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Green For Life
> Greens: A New Food
Group
Chapter 6
Greens: A New Food
Group
I wonder how greens, such as kale, romaine lettuce, spinach,
carrot tops, and others got classified as vegetables? Why do we call many
completely different food groups vegetables, when they look different and
contain different sets of nutrients? A produce manager from a local health food
store complained to me that his customers often got confused when looking for a
particular ingredient among 150+ pieces of produce all gathered under the single
name: vegetables. This man had worked in the produce section for more than ten
years. He suggested that the produce section be divided into several different
smaller groups of plant foods with specific similarities, like roots (carrots,
beets, daikon, etc.) flowers (broccoli, cauliflower, artichoke, etc.) and
non-sweet fruit (cucumber, zucchini, squash, tomato, etc.). Combining foods with
similar nutritional values would not only help shoppers to find necessary
ingredients faster, but also would help them to become familiar with more plant
foods and increase their variety of vegetarian food consumption.
Obviously people have never considered plants to be important enough to be
classified properly. Even at the regular supermarket one can see that other food
departments have more detailed classifications. For example, the meat department
is divided into poultry, fish, and meat which in turn is subdivided into smaller
sections, like veal, ground meats, bones, sub-products. Every item is carefully
categorized, specifying which part of the carcass it is from. Cheeses have their
own specification. Nobody would ever classify cheese and meat together in one
group like "sandwich food,'' because it would be inconvenient and unclear. Yet
this kind of confusion and error continually occurs in the produce section. Some
errors are quite serious, to such a degree that they could cause health
problems. As an example of this, placing starchy roots in the same category with
tomatoes and rhubarb could prompt customers to make improper food combining
choices. Many nutritionists believe in the benefits of proper food combining.
For example, starchy tubers combined in one meal with sour fruits or vegetables
can create fermentation and gas in our intestines.
Placing greens in the same category as vegetables has caused people to
mistakenly apply the combining rules of starchy vegetables to greens. Driven by
this confusion, many concerned people wrote to me inquiring if blending fruits
with greens was proper food combining. They had heard that "fruits and
vegetables did not mix well." Yes, to combine starchy vegetables with fruits
would not be a good idea. Such a combination can cause gas in the intestines.
However, greens are not vegetables and
greens are not starchy. In fact, greens are the only food group that helps
digest other foods through stimulating the secretion of digestive enzymes. Thus,
greens can be combined with any other foods. In addition, it has been recorded
that chimpanzees often consume fruits and leaves off of the same tree at the
same feeding time. In fact, Jane Goodall and other researchers have observed
them rolling fruits inside of leaves and eating them as "sandwiches."
Yet, there is another great misconception which results from placing greens and
vegetables into the same category Such inappropriate generalizations have lead
researchers to the erroneous conclusion that greens are a poor source of
protein. Contrary to this popular belief, greens are an excellent source of
protein, as you will see in the following chapter.
I propose that we separate greens from vegetables, now and forevermore. Greens
have never received proper attention and have never been researched adequately
because they have been incorrectly identified as vegetables. We don't even have
a proper name for greens in most languages. The name "dark green leafy
vegetables" is long and inconvenient to use, similar to "the animal with horns
that gives milk."
We don't have complete nutritional data about greens. For this book I had to
collect bits and pieces of information out of books and magazines from different
countries and I still don't have all the parts. I have not, for example, been
able to find the complete nutritional content of carrot tops anywhere.
Nevertheless, I have enough to draw some essential conclusions:
greens are the primary food group that match
human nutritional needs most completely.
In the following chart please see a list of all essential minerals and vitamins
that are recommended by USDA and a list of these nutrients available in Kale and
Lambsquarters (an edible weed). Based on this data, we can conclude that greens
are the most essential food for humans.
Chapter 7 -
Abundance of Protein In Greens
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Green For Life by Victoria Boutenko
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