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Thread: Green Smoothies Anyone?

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    Helper Gregg's Avatar
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    Green Smoothies Anyone?

    Kind of long, but since I'm the ultimate skeptic of things like this I really wanted to share some notes with the hopes this might help someone else...

    Now in our 50's DW and I decided to up our game and take better care of ourselves. Our biggest step was planting a fairly large garden with a wide variety of produce to make it easy to eat "close to the ground" AND to know that we were getting organic at the same time. Prior to this our diet was fairly typical, middle class American fare (aka: crappy). We made a very simple switch to using less meat and dairy, less pasta and less processed foods. Nothing got cut out and no radical changes, we just started applying a little more common sense to our diets. DW started reading up on green smoothies and we both agreed that it was a sensible way to get lots of nutrition into a convenient and portable package. Adding those in was probably the biggest single nutrition shift for us. Much to our surprise, here is what we have been able to document in less than a year of doing this...

    DW lost 15 pounds and has the same BMI she did in her 20's. We're guessing a little because no one took their BMI 30 years ago, but close enough. She has suffered from irritable bowels for years and years. The only thing that even moderately helped was a daily pro-biotic capsule. That is now gone. She simply doesn't have IBS any more. We think it may be from all the fiber getting her scrubbed clean all the way through her GI tract. She was also a seasonal hay fever sufferer. That is also gone. She had one single day this year when she was a little stuffy. It seems every cottonwood within about 1000 miles of us bloomed on the same day, but that was it. No more allergies.

    I lost 55 pounds, still have 15 to go. Not sure about my BMI because I don't pay any attention to it, but I'm sure its a lot better because I was always too short for my weight. My cholesterol was always high, 280 before I went on statins. It was 220 on Previstatin and my Dr. was talking Lipitor. My LDL/HDL ratio was way off and my triglycerides were sky high. Now that's all gone...with NO meds. Overall number is down to 180 and dropping, LDL and triglycerides are also way down and heading lower, HDL is on the way up. I should mention that I eat just as much pizza as ever, just more veggies in between slices. I slept with a CPAP for years and now don't. No apnea, no snoring, no feeling like there's a dead racoon in my mouth if I oversleep and the thing runs out of water. I was a minor hay fever sufferer compared to DW, but now (except for the one cottonwood day) have no symptoms at all.

    My Dr. was pretty standoffish at my annual physical last month when I told him I stopped taking all the dope and had decided to address the problems rather than simply treat the symptoms. Hit a little close to home I guess. When the blood panels came back he just included a note that said I could call any time if I wanted to reconsider Lipitor since my cholesterol wasn't to my goal yet. My goal is <150 for the total, but going from 280 to 180 makes me think I'm on the right track.

    Everything is part of a bigger whole, but the smoothies are what we give the most credit to in our transformation because its the one thing we have been pretty religious about doing every day no matter what else is going on. We use a combination of garden produce and frozen fruit from Sam's Club. We have a Vita-Mix blender. From what I've read it is pretty important to have a good blender because the ingredients will be broken down into smaller pieces making nutrients more available to your body. At any rate we usually have all this in our smoothies: filtered water, walnuts, lots of kale and spinach, beets, beet greens, parsley, celery, a few sprouts of various kinds (we do the sprouting), black cherries, blueberries, a banana, strawberries, a tablespoon or two of Greek yogurt mostly just because we like a creamier texture, a teaspoon of bee pollen and a chunk of zucchini. Other things like apples, carrots, peaches, etc. come and go with the seasons, but that's the basic recipe. The taste is better than it sounds thanks to the fruit. Our costs have been pretty minimal with the garden in full swing and I've frozen all I could for later, but buying all the greens won't be cheap this winter. Still, I'm figuring a full blender, 3 quarts, will cost just under $11 when we have to buy almost everything that goes in to it. The way we use them that is the equivalent of three meals at $3.66 each. Not cheap, but not bad. A heck of a lot cheaper than Lipitor.

    I'm probably preaching to the choir posting this here, but I'm pretty thrilled with the results of our experiment. The bonus for a closet anarchist like me is that there really isn't much of any way for corporate America to profit from this. Its not particularly scalable and any processing done in a value added scenario destroys the product. Anyway, if anyone is on the fence trying to decide if this kind of switch might be beneficial you can count DW and I in as believers.
    "Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"

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    Thanks for the info, I will try it, anything is worth staying off these statins!

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    Senior Member JaneV2.0's Avatar
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    I have the blender and should make green smoothies, if only to get more vegetables (and potassium) down. The texture of blended vegetables is definitely an acquired taste. I use green(ish) bananas for resistant starch, and might throw in such additions as gelatin, maca, MCT oil, probiotics...

    I'm developing a Kombucha jones, and I've downloaded an e-book on the subject, so down the road I may be adding some of that too.

    Thanks for bringing this up and relating your experience.

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    Helper Gregg's Avatar
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    That's interesting Jane, I never gave much thought to the consistency. Ours are about like an average milk shake. I think the yogurt we add helps with that. We've got our first batch of kombucha fermenting right now. Its a little cooler than ideal in our house so growing slow, but it is growing.
    "Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"

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    That is very interesting. I had not read of anyone in real life who did green smoothies, but your results are impressive. Thanks for sharing the details.

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    Never heard of Kombucha until now, so just ordered a kombucha scoby from amazon, exciting!

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    I bet changing your diet may have just as much to do with it as the green smoothies. But it's probably the whole shebang combined. We don't have a garden or the time so hard to do daily but have been doing on weekends for several years now. Ours consists of carrots, cucumber, celery, beets, apple, frozen banana (half), a handful of greens, parsley and spirulina powder. We recently started adding a bit of fresh ginger and turmeric root which gives it a kick. We really notice a difference if we go without, ie energy level and vibrance for lack of a better word.

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    This is very timely for me, as I have been feeling sluggish - mentally / physically as well as digestively. I was really trying to pep talk myself into a new eating routine... as with all things, I was very much on target for months and have recently begun to allow myself to justify additions that just aren't in my best interests. I think this is just the thread I needed to see.

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    Do I need kefir grains and a scoby? Or will just a scoby make kombucha tea?

    thank you

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    Helper Gregg's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by pinkytoe View Post
    I bet changing your diet may have just as much to do with it as the green smoothies. But it's probably the whole shebang combined.
    No question its a bit of everything. The thing I've come to like about the smoothies is that, depending on the exact recipe, its somewhere around 15 USDA servings of fruits and vegetables in a quart of the stuff. Don't know about anyone else, but that alone is a lot more than I was getting in the past. Unless you counted onions on my burger...

    Davidwd: our kombucha kit just came with a scoby and a big tea bag. It appears to be doing what it is supposed to do. We'll know for sure in another week or so.
    "Back when I was a young boy all my aunts and uncles would poke me in the ribs at weddings saying your next! Your next! They stopped doing all that crap when I started doing it to them... at funerals!"

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