire section devoted to green leafy vegetables, including sub-sections of what they called "cooking" meaning those greens that are traditionally cooked such as collards and turnip greens, "salad" which are the familiar salad items such as Romaine and green leaf, and a third category called "other" which seems to be an extended list of salad greens like arugula and watercress. Some of the "greens" are actually reddish in color but are still considered "greens.

The thing about greens that really struck me is that when Victoria B. began to do her research she listed the RDA for the average adult person and then compared them to different food items and green leafy vegetables turned out to be the one category of foods that actually matched ingredient for ingredient what human beings need. Vegetable greens actually contain all the nutrients in larger amounts that humans require to remain healthy with the one exception being vitamin B12. I was impressed. She had some other charts in the video that I did not see on the web site (yet) that showed that fruits have most of the nutrients, too, but not in the large quantities that leafy greens have them.

The conclusion that I see to her story was that when she added in more leafy greens, her family went back to better health again.  She does not overtly state that, but both her son and her daughter are raw food experts now, too. So that must have been the end result. She also claims to be the person who invented the green smoothie which she did because she has some missing molars in the back so chewing lots of salad was hard for her. She came up with the idea to do smoothies and over time, added fruit for flavor and voila! The smoothie was born. Many people do smoothies for health and they have become very popular.

I had kind of dismissed them out of lack of interest. I have never liked apple sauce because it reminds me of disgusting baby food. Smoothies seemed kind of like that, to me, but, I'm thinking of giving them a another try. I'll have to bend the rule and add some fruit, I think, for flavor. My doctor did say I could have apples and grapefruit. I suppose I could try it and test my sugars to see if it is OK for me. But that is my thought after having finished the shopping! Ha.

Today when I went grocery shopping, since I had just been reading about all the different varieties of greens and how to use them in the encyclopedia, I was a little bit floored that I actually found them at my Whole Foods Market. I had gone there because I knew that would probably be the one place I would find the majority of them. They had even more than what was in the book. They had nearly a whole wall stacked from cart height to above my head with beautiful healthy greens. It was like being in wonderland. On the opposite wall of the fruit and vegetable area, they had lots of bagged lettuces and boxed sprouts, too. I bought some greens from the big wall that I had never bought before, and sprouts from the other wall, and am planning on trying them out over the next few days.

Victoria's chimpanzee food chart works out to be half fruit, about forty percent greens, and five percent nuts, seeds and bark, and about five percent insects. She chose chimpanzees because their genes are 99.4 percent identical to ours. I've translated that into human terms to mean fifty percent fruit (but not sweet fruit for me, yet), forty percent greens, five percent nuts and seeds, and five percent animal protein such as eggs or cheese or whatever else a person wants to eat from fish to hamburger.

So those are the percentages I am working on putting into practice now. On the issue of fruit. I am still very leery of including sweet fruits -- apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, etc. So I am, for now, sticking to tomatoes, avocados, bell peppers, zucchini, cucumber, etc. as my fruits. There is one more category that I am going to include and that is cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cabbages. I'm not going to be measuring and getting nit picky about this. I'm just going to make salads, and maybe some smoothies, with lots of leafy stuff, a few fruits, and anything that feels good for flavor and accent.

One other tidbit of information about greens. It seems that you need to rotate the crop that you are eating, meaning Romaine lettuce, today, green leaf, tomorrow, and spinach the next day and then back again using any number and variety that is appealing and available. It has something to do with alkaline properties or something similar which I cannot remember right now. (I'll get back on that when I find that info again.) It seems like a pretty simple thing to do and would probably keep me more interested, too, so, rotate the crops, it is.

I am really kind of glad I finally found this out about the greens. I've heard it all my life that they are good for you, but never really considered what that really meant. I never really saw anybody actually doing that -- that I noticed. I now feel like I have a basis to begin and will make adjustments as I go along.

I hope that you are also inspired to include or at least investigate greens. Why? Because they are good for you! Ha

Please note the following link: which has a 50% off discount until Nov. 19th on the DVD: "Simply Raw" plus some other stuff you will see at the site.

http://www.rawfor30days.com/RawFor30/special_top.html#order_now2

Be back soon

--Marcia