Every morning I make a green smoothie to start the day for Ellen and myself. We started doing this after reading Terry Wahl’s book “The Wahl’s Protocol”. Dr. Wahl was able to beat MS using paleo diet principals and functional medicine. She did all the standard medical protocols for MS and ended up a complete invalid. At that point she decided to hit the books and find her own way to health. Watching her give a TED talk on her findings, you can’t even tell she has MS. There are enough brain similarities between MS and stroke that we decided to give her protocol a try.
The challenge is that her protocol involves eating way more greens than we usually eat, and we are pretty good with our greens. I decided that the only reasonable way to get enough greens into our diet was to incorporate dried, powdered greens in the form of a smoothie at least once a day. Naturally my creative juices got started and I created a super green smoothie blend, combined with a ton of other gut healing and brain healing nutrients. My first batch cost me over a $1000 for about 200 servings worth. This crazy mixture has 23 different powders mixed together including Kale, Broccoli Sprout, Alfalfa leaf, Chlorella, Fo-Ti root, Blueberry extract, and Bladderwrack. The rest is mostly specific amino acids, herbal extracts, vitamins, and collagens.
I dump a couple ounces of this mix into 4 cups of water in my blender along with a couple generous squirts of my stevia liquid sweetener to get started. Then I add about half a cup of frozen green banana slices and a cup of other dark frozen fruit – blueberries, dark cherries, or strawberries. I don’t usually use blackberries because their tiny seeds get caught in my teeth. Then I blend this all up and we have a “green” smoothie, which usually is more of a purple color because of the fruit. If you want to pump up the protein levels you could add a couple raw pastured eggs or possibly some whey protein or other protein powder.
I would not expect anybody to create the crazy mixture I made up, so I asked Amber, over at Elliott’s Natural Foods, what the best/most popular green drink mixes were on the market. Her top three picks were:
Green Vibrance
Ultra Juice Green
& Macro Greens
Just to encourage my patients to jump onto the green juice lifestyle, she offered to take $5 off the price of any one of the above products 30 or 60 day supply just by bringing in this coupon when you stop by her store on El Camino Ave. Link to coupon
By my calculations my green drink is equal to eating 8 to 10 cups of leafy green vegetables. The nutrition from the dark berries is equally important for all the antioxidants and flavinols. These are actually the same chemicals that give these fruits their dark color.
The frozen green bananas is for a different reason. While bananas are still green, they contain a lot of resistant starch, which feeds the good guy probiotic bacteria in your gut. This resistant starch turns into sugar as the banana ripens. This ingredient you will have to prepare yourself, as I have never seen it in a grocer’s freezer. Just peel your bananas and cut them up. Then put the cut pieces into a Ziploc bag and freeze. Be sure to spread out the banana pieces somewhat otherwise it will all freeze into one huge lump.
Starting your morning with a big load of greens and berries helps take down the inflammation throughout your body and supports your detoxification process in your liver. I usually wait until around 11:00 in the morning to start eating, and this is what I start with. I simply take a jar of my smoothie to work and have it at my break time. This then holds me until lunch around 1:30 when I eat my major protein meal of the day. I will then have fresh greens in the form of a big salad, along with my lunch protein. Dinner is usually more of a snack as we don’t want to eat anything heavy before bedtime.
It is best to not eat anything for three hours before you head for bed. We are seeking to give the body a rest from food for 12 to 16 hours every day. That way it will have 4 to 8 hours of time to clean the body out and break down any poisons left over from the metabolic process of living. So toward that end I try to keep my eating between 11 am and 7 pm. Coffee or tea in the early morning does not disturb this process. In fact it helps it.
This time of year is especially a good time for bumping up your green consumption. In earlier times winter usually meant famine and the only thing to eat were early greens coming up and tree bark. There were no ripe fruits, vegetables, or other things to eat, unless you got lucky and caught a rabbit. Our bodies naturally used wintertime to heal and clean out the toxins from the prior year. It was also the time to live off the stored fat from all the foods we ate during the harvest season. Our bodies find winter a natural time to switch into fat burning. Winter is a slower time of year. Our metabolism slows down in preparation for the coming lean months. This is part of the reason it is so easy to gain weight over the holidays.
For us a green smoothie is a quick and simple answer to boosting nutritious greens in our diet. I suppose in an ideal world we would be harvesting these greens from our hot house every morning and juicing them fresh each day. But I don’t have a hot house and juicing is a pain in the posterior. I feel that using a green drink mix is a very reasonable answer to support our busy lifestyle.