The Power of Green

The Power Of Green

Have you ever gotten the uneasy feeling there's more disease around today than ever before? Well, you're right.

Infertility is on the rise. Cancer, heart disease, emphysema, and virulent viruses seem to be everywhere. More Americans are more overweight - dangerously overweight - than ever before. As David Sandoval of Green Kamut Corporation says, " ... if we were a frog or a lizard, we would have been put on the protected species list already."

Why Is Illness On The Rise?

Common sense and a little thought bring a number of contributing factors to mind. Certainly, advertising is one: we have gotten so confused and frightened by what we see on TV and read in newspapers and magazines that we are afraid to make any healthcare decision without our doctor's approval. We are convinced we're not intelligent enough to take care of ourselves.

What we don't realize is that traditional American (a.k.a. allopathic) medicine is crisis management via surgery or synthetic drugs. In other words, it primarily treats symptoms. Unfortunately, symptom suppression doesn't address the root cause of the illness. Take cancer, for example.

Medical doctors are trained to see the root cause of cancer as cell mutation. Their approach, therefore, is to cut out or kill off the mutated cells so they cannot spread and mutate more cells.

Admirable, but only partially effective. Why? Because the tumor is merely a symptom of the root cause. The real root cause of all cancer is lack of oxygen at the cellular level.

Cancer cannot live in the presence of oxygen. Period. End of discussion. That's why doctors advocate no smoking and plenty of exercise, because both activities increase the amount of oxygen we taken into the body. But, again, this course is only partially effective, because disease does not manifest itself over a short period of time. It actually takes months, years, sometimes decades for a cellular problem to incubate to the point that it takes command of our lives.

If we opt to suppress our symptoms rather than deal with the root cause those symptoms are screaming at us to notice, we eventually end up with disease. If, on the other hand, we interrupt those incubation cycles, we can live long, healthy lives.

The choice is ours.

And there is no mystery to interrupting those incubation cycles. Researchers have found that fully 95% of people with serious, chronic, or life-threatening diseases eat a non-nutritious diet. Just because it’s a cliché doesn't mean it isn't true: in the long run, we really are what we eat. Which means—believe it or not—we can get off the road to disease simply by eating live (uncooked, non-pasteurized, minimally processed, live-enzyme fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds) and green foods. In fact, green foods alone can reverse the trend toward disease.

What Are Green Foods?

Oh, come on—you know what they are! We’ve been hearing about them since we were little kids: deep-green leafy vegetables. Spinach. Broccoli. Lettuce. Celery. Kale. Lettuce. Leaks. Scallions. Brussel Sprouts. Collard greens.

You get the picture.

Not vitamins or medicines, just deep-green leafy vegetables. Grandma knew what she was talking about when she told us to eat our spinach so we could grow up to be strong like Popeye. The nutrient power in deep-green leafy vegetables to heal and rejuvenate the human body is unmatched by any combination of synthetic medicines or supplements.

Here’s how it works:

Green foods contain chlorophyll, the same green pigment found in plants. In case you've forgotten your high-school biology, the oxygen we breathe comes from the chlorophyll in plants. Simply put: no chlorophyll, no human life.

Chlorophyll is identical to human blood except that the center element in chlorophyll is magnesium, whereas the center element in blood is iron. Chlorophyll, in fact, is the only food perfectly suited to deliver and maintain the appropriate amounts of magnesium and iron needed to maintain good health to both men and women. Its magnesium, for example, goes directly to muscle tissue and can rapidly relieve painful cramps.

Some researchers claim that chlorophyll has the ability to release magnesium from its center and absorb iron, and thus become hemoglobin. Chlorophyll literally becomes human blood. More blood means more ability to disburse oxygen to the cells!

"Plants are the ‘lungs’ of the planet," says Yoshihide Hagiwara, M.D. in Green Barley Essence (Keats Publishing, 1985), "breathing out the oxygen all animal life needs to live. Plants are also the primary source of all that is of nutritional value."

Chlorophyll not only increases oxygen levels throughout the body, it also releases carbon dioxide, which helps prevent disease incubation. Green foods take the toxic byproducts of our inhaling heat and pollution—carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide—and converts them into oxygen.

The Green Equation:

Green Foods = Oxygen = The Most Powerful Disease Prevention And Recovery “Medicine” Available

Even the Side Effects Are Positive

Deep-green leafy vegetables have rejuvenating enzymes that are responsible for virtually every chemical reaction at the cellular level. The side effects are as good for us as the main effect!

Side Effect #1 - Increased Digestion

Not only do green foods have heavy chlorophyll concentrations to oxygenate the body, they are utterly digestible. When we increase our food’s digestibility, we increase the speed of its elimination, which, in turn, helps eliminate illness.

Here’s how it works: a lot of the foods we eat are simply not digested by the body: pizza, French fries, gooey chocolate cake—you know the kind. As undigested food goes through the intestinal system, it turns to waste, attaches itself to the intestinal wall (sometimes hiding in little pockets called diverticulum), and becomes toxic. Toxic waste is essentially slow-acting poison to the human body.

Green foods, with their rich digestive and antioxidant enzymes, cause those toxins that have built up over the years (or decades) to begin sloughing off from their hiding places. Once they are voided, subsequent food is fully digested and fully eliminated. In other words, our guts feel better, our digestive tract works better, and our calories turn more to energy than fat.

Side Effect #2 - Normalized Elimination

Green foods also contain potassium and cell salts, which encourage normal elimination. Yes, fiber helps avoid or correct constipation, but the recent trend of relying solely on fiber is actually counterproductive. Fiber is bulky, and too much bulk can literally stretch the intestines out of shape, and, thus, out of proper functioning.

Here’s how it works: Potassium causes the bowel to contract while sodium causes it to expand. Between contracting and expanding, contracting and expanding, the bowel gently squeezes waste material downwards until . . . viola! Daily, easy elimination. Does it get any better than that?

Well, actually, yes, it does.

Side Effect #3 – Alkalization

Let's face it: Americans are gassy people. Based on the abundance of TV commercials for antacids, it seems just about everybody in the country has acid indigestion. Most of us don’t realize, however, that an overly acidic body is courting illness or disease. Alkalizing the body is one of the most powerful and important ways of interrupting carcinogenic incubations.

Deep-green leafy vegetables do just that! They raise the body’s alkaline level to counteract its tendency toward acidity. No surgery, no laboratory-developed drug, no chemically treated supplement can get your digestive tract back on track as easily and effectively as dark-green leafy vegetables.

Here’s how it works: Human blood needs a pH of 7.4 to be considered healthy. Anything above seven is considered alkaline, anything below seven is acidic—yet another simple equation.

Most people gobbling Tums® and Rolaids® probably fall somewhere between five and six. Not good. Unfortunately, antacids neutralize digestive acids, often for hours. Suppose, for example, you have pizza for lunch. You get heartburn back at the office and pop an antacid. Later, when you eat another hard-on-the-stomach combination—like a fast-food hamburger or even homemade meat and potatoes—those neutralized digestive acids are still unavailable to go to work.

In other words, your body didn’t digest lunch because you neutralized your digestive acids, and now it can't digest dinner, either. The entire day's food joins the accumulation you've already got sitting in your gut, and the whole mess festers. Now you’ve got more acid indigestion, so you take more antacids, feel better, eat more, the cycle builds up more poison in your system until … voila! You’re well on your way to a disease-friendly environment. Eventual result: gastroesophageal reflux, diverticulitus, cancer.

Dark-green leafy vegetables, on the other hand, counteract that acid indigestion with their alkalinity. The digestive acids keep working. The food gets digested. The contract/expand process pushes out the waste. No pain, no toxic build-up, no disease-friendly environment.

Side Effect #4 – Trace Minerals

All too often, trace minerals are missing from the fast foods, packaged foods, frozen foods, and processed foods we tend to eat on a regular, if not daily basis. A lot of today's diseases can be traced back to trace-mineral deficiencies—in fact, trace-mineral deficiency may be the number one cause of disease in Western culture today.

Here’s how it works:

Each and every trace mineral functions in relation to the other elements of the body. They enhance the immune system by becoming the most efficient building blocks for our defender cells, T-lymphocytes, also known as T-cells. Trace minerals literally create a rapid response to disease by providing the raw material needed to manufacture those defensive enzymes.

Man has never yet created a supplement or a synthetic "foodstuff" with the same benefits of the trace minerals found in deep-green leafy vegetables. Want proof? Look at any mineral chart. The #1 recommended source of virtually all minerals and trace minerals is always deep-green leafy vegetables. They are the best way to take in trace minerals.

Deep-green leafy vegetables are also the safest way to take in minerals and trace minerals, because there is no chance of toxic build-up. The human body either utilizes or eliminates green-food minerals; it never stores them. It can store synthetic minerals, on the other hand, which can ultimately lead to another kind of toxicity.

Still More Side Effects

Lactose-Free Calcium

Want strong nails and luxurious hair? Better yet, want to avoid or even reverse osteoporosis? The answer, of course, is calcium—and green foods are far richer in assimilable calcium than milk. Of course, you could take a lot of trace-mineral or calcium supplements, but the calcium bioavailability in a supplement is only a fraction of what you get from a single serving of deep-green leafy vegetables.

Energy Boost

Incorporate concentrated greens into your fresh-vegetable-juice routine. Since green juices have no calories, they're not stored as fat, they're used as energy.
Blood-Sugar Regulation

Hypoglycemics and diabetics take note: green juice alkalizes the small intestine, which, in turn, regulates the passage of glucose through the intestinal barrier. Result: no blood-sugar problem—naturally.

So, eat your spinach. Nibble on your broccoli. Chomp on your celery and enjoy your kale and lettuce and leaks and scallions.

And with every bite, remember: you're taking a step toward protecting yourself against cancer, heart disease, emphysema, diverticulitus, adult-onset diabetes, and many other health problems. In a society that is at once overweight and malnourished, green foods are the best, easiest and most natural weapon we have in the fight to prevent and reverse the trend toward disease.