Marlene told me, after my class in Kennewick, Washington, that she makes chia pudding for her diabetic husband as a meal or dessert. (Cinnamon is a great blood-sugar controller—note that she adds lots of cinnamon to his pudding.) It’s a great idea, since chia is a power food, and high in protein as well. (It’s pure fallacy that you can’t get enough protein eating a plant-based diet! You don’t have to go out of your way to find protein—greens, nuts, seeds, grains, and legumes average about 10%, which is perfect. But chia is particularly high, at 23%.)
I asked for the recipe, and here it is. Thank you, Marlene!
MARLENE’S CHIA SEED PUDDING
Stir together
1 TBSP chia seed
about 1/4 to 1/3 cup of any milk alternative or water (hubby uses unsweetened chocolate almond milk, I use regular or coconut milk)
As much cinnamon as you enjoy (Hubby is diabetic so he gets about 1 tsp, I use less)
Let those two soak while you are busy for about 20 minutes.
Add any seed that you like:
1/2 TBSP sesame seed
!/2 TBSP sunflower seed
1/2 TBSP pumpkin seed
Stir above together and add more liquid if needed
1 TBS nuts
1/2 TBSP unsweetened flaked coconut
Sprinkle of hemp seed powder
Stir all together and then add whatever fruit you enjoy. We enjoy it with no added sweetener, just frozen berries in the winter or fresh fruit in the summer. I usually do not add the fruit till he is ready to eat, it can sit in the fridge for a couple of days if he gets too busy. When I add the fruit, I mix in a little more liquid.
This gives hubby a nice breakfast or dessert and does not raise his blood sugar as other breakfasts and desserts do. He likes the energy he gets from eating it. It is usually a daily meal for him. Quantities can be increased for a family (our kids are gone and raised).
I have been a special education teacher for 17 years and switched to teaching kindergarten this school year! I am so excited to spend my days with 37 energetic little people.
To start the year off, we talk about how to treat each other and filling each other’s invisible bucket each day with kindness. We want to be bucket fillers, not bucket dippers.
We now have a jar in our class, and whenever I catch someone being kind we get a warm fuzzy (a pom-pom). When our bucket is full, we get a class party. Well…I have been a green smoothie drinker for over a year. My students see me drinking one every morning. When I asked them what kind of party they wanted to have, when our bucket is full, can you guess what they wanted?
Not ice cream, not candy, but a green smoothie party! I am so proud of them, and this Friday we will be earning our first green smoothie party! Way to go kindergarteners! Thank you Robyn for inspiring me and generations to come!
~Jenn Jettner, Spring Lake, Michigan
Robyn’s note:
If it weren’t for the internet, how would I ever “meet” Jenn, who loves teaching and children so much that she teaches kids to fill kindness buckets every day AND she teaches them to drink green juice! (See the photo attached I asked her to take—she said the party was a brilliant success!) Sometimes I can’t believe I get to read awesome stuff like this every day! I love it!
Kids just want a party! It just has to be special and fun. It doesn’t have to feature junk food! In fact, we do them a disservice by modeling the attitude that parties have to be toxic. If we stop and check ourselves, we might realize that WE, not the kids, have some kind of mental rule that it’s not a party if there’s no sugar?
Jenn (unintentionally, perhaps) did exactly what I did with my 18-month old when I started making and drinking green smoothies. I originally acted like it was very special, and I kept it all to myself at first and just let him watch me drinking it.
He wanted some and I was a little miserly in my sharing it at first—I purposefully created a bit of scarcity and demand! He asked what it was, and I said, “Green ice cream!”
FYI, the whole thing eventually lost its cachet. That 18-month old is now an 18-year old. Last month he won the popular vote for Homecoming King in a landslide.
(Unfortunately, no teacher nominated him—you can make the obvious inferences about my kid, both good and bad, LOL! I used to wring my hands about his attitude towards grades and school, when he was little, but I’ve “grown up” a lot in my parenting. Now I just enforce the lower limits—nothing less than a C- is acceptable! And I laugh about and enjoy how different he is from me, and hope that rather impressive charisma gives him what his GPA lacks, because it’s his life to live, not mine!)
But despite his rolling his eyes at my healthy habits, sometimes he comes over from his dad’s hot-dogs-and-Top-Ramen house to get a healthy meal or snack here. A really pretty girl at school recently baked him something. He knows her to be really interested in health and taking care of her body. She told him he could pay her back by making her a green smoothie! Suddenly he is interested in not only drinking them, but also MAKING them.
Green smoothies are making a popularity comeback in his life I haven’t seen for….oh, a decade and a half?
I recently taught you how to make Rejuvelac. If, like me, you’re looking to increase lacto-fermented, probiotic foods in your diet, today I’ve got another idea for you. (Try to get at least two cultured foods in your diet every day! This is Step 8 of 12 Steps to Whole Foods.)
Have you ever heard of Beet Kvass? I recently had some when a vendor wanting me to sell his stuff mailed me samples. Too expensive to buy on the internet and ship—but I loved it. I am going to plant even MORE beets next spring. I have lots of jars of cultured beets in my food storage, which are 3 years old, but now I’m making them into a probiotic drink. I remember how shocked I was to learn that you could “put up” raw vegetables that “keep” for long periods of time, using lacto-fermentation. Now it seems common and easy, a “lost art” that people have done in virtually every culture of the world for thousands of years.
One of my employees, Melinda, said to me the other day about a pile of beets from my garden, “I love how beets look!” Kristin just saw this photo on my computer and made the same comment. ME TOO! They’re so ruby-red!
That juice staining your hands is potent pigmentation with high levels of carotenoid and other antioxidants that protect your eyes, normalize blood pressure, prevent inflammation and colo-rectal cancers, and cleanse your blood and your liver.
If beets make your urine pink, please read more detail about that in Chapter 5 of my 12 Steps to Whole Foods manual. Cultured Beets / Beet Kvass
2-3 large beets
1/4 cup whey (the clear yellow liquid, separated from the milk solids in yogurt or kefir) or 1 pkg. Vegetable Culture from Body Ecology. Or, double the salt and refrigerate for longer to cut the saltiness.
2 tsp Original Crystal Himalayan salt
2 quart jars
water
Peel and chop beet in 2″ pieces. Place beet chunks in your jars. Add salt and ¼ cup whey (or 1 pkg. Body Ecology Vegetable Culture).
Add enough filtered water to fill the rest of the container, leaving 1″ headroom.
Stir well, cover, and let it sit at room temperature for 3-5 days. Put jars in fridge or cold storage. They will keep there indefinitely (I have kept my cultured beets for 2 years in cold storage, which is not nearly as cool as refrigeration).
Remove from fridge and blend in high-speed blender (with extra water if you prefer it to be thinner).
Enjoy chilled as a drink, mixed with a little bit of fresh lime juice, or freshly ground pepper. You can use kvass in recipes to replace vinegar.
Drink in small quantities with a meal, to facilitate digestion and build up healthy colonies of good bacteria in your gut. You can drink 8 oz. if you are used to probiotic foods and have a healthy diet. If not, start with just a few ounces and work your way up.
Thanks to reader Christy White for suggesting I write about beet kvass. Christy is a fan of Kristen Bowen’s site livingthegoodlifenaturally.com. Kristen recently wrote about beet kvass, and I have incorporated some of her ideas.
I recently received this inspiring letter (edited for length) and photo from GSG Cheryl. You’re going to love reading it!
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl:
I met you at the Portland conference, and had you sign my book after the talk. I know you meet a lot of people and probably don’t remember me, but I was there with my mom, and told you about how Costco hooked me up with GreenSmoothieGirl.com when I purchased my blender.
I am 5’6″ and weighed 155 pounds when I came back from our home in Arizona in May 2011. When my husband and I returned to our home in Washington, we went to our local Costco for food. I told my husband that if the blender road show was there, THIS was the year I was going to take the plunge. Lo and behold, the BlendTec guy was there and I became the proud owner of a high-speed blender. The demo guy gave me a paper with three recipes, and the URL GreenSmoothieGirl.com.
I came home that day with my blender, spinach and fruit. The first thing I did was go to GSG on the web and my life was transformed from that day forward.
I have been making green smoothies daily since May. I’m now 100% vegan and eat mostly raw. I have lost over 23 pounds and have no desire to eat bad foods anymore. My taste buds have been reprogrammed to the beautiful plant foods offered by nature and I now love myself too much to use my body as a garbage can.
Once you learn how good real food tastes, you can’t go back to the SAD (Standard American Diet) way of dying (it’s certainly not living).
Robyn, you were my catalyst for change along with my own will for a better life. I am eternally grateful that you are there to spread the message about how we can all benefit from changes in our food. I am now sharing your message with people that ask me what I’ve done to look so great and feel so fabulous. I’m proud to call myself part of the “green team.”
In Denver this summer, I met Lisa, who was, not long ago, completely debilitated by Lupus. Here’s her story, in 4 minutes, that I hope inspires you, if you have an auto-immune condition, to change your nutrition.
(Sorry it was windy, which affected the sound. TURN IT UP!)
I have been studying the methods of the natural practitioners lately (Wigmore or Gerson clinics, for instance), and one of the highest SUCCESS rates are with auto-immune conditions like Lupus.
I just watched a few YouTube videos of people with Lupus, talking about what a day in their life is like—a very depressing 15 minutes. People grotesquely swollen from steroids, devastated immune function allowing staph infections and bronchitis and pneumonia. Folks undergoing surgeries to address necrosis from the drug complications, every joint in their body aching, a need to sleep all day long. A deceased Lupus victim’s son saying, “The drugs trying to save you from Lupus kill the rest of your body.”
It recommits me to do what’s in my power to strengthen immune function and prevent these horrific diseases including fibromyalgia, Chronic Fatigue, etc. For me, my children, my readers.
Sitting around hoping they’ll find a drug that “cures” it or throwing money at pharmaceutical companies, to that end, seems a big mistake. (Apparently, the last time they found a new drug for it, Eisenhower was in the White House.)
Other REALLY treatable conditions we get constant emails about, highly responsive to treatment using excellent nutrition: type II diabetes and heart disease.
It’s worth it, to expend the effort to return to eating the way people did when cancer affected 1 in 100, rather than 1 in 3, and Lupus was unheard of. Thanks for inspiring us, Lisa!
That’s how much green smoothie my daughter, Emma, made for nearly 1,000 people who came to my local classes in Orem, Layton and Sandy a few weeks ago! It was a cases of the fishes and the loaves—-thanks to Dixie cups!
My favorite moment besides the AWESOME return-to-health stories we heard was a lady on the front row. She’d already confessed when I asked for a show of hands, “Who has no idea what this racket is, and got dragged here by someone who loves you?”
I read a few pages from my children’s book, The Adventures of Junk Food Dude, where Green Smoothie Guy suggests to his new friend, Junk Food Dude:
“Try not eating sugar for four days!” (“Then good food will taste great!”)
Upon that statement, the lady on the front row gasped, “OH MY LORD!”
As if 4 days without sugar might kill her. I cracked up. It is what it is. That white stuff is the most addictive substance on Planet Earth.
And then, out of 300 people in the room, she won the 12 Steps to Whole Foods course and whooped it up, which made my night.
Check out an excerpt of this email from Kim Newhouse in Arizona, with the photos she sent us:
“I won the [12 Steps to] Whole Foods Course when Robyn came to Tucson and I wanted to show you all what I’ve been doing with it! My birthday was coming up so I decided to do a ‘Green Smoothie Demo Party’ with my friends. It was so successful that I did another one the following week, opening it up to the first 15 people who signed up from our buying club (we order Azure Standard, Frontier Wholesale, local honey and other foods together—there are a couple hundred on our yahoo group from all over Southern Arizona. In fact, one of our members was your volunteer who ate the plate of greens!) Everyone had so much fun that we’ve decided to have GSG parties every Friday and Saturday night of the first weekend of each month!
My husband made a list on the web where individuals can sign up for an ingredient to bring to make a recipe that’s featured in the selected videos we’ll be watching. We obviously made the smoothies the first time and this time we’ll be doing super salads, 2 dressings, and the almond joy fudge! We’ll do the fudge first and stick it in the freezer while we watch the other videos and assemble salads…by the time we’re done eating those, the fudge will be ready to enjoy
You’ve got many new followers in Tucson now! Here’s a testimonial from a 21 year old who attended my first party (she has 7 siblings):
“We all love the green smoothies and are making them at least once a day with ginger, bee pollen, kale, collard greens, chard, spinach, cabbage, chia, flax oil, and fruit. My brothers think they are dessert and say we haven’t made a green smoothie they didn’t like yet. Thank you so much for opening your home for green smoothie night and we are looking forward to the next one!”
The night before my bet with Matthew started—I must pay $10,000 if I eat any sugar—I told the kids. I wanted them to be part of watching me.
(Matthew’s mom and grandma had come to my class in Sandy the week before we started, and I asked his mom to let me know if she saw M cheat. She said, “And my son has to pay you ten grand? No way.” Duh. What was I thinking?)
My kids gasped at the sum and said, “Where would you get ten thousand dollars?” I said, solemnly, gulping: “Well….I’d have to sell one of you kids.”
I think now my children will be rather supportive of the Sugar Bet. Vigilant, even.
The point, though, I told Tennyson, is that I can CHOOSE and I don’t HAVE to eat sugar, so the danger is very low that I will have to sell a kid.
It’s all upside. Kristin said to me last week, “When I eat sugar, my body hurts.”
As for me, when I eat it, I feel anxious when I wake up the next morning instead of positive and excited for the day.
Matthew loves gross-out incentive contests. He has this can of silkworm larvae that he wanted us to bet—if we eat sugar, we have to eat 2 silkworm larvae. He claims a friend of his ate them and they’re the worst food in the history of food.
(I’d eat something yucky, so that probably wouldn’t work with me. After all, I drink wheat grass all the time even though I get chills down my spine—in a bad way—just THINKING about the kind of wheatgrass we have around here. At CHI, it was sweeter and….better, somehow.)
Matthew is a Yellow personality (see Hartman’s Color Code) and makes EVERYTHING into a game. And I’m a Red/Blue, so I hate to lose and I hate to fail. I predict nobody pays anybody a dime and at the end of a year, we’re both happier, wealthier (from no purchases of desserts) and healthier.
Matthew and I were talking after a Zumba/yoga marathon last night, about how my favorite thing, mint-frosting brownies, weren’t tempting early that evening at my neighborhood 9/11 meeting/BBQ.
It’s like when I was in church, as a kid, and they taught us to make up our minds about our values before we’re in a dicey situation. Like, if you have made the decision in an absolute way that you don’t do drugs, then there’s no temptation when your friends are at a party smoking pot. The decision was made long ago.
Making a Sugar Bet takes all the decision-making away. There’s no choice about the brownie. No way is it worth $10,000. And my health gets to stay outstanding, instead of just great, as a result.
It’s ALL upside! Two weeks in, I haven’t even been tempted. I am loving the Sugar Bet. In fact, I want to make it stricter. It’s too easy right now. I’ll get Matthew on video soon, to negotiate that.
Sometimes I re-post comments my readers make, because….I think they’re important enough not to get buried. Because someone said something pithy or cool or weird. Or because it’s my blog and I just feel like it.
In response to my post “Classroom Rewards That Aren’t Food”:
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: I’m new! Just bought your book, which is brill. When should I drink my green smoothies, and how many times a day?
Answer: Sue, you can have green smoothies WHENEVER YOU WANT, as much as you want! Three meals a day, for several months, if you want. (Just have a variety of ingredients. You’ll lose weight—if you have any excess weight.) Once a day. Twice a day. For any of the three meals, or an afternoon snack. Upside down or rightside up. I’m feeling like Dr. Seuss here…..could you, would you, on a train? Would you, could you, in the rain?
I drink mine at the baseball game, in the car, at the tennis match, in the airport, at my classes. The more publicly, the better. The more people who see, RIGHT ON! Turned up noses, gagging sounds, jokes? Bring it. That’s just a first reaction. Starts a conversation and in 90 seconds of my telling WHY I do it, they’re 80% more likely to go make something GREAT happen in their daily food regimen.
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: As an elementary music teacher, I have to explain that my green smoothie isn’t kryptonite or mold. (No coffee or soda for me!) Several students wrote me thank-you letters at the end of the year and drew pictures of my green smoothies (your drink). I didn’t realize it had made any kind of impression! I quoted you about sugar being “the nice girl’s crack cocaine” and asked friends on facebook to join me in the sugar bet….no takers so far! —Sandi
Answer: Sandi, kryptonite, mold. Haha! Realizing WHAT AN IMPACT we make when we set a nutritional example. Isn’t it AMAZING?! In no area of life are people MORE desperate for a Pied Piper than in the arena of NUTRITION. It’s like people need to be led out of the abyss, through the Red Sea, somewhere better than the hell of lupus, high blood pressure, and obesity they’re living in. We need as many examples as possible. On average, when people hear it from the 3rd person, that’s when they start listening.
None of your friends wanna give up their cocaine? Heh. Well, that’s too bad, but do it with me and Matthew and we can all feel superior, holier than thou. (I’m kidding. We’re doing it, and we’ll tell about how great we feel, and more people will join in…..when they’re ready. Maybe after they get the flu this winter.)
In response to my blog entry, “How much is your health worth?” Victoria invoked this saying (let us know if you are aware of the author):
“A person with their health has hundreds of dreams. A person without their health has ONE.”
Read p. 116, The Diet Dilemma: Can What We Eat Really Prevent Cancer? Regarding the comments of nutrition and natural medicine practitioner Anne Duney, PhD; Ayurvedic doctor Pratima Raichur; and myself (GSG), journalist Leilah Mundt says,
“As different[ly] as these three health gurus approach diet, it is astonishing how similar their recommendations for a cancer free life are. In my conversations with all of them, the reoccurring themes were undeniably obvious:
1) Lessen your toxic burden by steering clear of all packaged, processed and refined foods which contain harmul chemicals and preservatives,
2) Help your amazing body heal itself through eating mostly whole, fresh plant foods as close to their natural state as possible, and
3) Seriously limit your intake of cancer causing foods, including red meat, fried foods, and refined sugars.”
She ends her article with a green smoothie recipe. This makes me happy.
Dear GreenSmoothieGirl: I really like the idea of adding the Rejuvelac as my green smoothie base, but I’m honestly totally freaked out to leave something perishable on my countertop in an unsealed container for several days. What are the chances that “bad bacteria” get in there and make me sick? I really appreciate any feedback you have. It sounds like a great opportunity to make green smoothies do even more for me, but I can’t get over the initial concept. –Grace
Answer: Grace, I think it might help if I explain the concept a bit more. Fermented foods are part of your diet already, if you eat yogurt or sauerkraut, or even beer. The manufacturer had to let it sit at room temperature for a time, to grow the cultures.
Also, before refrigeration, human beings had a stronger inner terrain and microbes rarely harmed them. Of course, now we have antibiotics that have seriously damaged most people’s balance of beneficial microorganisms colonizing the digestive tract. We also have refined foods weakening us, and few, if any, cultured foods strengthening us. We now seem to believe that killing a couple million of the billions of microscopic critters around us will somehow do the trick.
It’s a weird modern concept that everything we eat has to be sterilized—ancient peoples lived amongst billions of organisms very peacefully for thousands of years. So maybe our food is sterilized, fumigated, pasteurized, irradiated…..but there are billions of organisms everywhere ELSE (which makes the antibiotic wipes a pointless waste of money).
So, it feels unnatural to you but only because of our strange modern traditions, and the fact that we’ve gotten away from eating foods that nurture our gut’s need for healthy colonization. Just ONE course of antibiotics can change the gut’s internal terrain forever.
Every culture of the world eats cultured foods. Some chew up a food and spit it, with their saliva, into an earthen pot, and drink it a week later. (I won’t be teaching you those methods, don’t worry.) There are literally hundreds of types of cultured foods, in traditional / indigenous peoples, and in people who have not completely adopted processed diets.
The most complete and well known work on this concept is Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions, which has some good info but advocates for lots of meat and dairy and a very rich diet. My 12 Steps to Whole Foods program deals with it in a condensed way in Ch. 8 and uses what I feel are a do-able, moderate amount of probiotic foods that do not require us to purchase $10/lb. animal parts. My work focuses on culturing vegetables, optionally some raw, antibiotic- and hormone-free milk, or coconut liquid. (I now culture my coconut liquid before using it in Hot Pink Breakfast Smoothie).
My blog on 9/15 talks about learning vicariously through others—the examples I gave were learning from others’ health disasters. But you can learn from my health victories, too. Does it help you to know that I have had a quart or a half gallon of raw kefir, or yogurt, or coconut kefir, or sprouts, or Rejuvelac, or sauerkraut, on my counter, pretty much every day of my life for the past 17 years? We have had zero instances of problems, illness, food poisoning.
It also helps if you understand the process of how food has historically been preserved. You can preserve foods a few ways. One, drying it to dramatically slow oxidation, which often involves lots of salt. Two, can it by killing all its lifeforce (enzymes and vitamins) so that there’s very little to oxidize, and then sealing it against air and bacteria. Third, utilizing lactobacillus and other beneficial organisms and lactic acid to break down the proteins and preserve the food (fermenting).
The way I make sauerkraut (see Ch. 8 of 12 Steps) is that the unrefined salt preserves it for a few days while the (slower) lactic acid begins to take over. I have two-year old raw sauerkraut (that I preserved with whey from my yogurt/kefir) that has been unsealed (but covered tightly with a lid) that we are still eating. It’s too soft, and it’s better, texture-wise, at six months old. But it’s preserved, and the healthy bacteria help my family stay healthy.
It might help to address the semantics. The word “fermented” has a negative connotation. (Although beer drinkers who wouldn’t be caught dead eating fermented vegetables drink PLENTY of fermentation.) When you think of fermented, do you think of ROTTEN? We aren’t eating any rotten foods at my house. We could mentally replace that word with a much nicer one: cultured!
So, don’t eat fermented foods. Eat cultured ones!
If “bad” bacteria gets into your cultured foods and makes them “go bad,” you will know. They will taste bad and/or mold. I have almost never had this happen. Once it happened with a bottle of sauerkraut. Never with kefir or Rejuvelac.
My Rejuvelac ferments in a day. At CHI, they told me 3-5 days, but mine tastes plenty tart 24 hours after I blend the sprouts and water, and put it on the counter to grow (aka ferment, aka culture).
Here’s my new video showing this easy, inexpensive habit that has the potential to see you through the winter without viruses or infections!
