What I'm Reading Today

I ordered two books by Victoria Boutenko about raw foods, they arrived today and I've read both of them. I haven't done much else, it's a lazy, sit-around-and-try-to-stay-warm day.

I liked both books, especially Green for Life, which details the benefits of green smoothies and scientific logic for why they're good for you. For years, all the reading I've done in diet and nutrition has seemed to be pointing to one conclusion - that people do best on a diet of rabbit food. No matter which diet is glorified, if you really look at what the author is eating day to day, it's mostly salad. Sure, they may say you can eat cream, steak and cheese if you combine correctly, or you can eat lots of carbs if you stay away from animal products, or if you count fat grams, or if you stay away from sugar - but, when you look at their own real life diets, they're eating a lot of salad. My own conclusion was that, if you eat mostly rabbit food, it doesn't really matter what else you eat, you're going to be healthy.

As it turns out, my sarcastic conclusion wasn't far from the truth. Victoria Boutenko points out that chimps are closely related to humans, so much so, that we use them for scientific experiments to find cures for humans. But if we reverse our perspective and try drawing some conclusions about the best diet for people by looking at what chimps eat in the wild, we might prevent the diseases we're trying to cure. And chimps eat a LOT of rabbit food. They eat almost half fruit, a third leaves, and the rest is insects and other stuff. Her conclusion is that humans should be eating a whole lot of fruit, almost as many greens, and only a little bit of everything else. But our bodies are so out of balance that we've lost our natural taste for greens. The solution: blend them with sweet, delicious fruits in a green smoothie! She notes an experiment she was a part of where volunteers drank a quart of green smoothies every day for a month. She made the smoothies and delivered them to a central location where participants would pick them up. They continued their usual diet, but added a quart of green smoothies each day. The book lists all the symptoms they saw improvement in after a month, and it was everything from bad digestion to allergies, and fatigue and warts in between. It sounds like a typical miracle cure, but I do think there's something to it, if only because every other diet that works seems to point to greens as a necessary portion (if not the base) of a healthy diet, although that's never the part of the diet they advertise.

She goes into hydrochloric acid and acid/alkaline balance, which I think is a more plausible explanation for why raw foods work than the live enzyme theory.

More reading: I found an interesting question about John Locke, and Charlotte Mason's conclusion that he was partially responsible for the terrors of French Revolution on one of the blogs I regularly check, CM, Children and Lots of Grace. I've printed it out and I'm off to read it now; I hope to gain some understanding.