Archive for March, 2008

So I taped an episode of a major network reality TV show last August.  It’s really how this site got started: I was told by the TV people they’d be flooded with emails of people wanting to reach me, so a friend told me I should put up a site.  It’s taken on a life of its own since then—who knew!

By contract, I can’t talk about it or give away details, but suffice it to say that my GREEN SMOOTHIES made in my BLENDTEC (and getting kids to drink them) will feature very prominently in what promises to be good prime-time television.  It hasn’t aired yet and the network hasn’t told me when it will—anytime, and probably soon. But another thing I think they’ll show is how we abuse our kids by making them eat healthy food like one of our family favorites, my CHOCOLATE BEET CAKE.

Several groups of researchers worldwide have been isolating compounds in beets because they are so powerful in their healing and purifying properties.  Just now, the American Heart Assn. journal Hypertension published research by the London School of Medicine.  The study says drinking beet juice can significantly reduce blood pressure.

The juice of the beet is rich in sodium, sulphur, chlorine, iodine, copper and vitamins B1, B2, C and bioflavonoids.  Folic acid found abundantly in beets prevents anemias and cervical cancer.  The juice is excellent for cleansing and rebuilding the kidneys and gallbladder. As a fibrous root, it’s excellent for eliminating constipation, adding bulk to the diet and improving peristalsis in the intestines.  The red color is actually betacyanin, a powerful anti-carcinogen known to prevent colon cancer.  Another study showed a 30-40 percent drop in cholesterol and triglycerides of animals fed beet fiber.

The chocolate beet cake is so good that my daughter asked for it for her birthday last summer.  On the show, I took NO end of hell for doing such a heinous thing to my family.  Denying them refined sugar, flour, and chemicals!  The horror!  (All in favor of a “vegetable root cake,” people called it.)  Somebody call Child Protective Services.  Hopefully you will enjoy abusing YOUR family in the same manner—check tomorrow’s blog for the recipe (since this has gotten kind of long).

You know drinking soda is bad for you.  Perhaps you and I talking a bit about WHY will be just the trigger you need to kick the habit—or get your kids to do so.  Have a kid you care about read this.  According to the Nutrition Research Center (Oct. 2007), here’s what you can expect in the first hour after drinking one can of Coke:

Within 10 minutes, 10 teaspoons of sugar, 100 percent of your recommended daily intake, shoots to your bloodstream.  (Keep in mind that nowhere is refined and acidic corn syrup or sugar actually “recommended.”  Good sugars don’t come from a can of Coke.)  Phosphoric acid cuts the flavor—otherwise, you’d throw up from the overwhelming sweetness.  That same phosphoric acid is draining calcium from your bones and teeth.

Within 20 minutes, your blood sugar goes through the roof, and your liver responds to the resulting insulin burst by turning massive amounts of sugar into fat.

Within 40 minutes, the enormous caffeine stimulation causes your pupils to dilate, your blood pressure to rise, and your liver to dump more sugar into your bloodstream. Dopamine stimulates the pleasure centers of your brain (just like street drugs do).

After 60 minutes, you start to crash.  You’ll feel shaky and desperately crave more sugar and caffeine.  Run to the machine for another can of Coke, and do it again daily until you develop diabetes.  Shouldn’t take too long.  Then you’ll have daily blood testing and insulin shots to look forward to, plus a shortened life expectancy and a host of very unpleasant risks, like limb amputation, for instance.

Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: I come from a family with a strong link to genetic breast cancer . . . doctors have a way to scare the pants off of you . . . I was told during a mammogram that I have calcifications in my breast.  Where does that come from and how do I cleanse it out of my body?

Answer:  Dairy has more than three times the amount of protein that human breast milk does.  That’s fine for a baby cow who will weigh several hundred pounds at his first birthday.  But for a human, excess protein causes bone loss (as well as massively higher rates of breast cancer—see my recent blog quoting Colin Campbell).  And most petite, female Americans are eating as much protein as Mr. Universe needs.  These excesses of protein causes calcium and other minerals to back up—calcification in the breasts being just one way that happens (painful kidney stones being another).  And “low-fat” dairy products (skim milk, etc.) have the highest protein.  People always think they’re having a “healthy breakfast” starting their day with some kind of cereal and skim milk.  But they have been misled by the megabucks dairy industry.

 Remember in science class when you put a mineral like salt in water and measured how much of it would go into and out of solution?  To oversimplify, calcium is like that: if you get more of it than you can use, it will go “out of solution,” so to speak, and crystallize into stones and deposits in various places in the body.  Keep in mind that the dairy industry has strong-armed our government into advertising ridiculous calcium requirements (1,000 to 1,500 mg. daily for women).  But in poor countries where people get only 200 mg. daily from inexpensive whole plant foods, they have strong bones and virtually no osteoporosis, even in old age.  

I just read this:

“Food is cheaper now by a long way, more abundantly available, more highly refined and more pressingly sold to us by very clever advertising companies and techniques.  The remarkable thing is how anybody stays thin.”

–Dr. Andrew Prentice, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

True and false.  Everybody talks about how screwed we are because of the refined-food explosion of the past 50 years.  I agree that the low cost of refined foods, and the addictive qualities of sugar- and MSG-added foods create an enormous problem.  But you can study many periods of history when the upper class had serious weight problems.  They had two huge liability factors we don’t have.  Here’s why we shouldn’t use the above reasoning as an excuse:

1.  First, we live in an age of great enlightenment about nutrition.  Even in the past 10 years, we’ve experienced a quantum leap in what we know about food and how it can heal us (or hurt us).  A person in 17th century England encountered as much information in a lifetime as you can read in a weekday edition of the New York Times.  Throughout most of history, people have thought lard is a nutritious food.  Even many of the least educated among us know better than that.

2.  For the first time in history, those of us in the First World can spend a few minutes in a car, drive to a market, and walk in to choose from an abundance of produce from all over the world.  Fresh, colorful fruits and vegetables are available to us 12 months of the year.  My ancestors and yours were lucky to get 3-4 months a year with high-antioxidant foods.  That’s if they stayed put long enough to plant a garden.  My g-g-g-g-grandfather Benjamin Franklin Johnson had scurvy, malaria, and typhoid, partly as a result of months-long trips on a horse where the only food he had for an entire season was cornmeal!

We really have no excuse because we have countervailing advantages, offsetting the disadvantages of the time and space we live in.  At least OUR disadvantages can be overcome with good choices, unlike the disadvantages my Grandfather Benjamin lived with.  We’re best off if we shop the perimeter of the supermarket, especially the produce section, and stay out of the junk-food middle; shop when we’re not hungry; and stay far away from foods with addictive chemicals (MSG, corn syrup, sugar, and refined salt).  Oh, and stay away from that place with the big yellow M whose mascot is a clown named Ron.