Green Smoothies For Life

Originally Published November 2005
by Victoria Boutenko

"In Green for Life, Victoria gives us a unique, yet simple and delicious strategy for boosting our nutritional levels. Green smoothies are nothing short of revolutionary! I would recommend this book to just about anyone. It meets the needs of those who are seeking to move from a standard American diet into a healthier lifestyle, as well as those who have 'been raw' for years!" Phyllis Linn, raw food enthusiast.

This amazing new nutrition book may be purchased by email from the author at: Victoria@rawfamily.com or by mail from: Raw food Publishing, P.O. Box 172, Ashland, OR 97520 541-488-8865

Synopsis of, Green for Life:

My husband, our two youngest children, and I have been eating an only raw foods diet since January of 1994, more than eleven years. We went on this radical diet out of complete despair when our medical doctors didn't leave us any chances to recover from our horrible illnesses.

By turning off the pilot in our stove and discontinuing all cooking, we were able to heal all of our incurable, life-threatening diseases.

After several years of being raw foodists, however, each one of us began to feel like we had reached a plateau where our healing process stopped and even somewhat began to go backwards.

A burning question began to grow stronger in my heart with each day. "Is there anything missing in our diet?" The answer would come right away: "Nope. Nothing could be better than a raw food diet."

Yet, however tiny, the unwanted signs of less than perfect health kept surfacing in minor but noticeable symptoms such as a wart on a hand or a gray hair that brought doubts and questions about the completeness of the raw food diet in its present form.

In my eager quest,I started collecting data about every single food that existed for humans. After many wrong guesses, I finally found the correct answer. I found one particular food group that matched ALL human nutritional needs: GREENS.

The truth is, in my family, we were not eating enough greens. Moreover, we did not like them. We knew that greens were important, but we never heard anywhere exactly how much greens we needed in our diet.

We had only a vague recommendation to eat as much as possible. In order to find out how much greens we needed to eat, I decided to study the eating habits of chimpanzees since they are one of the closest creatures to human beings.

"Modern people 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."

Despite all the scientific research, human health is continuously declining. Many nutritionists connect human health problems with nutritional deficiencies.

Understanding chimpanzees' eating habits may help us better understand human dietary needs.

The two major food groups for chimpanzees are fruits and greens. Please do not confuse greens with root vegetables like carrots, beets, or potatoes. Also do not confuse greens with 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.

Let us compare the standard American diet with that of chimpanzees. They look totally different. These two diets hardly have anything in common! We humans eat mostly things that chimpanzees don't eat at all, like cooked starchy foods, oils, butter, yogurt, cheese, hamburgers, etc.

While most of our vegetables are roots, wild chimpanzees almost never eat root vegetables unless there is a drought and fruits and greens are unavailable. It is the intake of greens that has declined most dramatically in the human diet. Our consumption of greens has generally shrunk to the two wilted iceberg lettuce leaves on our sandwich.

Let us compare the standard American diet with an average diet of a typical raw foodist. I think that a raw food diet demonstrates a vast improvement over the regular diet. Firstly, all ingredients in a raw diet are uncooked, and full of enzymes and vitamins; thus the raw food diet is like a revolution in comparison with the standard American diet. That explains why so many people reported that they instantly felt better on a raw diet.

Raw fooders eat a lot of fruit, especially if we keep in mind that bell-peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes are also fruits. However, even though raw-foodists typically consume noticeably more greens than people on an average mainstream diet, greens almost never constitute 45 percent of their food. [As in the typical chimpanzee diet.]

So what do raw foodists eat in place of their missing greens? The answer is: most people on a raw food diet consume large amounts of fruits, nuts and seeds. Often they use nuts as a substitute for carbohydrates, particularly when trying to mimic cooked dishes with raw ingredients, even though nuts are 70-80% fat.

Also, raw foodists 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. Another big quota in a typical raw diet belongs to root vegetables mostly due to juicing. Also, roots taste sweeter than greens and thus comprise a large portion of raw salads.

Considering all of these factors, when we compare the typical raw food diet with the chimpanzee diet, we can clearly see that there are two main ways to further improve our individual eating patterns: to increase our consumption of greens, and to reduce our intake of nuts, seeds, and oils.

Another striking characteristic aspect of the chimpanzee eating pattern is that they never eat in the late afternoon or evening.

The more I read about the nutritional content of greens, the more I became convinced that greens were the most important food for humans. If I could only find a way to enjoy them enough to consume the optimal quantity needed to become perfectly healthy!

I tried countless times to force myself to eat large amounts of greens in the form of salad or by themselves, only to discover that I was not physically able to do that. After about two cups of shredded greens I would either have heartburn or nausea.

Greens possess more valuable nutrients than any other food group, but all these nutrients are stored inside the cells of plants. To release all the valuable nutrients from within the the cells, the cell walls need to be ruptured.

This is why I decided to try to"chew" my greens in the Vitamix Blender. First I blended a bunch of kale with water. I was thinking, "I will just close my eyes and nose and drink it."

But as soon as I opened the lid, I closed it again quickly because I felt queasy from the strong, wheat grass smell. That dark green, almost black mixture was totally unconsumable. After some brainstorming, I added several bananas and blended it again. And that was when the magic began!

I slowly, and with some trepidation, removed the lid and sniffed the air, and to my greatest surprise this bright green concoction smelled very pleasant. I cautiously tasted a sip and was exhilarated! It was better than tasty! Not too sweet, not too bitter, it was the most unusual taste I had ever tried, and I could describe it in one word: freshness.

When I first started drinking green smoothies, I didn't mention it to anybody and did not expect anything significant to happen. Since I did not have any big health problems, I was not pursuing any dramatic changes. I just didn't want to age so noticeably.

However, after about a month of erratic green smoothie drinking, two moles and a wart I had since early childhood peeled off my body. I felt more energized than ever before, and started sharing my experience with my family and friends.

The next thing I noticed was that those cravings I had occasionally for heavy foods like nuts or crackers, especially in the evenings, had totally disappeared.

I noticed that many of the wrinkles on my face went away and I began to hear compliments from other people about my fresh look. My nails became stronger, my vision sharpened and I had a wonderful taste in my mouth, even upon waking in the morning (pleasure I hadn't had since youth).

My dream had come true at last! I was consuming plenty of greens every day. I began to feel lighter and my energy increased. My tastes started to change. I discovered that my body was so starved for greens that for several weeks, I lived almost entirely on green smoothies.

Plain fruits and vegetables became much more desirable for me and my cravings for fatty foods declined dramatically. When I began to drink green smoothies, I noticed right away that those kinds of cravings disappeared.

I purchased an additional Vitamix blender for my office. Whenever friends or customers came in, they saw a big green cup next to my computer and I treated them to a sample of my new discovery. To my great satisfaction, everybody loved it, despite their different dietary habits.

Inspired by the warm reception, I wrote an article "Ode to Green Smoothie" and emailed it to all those in my Internet address book. Almost instantly I began to receive strong, positive feedback and many detailed testimonials from my friends, students, and customers. While I felt compelled to do more research, it looked like the multiple benefits of green smoothie became obvious to everybody who tried them, and the number of people who were drinking green smoothie turned into a "green wave," growing rapidly every day.

(This above excerpt is just a sample of the revolutionary information in, Green for Life.)

Victoria Boutenko teaches classes on raw food at South Oregon University and, as a result of her teachings, many raw food communities have been formed throughout the world. Victoria and her family have lived on a 100% raw food diet since 1994 and all four have cured their incurable diseases. The transformation of Victoria's family to raw food is described in her book, Raw Family. Victoria is also the author of 12 Steps to Raw Foods. Her two children have written a book containing delicious raw food recipes called Eating without Heating.

© Copyright Victoria Boutenko – www.rawfamily.com

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