today´s breakfasthere is the recipe for the smoothie:
one cup strawberries
half cup blueberries
two bananas
seven leaves of romaine lettuce.
1 cup of water.
blend...
and that's it! simple to make, tastes great, and very cleansing. i added the blueberries for the antioxidant boost, you can also make it without them and it tastes great that way too. romaine lettuce has a high chlorophyll content which is very cleansing/detoxifying.
i'm sort of slowly heading toward going "raw" as a vegan. this is the next step on the journey for me - one i've known i was going to take but haven't had the time yet or the inclination to follow. but i'm getting there, it feels like it is time to start moving that direction. so i started reading this book:
12 Steps to Raw Foods: How to End Your Dependency on Cooked Food
i don't know why but i had a good feeling about this book. it hasn't disappointed. i love the way it is written, and i love the stories mrs. boutenko tells about her own family's history. basically the short story is, they all had really awful health problems. they did the raw vegan thing and everyone started feeling better, rather dramatically. she had a diabetic son for instance who was cured, her asthmatic daughter? also cured. she and her husband had all sorts of problems - all cured by eating raw, vegan foods.
but then they ran into problems after being raw vegans for nine years. it seemed their diet wasn't quite cutting it. so they added in greens, lots of greens, and things got better again.
so i'm experimenting with the green smoothies. i figure its a great way to start inching my way toward going raw. moving away from cooked foods is i think a bigger deal than i imagined it would be. it turns out there are opiates created by cooking food. grilled meat for instance has highly addictive toxic substances that are also found in cigarettes. 100 grams worth of grilled meat equals 800 cigarettes worth of these toxic addictive chemicals.
but this addictive property of cooked food isn't just limited to meat. it doesn't matter what kind of food it is, when you cook it, addictive chemicals that often have opiate effects, are created. here are a few other things i've learned about cooking food:
- many fats cooked at temperatures over 300 degrees turn into trans fats. different fats have different temperatures at which they go toxic.
- vegetables and fruits naturally contain enzymes that help digestion. at temperatures over 118 degrees, the enzymes disappear. (there is a restaurant in orlando called Cafe 118 for this very reason). when the enzymes disappear, the body has to make up for it by manufacturing enzymes to digest the food. this is hard on the pancreas and is stressful. i read recently that the enzymes created by the pancreas go around killing cancer cells. by diverting them to digestive activities, our ability to fight cancer is limited.
- many other vitamins and nutrients disappear in even light cooking. for instance falcarinol, a cancer fighting nutrient found in carrots, is halved when carrots are blanched.
- the pH of foods changes when foods are cooked. they become more acidic. the more acidic a food is, the harder it is on the body. one way the body adjusts by pulling calcium out of the bones to change the pH back to where it needs to be. ever notice Tums and Rolaids are made mostly of calcium? there's a good reason for that. raw foods are much more alkaline. the blood stream has a certain pH it has to maintain - it's basic survival. so the body will do everything it can to adjust to whatever dietary choices we make.
so... for all of these reasons - the pH of foods, toxic chemicals created by cooking, nutrient density, and the resulting health and wellness of eating raw - i want to move in this direction.
honestly it feels like moving toward a completely raw diet is going to be harder than going vegan was. but i am already experiencing benefits from eating the green smoothies. so... i'm going to continue experimenting in that direction.
if you want to read more, some of it is in the book i linked to above, and some of it is in the Thrive book i blogged about before.
discussion thread| 1 |
Didn't you leave out ice? Because without it, it's not really a smoothie - it is just juice with pulp...
Does the romaine actually taste good in there? I'd be tempted to leave that out, and just eat extra romaine at another meal...
Interesting stuff about the ph of foods when cooked. It is always good to hear the scientific backing on some of these dietary options out there. So many people make a choice and can't really explain why, and then they just look like a wacko. But you make a compelling argument. Not as compelling as what my husband cooked for dinner last night, tho...maybe that's the opiates talking...
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haha good point. no i didn't use ice! i didn't even use frozen fruit! but you could do it that way for sure.
and yes the romaine tastes fine actually. there are several recipes in the "12 Steps" book regarding green smoothies - one with kale, one with spinach, one with some greens i've never even heard of. her romaine recipe is basically the same thing i posted except without the blueberries. i'm trying to remember, she may have used 2 cups of water instead of 1.
you could of course just eat a huge salad every day, or add greens to every meal.
if you look at things from an anthropological and genetic perspective, people probably historically ate a diet very similar to the chimp diet for most of our biological history. chimps eat about 45% greens. that's a LOT of greens. but there are crazy amounts of vitamins, protein (kale and spinach are 40% protein in amino acid form!), minerals and fiber - all stuff we know we need to be healthy. but how many of us eat enough of this stuff?
so the idea with the smoothies is to package the greens in a way that is palatable and easy to digest. boutenko uses a vitamix blender to totally liquefy the greens so that she is able to absorb all of the nutrients. i don't have a fancy blender like that but i am planning to get one when i can afford it.
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You can also make a macha smoothie with a few little doses of the macha powder - delish!