Green Smoothies, Part 5: Resources, Info & More

This article was borrowed from www.eatsprouts.com, an excellent source for sprouting equipment and seeds.

Green Smoothies are simple – take any fresh greens you like and blend them with fruit. My current favorite is spinach with 2 big pears. Spinach builds strong bones! And a clean colon, but Popeye was quiet about that.

Remember the Variety Rule – don’t eat today what you ate yesterday. Blend different fruits and greens each day. Vita-Mix is the best blender, and http://www.ebay.com/ is the best source for the most economical model. HOWEVER, just use a strong blender if it's all you can do.

Living Green Smoothies
Living greens are smoothies made with greens, and ideally sprouts!

LIVING Greens (sprouts) growing FRESH at home give you the most powerful Green Smoothies. .

LIVING greens have all nutrients in perfect balance for high-energy Green Smoothies. Lettuce loses 60% of its vitamin C within 24 hours of picking. Truthfully, only LIVING (sprouted) greens give you enzymes and biophotons. What's a living green? It's still growing in the moment you eat it.

Dr. Gabriel Cousens writes in Conscious Eating:
"The more biophotons we take in through our foods, the better our health."Biophotons are NOT in dead greens from the store. They're light energy emitted by the active DNA in LIVING plants.

Making a Green Smoothie
Green Smoothies are so easy to make, so quick, and taste divine – unless you do something truly stupid, as I did the other day, and mix arugula (rocket), spinach and parsley in one smoothie (talk about bitter).

Reader Paizley writes:
"I would not call that stupid...just not suited for your tastes. I blended up a bunch of green endive this morning with spinach and lemon. It was wonderful. Green endive is more bitter than arugula."

"Suggest to your readers to experiment ... they can add other ingredients to change the flavor. There are no rules or regulations to making your own green smoothie!"

Good point, thank you Paizley!

Green Smoothies are the most nutritious meal on earth. A good Smoothie is 60% fresh fruit mixed with 40% green leafy vegetables.

Children love the taste of Green Smoothie. Sweet fruit takes away the bitter taste of greens. If your Smoothie tastes too bitter, add more fruit.

Energy in Green Smoothies
The late Dr Ann Wigmore invented Green Smoothies in 1988 when traveling in Europe. She called them Energy Soup, and added bean sprouts and avocado too.

Dr Ann spoke of an instant surge in energy and brain focus with her first Green Smoothie. Wow, more energy and clarity when she was already buzzing from 25 years of raw foods – the higher you go, the higher you go! (whoever wrote “the harder you fall” was on cooked food).

Green Smoothies are easy to digest. A blender is the perfect set of teeth. It's a dream come true for your digestive enzymes. Nutrients are absorbed quickly and easily.

The fibrous greens of a Smoothie are blended into a mush. Blending by-passes all digestive problems like sore teeth, peptic ulcer, colitis, and a sick pancreas.

Green Smoothies are a complete food. With their fiber, the fruit sugars are absorbed more slowly. You don't get that blood sugar rush you get from juicing.

Minerals in Green Smoothie
Can you count with your children how many wild animals live on greens alone? Buck, zebra, elephants, hippo, giraffes, apes, ox, the list is endless!

Greens nourish every cell in your body-brain. I blend a quart of Green Smoothie daily.

We humans are losing our connection with Green. Truly we need to GoGreen in our diet. A chlorophyll molecule (the green in leaves) differs from a human blood molecule by only one atom. The late Dr Jensen proved in The Healing Power of Chlorophyll that if you're anemic or tired, Green Smoothies will quickly raise your red blood cell count.

The core atom in Green Smoothie is magnesium (in human blood it's iron). Cravings are often a sign of magnesium deficiency. Green Smoothies are the best food to end your addiction to cakes, cookies and chocolate. When your body gets the nutrients it needs, cravings go.

Green Smoothies are rich in alkaline minerals like calcium. The high-calcium greens are the fibrous ones such as dandelion, kale and collard. Wherever there's a hard shell – as in teeth, bone, or tough-to-chew greens – you will find calcium.

Green Smoothies are a perfect food for children of all ages, including babies when introducing new food after mother's milk. Be careful and slowly increase the amount of smoothies to avoid food allergies.

Protein in Green Smoothies
How does an elephant get her protein? She weighs 3,000 pounds! How does a gorilla get hers? She can bench-press 4,000 lbs! From eating green leaves.

Did you know, this is the best-kept secret in the capitalized world? That the richest source of protein for humans is green leaves? Leaf protein is easy to digest, easily assimilated into the tissues, and has none of the harmful side effects of flesh protein.

Green Smoothies contain all essential amino acids. If you're moving toward a heart-friendly, earth-friendly vegan diet (non-dairy vegetarian) then it's a good idea to eat Green Smoothie daily to meet all your nutrient needs.

Believe it or not, Green Smoothies are a good source of Omega-3 unsaturated fat. Green leaves are the plant’s food factory where all these nutrients are made. Blend a LOT of greens into a Smoothie, rather than kill the fish in the sea. Fish oil is NOT a good source of Omega-3. Green leaves and flax seeds are far better.

The United Nations reports:
"The livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions than transport." [that's farmed animals, birds + fish] "Livestock are also a major source of land and water degradation ... The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops." (UN Food & Agricultural Organization report, Nov. 2006)

Amazing! Why change our car, when the UN is telling us to change our diet? Go vegan with Green Smoothies! Do you love your children? Then protect their earth. It's the only home they have.

Calories in Green Smoothie
Only problem with Green Smoothie and other vegetable blends – they're nearly calorie-free!
If you weigh 140 lbs, you need 1,400 calories a day to sustain your basal metabolic rate at rest (BMR) – that’s the calories you must eat before you make a single move. Resting BMR is equal to 10 times your ideal body weight.

A cup of spinach is 7 calories. One slice of vegetarian pizza is 670 calories. That’s 96 cups of green leaves! Do you understand WHY you could be buying pizza after a Green Smoothie? Simply because you’ve not eaten 96 cups of greens today!

If you’re addicted to your local bakery, try eating a lot more calories in the form of fruit and lightly cooked starchy vegetables such as butternut, squash and sweet potato.

Eat as much fruit as you like half an hour before your Green Smoothie, or add more to your Smoothie. Fruit reduces hunger pangs because it's rich in carbohydrates.

You may crave sweet after your Green Smoothie. Read why here under Energy Soup. These days I satisfy that craving by sucking on a few pieces of home-dried fruit (banana or apple).

Green Smoothie Healing
Because Green Smoothies are blended, it’s easy to swallow them too quickly. This can result in a runny tummy. Greens are the best food to clean and heal your colon.

If you experience a colon reaction, EAT SLOWER. Chew your Smoothie. If needed, refrigerate it and eat over an hour or two, instead of all at once. Get those GREENS into you!

The incredible density of nutrients in a Green Smoothie will feed every cell in your body-mind. We don’t get enough nutrition from eating the greens whole. I experienced this when on vacation recently. My gums were bleeding within three days, with no green blends, even though I was eating a salad of fresh garden greens daily.

Greens for Smoothies
Be sure to blend DIFFERENT greens every day into a Smoothie. Greens have alkaloids that are good in small quantities but slightly toxic if you eat the same green day-after-day. Greens are a lot like homeopathic remedies.

We should never have any food, drink, herb or supplement seven days a week – always take 1-2 days break.

Some greens are high in oxalic acid which binds with calcium to form calcium oxalate, an insoluble salt. Add these to a Green Smoothie for variety, but do NOT make an entire Smoothie out of them. They are lambsquarters, beet leaves, purslane, spinach, Swiss chard, parsley, amaranth leaves and sorrel. Leave rhubarb leaves alone, they can poison you when eaten in large quantities.

Sweet baby-leaf spinach is fine to eat in quantity. It tastes like the acid has been bred out of it.
LOW in oxalic acid and good to eat in Green Smoothies are: dandelion greens and kale (more calcium than dairy), lettuce, celery, watercress, escarole, mustard greens, turnip greens, carrot tops, broccoli, asparagus, cabbage, and most other greens.

Alfalfa is rich in minerals and trace elements – its roots grow more than 100 feet deep – and it has all essential amino acids and all known vitamins. It’s especially good for our kidney-bladder, writes Paul Pitchford in Healing With Whole Foods.

Add a sulfur green often to your Green Smoothies – all the cruciferous vegetables are sulfur-rich. That’s any plant of the Mustard family – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese celery, collard, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, mustard, radish, rutabaga, turnip, and watercress.

Cruciferous green sprouts are the highest known source of the phytochemical, sulforaphane, which stimulates the production of cancer-killing enzymes. The sprouts contain 20-50 times more sulforaphane than the mature vegetables – in fact some mature broccoli has no sulforaphane at all.

To protect yourself and your family from heart disease and cancer, eat Green Smoothies made with organic baby greens sprouts!

Fruits for Green Smoothies
For fruit in your Green Smoothie, enjoy apples, pears, bananas, oranges, papaya, and all the summer fruits. Strawberries and raspberries taste good in Green Smoothie when combined with ripe banana. Peel fruit when it's not organic.

Watermelon is perfect, so sweet and quick to blend with greens into a Smoothie. Watermelon is actually a gourd (like squashes) so it's more vegetable than fruit.

It's fine to mix fruit and greens in one Smoothie. I know some books like Fit For Life say don't mix fruit (and especially not melon) with anything but when it's blended, that rule does not apply.

Only with fat, fruit is not a good mixer. Fat is a sticky molecule that clumps together in your blood and blocks the insulin receptors on your cells. As a result, insulin can't shuttle the fruit sugars into your cells. The sugar stays too long in your blood, leading to blood sugar problems and candida. I find avocado is okay to blend into my Green Smoothie when I want more fat.

Preferably don’t rinse any greens you pick yourself, they have healthy microbes, like the ones making Vitamin B12. Fresh-picked greens from the soil are a good source of B12. Cows get their B12 (present in their raw milk) from eating green grass.

Green Smoothie Recipes
Some people add water to their Green Smoothie, but I leave the water out because I seldom drink with meals. Water dilutes our digestive juices. I also tend to use less fruit, about 30% fruit and 70% greens, because I eat so much fruit the rest of the day.

Greens are the perfect food for building strong bones and teeth – nearly every animal on earth has discovered that, except the big cats and polar bears!

Here's my basic Green Smoothie Recipe:
2-3 sweet fruits, e.g. apple or pear – blend first to form your blending base, 1-2 vegetable fruits and/or a celery stalk added next, e.g. summer squash or zucchini, One tray of organic baby greens like sunflower or salad mix from my Sprouter, or one packet of pre-washed organic greens, or a plateful of farm greens.

Here's a variety of Green Smoothie Recipes from Frederic Patenaude
Always blend the fruit first –

2-3 cups any greens of your choice, 2 cups papaya, 2 oranges, 3 dates

1 handful lettuce leaves, 1 handful mint, 4 bananas, 1/2 cup water

1/2 bunch romaine lettuce, 1 cup strawberries, 2 bananas, water

4-5 kale leaves, 4 apples, 1/2 lemon juiced, water

2 big handfuls mixed baby greens, 2 pears, 2 mangoes, 1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries

choc-mint – 2 cups spinach, 10-12 mint leaves, 3 bananas, 2 Tbs. carob powder, 1 cup water

1 handful of spinach, 2 stalks of celery, 2 bananas, 2 pears, 1 apple, 1 cup water

1 small handful of spinach, 2 cups arugula, 2-3 mangoes, 1 cup water

1/2 head romaine lettuce, 1 small pineapple, 1 large mango, 1-inch fresh ginger

1 handful wild greens (e.g. dandelion), 1 small handful mint leaves, 3 cups honeydew melon
3-4 stalks celery, 2 ripe persimmons, 1 banana

1 handful chard leaves, 5-6 kale leaves, 3 large bananas, 1 cup water

1 handful parsley, 3 cups of peeled papaya

Do you see how anything goes? Buy bunches of greens, a variety of fresh fruits, sprout and CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

The First Step to Health is One Green Smoothie a Day.

How much time and money we save on dental and medical bills when we get the kitchen equipment we need to enjoy Mother Nature's food!

* GREEN SMOOTHIE RESOURCES *

Clent Manich, a Costco employee in Oregon has lost over 200lbs in 8 months on green smoothies, a complete food! Read about it here!

Here's an entire blog dedicated to green smoothies, called The Green Smoothie Blog

Another blog dedicated to green smoothies, called Green Smoothie Girl

Valerie Winters is a woman who lost 127 lbs in 25 weeks strictly on green smoothies. (6 months) Unfortunately her blog, The Green Smoothie Experiment is offline, but it may be worth googling to read about her in other forums.

And my friend Erin at Vegan Done Light has a great forum at Green Smoothie Central