Customer Reviews

Green for Life

5 star:		(214)
4 star:		(42)
3 star:		(25)
2 star:		(14)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

I used to do a lot of juicing in the past but it is very time consuming and really messy. My problem is over since I got Green for Life. Making smoothies is a great alternative to juicing. It is much faster, less messy, and you also get some fiber in addition to juice. In addition to great recipes for making smoothies the book is also a good source of information about proper nutrition, the importance of hydrochloric acid in the stomach and much more. Get this book!! Another great volume that you may not miss is Can We Live 150. These two books together make a perfect gift of showing the way to healthy living just for anyone.

What a wonderful book! For the past 20 years I've been on a quest to eat more natural foods,and my health improved drastically. But I still suffered from junk food cravings...until I discovered Green for Life!

Following Victoria's advice, I added lots of GREENS to my fruit smoothies, and the first day I did so MY FOOD CRAVINGS STOPPED. Bang. Just vanished. Just like my brain's "cravings switch" was flipped to the OFF position. Apparently my body had been craving minerals all those years, and once I started eating GREENS the cravings stopped. And I'm finally trimming down!

Victoria's research in this area is much needed, and much appreciated. I especially love the chapter on the chimpanzees and their daily eating habits.

My wife and I participated in one of Victoria's Green for Life teleconferences, and we loved it. She speaks from her heart, is really a nice lady, and this was one of the best conferences ever. We love Victoria! And we sure love the changes that are happening in our bodies!

Get this Green for Life book, make yourself some green smoothies, and watch your food cravings vanish. This is the secret to losing weight! :)

Thanks, Victoria, for Green for Life!

I was diagnosed with IBS almost a year ago, and tried my best to control it through diet (check out Heather VonVorous' Eating for IBS), but I would still have flare-ups, especially during stressful times.
The green smooties are not only easy to digest (b/c its all blended for you) but they do wonders to regulate your GI tract. I have not had a flare- up since I started drinking my smoothies. If you have IBS, acid reflux, heartburn, or any other digestive issues you owe it to yourself to read this book.

I've been studying nutrition with an almost overly-zealous passion since I was about 18 years old and I've run through so many paradigms and points of view they run the gamut from athletic old-school nutritional ideas (like loading up on big juicy steaks before athletic events) to "the Zone", food combining (of which I am a practitioner and believer), anti wheat/gluten/dairy/meat lifestyles, high protein fads (never even tried this because it made NO sense on any level to me) to the strictest Candida cleanses out there (lived on the Body Ecology Diet for years, and it did change my life at the time) and then finally found my way to the whole raw foods movement.

Eating raw foods for the enzymes, pure nutrition and life force just felt right to me, but when I'd pick up raw meals or look at recipes I saw the need for expensive kitchen equipment I neither wanted nor could afford, and overly complex recipes I didn't even want to think about attempting. In what might be an intuitive aspect, I hate cooking! I used to joke that if there was some kind of drink or mush we could live on in perfect health, like Robocop, and it tasted good I'd be all over it!

Well, I got closer when I found Dr. Doug Graham's book "The 80/10/10 Diet", which has some fabulous concepts and ideas, but when I applied them it wasn't quite the perefct fit. Close, but no banana, so to speak. This whole green smoothie concept came to me through Facebook of all things, and while I've only been adding these to my life for about a week, I am already a firm believer that THIS is the missing piece to the nutritional puzzle for me.

I began reading this book last night to augment the knowledge and recipes I'd already found in doing online research and I absolutely love this. Victoria speaks from the heart but also obviously put so much time and focus into looking into this from a scientific standpoint, the research is admirable. Personally, I don't really need science to tell me what works, I try things out (other than Atkins) and see how I feel. But the science is certainly interesting and validating. Some people might scoff at using champanzees as nutritional models for us to follow or look to for advice but if you leave aside human ego for a moment and open your mind the tiniest bit there is SO much to be gleaned from this point of view.

I've had the oddest and most overwhelming cravings for fast food and junk food my whole life, especially lately and I'd find I could eat incredibly healthy and hydrate myself so well for a while, then I'd swing into ridiculous binges. When I read another review on here raving about these smoothies stopping those cravings I literally went to the store that night, loaded up on gorgeous greens and fruit and tried it. And they were right. The cravings were gone before I was halfway through my evening dinner smoothie. I wasn't hungry or thirsty and even my emotional comfort food trigger was silenced. That seemed impossible but it happened. So I kept at it all weekend, making sure I always had at least one good pint per day, preferably two. Here's what I've noticed in just this first week:

- better memory
- increased clarity and ability to focus at work
- while everyone here, even the healthy folks, are dropping like flies with some virus floating around, I have no symptoms whatsoever
- physical pms symptoms that were present recently are gone
- chronic asthma is lessening day by day
- better sleep
- several really great bowel movements per day
- waking up easily and before my alarm even! (haven't done that in ages)
- decreased appetite and cravings for sugar, etc

And this is just from having about one per day for 6 days. Seriously. This book answers many questions for me and gives me yet another fabulous tool in my quest for total well being. I've always wondered why I found greens in quantity so hard to digest, even when taking enzymes with them, and she explains that very clearly and logically here. Now I know that by blending these greens, we are essentially "pre-chewing" them for our bodies until they relearn how to digest what we are meant to rely on for most of our nutritional needs; greens. And since these include ample amounts of fruit these smoothies taste great.

I'm so grateful to Victoria for her tireless work and for sharing this with everyone ready for really stellar health. If I feel this wonderful just adding them into my usual daily routine, I can only imagine what awaits.

I used her husband's smoothie recipe this morning (spinach, lime, banana, apple and water) and it's fantastic. Replaces my long-time cravings for some kind of sweet breakfast (which used to be a blended or iced coffee drink with a scone).

And personally, I love that she shares the experiences of herself and her family along the way as anecdotal support for her journey into this way of living. It takes interesting concepts and makes them more relevant and real for me. But nothing replaces my own experience, as she wonderfully points out in the beginning of the book, and for me this has been life changing already.

In this book, Victoria Boutenko explains why eating raw greens is so important. Although nutritional recommendations often seem to shift with the winds, one consistent and clear piece of advice has always been to eat lots of those leafy green vegetables -- filled with phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, etc. The big problem, of course, is that these foods are often not too palatable unless smothered in fat-laden, salty, or otherwise dubious dressings. What if there were a way to eat your greens and actually enjoy the experience? That is what this book offers. I have followed the recipes and enjoyed almost all of them (there was one clinker), and I have enjoyed real health benefits from eating my greens. It's clear from the study that she describes (with detailed information about the experiences of the study participants) that I'm not alone in finding great benefit from her green smoothies. I recommend this book to everyone. It is truly a book that will help everyone who follows its advice.

My boyfriend and I have slowly been making our way towards foods that are alive, but we were struggling. And then I found Victoria's book. Reading chapter after chapter I found myself wanting to give these green smoothies a try. So, we finally bought the VitaMix blender, and away we went! Now, after food cravings have diminshed, toe nail fungus' vanished, and acne is a past memory...we are HAPPY, calmer and loving our daily green smoothies. Thank you so much, Victoria! You've had a dramatic impact on our family! I would recommend this book to everyone...and I do!

In her most accessible book yet, Victoria Boutenko brings the benefits of greens to everybody--not just those willing to commit to a 100% raw food lifestyle. The information she shares in Green for Life will improve the diet and nutrient assimlation for the heaviest meat eater, to the occasional vegetarian, to the 100% raw fooder.

Green smoothies make "objectionable" foods like heads of kale, lambquarters, or carrot tops completely palatable. Through the magic of blending fruits like watermelon or bananas with greens, they become tasty liquid treats that help everything from insufficient stomach HCL to arthritis.

I found this book surprisingly engaging. Admittedly, I enjoy eating greens. I've even been known to make the occasional kale-raspberry smoothie; however, I had no idea of the science behind these strange cravings. Victoria has collected nutritional profiles of specific greens, results from a scientific study about the effect of green smoothies on stomach acid, favorite recipes and some impressive testimonials from participants in the Roseburg Study.

I found her observations about chimpanzees especially refreshing: they share so much of our DNA that scientists ruthlessly experiment on chimps by giving them all kinds of human diseases. Victoria turns this similarity around and suggests we look to wild chimpanzees for ways to stay or become healthy, rather than inflicting illnesses on them in captivity. Chimpanzees naturally eat far more greens than humans.

Green for Life is filled with practical observations, and it contains Victoria's characteristic analytical and experimental quest for "what works." When she finally finds something reliably great, she wants to share it with as many people as possible. Her passion is as infectious as the green smoothies are delicious. Yes, I like greens anyway, but I have personally witnessed non-greens lovers actually enjoying the smoothies I make. These same Standard American Diet people now regularly request large helpings of raw fruits and vegetables. Thank you, Victoria, for such an easy way to make a difference in people's lives!

I just received this book yesterday and spent a considerable amount of time last night browsing through it. The book is EXCELLENT....very informative and well written. It made me realise just how much I have been missing out on this much-needed part of the diet that is so necessary...and how easy it is to eat this way. I have been juicing a lot of greens but haven't tried "green smoothies" before. I made my first one last night and was HOOKED...really really good stuff...now I know why others are so addicted. And the fantastic thing is that it is so SO good for you!! Green smoothies really make it easy to consume lots of greens...and quickly too! Juicing greens is a nightmare because you have to spend so much time and use soooooo much green veggies to get such a little bit of juice....doing it this way, the "green smoothie" method, makes all the difference in the world...and you get ALL the goodness. I learned a lot about other things too that I hadn't known about before....the importance of hydrochloric acid in the stomach for example. Get this book!! It is a valuable & necessary addition to your health foods library!

If you aren't familiar with green smoothies, this book is great for getting started. The first part is information and motivation. Then there are recipes. We prefer the savory green drinks to the sweet ones, but both are good. Our favorite is any combination of green stuff -- spinach, cilantro, romaine lettuce -- with water, onion, garlic, tomatoes, and avocado. It's like a cross between salsa, gazpacho, and guacamole; it goes down easy! We were so surprised! We find kale a bit 'tough' to blend -- it wants to stay in larger flake, so mostly we just skip the kale.

I enjoyed reading this book, but what I really enjoy is the way I feel when I drink green smoothies. This is a pratical, easy, realistic way to provide yourself and your family with quality nutrition. Victoria leads you through the science and then through the "how tos". It is so simple when she puts it all together for you.