Section 8

In addition to smoothies, I use salads, flax crackers, fruit and occasionally seeds or nuts. To always be able to make fresh smoothies with greens, I bought an extra blender for the office. Whenever friends or clients stop by my office, they see a large pitcher of bright green liquid next to my computer. I always offer a taste of the marvelous smoothie. To my satisfaction, everyone likes green smoothies without exception, even though everyone eats differently.Unexpectedly for me, some friends and coworkers have improved health after a cup of green smoothie in my office!

Understanding the basics of chimpanzee nutrition will help us better understand the needs of humans. Take a look at the diagram (Figure 1), which shows a typical chimpanzee diet in the wild jungle (I created it based on data from Jane Goodall's book Chimpanzees of the Gombe Valley).As you can see, the two main groups in the chimpanzee diet are fruits and greens. Please do not confuse greens with root vegetables such as carrots, beets, or potatoes. Also, please do not confuse greens with cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and peppers. Chimpanzees eat root vegetables very rarely, only in cases of drought or starvation. According to Jane Goodall, the amount of time chimpanzees eat greens varies from 25 to 50% depending on the season.

According to published nutritional calculations, only one category of food - plant greens - contained all the nutrients humans need. The bitter truth was that we didn't eat enough greens. What's more, we didn't really love it. We were sure that greens were an important part of the diet, but we never knew exactly how much of them we needed. All we heard was a vague recommendation to eat as much green vegetables as possible. To figure out how much greens to eat, I decided to study the diet of primates, particularly chimpanzees, as they are the closest "relatives" of humans.

When I started to collect materials for a book about greens, I was immediately hopelessly drowned in an ocean of information. In this critical situation I had to "find the truth or die". I felt responsible not only for my husband and children, who followed me on a raw diet, but also for all the listeners of my lectures and readers of my books, who switched to raw food. In the end, I decided to put everything on hold for a few months, sit down and read every available primary source on nutritional research. I decided to discard all ready-made opinions and focus only on the scientific evidence, because other people's seemingly flawless logical reasoning very often leads the reader to erroneous conclusions with devastating consequences. (Later in this book, I will give examples of such errors, of which I myself have been a victim.)

Nutritionists have never singled out greens and separate food group because most people don't see them as real food. Despite the fact that the nutritional value of carrot tops is several times greater than that of the roots, there is a deeply ingrained belief that greens are food for rabbits, sheep and cows. This belief prevents us from adding carrot tops to salads. As a result, we are throwing away the most nutritious part of carrots and many other plants.

There is another profound misconception stemming from the erroneous categorization of greens as vegetables. Unfortunately, many nutritionists and researchers are convinced that greens are not rich in protein. In the next chapter, you'll learn that, contrary to this popular theory, greens are an excellent source of protein. Nevertheless, I have enough data to make the following important conclusion: greens are the major food group that best meets human nutrient needs.