Robyn's Blog

Two more of my favorite books, with links to obtain them.  As you can afford to own these books, you’re building your arsenal of tools to quit or massively reduce refined foods and animal products forever:

James and Colleen Simmons’ Original Fast Foods is so pure in its intent, to help others experience the profound health improvements that the formerly very ill Jim Simmons achieved when he undertook a whole-foods, plant-based diet.  The book is intelligently written, and it contains tons of information and lots of good recipes at the end, all of them easy.  Self published and therefore more expensive than most books, you can occasionally get used copies on Amazon, but the author sells them at www.originalfastfoods.com.

Victoria Boutenko’s Green for Life documents how Boutenko, a long-time raw foodist, felt there was a missing link in her family’s nutrition, even as good as it was.  (They eliminated many chronic diseases from their lives when they went all raw 15 years ago.)  She undertook to study the diet of primates, since humans share 99.4% of our DNA with primates.  Of course, what she found is that they eat copiously of greens, a wide variety of them.  

Boutenko asks the reader to undertake an experiment: to chew a mouthful of greens, and spit it out right before swallowing.  You’ll find it is simply torn up, not creamed and ready for digestion like it needs to be.  This is because over several generations of eating increasingly more refined foods, the human body has adapted by developing ever-narrower palates.  We no longer chew food to the extent that we need to to extract nutrition from denser foods like raw green vegetables, like primates with wide palates do.  The BlendTec Total Blender does that breakdown for you, in the green smoothie: all you have to do is “chew” as you drink it, to create saliva for digestion.

Greens like kale, collards, mustard greens, arugula, turnip greens, celery, spinach, dandelion greens, beet greens, and chard don’t end up on too many salad plates.  But they’re easy in green smoothies.  And, you don’t have to drizzle them with fattening, chemical-laden salad dressings to get them down, in a smoothie.

Best of all, in addition to the superior nutrition of dark leafy greens, Boutenko points out that kale fiber, for instance, can remove many times its own weight in toxins from the body.  She undertook to study a group of 30 people ranging from the morbidly obese in wheelchairs to people who already ate a fairly healthful diet: every one of the 30 reported excellent improvements in health, some of them very dramatic.  Many said they just wished they had more than a quart a day!  The top three health benefits were better digestion/elimination, more energy, and weight loss. 

Yesterday my friend Shelley Abegg, a breast cancer five-year survivor, was on the front page.  She beat cancer without chemo or radiation with a raw-food vegan diet:

http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/286151/17/

This is a four-part series on local women with breast cancer.  The first two parts were  full of radiation and chemo stories, including a woman with small children who is 36 years old and now full of cancer, waiting to die and trying to give her children as many memories as possible before she goes.  I was hoping, reading the first two parts, they’d feature someone who chose an alternative, so I’m thrilled that this story ran.  I’m disappointed that Kim O’Neill at BYU didn’t say more positive things, because he tested her as cancer free early in Shelley’s raw treatment, and for some reason he chose to use his time with the reporter to say that everyone should get medical treatment.  Fear of the power of Mainstream Medicine is real!

You may know from reading my story that my first inspiration in life was my grandmother who did the exact same thing.  Shelley talks about how even 8 years ago, people thought she was crazy to forgo medical treatment, so imagine how my grandmother was received in 1983!  (She got the last laugh, though.)

Vegetables and fruits, nuts and seeds, grains and legumes, especially in their raw (and sprouted) state are MEDICINE.  They are powerful.  Sometimes in a fight with cancer, time is not on your side.  Shelley mentions her friend who went the rounds with chemo three times and THEN started trying to eat raw just before she passed away.  (The reporter isn’t telling that whole story.)

Several years ago, Shelley and I also went to the funeral of our friend Jill, a 44-year old wealthy wife of an M.D. and mother of five children.  It was one of the most heartbreaking funerals I have ever attended, watching Jill’s little three-year old daughter all dressed up in her tulle and lace, following the casket.  Very shortly before Jill died, Shelley and I went to her house to tell her about cleansing, wheat grass juice, raw food—because she asked us to.  Jill said, “I have known this is what I am supposed to do.”  But she feared it was too late.

Women shouldn’t be dying en masse from this disease.  In all the places of the world where women fear breast cancer because rates are so high—like here—the culture is plagued by ubiquitous toxic food.  The answer does not lie in more cutting, burning, and poisoning (surgery, radiation, and chemo).  You can give your money to the people hawking the little pink ribbons.  But if you do, your money will go to funding development of more burning-and-poisoning approaches for women.

The answer lies in prevention, and an important part of that is a lifestyle of enzyme-rich plant foods and daily physical activity.

Sorry I’ve been MIA (I somehow got locked out of my own blog, and my webmaster was off celebrating Diwali)!  Before we move on to more of my favorite books, announcements: tomorrow is the LAST DAY to order raw almonds in the group buy.  You must have your check postmarked tomorrow, Oct. 30.  To answer the two most common questions, yes, the nuts are shelled, and they will arrive to you mid-November.

So, three more of my “top shelf” nutrition books, with the links to pick them up on Amazon if you like:

Dr. Joel Furhman’s Eat to Live contains excellent data about a plant-based diet versus meat and processed foods from a courageous medical doctor willing to recommend vegetarian lifestyle changes instead of drugs and surgeries.  The books contain a limited number of simple recipes at the end.  Possibly because many of Furhman’s patients are cardiac patients, he is preoccupied with “low fat” in Eat to Live, which I think unnecessary and even possibly harmful for some people, but it’s a small criticism of a great book.

John Robbins’ The Food Revolution (as well as his earlier work Diet for a New America), a pivotal book with a compassionate voice for the Earth, the animals we abuse raising them for food, and the people of the planet.  The son of Baskin Robbins’ founder, John abandoned his destiny to teach people instead about the virtues of a plant-based diet, and you will be forever changed by reading his book that comprehensively documents why we should eat lower on the food chain.  The author is precise with data, and he covers all the data points comprehensively, from cancer and heart disease risk, to genetically modified foods, to global warming, to animal cruelty.

Mike Anderson’s The Rave Diet & Lifestyle is fun and fairly quick to read, because it pulls no punches.  It’s hard hitting and unapologetic in its promotion of the plant-based diet.  It’s jam-packed with information (that duplicates Robbins, Fuhrman, and Campbell), well written, and contains lots of easy recipes at the end.  My only slight quibble with Anderson (and Fuhrman) is that I don’t think people in normal weight ranges need to be afraid of fats, the kind found in nuts, seeds, and unprocessed oils.

Here are three more of my picks from my Top Shelf–the most pivotal books on health and nutrition:

Dr. Robert O. Young and Shelley Young’s books and recipe books:  Sick and Tired, The pH Miracle, The pH Miracle for Weight Loss, Back to the House of Health I and II (containing many excellent recipes).  Dr. Young, with multiple PhDs, is the most credible authority on why an alkaline diet is the most important aspect of disease prevention and treatment.  His ace-in-the-hole over other authors is that his wife is a recipe developer and therefore gives practical help in addition to this century’s leading-edge nutrition theory.

Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, which contains a massive amount of great information and tons of recipes, newtrendspublishing.com,  877-707-1776 .  I mostly disagree with the author about meat and dairy (which she embraces, in fermented and organic forms), in light of The China Study’s implications, as well as a large body of other research documenting the virtues of avoiding animal proteins.  But I agree with everything else she promotes, and the book is worth owning just for the fermented foods information and recipes, where Fallon is the reigning authority.

Dr. Colin Campbell’s The China Study, the largest and most comprehensive nutrition study in history conducted jointly by Oxford and Cornell, the most empirical evidence ever gathered validating a plant-based diet. 

Colin Campbell is a professor of nutrition at Cornell University and has sat on the highest nutrition governing boards in the U.S.  He is the son of a cattle rancher and believed, in his early nutrition research, that he would find lack of protein to be the cause of childhood liver cancer in the Phillipines.

He found just the opposite: the wealthier children with good access to meat/milk were dying of liver cancer, not the poor children who could afford only plant food.  Time and again, Campbell and many other researchers discovered the same results: that in animals and humans, high consumption of animal protein causes all the modern Western diseases, including cancer, heart disease, autoimmune diseases, and much more.

The rodent studies are fascinating: two groups of mice are put on 5% animal protein pellets (casein, from milk) and 20% animal protein pellets, respectively.  That parallels an almost-vegan diet versus the typical American diet.  At the typical rodent lifespan, the 5% group were lean and healthy and the 20% group were full of cancerous tumors and many were dead (all would die early).

Even more fascinating is how the researchers could SWITCH the groups’ diets.  Lean, healthy rodents develop tumors and die when placed on the 20% animal protein diet, and formerly cancerous rodents lose weight, tumors are eliminated, and they live and thrive when placed on the 5% animal protein diet.  These studies were duplicated with the same results, by other researchers all over the globe.

Campbell went on to conduct the largest, most longitudinal, most comprehensive nutrition study in human beings, in history, yielding hundreds of statistically significant correlations.  He has been studying 6,500 people in China for about 30 years now.  Whether or not you completely eliminate animal foods from your diet, this book is so compelling that you will be motivated to make a commitment to a plant-based diet and share the message with others.

Don’t forget Tera’s Body Enlightenment System is available only until NOON TOMORROW (Saturday):

http://tinyurl.com/5qt4ve

If you missed it, you can write me and I’ll go grovel to her on your behalf, but I dunno, ’cause when she kicks it off, she’s paired everyone with a buddy and all that great stuff.  You will love it and you WILL lose weight the healthiest way possible.

In honor of that, in this blog series, I’m writing brief reviews of my very favorite nutrition books, starting with my favorite RAW FOOD books.  I’m telling you about the best books that you might want to buy, check out from the library, or at least know a little about.  These are by no means ALL the books I read on nutrition, just my favorites, what my friend Matthew calls The Top Shelf.  Just click on the book title to be taken to Amazon to buy it.

For those wanting to eat more raw food:

Any of Victoria Boutenko’s books

Igor and Valya Boutenko, Eating Without Heating (easy, great recipes)

Renee Underkoffler’s Living Cuisine (caveat: recipes are delicious and gourmet, but time consuming)

Kenney and Melngailis’ Raw Food Real World (gourmet, some labor intensive recipes, some pretty easy, the authors are gorgeous, the perfect examples of what raw cuisine does for beauty)

Gabriel Cousins’ Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine

Jordan Maerin’s Raw Foods For Busy People (easy, machine-free recipes)

Jennifer Cornbleet’s Raw Food Made Easy for 1 or 2 People

Brigitte Mars’ Rawsome! (lots of good info in addition to recipes)

Feel free to share some of your favorite books, too, as we go along in this series!

If you have been thinking about getting a water ionizer through the biannual group buys that I facilitate, to obtain wholesale pricing on 10+ units, we have enough now and are placing the order on MONDAY. 

Microbiologist and nutritionist Dr. Robert O. Young (author of The pH Miracle, Sick and Tired, and several other books) says that you can do more to neutralize the acidity in your cells with ALKALINE WATER than with all the alkaline food you could eat.  So, it’s frankly the best and easiest way to deal with acidic foods (topping the list: sodas, coffee, dairy, meat, and processed foods) as well as environmental pollution and stress that cause acidosis, burning out your tissues and aging your cells.

I am crazy about my under-sink mounted Life Ionizer, and I hate hearing about people paying $4,000 through the network marketing company’s product (which sits on top of your counter and attaches to the sink faucet with hoses!).  That’s Enagic or Kangen, the company I’m referring to.

Last year, with my alkaline water, I had my first-ever cold Utah winter without spots of cracked, dry, bleeding skin.  I feel a dramatic difference in my energy drinking alkaline water versus my reverse osmosis, distilled, bottled, or tap water.  My 15-year old son Kincade, who rolls his eyes at most of what I do like any teenager worth his salt, said to me a few weeks after we got the ionizer, “Mom, I don’t know what that water is or what that machine does.  But I feel AMAZING when I drink that water.”

So if you want the wholesale prices and are thinking about jumping in, we won’t be doing this for another six months, so email me at robyn@greensmoothiegirl.com for the details.  I am not allowed to publish them on the site because they are not the “manufacturer suggested retail prices” and dealers would pitch a fit.  Your transaction is direct with the company–I’m just a facilitator bringing them at least 10 at a time.  You get a five-year warranty and, if you want, financing so you can make payments.

And here’s the link of my report on alkaline water on the site, telling you what I believe IDEAL water to be, and discussing the health benefits of alkaline water—for your reading pleasure:

http://www.greensmoothiegirl.com/why-drink-alkaline-water.html

Here’s an independent web site’s rating of the various machines produced by the top reputable companies:

www.compareionizers.com

Email me for pricing of the various models (including a countertop one for those who rent their homes) at robyn@greensmoothiegirl.com.

Today I present to you the healthiest program I’ve ever seen to lose

weight, developed by my friend Tera.  It’s in keeping with

GreenSmoothieGirl.com principles of healing and promoting

energy and vitality through a plant-based, whole-foods, mostly

raw lifestyle.  And goes it one better—because for people DEADLY

SERIOUS about weight loss, there’s nothing better than 100% raw.

It’s the 30-Day Raw Food Weight Loss Program, or Body

Enlightenment System (BES).

You have less than three days to sign up for this transformational

30-Day weight loss program, and I recommend that you reserve

a spot right away.  You get daily email coaching, a real, live “buddy”

assigned to you to keep you accountable and supported every day,

a success planner and prep week, a fitness program,

a menu planner, a workbook, green recipes, and a lifetime pass

to the program if you want to come back again. 

http://tinyurl.com/5qt4ve

Let’s get off the emotional eating roller coaster, say goodbye

to addictions, and rediscover what you are really meant to look

and feel like, with this system guaranteed to help you release

excess weight and get you back in control of your eating habits, your 

health, and your life. 

I’m endorsing this because the program addresses SO much

more than just food.   Because you know our tendency to overeat

or eat the wrong foods is about issues deeper than the fact that

bad food tastes good, don’t you?

Angela Stokes lost 160 lbs. by eating a raw-food diet.  She said on CNN

recently, “If I did it, you can do it, too!”  She endorses this program.

This offer is covered by a money-back NO RISK guarantee.  The only thing

you’ll lose, then, is those extra pounds. 

Click here (or paste this link into your browser) to read what those who’ve

been through the program say, and to sign up.  This event closes at

noon on Oct. 25!

http://tinyurl.com/5qt4ve

You’re still reading . . . so I’m guessing you’ve “lost” weight only to find it again?

A few times?  How many times in your life have you gained and lost 10 lbs.?

Or 20?

Did you just sigh, thinking about how many times you’ve been through that?

So many people are out there telling you how to lose weight, and

I am furious with most of them—including the M.D.s—who teach

ways of losing weight that damage your health in the process.  Some just

want to grab their share of the big diet empire.  And others?  Well, maybe

they’re choosing to remain ignorant.  Ignorant of what Dr. Joel Fuhrman says

is even MORE evidence that plant foods prevent disease than we have evidence

that smoking causes lung cancer!

Calorie counting backfires.  Eating massive protein and minimizing carbs is a

cancer- and heart-disease-causing diet.  Eating for your blood type is

based on bogus “science,” at best.

At GreenSmoothieGirl.com, I don’t support that kind of dieting, and I’ve told

you on this blog exactly what’s wrong with all those dieting approaches.

Y’all have asked me to create a COMPREHENSIVE weight loss program.

I’ve thought about it.  But why re-invent the wheel, when it’s been done?

I’ve found that program, the one that will not only cause weight loss, but

VIBRANT HEALTH and minimized disease risk.  It’s essentially what

I would write, if I wrote a targeted weight-loss program.

I’ll tell you tomorrow!  Stay tuned, because you’ll have only three

days to jump in, at that point.

I just took the kids to the dollar movie tonight, Wall-E, for the last night of the “Staycation” we’ve been having for their fall school break.  If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a robot that is the only remaining life form on Earth, since humans destroyed it with profligate consumption and garbage pileup and toxic waste.  He goes around doing waste disposal, until he meets and falls for a probe sent from a spaceship where the remaining living humans are.  The probe (appropriately, “Eve”) has the task of trying to find any green life, so humans can come back to the planet and make it green again.

These humans are grossly overfed, underactive, basically obese babies floating on hover chairs with robots doing everything they need (like levering them back into their hover chairs if they fall out and fetching them yet more junk food).  They consume electronics and fast food in their stationary life–none of them have ever seen a plant, let alone eaten one.  Humans have forgotten how to work and to read well.  Somehow they must still be having sex, because the movie shows babies.  I wondered how that worked, because the humans can’t even walk.  (In the climactic ending scene, they all roll out of their hover chairs and begin trying to totter around.  They also plant the tiny little plant Eve found, and the captain says to all the people gathered around, “Kids, we’re going to plant lots of plants, like vegetable plants!  And pizza plants!”)

Afterward, I had a conversation with my kids about, how far-fetched IS it, really, that we are like this 700 years in the future, considering the direction we’ve been going?  I told them that they haven’t experienced, like I have, a time when there were no video games (unless you count Atari Pong, wasn’t it called?–we thought that was so cool! and Ms. PacMan in the video arcade, if you had a quarter).  They weren’t around, like I was, back before everyone got fat.  (It has happened in only a couple of generations!)  Back when people made dinner every night.  This is a little part of our conversation:

Emma: Mom! We need to start recycling!

Me: Are you kidding me? Recycling is for people who actually BUY glass, plastic, and tin.  See, we don’t eat much of anything from boxes, cans, and jars.  The occasional can I use, I can toss in the neighbor’s recycling thing on garbage day.  Our eating 99% plant food, and growing a lot of it, is better than recycling, and the fact that every scrap goes to the compost pile means that we turn that into fertilizer, which makes us more food, and so on forever.  What we do is UNCYCLE.

Emma: You just made that word up.  The Joneses totally recycle!

Me: No, I didn’t make it up.  It’s good to recycle, but the Joneses recycle because they eat lots of packaged, processed food.  If you don’t eat that, you don’t even HAVE to recycle.

Kincade:  Man, those hover chairs would be COOOOOOL, though.  You wouldn’t have to do ANYTHING.

Sigh.

I’ve got a bit more work to do to teach my kids that WORK IS A BLESSING.  The law of the harvest and all that–I love every time I haul cabbage out of my garden and in 30 minutes turn 2 big heads of it into 6-7 quarts of raw sauerkraut.  But watching the big old incapacitated grownup babies on Wall-E may have influenced my kids a bit in that direction!  Have you seen the movie with your kids, if you have any–and what did you think?

Check out the gsg.com homepage for my brand-new video on composting and my garden:

www.GreenSmoothieGirl.com (or see it on YouTube–click on “watch this in high quality”)

What a year this has been.  The much-predicted failure of American investment banking has come to pass, our nation’s net worth has plummeted precipitously, and we’ve started into what promises to be a long recession.  I just came across this quote by a wise man named Joseph Smith, from 175 years ago:

“Our nation, which possesses greater resources than any other, is rent, from center to circumference, with party strife, political intrigues, and sectional interest; our counselors are panic stricken, our legislators are astonished, and our senators are confounded, our merchants are paralyzed, our tradesmen are disheartened, our mechanics out of employ, our farmers distressed, and our poor crying for bread, our banks are broken, our credit ruined, and our states overwhelmed in debt, yet we are, and have been in peace.”

So, many other times in even the comparatively short history of the U.S., we have found ourselves in perilous times.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, right? 

But we need not fear because we can do simple, inexpensive things to prepare.  People of the dominant religion where I live (Utah) are counselled to store a year’s supply of food.  Yet no matter how long this counsel is given, and how urgently, at any given time, only 15 percent of LDS (Mormon) people actually have a year’s supply.  At the moment, church leaders are pleading with the people to get a three-month supply in place in the immediate future.

This is a smart thing to do for anyone, not just LDS people.  You have observed how sensitive supply and demand is, for food.  (I mentioned in a blog comment recently that I cannot buy canning jars anywhere, because Kerr and Ball cannot keep up with the demand nationally.  You have seen the price of rice increase 250 percent.)  That’s all I’m going to say about that, because I frankly hate scare tactics.  (Love Mike Adams “The Health Ranger,” hate all the fear-mongering in his newsletters.)

Victoria Boutenko says she calculated once that her family of four could live for a year on one 50-lb. bag of wheat, by sprouting it.  I don’t know how that’s possible, unless she is calculating nutrients rather than caloric needs—but anyway, she said that.  The LDS Church has a calculator at lds.org, and one person needs 200 lbs. of grain per year.  (Of course, 50 lbs. of sprouted grain has in some cases as much nutrition, plus lots of live enzymes, that 200 lbs. of dry grain does!)  Thus, my family of six has stored 1,200 lbs. of grain: wheat, quinoa, rye, rolled oats and oat groats, popcorn, Kamut, and spelt.  That may sound like an obscene quantity, but when you add it up, people eat a lot of food!  We also store 400 lbs. of legumes (lentils, split peas, beans) and lots of other items like coconut oil, olive oil, agave, honey, and sea salt.  I do more than that, but if all the rest will be overwhelming to you for now, just start with a three-month supply of those basics.  When you’ve got those inexpensive bases covered, consider storing bottles of VitaMineral Green for your greens; cans of Ultimate Meal for easy, optimal nutrition; nuts and seeds (frozen in Ziplocs where possible); and spices, herbs, and condiments. 

The point is, when your food storage is a bunch of white flour, white sugar, canned powdered milk, canned turkey, and macaroni (the staples of most Mormon one-year supplies), you might not end up hungry, but you’re going to end up sick.

Store whole grains, and know how to use them.  What I am teaching you in Step 9 isn’t just for good nutrition—it’s for good emergency preparedness!  When you know how to sprout as I teach in Step 7, you have the invaluable skill to use dry, long-term storage foods (like any grain) and make it live food that will keep your family healthy—not just alive.

My European immigrant ancestors came across the plains from the East Coast to Utah, with handcarts, and some of them were caught in winter storms.  Their nutrition was sometimes reduced, in the winter, to small rations of cornmeal fried in lard, day after day.  Some of them died of starvation, as well as exposure.  Some became ill with typhoid, malaria, scurvy, and smallpox.

We have the ability to spend very little but have the peace of mind to be prepared well, by storing whole foods.  I hope you’re getting a year’s supply of RAW ALMONDS in the current group buy—yet another way to eat well now AND buy very inexpensive insurance against emergencies.  It’s the kind of insurance that doesn’t need the backing of our virtually bankrupt federal government.  It’s the kind of insurance that pays no premiums to a huge company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, being robbed by its executives.