As you can see, the two major mod groups for chimpanzees are fruits and greens. Please do not confuse greens with root vegetables like carrots, beets, or potatoes. Also do not confuse greens with non-sweet fruits like cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini, and bell peppers. Chimps only eat root vegetables in the case of drought or famine as a fall-back food. According to Jane Goodall, a world-famous researcher of chimpanzees, the percentage of time that chimpanzees spend eating greens in relation to the rest of their diet varies from 25-50% depending on the season. Two to seven percent of their diet is pith and bark. [Piths are the stems and more fibrous parts of plants.) When the trees are blooming, in March and April, chimpanzees consume blossoms, up to 10% of their ratio. Chimpanzees do not eat very many nuts, but their diet could be up to 5% seeds. Also, particularly in November, they consume small amounts of insects and even small animals, however, Goodall says this part of their diet is irregular and insignificant, as they could go months and months without consuming any animals, and seem to have no ill effects. There is other research that points out that wild chimpanzees' intake of insects and ether animals never comprises more than 1% of their diet.

As long as I can remember, chimpanzees have been depicted with a banana or an orange in their hands, which definitely misled me to the assumption that they eat only fruit. To know that greens compose almost half of their dirt was a revelation for me. My research gave me a solid idea that humans are supposed to eat far more greens than I would have guessed.

Let us compare the standard American diet with the diet of chimpanzees. As you can see they look totally different. These two diets hardly have anything in common! We humans eat mostly things that chimpanzees don't eat at all, like cooked starchy foods, oils, butter, yogurt, cheese, hamburgers, etc. While most of our vegetables are roots, wild chimpanzees almost never eat root vegetables unless there is a drought and lotus and greens are unavailable. It is the intake of greens that has declined most dramatically in the human diet.

Our consumption of greens has generally shrunk to the two wilted iceberg lettuce leaves on our sandwich.

Let us compare the standard American diet with an average diet of a typical raw foodist.

I think that a raw food diet demonstrates a vast improvement over the regular diet. Firstly, all ingredients in a raw diet are uncooked, and full of enzymes and vitamins; thus the raw food diet is like a revolution in comparison with the standard American diet. That explains why so many people reported that they instantly felt better on a raw diet. We can see that raw fooders eat a lot of fruit, especially if we keep in mind that bell-peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, and tomatoes are also fruits. However, even though raw-foodists typically consume noticeably more greens than people on an average mainstream diet, greens almost never constitute 45 percent of their food. So what do raw foodists eat in place of their missing greens? The answer is most people on a raw food diet consume large amounts of fruits, nuts and seeds. Often they use nuts as a substitute for carbohydrates, particularly when trying to mimic cooked dishes with raw ingredients, even though nuts are 70-80% fat. Also, raw foodists increase their consumption of oils and avocados because the most common way of eating salads, their main staple, is to have it mixed with dressing, sauce or guacamole. Another big quota in a typical raw diet belongs to root vegetables mostly due to juicing. Also, roots taste sweeter than greens and thus comprise a large portion of raw salads.

Considering all of these factors, when we compare the typical raw food diet with the chimpanzee diet, we can clearly see that there are two main ways to further improve our individual eating patterns: to increase our consumption of greens, and to reduce our intake of nuts, seeds, and oils.

For example, based on how much fruit we consume in my family (about 4 or 5 pounds per day per person) I estimate that we need to eat about two good sized bunches of dark leafy greens per person per day.

Another striking characteristic aspect the chimpanzee eating pattern is that they never eat in the late afternoon or evening. Chimpanzees wake up very early, at the first light of dawn. After leaving their nests, they groom each other for a few minutes and then begin searching for food. Chimpanzees have to work hard in order to get their food, climbing many trees or searching through numerous low shrubs. Most often they feed on fruit in the morning and a little bit on leaves. After about four hours, they take a break for an hour or two, playing, or sleeping in the sun. Then the chimps resume feeding, eating mostly greens until about three or four o'clock in the afternoon, after which they groom and prepare their nests for the night sleep.

In contrast, my own eating pattern is vastly different. I don't normally eat anything until noon or later, and in the evening l stock up on food. I am currently striving to stop eating after 6 p. m. While I am experiencing positive results and finally shedding some extra weight, I have to admit that restraining myself from eating late is a lot harder than I expected. I attribute this to the larger amount of stress we tend to accumulate towards the end of the day.

Chapter 4 - Green Smoothie Revolution

Back to Green For Life by Victoria Boutenko

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