Archive for February, 2009

Dear Robyn

The above are the gadgets that you are using for your water system, right?

Could you advise the brands and models which you are using.  Would like to get a tried and tested one.

Tks

JK

Many health food nuts like me have a mental list of ingredients they know are nutritional powerhouses, and we want to get them in our diet but often fail to do so, because we don’t know how or don’t fit it into the day’s menu. Green smoothies are the perfect way to do that—just toss some stuff in! Be adventurous. Use those exotic, high-impact nutrition items if you can afford them. If not, please don’t worry about it—you’re getting tons of fiber, vitamins, minerals, and enzymes from the simple greens and fruit combinations. Smoothies don’t have to contain expensive, exotic ingredients. But not all of the “other ingredients” discussed in this section are expensive.

Kelp and dulse

If you don’t mind the seaweedy taste of sea vegetables like kelp and dulse, use those high-impact foods in your blender. Just a little bit is enough, and they are more thyroid nourishing than any other food. So if you are hypothyroid (as about 25 percent of women are in America, many of them undiagnosed), consider getting one or both of these foods in your daily diet. Green smoothies are an easy way to do that. Those who suffer with low energy and slow metabolism often have low thyroid problems. (And diagnosing it can be difficult, involving full-panel blood testing done by a hormone clinic, examining the interplay of several different variables.) Taking a thyroid hormone causes disease risk and can burn out the thyroid even more over time, especially the synthetic drugs such as Synthroid and Cytomel. Sea vegetables nourish and support the thyroid rather than sort of jab and poke it to perform.

Flax oil

If you don’t know how to get flax oil in your diet, minerals from greens are absorbed better when eaten with some fats, so putting flax oil in your green smoothie is a great idea. You’ll never even notice it, used in this form. A tablespoon daily is a good dosage for an adult to avoid inflammatory ailments, and protect healthy cell membranes needed to keep toxic elements out but allow nutrients in. Flax oil has wide-ranging benefits uncovered in research in the past decade involving the immune, circulatory, reproductive, cardiovascular, and nervous system. It’s rich in essential fatty acids, including the rather rare omega-6 and omega-9 nutrients that your body cannot manufacture itself and must receive from outside sources.

Using flax oil, you can avoid taking fish oil with all its attendant risks (fish being tainted with mercury and other pollutants). Flax has more lignans by 80 times than the next-highest food, which cut your risk of breast and colon cancers dramatically. Research connects it to reduction of PMS symptoms, improvement in multiple sclerosis treatment, reduction in allergies and arthritis and diabetes, as well as eczema, asthsma, and loss of eyesight. It increases fat burning and allows you to recover from sprains and muscle fatigue more quickly.

You should never heat flax oil, which damages its nutritional properties, and you must purchase it refrigerated and use it very fresh, as it becomes rancid in only a month or two. This is one of the more expensive ingredients you can add to smoothies. If you prefer, you can grind a small amount of flaxseed instead. This is inexpensive, but the whole seed is mucilaginous, thereby making your smoothie thicker and bulkier, so if you add ground flaxseed instead of oil, you may want to add more water to compensate. Use freshly ground flaxseed, as it oxidizes and becomes rancid quickly once ground. You can use your BlendTec Total Blender, or a small $10 electric coffee grinder from any store like Target or Walmart.

If you add interesting things to your GS, let us know! I’ll be posting more of my additions over the next 6 days.

I have just a few hundred pounds of raw, unpasteurized almonds left, and I’m willing to ship them, and you can order 50 lbs. instead of 100 if you want.  Shipping adds $1/lb., so they are $4/lb. if you are not local.  (We lost money in the group buy shipping to the east coast, so the shipping has increased a little.)  They are in the GreenSmoothieGirl.com store now, under Group Buys, until the supply is gone!

I was recently in a conversation where a 23-year old adult said, regarding this topic, “If I don’t drink bottled water, where will I get it?”  She was totally serious.  Back in the olden days (before water bottles but after the wheel was invented), we used to fill a reusable water bottle or cup at the sink or from the pitcher in the fridge or water cooler or fountain at work.  Soccer moms took a 2-gallon cooler with paper cups to the game.

A popular email goes around constantly about how a Johns Hopkins newsletter stated that Sheryl Crow’s breast cancer was caused by dioxins leaching into the bottled water she drank.  Sheryl Crow doesn’t know what caused her breast cancer any more than anyone else can isolate one factor like that (out of so many in our daily environment).  The watchdog sites like truthorfiction.com and snopes.com were quick to repudiate the story.  This should not, however, be taken as evidence that plastics are perfectly safe.

While this email has no accuracy, and highly dangerous dioxins do not leach from plastic into water, other toxic chemicals like phthalates do.  Avoid bottled drinking water, which often contains more chemicals in the water than tap water does.  It may be convenient, but taking five seconds to fill our own water container not only saves us from drinking chemicals, it also decreases the impact on the environment.  Currently well over 1 million drinking water bottles DAILY are filling up our municipal garbage piles.

My town of 10,000 people ships its garbage to Price, Utah, two hours away, because our landfills are full.  One of the biggest-impact and lowest-sacrifice things we can do to ameliorate that situation is to SWEAR OFF BOTTLED WATER.

The best thing to put your green smoothie in is a simple canning jar.  No leaching of anything.  The only bad thing is that you have to be careful not to break it.

I have changed to using only agave nectar for sweetner in our foods. I have only found it available locally in small size containers. It is unreasonably expensive that way… not to mention that I seem to run out frequently. It takes 2 containers just to make one recipe of Almond Joy! I saw you using a gallon size container in your new YouTube and was wondering where we can get it in that quantity. 

Lynn

PS Since I am always a little short on time, I was wondering if the almonds in your Almond Joy Fudge, have to be dehydreated once sprouted or can they just be towel dried the morning after soaking, chopped and added immediately?