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Comments from another dentist, Kristi……part 7 of 7

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A reader and dentist, Kristi, shared these observations after my root canal post. I have paraphrased some of her comments for length:

“ I have much respect for Robyn and her goals of sharing important life saving information with all of you. Her willingness to stand up for what she believes in is admirable. I would mention a word of caution though about jumping on bandwagon before you’ve done your own due diligence as there are always consequences for the decisions we make.

I always use dental dams and highly recommend you not use dentists who don’t put dental dams in place for root canals and other procedures.

As for amalgam, indeed there are gases that are given off from amalgam fillings; however, it is very minute and your exposure to mercury from air pollution, car exhaust, among other things, particularly if you are big fish eaters is much MUCH greater than what is given off from metal fillings. In fact, the greatest exposure to mercury when it comes to amalgam fillings is in the process of putting them in OR TAKING THEM OUT for all of you considering this procedure.

Trust me, dentists LOVE doing composite (plastic) fillings and usually are more than happy to do this if you insist. You know why? Because they tend to not last as long as amalgam fillings (often replacing in the range of 5 or so years) as compared to metal which many times last 20 plus) and because they can charge you more to put them in. (They are more technique sensitive, take longer to put in and thus they can charge more). Just know there are pros and cons to both. Just as there are some studies that show this leakage of gas, there are many more studies that show that the exposure is VERY minimal in comparison to other routine day to day practices. Especially with today’s techniques of placement.  Unless you are planning to make a radical lifestyle change you will not notice a difference as you are unfortunately exposed in so many other ways where with much higher loads than a filling would give off. Also for interest sake, there are studies that show blood levels of mercury being the same for people who have never had a metal filling before and those who have a mouth full of them.

Now, am I saying that I would put amalgam in my own children’s mouths? No, I plan on never doing that but I also plan on doing everything I can to prevent them from getting a cavity in the first place and that is the reason I love the things that Robyn is teaching about whole food and healthy eating because I believe this is the first step in prevention.

Which brings me to the topic of root canal therapy. Before you start walking into your dentist and refusing root canal treatment, you need to understand why it is done and what the alternative is.

Root canal treatment is done (MOST TIMES) because a person has a cavity that has gone so deep that it has eventually gone into the nerve of the tooth. It takes a lot to get to this point and is usually because someone has neglected to see a dentist sooner to deal with the cavity before it got too big. And then we must look at why that person got a cavity in the first place? In MOST cases it’s because they don’t take proper care of them, they have a poor diet and perhaps at no fault of their own, were never taught how.

So a root canal is a dentist’s last attempt basically to save a tooth that in most cases has not been properly taken care of in the first place. Unfortunately the alternative to root canal therapy is extraction. For those of you who have had root canal therapy done, are you now considering pulling all those teeth? Do you think that you would be better off having NO teeth? Do you think that your standard of living would go up having no teeth to chew with and trying to eat a plant based diet? Trust me, dentures are not a bed of roses. If you decide that you don’t want dentures but that you would rather have implants placed (titanium posts drilled in your jaw bone with a fake tooth built on top)? Are you prepared to pay $3k to $5k (depending on the dentist) PER TOOTH to have each of these teeth replaced? And that entirely depends on whether you are even a candidate for implant placement in the first place. Do you recognize that as you start losing teeth there is a tendency for things to break down more rapidly and that you can start having more jaw joint issues? There are a lot of other consequences to pulling teeth.

About those studies, I will not dispute their validity; however, I think it’s very difficult to determine that root canals are the cause of cancer in those cases. I think there are way too many other factors.

Consider for example the fact that generally speaking those who have need for a lot of root canal therapy, usually have had in the past or do have a poor diet and could that have not been the possible cause of the cancer? I’m curious how many of those people were smokers, or ate high meat diets, or highly processed diets…I just think there are much bigger fish to fry here. If you compared the number of people out there with root canals who have never had cancer, I don’t know how convincing that material would be.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that one must consider the alternatives. Yes having fillings and root canal treatment is unfortunately a compromise and it would be better if we never had to do them, but it is what it is and the alternative is not any better.

I would agree that most dentists don’t do a very good job of promoting prevention and that is what this really comes down to: Being educated on how to prevent cavities and the need for root canal treatment in the first place.

A few of my suggestions are as follows:

-Make sure you are brushing at least in the morning after breakfast and at night before you go to bed.

-Floss at least once a day (preferably at night)

-Do not put your baby to bed with a bottle of milk or juice or anything but water (I’ve pulled enough teeth on 1 and 2 year olds to know this is important). Breast feeding, that is a different story but you still must wipe out their mouths as there is still sugar in breast milk and they can still get cavities from it.

-Definitely try to have a diet that is whole foods based. Eating more of what Robyn promotes and less of what she doesn’t will definitely steer you in the right direction.

-Have regular checkups to the dentist so that if you do get a cavity you can catch it while it’s small and before it turns into root canal therapy.

-A couple of cautions about a whole foods diet is that if you like to eat dried fruit such as raisins, you are still at risk of decay because these chewy sticky foods are very good at sticking in the grooves of teeth as well as between them and if you don’t get it cleaned out, bacteria will break it down into simple sugars and cause cavities. So brush brush brush.

-If you are a big vegetable and fruit juicer, be careful, drink it in one sitting and don’t sip it all day long. Fruit juice especially is still sugar and if you are bathing your teeth in it all day long, you are much more likely to get cavities.

-Also watch the amount of acid intake. Vinegars, lemon and lime juice, they all have acid and can break down & weaken tooth structure rapidly. So be cautious, rinse with water, and brush about 30 or so minutes after.

-Please help your children brush their teeth as they cannot do it on their own. Until they can hand write their name legibly or tie their own shoe or maybe even longer, they literally do not have the manual dexterity to get everywhere so you need to help them…and don’t forget to floss their teeth too ?

Robyn’s response: Thanks to Dr. Kristy for sharing her thoughts, especially these suggestions. I would encourage more dentists reading this to seek out additional training to practice biologically. You have three different organizations accrediting or promoting holistic practices that deeply respect the human body and which are not afraid to question modern practices that are harmful to the human organism in general.

Dentists cold-mix mercury with other metals to make amalgam fillings in the office. The resulting mixture is neither chemically stable, nor biologically inert. It’s an oft-repeated but untrue statement that fish and pollution are higher sources of mercury, and that the amount offgassing in your mouth is “tiny.” The EPA stated in a report to Congress in 1997 that the highest body burden of inorganic mercury comes from dental amalgam fillings, and the report shows that dental exposure totals more than from food, including, fish, and water.

The ADA is far too invested in a few specific practices. It spends far too many resources defending harm and high risk. It’s time to support holistic dentists, and call more attention to alternatives in dental practice so that they gain more traction if they are effective.

In Utah, they are Dr. Wall in Bountiful (Dr. Ulm’s wife told me he is fantastic), Dr. Ulm in Lindon, Dr. Bruce Pyper in SLC, and Dr. Robertson in Spanish Fork. Thank you to GSG readers who have pointed me to these dentists.

(To access the other posts in this series, Click Here.)

The post Comments from another dentist, Kristi……part 7 of 7 appeared first on GreenSmoothieGirl.


My friend Nancy drops 100+ lbs.

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My longtime friend Nancy is a radio personality. I’ve done a couple of shows with her, most recently to talk about the release ofThe Adventures of Junk Food Dude. Nancy’s youngest child, Anna, refuses to drink soda and loves green smoothies, after they did an experiment and measured the amount of sugar that was in their daily diet, which shocked the kids. (Alex isn’t quite as eager, but Nancy’s working on it. He eats apples and fruit leather now instead of candy bars.)

Nancy emailed me last week asking about dehydrators. Like all of us, she keeps taking baby steps towards the healthiest lifestyle possible. She told me since I saw her last, she has lost ANOTHER 40 lbs., so I demanded photos. Holy cow, this hot mama looks better than she has in the 17 years I’ve known her, and as you can see in these before and after photos, she’s lost over 100 lbs. total.

I wanted to know HOW. She eats tons of veggies and fruits. She sticks to the outside of the store and stays away from processed foods in the middle. Occasionally she eats a little Chex cereal or a multi-grain cracker, but, she says, “for the most part, I am all about things looking like they came in nature when I eat them.”

[This reminds me of what my grandmother said to me once, when I was talking to her about how she cured herself of Stage III cancer with strict adherence to the Gerson diet, and then just ate a very healthy diet for the rest of her life. She said: “It’s not what you do once in a while that’s going to kill you. It’s what you do every day that’s going to save you.”]

Nancy paid attention to what foods bothered her, and she eliminated gluten and other sensitivities she identified, like dairy products.

She told me she eats corn products but worried about the fact that most of it is genetically modified. I told her I eat only ORGANIC corn products. Did you know that if it’s organic, it’s also NOT genetically modified? I just told Nancy that.

Nancy is one of the founders of www.themompodcast.com.  They are doing four shows this summer that you will find interesting:

  1. While losing 100 lbs., Nancy also lost her identity
  2. A mom’s body effects changes in her child’s body image
  3. Maintaining the changes to your body long term (guest: a woman four years past a 110 lb. weight loss)
  4. Re-establishing your identity after any major change (weight loss, divorce, job change, family loss, etc)

I hope you enjoy Nancy’s before-and-after photos. They show how external and powerful the difference is when we eat whole foods, and listen to our body’s needs and respond to them.

The post My friend Nancy drops 100+ lbs. appeared first on GreenSmoothieGirl.

We love the SOUTH! Part 3 of 3

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Sometimes we meet readers who are just pure inspiration to us all. We got a letter from Annette before we left for Atlanta, telling us about her parents in advance of them coming to our class in South Carolina.

Mel and Julie Lacock are 78 and 73, spry and healthy, and they’ve been eating a mostly plant-based, whole-foods diet, for almost as long as I’ve been alive. Mel reminds me of my own daddy, who is 69 and still runs 4 miles a day.

Here’s what Annette said about Mel and Julie (edited version):

“My parents are two of my heroes, for the health choices they made 42 years ago, the reason I’m so passionate about eating a plant-based diet for life. You share in your lectures that if the young mothers today will embrace a whole-foods, 60-80% raw diet, and teach their children the same, then there is hope for America’s health.

“My parents returned from a mission in Taiwan and learned from a naturopath about the raw food diet. They maintained that for a while, on a missionary’s budget, feeding three small children. Eventually they embraced more cooked food, but retained a high-raw lifestyle. They ‘made’ us eat healthy.

“They didn’t have the aid of the internet, libraries, or a popularized vegetarian movement. I realize now how tenacious my parents were to self-educate and thereby protect their own health and pass a wonderful example on to their children.

“They are living WITHOUT MEDICATION, eating a plant-based diet of vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes and seeds from all over the world where they have lived.

“Two of their children have turned to the Standard American Diet, with exactly the effects you would predict. And my parents’ peers are dropping like flies and eating lots of medication—the contrast is stark.

“I have great health because my parents safeguarded it when I was young. I veered into the S.A.D. for a few years, but I returned and have never looked back.”

What a love letter! I got emotional when Annette sent it to me before we flew to Georgia. Then I met her lovely parents, and I found tears in my eyes again as I edited this condensed version of her tribute to them.

I hope my kids “get it” enough to write something like that, someday. Don’t you? Who needs it on a headstone! I want to read it on the GSG blog while I’m still living, hehe.

And Mel and Julie get to do that—read it on the GSG blog—because they’ve taken the path less traveled and changed the course of their daughter’s life.

If my grandmother were still with us, she and the Lacocks would be fast friends. I remember that when my grandmother learned that oxygen spells death for cancer, and that a raw plant-based diet has the power to starve it out, she became a little “out of balance” in life.

Very normal, of course, given her diagnosis and a doc telling her she was going to die. Most conversations with her were about food, and most people found her to be a little militant and dogmatic. She eventually balanced out, and returned to thinking about other things besides just food—but many of you know what I’m talking about here:

When your eyes are first opened, you’re astonished. You’re angry, even. You want to tell everyone. Then, you’re frustrated when almost no one listens. It may take years to find ways to talk about your lifestyle that more people are interested in, and will take at least baby steps towards it. They do it because of your example and patience. They never do it because you’re preachy, condescending, or strident.

Here’s a photo of me with Mel and Julie Lacock that they just emailed. I’m inspired by their long-time stamina and consistency in living the truth. That’s why they look so good. Kristin kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s 78!

Love to you all for being a part of this movement. I cannot do it without you. We continue to spend $0.00 on advertising, thanks to your spreading the love to people you care about. God willing, I’ll keep teaching the classes if you keep showing up with your friends and family who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

The post We love the SOUTH! Part 3 of 3 appeared first on GreenSmoothieGirl.

K’Lynne comes to my house…with K-Mart pants

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Last year in Portland, I barely got to spend any time with someone I think is pretty special. In fact, she and her “before and after” photos, and her story, are in the latest 12 Steps to Whole Foods manual.

She lives in a tiny, one-stoplight town. No health food store. But she took 12 Steps to heart, changed her diet radically, and lost 100 POUNDS in less than a year. She’s a school lunch lady and a mom to four children, including two college students. She’s my age exactly.

She wrote on her blog about how, as a shy, very soft-spoken person, she drove 4.5 hours with her friends to hear me speak in Portland last year and then very nearly didn’t come up to talk to me. She did, though, and I asked her questions in front of 150 people. Details on that from last year, HERE.

She wrote me after that, “I just have to tell you the response to me being on your blog has been amazing, this last week has been mind blowing. All kinds of people emailing me who are exactly how I was and want advice. I tell them what I did and am doing….which is following your program and eating health and exercising.”

There’s really no other way, is there?

We had to tear out of Portland like bats out of Hades to make it to our gig in Seattle later that day. I finally got my chance to talk with K’Lynne at more length this week, sitting on my porch.

It’s all on camera and we’ll release that later.

Turns out, the day we filmed her, July 17, was her 25th wedding anniversary with her delightful, supportive husband, Chuck.

I asked him on camera to tell me how he felt about K’Lynne. He got emotional.  He said he was so proud of her. So thankful to her. Her choices impacted his life for the better.

I’ve been waiting for the visit from K’Lynne Wagner of Phoenix, Oregon, to tell me more about what it’s like to shed 100 pounds.

Because there are lots of ways to lose weight. And ditch her meds and get her health back.

But there’s just one way to get healthy, and it absolutely has to include a whole-foods diet.

I don’t want to get into whether that should include organic, grass-fed meat…..if you can afford that, that’s between you and your relationship with animals, it’s not my axe to grind. Or what percentage of carbs/fats/proteins you eat, in your whole-foods diet. Or whether or not a little “cheating” with processed food is allowed……you can experiment and discover your own “truth.”

All I care about it that you shift to whole foods, mostly plants!

That’s my core value. It DOES work for everybody. (With variations like the examples and debates above, and lots of individual variety.) And that core foundation is all I’m interested in teaching.

K’Lynne says that green smoothies were a huge part of her shift. She said, “I tried Step 1 in the program, I liked it, so I went on to Step 2, and pretty soon I was doing it all. I would read the manual out loud to Chuck. I was always taking it places, and always reading it.”

Chuck has dropped 20 lbs. by ditching the bacon-and-eggs breakfast in favor of unsweetened oatmeal, fruit, and green smoothie. His wife makes him a salad for lunch, and for dinner he eats lots of healthy stuff K’Lynne makes.

Don’t we all love compliant husbands? We’re happy to do what makes THEM happy—-just indulge us and eat what we feed you!

K’Lynne is off her blood pressure meds and has perfectly healthy cardiovascular biomarkers now. Both she and Chuck are at a healthy weight. How exciting—that we can make change at any age. They are both loving the energy they say changes EVERYTHING in life.

K’Lynne’s counsel to those who have 100 lbs. to lose? Just stay in today. Think positively and make good choices TODAY. Because you really CAN do it. One day at a time.

I gave her the latest, greatest 12 Steps to Whole Foods manual, and I had fun looking through her old copy at the recipes she’d marked as her favorites. We both love Pink Hummus Quesadillas and others.

She talked about how she sees dishes in restaurants that she used to love, and she momentarily feels the pull of addiction…..but then she realizes she actually doesn’t really want those foods any more. Kristin has said the same thing to me. I agree. I love chocolate and dessert. But honestly? The vast majority of it, most of the time, just isn’t interesting any more.

K’Lynne told me about going to Cheesecake Factory this week while on vacation, and ordering the most fabulous vegetarian burger made from faro (an Egyptian grain) and beets. It was so good that Chuck wished he had it, instead of his shrimp tacos.

I’d emailed K’Lynne asking if she wanted to bring any clothes she used to wear. She came with a pair of jeans in her old size, with a  K-Mart tag attached. She said:

“I threw those pants away. Because I’m never going back there.” After she left my house, she and Chuck headed to visit family in St. George and Vegas. They stopped at K-Mart and returned the pants.

Are you inspired? I am!

The post K’Lynne comes to my house…with K-Mart pants appeared first on GreenSmoothieGirl.

A healer in every home…..PART 2 of 3

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The medical profession doesn’t have a single drug that the blood-brain barrier doesn’t put up a mounted defense against! (It’s a good thing, since drugs are never assimilated, digested, and eliminated by the body as natural plant foods and medicinal extracts are. And they always have side effects. Some side effects we FEEL, some we don’t.)

That’s why my 16 certified coaches are training in MEDICINE CABINET MAKEOVER classes. We had one in Utah a week ago, and 100 people showed up. I LOVE the content of this class, so if you have the opportunity to attend, bring a notebook for a drink from a firehose, by my coaches and my amazing colleague Laura Jacobs.

I find, roughly, that 80 percent of health issues resolve with the whole-foods, plant-based diet I teach. But 20 percent of entrenched health issues remain.

That makes sense since we get ourselves in a world of hurt, if for decades we took antibiotics and other harmful drugs, and ate animals pumped full of steroids and antibiotics, ate gut-damaging genetically modified foods. Not to mention tens of thousands of chemicals we’re exposed to—pesticides, dental practices, water, air, cosmetics. It’s endless. The average baby has 273 chemicals in her umbilical cord at birth.

I’ve found people are frustrated with the monopoly that drugs and surgery has on our health care system.

People are hungry for ways to deal with blood sugar, headache, gastrointestinal distress, depressed metabolism, low libido, mood disorders, heartburn, inflammation, and so many other issues—that do not involve drugs.

Of course, most drugs are just scientists taking a naturally healing plant, and molecularly altering it. (Otherwise there is very little profit. You can patent only chemicals, not natural substances. You can’t make a billion dollars with a non-patented substance. Plus, insurance won’t cover it, if it’s not a drug.)

So, science knows that plants heal. Hardy plants that have “survived as the fittest” have healed us, for thousands of years, across continents and generation. Can you apply a raw aloe vera stalk to a sunburn and deny its power?

There are 188 references in the Bible to essential oils. A single essential oil may have 200 to 800 constituents. The Amazon rainforest alone is host to countless plants that comprise the majority of what modern medicine utilizes for drugs.

My point is, it’s a small, natural, logical step, once you’ve learned the power of a plant-based diet, to move towards using plants as self-directed medicine as well. And essential oils are ten times more powerful than herbs.

My coaches are training to do a free scan for you using the Zyto technology after they teach the Medicine Cabinet Makeover class. Humans are electrical organisms, and like EEG and EKG, the Compass software with the Zyto technology measures the energy meridians and determines where imbalances occur. The four-minute scan determines which essential oils your body needs to address those imbalances.

It’s really cool—last time I scanned, the blend of oils called ELEVATION resolved virtually everything for me. I began diffusing it next to my computer as I work, and I can feel the energetic difference immediately. Another time, my body wanted GINGER essential oil, so I added it to my smoothie for a few days.

The amygdala is part of the brain’s limbic system, and 20 years ago scientists discovered the only way to release emotional trauma stored there is with fragrance, the sense of smell, inhaled substances. Modern science, combined with ancient wisdom and experience, brings us essential oils with phenomenal power. Donna’s melanoma dying and falling out…..Allison healing of brain cancer without any burning or poisoning….it’s just the beginning of what you can learn to empower yourself to be the healer in your home.

Tomorrow I’ll list our coaches, and what city they live in and areas they will cover. You can contact one if you want to help us as an apprentice: you’ll do the scans, and learn to teach Medicine Cabinet Makeover and six other powerful classes to help our readers learn to own their own health.

There’s an exciting way to join our mission and earn an impressive income, with this opportunity. At our classes, which currently average 200, over half are signing up to attend Medicine Cabinet Makeover. As an apprentice, you can also help with VIP classes. That’s for “Green Smoothie Graduates”—learning more easy, inexpensive habits from 12 Steps to Whole Foods to take your health to the next level!

Contact the coach nearest you—she’ll probably come to your town to teach the class!

Watch for Medicine Cabinet Makeover classes, which will always be free, to be ticketed here on GreenSmoothieGirl.com, taught by Laura Jacobs and GreenSmoothieGirl coaches.

 

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Depression and Anxiety Nutrition Strategies, part 2 of 3

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1.      Are you getting enough greens? They contain the most bioavailable minerals of all foods. Bioavailable refers how much of the nutrient is actually utilized by your body, as opposed to how much of that nutrient is in the food. (For instance, dairy milk is high in calcium. But human beings use very little of it, and the milk from cows causes other problems, for instance, it causes the human body to produce mucous. For baby cows, the calcium in their mothers’ milk is VERY bioavailable.)

Living green foods have to be plentiful in the human diet. Our digestive tracts, the way they’re built, demand lots of plant food. And all the nutrients in greens are highly bioavailable to humans. Cows, too, it turns out. Jordan Rubin is raising “green cows,” who not only eat only organic plant food, but eat GREENS rather than grains and other weird additives to increase weight that the big farms are now feeding dairy and slaughter cattle. Greens are what cows in nature eat, and the quality of the cows’ milk changes radically when they’re fed something else. Even organic dairy ranchers aren’t going to the length that Rubin is, to create a food supply that our grandparents took for granted, before we morphed our food supply chain into a Frankenstein-ish disaster.

In my research published in The Green Smoothies Diet, half of my 175 respondents said green smoothies alone improved the stability of their mood.

2.      Are you eating 60-80% raw or better? I am not convinced that 100% raw is necessary or even ideal, but a diet high in unprocessed, raw foods gives you enzymes that take little away from your higher functions so that you can achieve truly transcendent states, like peace, happiness, harmony in relationships, and self-actualization.

Patty, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 7 years ago at age 40, has been living with us for a month and making our food, according to the way we have always eaten. We eat cooked soups made with vegetables, legumes, nuts and seeds. In addition to lots of raw in the form of green smoothies, vegetable juice, salads, and just snacking on carrots, bell peppers, etc. Patty is used to the obsession, on the other side, with RAW, RAW, RAW.

I love raw food and EVERY meal or snack around here is 60-80% raw. Count it in the bulk of the food, or count it in calories, I don’t care—but eat a primarily raw, plant-based diet. But humans have rarely eaten “all raw,” and legumes and whole grains are good food and very difficult to eat much of, unless they’re cooked. It’s a natural human tendency to want their food hot, now and then.

Patty said to me, “I feel amazing, eating your diet!” It’s not 100% raw, but it is 100% whole foods, and well over half of what we eat is raw.

I’m not absolutely convinced that eating organic, wild-caught, or free-range meat is all bad, as a smaller part of the diet. I don’t personally want those things, or prepare and serve them in my home.

And when the economy falls out—which it will, since it’s mathematically unsustainable that we continue forever the way we’re going—and you have to pay $40/lb. for your meat, what will you eat? Best to just learn to eat like that anyway. The U.S. government massively props up meat and dairy. It doesn’t prop up vegetable, fruit, and legume crops. Obviously we’re paying less than we should for beef, if it takes 20 lbs. of plant food to yield 1 lb. of beef.

3.      If you ARE eating meat, please ensure it is wild-caught fish from clean waters (not farmed, and not caught in dirty places like, no offense my Michiganian friends, the Great Lakes). Or range-free, organic chicken or turkey. Or grass-fed, organic beef. NEVER processed meat or dairy. It’s full of hormones. It surely has the potential to affect mood disorders.

4.      Are you staying out of the drive-thru? Virtually everything sold there puts you at high risk for depression. Even the toxic dressings on the low-nutrition salads. Not only because of low nutrition, high calorie foods, with their cascading effects.

But also the fact that they are denatured and your body has to work excessively to digest them. This takes away from higher functions, like neurological function. This results in a far higher likelihood that your brain and spirit are brought low, too, even as their host, the physical tabernacle, is forced to struggle and toil. Possibly the worst thing coming out of the drive-thru are toxic, heavy fats, which are difficult to metabolize, in some cases impossible to metabolize, and cause cell damage.

And the fried foods you buy in the grocery store have got to go, too. Chips. Gone. Please.

The last five items in this Nutrition Strategies for Depression and Anxiety list, tomorrow!

The post Depression and Anxiety Nutrition Strategies, part 2 of 3 appeared first on GreenSmoothieGirl.

athletes and experts quoted about eating plants

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I don’t preach about the -isms. I don’t talk about or embrace words like raw foodist, vegetarian, or vegan, even though I do teach to eat a high-raw, mostly-plants diet. I leave it to you to figure out whether you want organic, clean eggs, cheese, milk, or meat as a small (5% or less) part of your diet. The implications of the biggest nutrition study in history, the China Project done by Oxford and Cornell, are clear: a plant-based diet can overcome carcinogens in our lifestyle. The standard American diet that includes 20% animal protein is a cancer feeder and puts us at high risk for that, and many other diseases.

I personally do not ever put animal products in anything I make at home. Organic eggs and cheese were the last things to go, at my house. There were less and less of them until one day I realized it had been 18 months since I had bought either of them. Making an egg substitute with 1 Tbsp. chia soaked in 3 Tbsp. of water works great. The baked product is more crumbly, but I can live with that. That’s all I used eggs for, anyway. The days of serving my little kids “toads-in-a-hole” for dinner were long gone. (A piece of bread, a hole punched out and an egg put in, fried in a little butter.) In the early days of my transition, we had that WITH a green smoothie!

It’s a rare occasion that I eat anything in a restaurant with animal products, either. I choose not to embrace those titles for two reasons. One, I think they are a turn-off to many people who are just starting out, wanting only to learn about and eat more nutritious food. I want to “be there” for the folks just beginning a transition to a high-quality diet.

Second, because I am often approached in restaurants, everything I eat scrutinized and commented on, and I don’t want to be held to absolutes. So I never call myself any of those labels even though I have eaten a high-raw, 95%+ plant-based diet for 18 years.

I’m supportive of those who do eat veg, vegan, and raw, and I’m proud of my vegan daughter who goes out of her way to eat only plants, so that there is no cruelty to animals caused by her life. (She’s a competitive soccer and cross-country athlete, and we look high and low to make sure there is no leather in her cleats and running shoes as well.) She and I have two very different ideologies that fuel our similar choices—hers animal cruelty, mine nutrition—and both are valid and important.

The quotes below use the words “vegetarian” and “vegan” quite a bit, but of course they’re not my quotes. But if extremist labels offend you, just consider these thoughts towards my agenda of helping you EAT MORE PLANTS! Regardless of whether you have a goal of eating no animal products. :-)

“A number of studies have shown that cancer risk is lower and immune competence is higher in individuals who consume a vegetarian diet. Epidemiological studies almost unanimously report a strong correlation between a diet high in fruits and vegetables and low cancer risk.”

– John Boik, in his book Cancer & Natural Medicine: A Textbook of Basic Research and Clinical Research

“I have been a vegan for almost two years now and the benefits have been tremendous. I have more stamina and it helps keep me in a positive state of mind. I didn’t realize how weighed down I was when I ate meat. I never really felt 100 percent until I freed it from my diet. Now, I can’t imagine going back to meat. I feel incredible.”

– Mike Tyson, World heavyweight boxing champion, in 2011

“Today you have processed meats and a lot of animals suffering unnecessarily for it. Now, some people just blow that off and don’t have a conscience about it, or they just don’t care. They wouldn’t eat their dog, but they feel that way about other animals. But for me, I decided to stop eating meat. I didn’t want to contribute to all of that. I’m not trying to change the world, or wear that on my sleeve, or make a political statement, because that just turns people away. I only have control over one person, and that’s myself. And I feel good about it.”

– Mac Danzig, vegan mixed martial arts champ

“I’ve found that a person does not need protein from meat to be a successful athlete. In fact, my best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet.”

– Carl Lewis, nine-time Olympic gold medal winner

“Someone may say that there are some antioxidants in meat. They are not incorrect in saying this. But, it is like comparing a raindrop to a lake, with a piece of meat being the raindrop, and an apple or other raw fruit or vegetable being a lake of beneficial nutrients. Any antioxidants in the meat only got there by way of the animal eating plants. Animals, including humans, do not conduct photosynthesis, which is the process that takes place in plant cells when they absorb sun energy and store it, forming the colors in the plants. Therefore, antioxidants, which are in the natural colors of plants, are vastly more available in edible, raw plant substances, and much less present in meat, dairy, and eggs. By consuming animal protein to try to access antioxidants is less than licking the juice from a knife that just cut through a piece of fruit, instead of simply eating the fruit itself.

By consuming animal protein, you are also consuming free radicals, which exist and form in meat, milk, and eggs. So, even if you are consuming some trace amounts of certain antioxidants in the animal protein, you are countering it by also consuming the damaging free radicals in that animal flesh, dairy, or eggs. This scenario does not equal good nutrition – especially considering that meat, dairy, and eggs also contain saturated fat, cholesterol, and a variety of other substances that work against health.

Studies are constantly revealing how certain fruits and vegetables not only provide needed nutrients that are beneficial to health, but also that they contain and provide properties that prevent certain serious ailments, such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease; limit intestinal exposure to carcinogens; and help the body to contain, transport, and eliminate toxins.”

– Sunfood Diet Infusion: Transforming Health And Preventing Disease Through Raw Veganism by John McCabe

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Nutrition for pregnant moms, babies, toddlers…..part 4 of 5

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Today’s topic: NUTRITION DURING PREGNANCY.

Remember, what you’re eating when you’re pregnant is also contributing to healthy blood, bones, tissues, and organs—or not.

It’s so painful for me to remember back to eating 7-11 nachos, Diet Coke, a Special Burger and fries (extra fry sauce!) at lunch, and Ben & Jerry’s after dinner, throughout my first pregnancy. I didn’t know any better. I assumed my body was making good fuel for my baby, out of the bad fuel I fed myself—as illogical as that is.

I imagine that’s why I not only gained 65 lbs., but it’s also why my baby developed significant auto-immune problems in his first year of life. With my later pregnancies, I was learning and implementing good nutrition strategies, and the babies were FAR healthier.

My last baby was (and still is, at age 12) completely healthy—never once a bacterial infection of any kind, never any antibiotics or meds or even doctor visits. The labor and delivery got easier, too, when I ate the right foods throughout the pregnancy and gained only 35 lbs. instead of 65!

I can’t even count how many times a 12 Steps to Whole Foods young mom has talked to me after a class I teach, and told me this:

“I’m so thrilled that I changed my diet to eat whole foods, because this last pregnancy has been my easiest and healthiest!”

I’ve had many moms tell me about major complications they had during their earlier pregnancies, while they were eating the Standard American Diet, and how all that changed when they embraced whole-foods fuel.

One mother in Texas told me that with her first 4 children, she was on bed rest, with terrible edema, and pre-eclampsia. As she told me this, she was 9 months pregnant, and beaming ear to ear. She said, “This is my first problem-free pregnancy. I’m about to deliver, and I’m so excited I learned all about whole foods from you.”

My diet now is the diet I would eat if I were pregnant again. The “pregnancy diet” is no different than the ideal diet for life.

It’s high in greens, in vegetables, and in fruits—80% of more of them raw. I also eat cooked legumes (beans, split peas, lentils), and whole grains (organic quinoa, whole wheat, rolled oats or oat groats, spelt, Kamut, buckwheat, millet—most of them sprouted before they are baked at low temperatures). I buy sprouted-grain (whole grain only) bread or English muffins or tortillas at the health food store. But I also make my own granola.

I eat nuts and seeds every day, some of them sprouted, many of them rich sources of essential fatty acids. I soak and dehydrate nuts and seeds to add to my granola.

I use coconut oil on my skin and in occasional baking, for medium-chain triglycerides. I always have a quart of green smoothie a day. Most days, I also have a glass of vegetable juice, although at many points in my life, I’ve not had the time to make juice, and now I hire someone to do it.

I choose big salads in restaurants. I don’t eat refined sugar, ever, nor do I ever drink soda, or eat processed meats, or pork or beef. I eat a 95 percent plant-based diet, and I keep refined foods or animal products at 5 percent or less.

While I was having my babies, I was learning how to do all that. It was new to me then—it is habit now. I didn’t give up sugar cold-turkey back then. I had fits and starts in dealing with my addiction.

My changes involved bucking “the system.” Lots of systems, in fact. The medical system. The social system of parties and barbecues and family events and Easter and Halloween and Christmas. The church system of keeping kids quiet in nursery and later, in class, with junk food. The family system of generations of “comfort foods” that contributed to my babies’ health problems. It wasn’t easy. But it was one of the BEST THINGS I’VE EVER DONE. I’ve never looked back, and I have absolutely zero regret.

What I did HAD TO BE DONE.

So, what I’ve just described my diet being now is a great diet for a pregnant or nursing mom. It’s a terrible idea for a pregnant mom to eat a diet high in refined carbs. The baby does need good protein for brain health, and overall for building. There’s plenty of protein in nuts, seeds, legumes, grains, and greens.

If you avoid those good food categories, eating a vegan diet, you’re likely to develop dental problems, blood sugar issues, and fatigue-related disorders. If you want more protein, I suggest a scoop of our whole-food, vegan protein powder added to your green smoothies.

Doctors tell women to eat lots of protein, and everyone’s first thought with protein is meat and dairy. Those are “perfect proteins,” to be sure. But “perfect” doesn’t meant “better”—it just mean it is protein the body doesn’t have to assemble from amino acids, because it matches human flesh very closely. Protein from greens, seeds, legumes, grains, and nuts is protein the body has to work harder to build muscle with. But it’s far more durable muscle mass.

Always eat protein when you’re eating sugars. For instance, if you have a green smoothie and yours is high in fruits, eat a handful of almonds, too, or a bowl of lentil or split pea soup. Or add a scoop of protein powder. I make my green smoothies as high in greens, and as low in fruits, as I can tolerate. Slow down and regulate impact on blood sugar, by eating FIBER and QUALITY PROTEIN. This is how you can, with lifelong habits, avoid insulin problems and eventual diabetes, which currently most of our population is heading toward.

Don’t undertake a major, radical detox program while you’re pregnant or in the first year of nursing. As toxins range your body, on their way out, they flush through a developing fetus, and through your breast milk, as well.

Again, don’t take my advice in lieu of competent practitioner care and counsel.

Tomorrow, we talk once again about WHAT TO DO ABOUT PICKY KIDS.

 

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Alternatives to Antibiotics

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Winter’s coming up. The more raw plant foods you eat, and the more Chapter 8 probiotic-foods habits you incorporate into your diet, the more your body become inhospitable to viruses and infections.

But be prepared to nip the baddies in the butt, the minute you feel symptoms coming on, with natural alternatives to antibiotics. The sooner you get on it, the more effective natural solutions are.

In fact, even if people around me are getting sick, or if traveling soon, I start taking Kyolic garlic caps, goldenseal herb caps, spraying ACS and ACZ in my mouth every few hours, and licking On Guard off the back of my hand every few hours.

I don’t do goldenseal or OnGuard all the time—otherwise the body adapts and the effectiveness isn’t high when I need it. But the immune system needs to buck up when the flu is going around!

Right now my favorite ant-viral, anti-bacterial solutions, are two things that work in very different ways:

One, doTERRA’s On Guard essential oils blend. A microbiologist presented her research on it, at the convention in September, showing how On Guard killed MRSA in a petri dish, with many experiments over the course of a year. She used just 2-3 drops—more did not increase effectiveness.

Vancomycin, the antibiotic drug of choice for MRSA, was quite ineffective, in comparison. It is well known to take several days to begin to achieve its kill effect. And unfortunately, antibiotic drugs are not cell-selective as natural remedies generally are. They do a lot of ‘collateral damage,’ including killing off the good bacteria needed to keep bad bacteria in check for the future!

You can just put On Guard on the back of your hand and lick it off. When we had coach certification coming up, my ex-husband, my neighbors, and lots of people around me were getting sick. I gave my kids and my key employees a little bottle of On Guard and told them to use it every few hours, and I did the same. None of us got sick—then, or afterwards!

Talk to our support team at support123@greensmoothiegirl.com about how to get some at wholesale cost.

Using On Guard is like using 200 different cell-selective “bullets,” whereas Vancomycin is just one “bullet.” So the adaptogenic organisms in your body can’t mutate and create defenses against a 200-bullet approach, like it can fairly easily, with a one-strain antibiotic drug.

Two, ACZ nano for chelating toxins out of the body, and ACS 200 silver for killing all kinds of viral and bacterial organisms, only bad ones. They are phenomenal products to have on hand and use regularly, especially in the winter.

And look HERE, HERE, and HERE at my blog series from last year, regarding alternatives my readers and I have found to be very effective. Oh, and one more, the Top 10 ideas I got from my readers. When you’re armed with effective natural solutions, which are cell-specific and don’t harm gut flora, you don’t have to get sick repeatedly, and you don’t have awful side effects like thrush and vaginal yeast infections. Sometimes those side effects can go on for years!

Some of the holistic practitioners I work with say the body can spend literally decades trying to recover from the devastation of a single course of antibiotics.

(Doing Step 8 to 12 Steps to Whole Foods is a MUST, if you’ve ever been on an antibiotic and need to rebuild your gut health. Making and eating cultured foods can rebuild that all-important healthy GI tract where most of your body’s defenses happen.)

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Video: Denise Gets Off Coumadin

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Never have I raised the ire of more readers as when I did a video with Dr. Kirt Tyson, one of Dr. Gabriel Cousens’ 30 diabetics he treated in the documentary and wellness program Simply Raw. Dr. Tyson told me he is a clearly Type 1 diabetic, who is off insulin except on the occasion he gets a virus, or falls off his raw diet.

Dr. Cousens claims that 83 percent of Type 1 diabetics still have some functioning in their Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas, and can therefore heal, regenerate, and improve their situation, some of them even coming off insulin dependence. His program has people eat a raw, plant-based, alkaline diet. People leave with biomarkers radically changed, many of them off insulin, including 100% of the Type II diabetics who did the program.

It sounds crazy to people who’ve bought into the School of Medicine’s endocrinology specialty, who put people on insulin for life and tell them to eat whatever they want.

I am not making a claim about diabetes. Not here, nor in the video that infuriated some people. And I’m not making a claim now, showing you Denise’s story. I’m just letting her tell her story.

I met Denise at a class I taught in San Francisco in April. She won both Grand Prizes, the Blendtec and the 12 Steps course. And she told me how she got off blood thinners and solved her desperate health problems. Check it out here, and then read my comments below.

Some cardiac patients are ordered to take blood thinners by their doctors, and further, they are ordered to never stop taking them. Obviously, disregard for this advice for someone with a history of blood clots is no laughing matter. Don’t go off your blood thinners without competent medical supervision. However, you should always get a second opinion, and often a third. You may wish to find extremely competent practitioners outside those educated exclusively in drug approaches to advise you. They often have other ways to view the situation that consider the multi-faceted whole human organism. Rather than a focus on one body part separate from the whole, and the what-insurance-code-will-pay-for-what-drug approach.

I often have readers taking warfarin (brand name Coumadin) tell me, sorrowfully, that they cannot consume greens because they are taking Coumadin. I cannot advise you whether you can, or cannot, have green smoothies while taking this drug. I do think it’s tragic that people who have a major health problem have to eliminate the most important class of foods—foods that they need even more desperately than everybody else does. It’s because there’s high Vitamin K in greens, which binds to the drug and renders it ineffective, creating increased risk of blood clots.

I will say that I’ve had people on Coumadin tell me (a) that they’re not allowed to drink green smoothies or eat greens, and also (b) that they’re allowed to, but in managed amounts. This leads me to the advice to seek a second opinion, and really study an issue out. Not every doctor knows everything.

The advice to patients taking Coumadin is all over the map, so clearly it’s not as cut-and-dried as some cardiac patients think. Here’s a Mayo Clinic M.D. saying kale, spinach, chard, collard greens are highest in Vitamin K, and to limit Vita K consumption to 90-120 mcg daily.

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/warfarin/AN00455

Be informed. Own your own health care. I hope before you get blood clots in the first place, you learn how to utilize nutrition, hydrate, alkalize the body, and exercise, to keep your blood flowing well and your red blood cells robust, with good tension, not sticking together. Or that you take a diagnosis like that, already issued, as a wake-up call to activate your immune system with healthy practices and, if you can, intervene early to avoid a doc ordering Coumadin for you.

I just did darkfield live-blood microscopy last week at Parecelsus al Ronc in the Southern Swiss Alps. I looked at thousands of my own red blood cells, lymphocytes, and platelets under microscope. I also looked at many cancer patients’ blood, to compare. It was fascinating to look at my highly mobile, round, healthy red blood cells that move around and perform their functions independent of each other rather, than clumping together, slowing down functions and impeding oxygen and nutrient exchange. My white blood cell count was healthy and normal, and they were active and mobile.

Then, I looked at slides of very ill patients’ white blood cells, too many of them and too sluggish. Their red blood cells had bacteria attacking them, and one patient had shards of crystals sticking out of her RBC’s after a year of taking the immune suppressant methyltrexate! Absolutely fascinating. (No HIPPA laws in Europe—the clinics let me see LOTS of things U.S. docs would never let me see, even let me go on rounds with patients.)

Holistic healing is the wave of the future. America is going that direction, after a few decades of experimenting with the hope that drugs will make us well. More and more people are realizing the futility of this approach, and are fleeing to places like Paracelsus, where docs are committed to treating the person, rather than treating a tumor or a hardened artery.

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Why I’m in love with legumes, part 1 of 4

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love legumeMatthew texted me after a recent newsletter I sent out:

Matthew:  I just read your article on protein. I had to look up what a legume is. Dumb it down a little! Is there a lot of protein in peas?

Me:  Yes, in split peas, there is.

split peasMatthew:  Is that different from regular peas?

Me:  Yeah, split peas are HARD and you cook them. Haven’t you had split pea soup? Your mom was a health nut! Regular peas are squishier. They are green vegetables in a pod.

Matthew:  I love split pea soup! I don’t know what split peas are. You have to write to Americans who can identify everything on McDonald’s Dollar Menu but they could not say what a legume is.

This is a consistent theme of Matthew’s, reminding me to dumb it down a level. This is why I don’t like to teach you how to make, for example, tinctures of medicinal mushrooms, a major topic of my friend David Wolfe at his Longevity Conference.

(Oh, and also I don’t like to because I don’t have a clue HOW, and learning how is not on my bucket list.)

This is why I don’t like to get sucked down rabbit holes of controversies like whether vegetarianism is for everyone. (Lots of plants IS for everyone. Whether you eat clean, organic meat is a personal preference, and your dental health may be served by that.)

local grcMost people don’t want to read those fringey debates. They want practical help getting out of the trap. The S.A.D. trap.

I mostly like to talk about how regular people can make shifts to eating more whole, unadulterated foods. Plants in their natural state that make us feel great, maintain ideal weight, and minimize disease risk. That’s the zone I like to stay in.

To that end, Matthew says to write an article about TEN TYPES OF LEGUMES. I’m on it. Look for that in my next post. And while we’re talking about, I’ll share my split pea soup recipe, which is an example of the cheap and easy ways to raise a family on whole foods.

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15 Ways I Optimize Health and Energy Every Day—Besides Good Food! (part 1 of 4)

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Optimize your healthAt our Paracelsus retreat in Switzerland (I miss those lovely people who came, already!), we had a few evening seminars where I and Dr. Jared Nielsen (from Utah) spoke on a variety of topics. I asked those who attended to write down their questions. One was, “Besides good nutrition, what do you do to stay healthy?”

What a great question! I’m going to answer it in my next few blogs. I am nearing 47 years old, and I have strong energy from early, until late, virtually 100% of the time, with no symptoms or diagnoses except some mild anxiety sometimes, and some dental issues resulting from my poor habits early in life.

I do not believe that this situation is due to luck, nor is it explained by good heredity. Twenty years ago, I was in terrible health, with two dozen diagnoses, when I made radically different daily choices. I had a number of strikes against me, starting with a childhood where I was not breastfed, and then was on frequent antibiotics.

And my heredity isn’t particularly great either—cancer on one side, Alzheimer’s disease on the other. Nor is is just short-term luck, as my excellent health has been a fact for many years, since I began safeguarding it. Even through some very stressful life events.

Eat a healthy plant based diet most of the time.
Eat a healthy plant based diet most of the time.

Of course what we talk about most, on this blog, is the critical role a consistent, three-meals-a-day healthy diet is. Whole, plant-based, clean food is the bulk (90-95%) of what I eat. Yes, I eat “play foods,” too. I make sure they’re kept to 5 percent of the diet—maybe 10 percent on vacations. My core value, when it comes to food, is to be disciplined, without being obsessive.

And I truly believe that diet is one of two foundations. (The other is good emotional health and maturity.) It is inescapable that one is highly unlikely to be truly healthy, long-term, without focusing on it: learning and practicing principles of eating clean, high-vibration foods.

game-changerBut there is much more that I do, besides eat good food. I think that the things I’m about to explain are common practices, too, from my observations of people late in life who are in optimal health—compared to most of their peers whose main focus in life is surviving their many disease states.

The things on this list don’t even take much time, most of them, and many of them can be done while doing the dishes or driving in the car. Many of them are more about emotional than physical health—but is there any differentiating them, really?

Both my academic training, and my life experience, tells me that these 15 things are game-changers. Every single one is important. My next three posts will reveal all of them.

 

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Diet vs. Exercise

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Diet versus Exercise for weight lossDear GreenSmoothieGirl: I know that a great diet coupled with lots of exercise is the healthiest approach for all of us. Having said this, I just listened to a guy on the radio say he is a gym rat and is in excellent physical shape for his age (approaching 50,) but he’s a junk food king. Which is worse: Great diet, little or no exercise, OR so-so diet, but great cardio and muscle workouts. Happy Mother’s Day! –Patti

Answer:  It’s a funny question, and the answer may not even be helpful to anyone, but it will entertain me to answer it! Obviously it’s a terrible idea to have a bad diet OR live a sedentary lifestyle. But your guess about what I’m going to say is right: I think diet is even more important.

80-20-ruleWe do it all day long, eat food. It is so foundational. It’s the gas in the gas tank. When it’s hybridized, genetically modified, stripped of fiber and nutrition, or even made of nothing but chemicals (i.e. soda), your body doesn’t even have good fuel to work with, in a cardio or weight workout. Fuel is what builds every cell. With your weight, food is 80% and exercise is 20%. While I think both are critically important, nutrient density in your diet is probably the #1 most important issue for your health, and your emotional well-being. Stress management / attitude / ability to metabolize and move forward after negative events is the #2 most important factor affecting your overall health. Exercise is likely #3!

 

 

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Kathy Pugh loses 50 lbs eating whole foods!

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Kathy with Robyn (Before)
Kathy with Robyn (Before)

I love when people send me their test results, or their before-and-after photos, when they’ve changed their life.

Kathy is a GSG Detox two-time graduate…..and the winner of a Blendtec Total Blender at my lecture.

We met in October, 2013, in Northern Virginia. She came to my next lecture, 9 months later, near Baltimore. Here you see the photos, with me, of Kathy before and after implementing a whole-foods diet.

Last Fall, she was just shy of 200 pounds, with cholesterol of 198, diagnosed pre-diabetic. She told me, “I didn’t like the way I felt. I had to wiggle into my chair at work. My thighs embraced each other as I walked, and my belly would sometimes cause the grocery store self-checkout machine to yell at me: ‘Please remove items from scanner scale!’”

Kathy realized she needed to do something. The day before Christmas, she started the GreenSmoothieGirl 26-day Detox. By the end, she’d lost 10 pounds. More importantly, she’d realized that she COULD make the switch, from the Standard American Diet, to a healthy, whole-foods lifestyle.

Each weekend, following GSG advice, she tried something new, adding one new habit. Her cholesterol dropped over 50 points in two months. Her doctor told her that her fasting blood sugar was back to normal range–out of danger for diabetes.

Kathy and Robyn (After)
Kathy and Robyn (After)

Kathy has lost nearly 50 pounds in the last 7 months! She’s done the Detox TWICE. She says,

“I feel better about myself and I couldn’t have done it without the tools and information you provide on your website and books.  I am grateful for the work you have done in sharing your knowledge about foods and the food industry.”

Kathy, thank you for sharing your story!

 

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Science compared every diet. The winner? Real food!

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shutterstock_194081942Dr. David Katz and Dr. Stephanie Meller, at Yale University, completed a survey of the published research on diet over the past decade. The primary finding, surveying thousands of studies?

“A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”

Score one for my mission. This is what we teach. Eat plants, unprocessed ones!

The study compared low carb, low-fat, low glycemic, Mediterranean, mixed/balanced (DASH), Paleolithic, vegan, and many other diets.

Fewer cancers and less heart disease are documented in thousands of published studies. The most effective diets included not just fruits and vegetables, but whole grains, nuts, and seeds. Some other interesting findings:

Katz and Meller found “no decisive evidence” that low-fat diets are better than diets high in healthful fats, like the Mediterranean! Those fats include a lower ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids than the typical American diet.

shutterstock_212666641Finally, about the very popular fad, the “Paleo Diet”, Katz and Meller wrote:

“If Paleolithic eating is loosely interpreted to mean a diet based mostly on meat, no meaningful interpretation of health effects is possible.” They note that the composition of most meat in today’s food supply is not similar to that of mammoth meat, and that most plants available during the Stone Age are today extinct. [In other words, GSG interpretation, it’s not even possible to “follow” the diet Paleolithic man ate!]

Dr. Katz says, of the “dieting” landscape in the popular media:

shutterstock_136284278“It’s not just linguistic…I really at times feel like crying, when I think about that we’re paying for ignorance with human lives. At times, I hate the people with alphabet soup after their names who are promising the moon and the stars with certainty. I hate knowing that the next person is already rubbing his or her hands together with the next fad to make it on the bestseller list.”

Another GSG teaching confirmed by the Yale study:

Exaggerated emphasis on a single nutrient or food is inadvisable. The result, Katz and Meller write, is constant confusion and doubt. My conclusion, instead, is to just eat a wide variety of whole, colorful, unprocessed plant foods. Greens, vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds.

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When I came to your class I had just been diagnosed with rectal cancer

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green smoothiestraw berries (1)Our customer support rep Kami forwarded this to me and said, “This brought tears to my eyes.” Me, too.

“I was in so much pain I couldn’t sit. So I kept squirming. I felt that I was distracting those who wanted so much to learn from you. I kept starting to leave…but I selfishly wanted to learn too.

I want to tell you I have now been doing green smoothies for almost two years and am constantly getting other people started. Years of compulsively overeating carbs,sweets, and fats gave me the giant belly you saw that literally hangs to my knees.

What you would never have imagined is that my health was already greatly improved by your green smoothies. I truly believe the cancer was already being driven out by the greens. I believe that if I beat this, it will be because of you. If I had found you sooner I would never have had to go through all this.

hands hearts (1)Thank you for all the good information you made available to me. I am done with radiation and my first round of chemo . I am barely able to eat again. I am starting back on my green smoothies. I wish you could guide me through this but I could never afford you. I wonder how many lives you have saved and they don’t even know it.

Never become discouraged. The world needs you. Be well, dear sister, and never stop.”

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What Are Anti-Nutrients, And Should You Worry About Them In Your Food?

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What are Anti-Nutrients, and should you worry about them in your food?

One of the most confusing controversies in the world of health and nutrition is the debate about ANTI-NUTRIENTS.

For example, hot issues about Anti-Nutrients include but are not limited to these compounds…

  • Grains have PHYTATES.
  • Spinach has OXALATES.
  • Apple seeds have CYANIDE.
  • Legumes have PURINES and LECTINS.
  • Broccoli and cabbage have GOITROGENS.

Recent scare tactics about these “anti-nutrients” originate primarily from reductionistic thinking, circulated on the internet by a few “experts” theorizing. The sad consequence is that many consumers fear the most nutritious whole foods in the world.

While reports that all grains, legumes, and many fruits and vegetables contain anti-nutrients are true, the demonizing of these whole foods as dangerous is evidence that you aren’t being told the whole story.

No one addresses this issue more logically than my friend Jim Simmons, whose book Original Fast Foods I highly recommend. During an email exchange I had with Jim, he wrote:

“Research now supports the idea that anti-nutrients are nature’s way of helping us to be more intuitive in our eating patterns. For instance, some spinach is really good for you, but as you consume too much, the level of oxalates will build up in your bloodstream to a point that a signal will be sent to your brain and then a signal is sent from the brain to your endocrine system.

“The long and the short is, you will lose your appetite for spinach until the level of oxalates drop sufficient that your taste for spinach is turned back on….don’t get too complicated in your eating habits.”

Anti-nutrients are in most, if not all, whole foods. This does not mean they are bad, scary, or to be avoided.

In fact, avoiding the very foods that contain anti-nutrients will put your disease risk through the roof. They happen to also be the foods highest in fiber, micronutrients, and all disease-preventative compounds. Synergistically, the hundreds of phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals and enzymes in the same foods that contain goitrogens or oxalates, keep you slim, healthy, and clear-thinking till you’re old.

Anti-nutrients, as they are popularly referred to, possibly poorly named, serve an important purpose in the overall chemistry of the plant and in its delivery of phytonutrients to your body.

Phytates

Science actually knows very little about these anti-nutrients that some say rob your body of minerals, causing unnecessary fear among consumers in the past decade.

What Are Anti-Nutrients, And Should You Worry About Them In Your Food?Phytic acid is found naturally (in varying degrees) in most grains, seeds, legumes, and nuts, but our bodies don’t produce the enzyme to metabolize and absorb it.

Phytates can react with certain minerals (like iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc), and some carbs and proteins, binding to them and making them less available for our bodies to use. (1) This is why the Paleo diet community, in particular, has demonized them as harmful.

However, research doesn’t support avoiding phytates. In fact, evidence is clear that they are, in fact, helpful and important, particularly as a defense against kidney stones (by absorbing excess calcium), lowering cholesterol, (2)  as an antioxidant, (3) and even protecting against cancer. (4)

In many cases, it is the very quality of binding to excess minerals that makes phytic acid beneficial.

And if you’re still worried about phytates, it’s easy to neutralize them in your legumes, seeds, and grains–soaking or sprouting them for a few hours or overnight activates the enzymes that break down phytates.

Lectins

The “Eat Right for Your Blood Type” and Paleo movements are responsible for the panic over lectins, which are proteins in raw grains and legumes that help cells stick together. Lectins have been blamed for causing a host of health issues, particularly leaky gut and autoimmune disease.

But, as with phytates, lectins are neutralized with soaking, sprouting, and cooking.  It’s almost unheard of to eat legumes like kidney or pinto beans in their raw state, which is when lectins are active.

And, as with phytates, the risks of eliminating grains and legumes from the diet for fear of easily-managed “anti-nutrients” are far worse than the anti-nutrients themselves for the vast majority of us.

In his book How Not To Die, Dr. Michael Greger documents thousands of studies proving that the healthiest people on the planet consume grains, legumes, and other plant foods.

Speaking of grains and legumes in particular (the food groups most associated with lectins), he cited the recommendation of nine independent research teams analyzing half a million studies–to eat whole grains and/or legumes with every meal for cancer prevention. (5)  Every meal.

In a recent podcast interview I did with Joel Fuhrman, MD, author of Eat to Live and three other New York Times bestsellers, he explained that residuals of legumes attach to the villi in our stomach, and are our top defense against gut disease. And that the anti-lectin fear-mongering is nothing more nor less than a fad.

Eat your quinoa and pinto beans, folks!

Purines

These compounds are associated with protein and are ubiquitous in our cells and most foods. Moderately high purine-content plant foods include beans, lentils, asparagus, peas, oatmeal, and cauliflower.

Purines are necessary and good, but in concentrated amounts can cause problems for people with gout and a few other very specific illnesses.

Several researchers, including Choi, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, have found that plant proteins do NOT increase gout risk, while the high-protein organs and flesh of animals, do increase gout symptoms. (6)

It’s a non-issue unless you have a nutrition-related health problem that affects your purine metabolism.

Especially for children and infants, problems that may warrant looking at reducing foods containing purines may include autism, cerebral palsy, deafness, epilepsy, recurrent infections, or anemia.

In those cases, a doctor may limit purines to 150 mg or less. (Keep in mind that MOST cases of those illnesses have nothing to do with purines.)

Cyanide

True, it’s in apple seeds.

Cyanide is actually a trace element our body needs. What’s in apple seeds is a tiny amount, and your body breaks it down into another harmless compound in metabolism.

I put apples, core and all, in my green smoothies. My 74-year old dad has eaten apples whole, with the core, his whole life. (He likes to point that out, to whoever is within hearing range—“Hey look, I ate everything but the stem.”)

The cyanide used by Socrates’ murderer, the poison favored by German Nazis, is a synthetic chemical combined with another element—hydrogen cyanide or sodium cyanide or potassium cyanide.

In fact, the “amygdalin” made of natural cyanide and sugar, found in apple seeds, is the B17 found in other pits (like apricot) that had people lining up by the thousands in Mexican cancer clinics in the 1980’s.

My grandmother credited it, and a raw vegan “juicing” diet, with her cancer cure in that decade.

Oxalates

I have done this subject to death. And like the other anti-nutrient debates, it’s another tempest in a teapot.

At issue is the claim that oxalates (found in foods like spinach, other leafy greens, vegetables, and nuts) can overaccumulate, causing kidney stones and other health problems.

I do not disagree that there are a few people who are not metabolizing oxalates well (a condition called hyperoxaluria), but I’m very reticent to embrace the idea that we eliminate an entire class of foods because of it.

Greens have many critical properties that other foods do not, and these nutritional benefits are desperately needed by virtually everyone. Oxalates are one compound, of many, in a serving of spinach, and researchers looking at the anti-nutrients issue mostly agree that the benefits massively outweigh the tiny risks for a very few people, of eating leafy greens in abundance.

(If you do find that oxalates are a problem, you can google “low oxalate greens” and use those, instead, in your green smoothies and salads. Avoiding greens is tantamount, however, to avoiding health.)

A companion “old wives’ tale” in this controversy is the disproven idea that cooking your greens neutralizes oxalates. It doesn’t, and cooking your greens also kills enzymes, and damages many vitamins.

Goitrogens

Let’s use some common sense. Let’s say a food has sustained human life for thousands of years, and dozens or even hundreds of studies show it to be dramatically cancer preventative.

(I’m referring to broccoli, cabbage, and kale—the crucifers.) Let’s say we break down the many complex parts of the broccoli plant, over 100 beneficial compounds, and we find one that, when chemically isolated and in large amounts, could interfere with thyroid function–goitrogens.

Don’t succumb to the myth that you should avoid cruciferous vegetables if you want to avoid goiters or other thyroid conditions, even if you are hyperthyroid.  It is thoroughly lacking in evidence, and a classic example of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.”

In fact, the studies on crucifers’ role in preventing thyroid and other cancers demonstrates precisely the opposite–they are protective foods that you want to go out of your way to eat more of! (7)

This year, I attended a conference of wellness professionals and talked with my friend, oncologist Stephen Eisenmann. I said, “Tell me the top 3 cancer preventative things anyone can do.” One of his top 3 was to eat more crucifers.

Conclusions

If you’ve read this article  and are now going to avoid whole grains, cruciferous vegetables, or apple seeds, you’ve missed the point entirely.

Whatever OTHER food you eat instead of that whole plant food—animal flesh, or packaged foods—has far worse than an anti-nutrient or two.

They have heat-damaged carcinogenic oils, no fiber, refined sugar, chemicals from solvents and preservatives and flavor enhancers and packaging and colorings. (In fact, many packaged, processed, and animal foods also contain anti-nutrients. Almost everything does!)

You’re simply far better off eating whole foods. They’re the anti-anti-nutrient!

Learn WHY and HOW to eat more whole foods in my FREE VIDEO MASTERCLASS going on right now.  It’s your shortcut to my best tips, getting to the bottom of the controversies, and learning to eat more of the world’s healthiest foods.

We’d prefer that you do it inexpensively, deliciously, and easily–and you’d probably enjoy that too. That’s what the video class is all about!

 

Resources

1. Yoon JH, Thompson LU, Jenkins DA. “ The effect of phytic acid on in vitro rate of starch digestibility and blood glucose response.” The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 1983. 38, pp 835-842

2. Admassu, S. “Potential Health Benefits and Problems Associated with Phytochemical in Food Legumes.” East African Journal of Sciences. 2009. 3(2) pp 116-133.

3. Graf E, Empson KL, Eaton JW.  “Phytic Acid.  A Natural Antioxidant.”  Journal of Biological Chemistry. 1987. 262(24)

4. Vucinik I, Shamsuddin AM.  “Protection against cancer by dietary IP6 and inositol.” Nutrition and CAncer. 2006. 55(2) pp 109-125.

5. Gregor, M MD. 2015 How Not To Die. New York (NY): Flatiron Books

6. Choi HK, “Purine-RIch Foods, Dairy and Protein Intake, and the Risk of Gout in Men.” New England Journal of Medicine.  2004. 350 pp 1093-1103.

7. Bossetti C, Negri E, Kolonel L. “A Pooled Analysis of Case-control Studies of Thyroid Cancer. VII. Cruciferous and Other Vegetables.” Cancer Causes and Control. 2002. 13(8) pp 765-775.

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15 Ways I Optimize Health and Energy Every Day—Besides Good Food! (part 1 of 4)

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At our Paracelsus retreat in Switzerland (I miss those lovely people who came, already!), we had a few evening seminars where I and Dr. Jared Nielsen (from Utah) spoke on a variety of topics. I asked those who attended to write down their questions. One was, “Besides good nutrition, what do you do to stay healthy?”

What a great question! I’m going to answer it in my next few blogs. I am nearing 47 years old, and I have strong energy from early, until late, virtually 100% of the time, with no symptoms or diagnoses except some mild anxiety sometimes, and some dental issues resulting from my poor habits early in life.

I do not believe that this situation is due to luck, nor is it explained by good heredity. Twenty years ago, I was in terrible health, with two dozen diagnoses, when I made radically different daily choices. I had a number of strikes against me, starting with a childhood where I was not breastfed, and then was on frequent antibiotics.

And my heredity isn’t particularly great either—cancer on one side, Alzheimer’s disease on the other. Nor is is just short-term luck, as my excellent health has been a fact for many years, since I began safeguarding it. Even through some very stressful life events.

Of course what we talk about most, on this blog, is the critical role a consistent, three-meals-a-day healthy diet is. Whole, plant-based, clean food is the bulk (90-95%) of what I eat. Yes, I eat “play foods,” too. I make sure they’re kept to 5 percent of the diet—maybe 10 percent on vacations. My core value, when it comes to food, is to be disciplined, without being obsessive.

And I truly believe that diet is one of two foundations. (The other is good emotional health and maturity.) It is inescapable that one is highly unlikely to be truly healthy, long-term, without focusing on it: learning and practicing principles of eating clean, high-vibration foods.

But there is much more that I do, besides eat good food. I think that the things I’m about to explain are common practices, too, from my observations of people late in life who are in optimal health—compared to most of their peers whose main focus in life is surviving their many disease states.

The things on this list don’t even take much time, most of them, and many of them can be done while doing the dishes or driving in the car. Many of them are more about emotional than physical health—but is there any differentiating them, really?

Both my academic training, and my life experience, tells me that these 15 things are game-changers. Every single one is important. My next three posts will reveal all of them.

 

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Diet vs. Exercise

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Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: I know that a great diet coupled with lots of exercise is the healthiest approach for all of us. Having said this, I just listened to a guy on the radio say he is a gym rat and is in excellent physical shape for his age (approaching 50,) but he’s a junk food king. Which is worse: Great diet, little or no exercise, OR so-so diet, but great cardio and muscle workouts. Happy Mother’s Day! –Patti

Answer:  It’s a funny question, and the answer may not even be helpful to anyone, but it will entertain me to answer it! Obviously it’s a terrible idea to have a bad diet OR live a sedentary lifestyle. But your guess about what I’m going to say is right: I think diet is even more important.

We do it all day long, eat food. It is so foundational. It’s the gas in the gas tank. When it’s hybridized, genetically modified, stripped of fiber and nutrition, or even made of nothing but chemicals (i.e. soda), your body doesn’t even have good fuel to work with, in a cardio or weight workout. Fuel is what builds every cell. With your weight, food is 80% and exercise is 20%. While I think both are critically important, nutrient density in your diet is probably the #1 most important issue for your health, and your emotional well-being. Stress management / attitude / ability to metabolize and move forward after negative events is the #2 most important factor affecting your overall health. Exercise is likely #3!

 

 

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Kathy Pugh loses 50 lbs eating whole foods!

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Kathy with Robyn (Before)

Kathy with Robyn (Before)

I love when people send me their test results, or their before-and-after photos, when they’ve changed their life.

Kathy is a GSG Detox two-time graduate…..and the winner of a Blendtec Total Blender at my lecture.

We met in October, 2013, in Northern Virginia. She came to my next lecture, 9 months later, near Baltimore. Here you see the photos, with me, of Kathy before and after implementing a whole-foods diet.

Last Fall, she was just shy of 200 pounds, with cholesterol of 198, diagnosed pre-diabetic. She told me, “I didn’t like the way I felt. I had to wiggle into my chair at work. My thighs embraced each other as I walked, and my belly would sometimes cause the grocery store self-checkout machine to yell at me: ‘Please remove items from scanner scale!’”

Kathy realized she needed to do something. The day before Christmas, she started the GreenSmoothieGirl 26-day Detox. By the end, she’d lost 10 pounds. More importantly, she’d realized that she COULD make the switch, from the Standard American Diet, to a healthy, whole-foods lifestyle.

Each weekend, following GSG advice, she tried something new, adding one new habit. Her cholesterol dropped over 50 points in two months. Her doctor told her that her fasting blood sugar was back to normal range–out of danger for diabetes.

Kathy and Robyn (After)

Kathy and Robyn (After)

Kathy has lost nearly 50 pounds in the last 7 months! She’s done the Detox TWICE. She says,

“I feel better about myself and I couldn’t have done it without the tools and information you provide on your website and books.  I am grateful for the work you have done in sharing your knowledge about foods and the food industry.”

Kathy, thank you for sharing your story!

 

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