Obtain the Health Benefits of Vegetables with these Nutrient Dense Greens!
The benefits of vegetables in our daily diet cannot be overrated. Especially, green leafy vegetables. Greens contain many different nutrients from vitamins and minerals to phytonutrients and omega 3’s.
So we know all about the great benefits, but why don’t we eat greens at every meal? It seems to me that the main obstacle is...
our taste buds.
I wasn’t brought up eating a salad on a regular basis. Yes, I knew how good it was for me, but I didn’t want to actually sit down and eat one day in and day out.
Oh, come on... Be honest with yourself. If you didn’t have the salad swimming in tasty dressing, would you eat a salad every day? No? I can relate.
This is when a green smoothie comes into the picture. A green smoothie is fruit smoothie recipes blended with greens in order to assimilate as much nutrients that your body can handle.
Nutrient Density
Greens are super dense with nutrients. When you compare calorie to calorie, leafy green’s nutrient levels skyrocket over all other foods. These nutrients may help repair your body functions, boosts your immune system, protects your eyes, lower cholesterol, prevent cancer, and etc.
But all of these nutrients are encapsulated in walls of cellulose. Chewing thoroughly is the best way to break through those cellulose walls to get at the valuable micronutrients. But if you didn’t chew the greens thoroughly into a juicy pulp, the greens passed through our digestive tract and our body can’t reach the valuable nutrients that the benefits of vegetables can provide.
Again, that is where a green smoothie comes soaring into the stadium to save the game. Instead of only assimilating only half of the nutrients, we get 90-95%! When you consume a green smoothie, you are bypassing the need to use high calorie, chemical filled dressings.
Fiber
Fiber is one great benefits of vegetables that you receive from greens. Many of my friends and family say that adding greens daily into their lifestyle either through smoothies or salads have their digestion improve immensely.
Did you know that you should have at least 2-3 bowel movements a day? The food that comes into the mouth should be pushing yesterday’s food out. Like a conveyer belt. It makes you think... how can people eat for days on end and only have a bowel movement once every 2-4 days or longer?
When our bowels delay in our bodies, the fecal matter starts to rot. We have two problems.
One, our body tries to get rid of the toxins through our bowels but the exit door is jammed. So the toxins stay in our body causing more damage.
Two, the rotting fecal matter starts to produce more toxins for our bodies to remove. But wait... We can’t remove them through our bowels. So the toxins start to exit different avenues, such as our skin causing acne, rashes, boils, etc.
As a teenager I had horrible acne. But once I started to cleanse my colon every month, my skin transformed.
Over the years, I have noticed that kale seems to be the most cleansing of the greens for my body. Experiment and see what greens work best for you.
By consistently maintaining a health digestive tract that will remove harmful toxins, you will never know what diseases you prevented in your future. It really is better to be safe than sorry!
Storing Leafy Greens
If I know that I will be using my greens over the next 2-4 days, I leave them in my refrigerator. But if I need to store them for a longer period of time, I wash them and freeze them in a quart Ziploc bag. Once I want a green smoothie, I throw my fruit and water in the blender with the frozen greens on top and blend away!
Now some words of advice for storing your greens in the refrigerator. The moisture in the leaves evaporate into the air easily. That is why that lettuce that you bought in the store two days ago is already wilting. The water contained within the cell walls causes the greens to be crisp.
At the grocery store they spray their produce with water throughout the day. Now, I don’t know about you... But I do not have the time or the memory to spray my greens a couple times a day. Here is a simple trick that I learned that has kept my greens fresh and crisp much longer.
Get a paper towel and soak it down. Then squeeze some of the water out, but not all of it. Then wrap the wet paper towel around your greens and place into a bag or container. Do not completely seal up the bag or container as that will cause your greens to rot much faster.
You may need to keep an eye on your paper towel. You don’t want a dry paper towel drawing out water from your produce. That would kind of defeat the purpose. Please don’t just go away saying, “That was informative.”. Apply this information. Change your life. If you could just eat one salad or one smoothie in your day, your body will thank you. Experiment with all of the different greens and see the benefits of vegetables in your own life.
Benefits of Vegetables:
Below is a list of different greens that explain the different benefits of vegetables:
Go from Benefits of Vegetables to Smoothie Recipes
Go from Benefits of Vegetables to Green Smoothie
