Get Your Green’s Smoothie
By Guest Blogger Hayley Chesshir
By Periodically I go through phases when I’m all about the green smoothie. Mainly when I feel bloated or need to detox, but this time it was from skimming through Victoria Boutenko’s book Green for Life. This book has been in my kitchen for years and years, and every once in awhile I pick it up for some green smoothie recipe inspiration, completely skipping over the well-researched content.
So the other morning I woke up and made a green smoothie. It had been awhile and I wasn’t totally sure I was making it the way I used to, so I picked up the book for a recipe refresher but I couldn’t find the recipe I was looking for in the book. I think the standard recipe I was making before was something I was following from a friend. Anyway, I made it from memory and it was delicious. As I drank my green smoothie, I read a few chapters from Green for Life. Victoria and her family are raw foodists. Her and her husband have struggled with poor health, and her children had severe allergies, so they made a choice as a family to go raw. With improved health, but still having cravings for non-raw food, she was not completely satisfied with the raw diet they were on. So Victoria went to work researching diets.
She decided to research the eating habits of chimpanzees since humans 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. Chimps have the same A-B-O blood groupings as humans, and human brains are very much like chimpanzee brains, making the major differences between humans and chimps not anatomical, but behavioral.
The Standard American Diet in comparison to the Chimpanzee Diet is drastically different. Take a look at this chart from Boutenko’s book.
And check out this comparison of a Typical Raw Food Diet and the Chimp Diet. Better, but still – very little consumption of greens.
That said, according to this research, we are not eating enough greens. When I say greens, I mean green leafy vegetables – not green fruit and vegetables like cucumber, bell peppers, pears, etc. I’m talking about Kale, Spinach, Collards, Chard, Lettuce, Arugula, Cabbage, and the like.
If the chimps can do it, we can do it! Given, we do not spend half our afternoon climbing trees and eating leaves, but we should definitely be aware that we are severely lacking in our diet, on a whole.
Here’s a recipe for a tasty green smoothie that I’ve been making recently:
{Please feel free to adjust this based on what you like, and the amount of people you are serving}
Here’s what you’ll need:
3 leaves of Kale – chopped, stem cut off (unless your blender will pulverize the s*** out of the stem)
1 banana
1 cup of water (appx. I just fill up the blender about 1/3rd of the way)
½ cup of blueberries
½ Tbsp of almond butter
1 Tbsp of flax seed (or flax seed oil if you don’t like the crunchies in your smoothie)
Optional: A dash of maple syrup – to sweeten it up a bit.
Add it all together in the blender and blend until smooth! Experiment all you want with different greens and fruit variations. You don’t always need the maple syrup to sweeten it, I usually omit it until the very end, taste it and if it tastes like earth, then add a bit.
How do you get your greens? Does a green smoothie make you want to gag? Try it before you trash it!
Have a lovely day, and don’t forget to eat/drink your greens!
Hayley Chesshir (hchesshir@gmail.com)
Hayley-wonderful
I’m on blood thinner, can’t do Kale, but you are on your way girl!