It is my humble opinion that starting your day with a green smoothie would help anyone feel better and greatly improve their health. (Here's a photo of my 80 year old mother enjoying her first smoothie!) Most Americans are starved for green leafy veggies in their diet and yet these are the very ultimate in nutritional powerhouses. Calorie for calorie, you cannot find a more nutritious food than kale, spinach, and other greens. So adding them to your breakfast will only start to fill up the nutritional deficiencies that plague most of us.
Just to add a little factoid, American mothers are so low in Vitamin K, one of the many vitamins abundantly found in greens, that babies born in the US are given a shot of vitamin K following birth. And why? Because babies born with low vitamin K levels have a much higher incidence of brain hemorrhage soon after childbirth (Disease-Proof Your Child, Joel Fuhrman, M.D.).
Green smoothies could also help to prevent other childhood diseases. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common childhood cancer and low consumption of vegetables and fruits right before and during pregnancy has been implicated in its causation (Fuhrman, p.4).
Is it any wonder that the Lord advises us in the Word of Wisdom (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89) to eat "all wholesome herbs" which were "ordained for the constitution, nature and use of man" as well as "every fruit in the season thereof"?
Kristen's Green Smoothie Recipe
1 cup of fresh orange juice*
1 to 4 oz of baby spinach greens or other greens
1/2 large banana, frozen
1 cup other fresh or frozen fruit--your choice**
Add the juice to your blender and then add the greens. Blend until you get all of the greens liquified. Add the other fruit and blend until smooth. Some people like to add protein powder or tofu. You can add these, but you may need to add some more water or juice.
*You can use water and frozen OJ concentrate too, but fresh is best!
** Strawberries and/or cherries will taste delicious but the resulting color will be funny. Adding blueberries will mask the green for the most part and is a good choice for a beginner who finds the bright green color a little too strange. :-) I also like to use peaches, pineapple, and mango. Citrus (as in the juice) helps to cover the taste of the spinach.
Just to add a little factoid, American mothers are so low in Vitamin K, one of the many vitamins abundantly found in greens, that babies born in the US are given a shot of vitamin K following birth. And why? Because babies born with low vitamin K levels have a much higher incidence of brain hemorrhage soon after childbirth (Disease-Proof Your Child, Joel Fuhrman, M.D.).
Green smoothies could also help to prevent other childhood diseases. Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is the most common childhood cancer and low consumption of vegetables and fruits right before and during pregnancy has been implicated in its causation (Fuhrman, p.4).
Is it any wonder that the Lord advises us in the Word of Wisdom (Doctrine and Covenants Section 89) to eat "all wholesome herbs" which were "ordained for the constitution, nature and use of man" as well as "every fruit in the season thereof"?
Kristen's Green Smoothie Recipe
1 cup of fresh orange juice*
1 to 4 oz of baby spinach greens or other greens
1/2 large banana, frozen
1 cup other fresh or frozen fruit--your choice**
Add the juice to your blender and then add the greens. Blend until you get all of the greens liquified. Add the other fruit and blend until smooth. Some people like to add protein powder or tofu. You can add these, but you may need to add some more water or juice.
*You can use water and frozen OJ concentrate too, but fresh is best!
** Strawberries and/or cherries will taste delicious but the resulting color will be funny. Adding blueberries will mask the green for the most part and is a good choice for a beginner who finds the bright green color a little too strange. :-) I also like to use peaches, pineapple, and mango. Citrus (as in the juice) helps to cover the taste of the spinach.
6 comments:
love it!! where do you buy organic spinach?
I buy it at Costco in 1 lb. boxes. You can also find it at Trader Joe's and other grocery stores. Our goal is to get 1 lb of greens into John everyday! Yikes! That's a lot of salad! So we use 1/4 lb in his green smoothies, 1/4 lb juiced with carrots and 1/2 lb in a huge all day salad that he brings to work. I use other types of greens for the salad (mixed baby greens, chard, kale etc.).
Looks good Kristen. You might want to copy your reply to mollie into tomorrow's post so others can see it even if they don't look at the comments.
BlogAwesome!
Love your blog, Kristen! I'm excited to read about your family's journey in raw foods. I am wondering how your daughter's feel about raw foods and what you do, if anything, to make this journey more palatable to them.
Sandra
Sandra,
How do my daughter's feel about raw foods? Well, I am not forcing them to "go raw." I told them that I'd like them to try the foods, but that they were free to make themselves a PB&J sandwich or boil up some pasta whenever they wanted to. I am hoping that as they try some of the new recipes, that they will enjoy many of them. My oldest daughter is at college and really misses the fresh veggies that we were already used to cooking for dinner. Cafeteria food is pretty unhealthy.
It's true. I miss the fresh food so much. The closet I come is the occasional spinach salad and sometimes fresh pineapple. I recently joined a vegatarian/vegan group and just the other day went to a potluck and I LOVED eating the real food that everybody brought.
I can't wait to get back home and try all the new recipes that Mom has discovered.
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