In June, I went to a raw foods dessert workshop to explore that style of eating. At the workshop, I met a woman who mentioned the name Victoria Boutenko and how she'd cured her family's ills by changing to a raw food lifestyle. Didn't give it much thought as I was scheduled to attend a Chek Institute workshop on Healthy Lifestyles which is a more reasonable eating style allowing for animal proteins, fruits, veggies & fats but restricting gluten, wheat & soy, depending on one's individual food sensitivities. In preparing for my new career as a wellness coach, I was building a library of books to bring back to Bangkok. Well, Borders just happened to be running their going-out-of-business sale and I happened onto Victoria Boutenko's Green for Life book. Needing to understand all the different styles of eating, I started reading the book in mid-August. Back in July, I had started experimenting with some juicing because of Jack LaLanne & some doctors who'd observed that their patients who juiced looked younger than their calendar age. And face it, Jack looked good for his age. What caught my attention in Victoria's book was her Roseburg experiment...basically an average town in Oregon started drinking a quart of green smoothies daily for 30 days. There were anecdotal accounts of warts falling off, improved digestion and better energy levels. So I started experimenting with green smoothies just to see the effects. Now earlier in the spring, I had an abscess on my upper left thigh, it had grown to the size of a dollar coin, then had shrunk down by April to the size of a nickel and had been about that size ever since. A couple of days after I started drinking green smoothies, the abscess was visually healing. As of today, Sept 6, after about 3 weeks of smoothies, it's smaller than a dime. Other than adding the green smoothie, I haven't changed my diet. I have noticed better energy levels.

I think Victoria is on to something about the power of green smoothies. It actually goes back further to living foods research of Ann Wigmore. However, I think most of us don't want to become vegetarians, vegans or raw foodists. What I did tease out from the Roseburg experiment is that it seems just adding green smoothies to what you normally eat can make a positive impact on one's health. Unfortunately, the data from Victoria's study is all post-study & observational. What I want, is to be able to better quantify the effect of green smoothies. Study participants will be asked to fill out a questionnaire before starting to add "green" smoothies to their normal diet. Study participants will be given some basic recipes to follow for four weeks. At the end of the study period, participants will be asked to fill out another questionnaire.