Raw Energy in a Glass: 126 Nutrition-Packed Smoothies, Green Drinks, and Other Satisfying Raw Beverages to Boost Your Well-Being
288
Raw Energy in a Glass: 126 Nutrition-Packed Smoothies, Green Drinks, and Other Satisfying Raw Beverages to Boost Your Well-Being
288eBook
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Overview
Boost your energy with all-natural smoothies, shakes, green drinks, power shots, and fermented beverages. Best-selling author Stephanie Tourles offers more than 120 delicious and super-nutritious recipes that can be made with a common kitchen blender. Brighten your day with drinks like Green Grapefruit Refresher, Ginger-Lime Mocktini, Pain-Away Chlorella Smoothie, and Sunbutter Banana Protein Shake. With plenty of vegan options and a variety of natural sweeteners to choose from, there’s no shortage of nourishing, energizing, and irresistible choices.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781612122496 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Storey Publishing, LLC |
| Publication date: | 11/18/2014 |
| Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Stephanie L. Tourles is the best-selling author of Pure Skin Care,Stephanie Tourles's Essential Oils: A Beginner's Guide, Organic Body Care Recipes, Hands-On Healing Remedies, and Raw Energy. She is a certified foot and hand reflexologist and aromatherapist—and a licensed massage therapist and holistic esthetician. Tourles also has a strong background in Western and Ayurvedic herbalism. She lives in Marble Falls, Texas.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Liquid is Vital to Life
Ample consumption of pure liquids is extremely important for maintaining superb health: plain purified water, fresh-pressed juices, teas, or blended beverages consisting of raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or other green leafy plants.
Liquids satisfy a wide range of physical needs in our lives. They quench our thirst, but they can also warm us on a cold day and cool us down on a hot day. Drinks, such as those found in this book, can be packed with deeply nourishing nutrients, providing the raw materials to energize and fortify us when well or heal us when ill. Regularly consumed, they can increase our vitality and our longevity, as well as act as drinkable comfort food, consoling and calming us in times of trauma or stress.
The human body consists of approximately 70 percent water, depending on size, age, and gender, so it is hardly surprising that we need to drink throughout the day to keep our bodies functioning at peak performance. Adults lose, on average, 3 quarts of water every day, more if they are very active. That's about 1 quart in urine, 2 to 3 cups in perspiration, and 5 cups in exhalation vapors. It's no wonder we get thirsty and are easily dehydrated. All lost liquid must be replaced, and the right balance of pure, chemical-free liquid — whether plain water or plant-derived — is essential for the proper functioning of every cell, every tissue, every organ, and even every thought in the body.
Water is a powerful factor in maximizing your health, so make sure you're drinking at least 8 cups of water per day, more if you're active. Coffee, caffeinated tea, alcoholic drinks (including wine and beer), and sodas don't count toward your total. In fact, you should drink an additional cup of water for each cup of caffeinated or alcoholic beverage consumed. Consuming a large, raw, juicy fruit or vegetable smoothie definitely counts toward your daily water quota!
Superfoods in Every Sip
Have you ever enjoyed a sweet raspberry smoothie, creamy banana milk shake, rich glass of chocolate milk, or tart strawberry yogurt drink? Maybe an Orange Julius from the mall, spicy holiday eggnog, or a glass of tangy, dairy-based, peach kefir are favorite drinkable treats. In this book, I will be introducing you to their raw, vegan cousins — more healthful and nutritionally dense versions that are free of dairy, eggs, sugar, alcohol, and artificial flavors and colors. They're chock-full of plant-derived rejuvenating liquids; energy-enhancing live enzymes; easy-to-assimilate vitamins, minerals, healthy fats, fiber, complex carbohydrates, natural sugars, and proteins; plus loads of tongue-tantalizing flavor.
Every day there is new information printed and reported on the television, radio, and Internet regarding the benefits of eating a plant-based diet or at least a diet that relies heavily on plants. If you don't know by now, you should: a daily diet rich in raw fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds, as well as whole grains and other plant-derived specialty ingredients such as raw cocoa, carob powder, spirulina powder, goji berries, and rejuvenating herbs, can maximize your health and well-being.
When you feed yourself only the very best raw plant foods — organic if possible — these foods become extraordinarily beautiful and sacred to your being. Why? Not only because they taste great, but also because you begin to feel better and look better than you have in years. Energy comes roaring back. Every cell that hungers for fuel and revitalizing fluids is satisfied. It's true that when you eat more raw plant foods, you tend to be less physically hungry on a day-to-day basis. By eating foods of superior quality, your body will be better satisfied and the quantity you consume will naturally diminish. Raw food does not have empty calories. Every bite you eat is nutritionally dense, so your body is happier and not always crying out for more.
Every sip of the raw, whole food–derived, superfood beverages in this book is so rejuvenating, refreshing, energizing, and youthifying that every cell of your body will be singing your praises for finally quenching the thirst for nutrient-rich liquids.
Happy cells = a happy, energetic body = happy you!
What Exactly Is Energy?
Most cultures have a name for mental, physical, and spiritual life energy: pneuma in Greek, neshamah in Hebrew, spiritus in Latin, qi in Chinese, prana in Sanskrit, ki in Japanese.
Although you can't physically hold it in your hands, you can see the sun's energy as light, feel it as warmth, and see evidence of it in the life around you. You can hear the invisible energy of thunder during a rainstorm and see purple bolts of lightning through the clouds. Positive mental energy, too, can be transmitted through a kind word or a thoughtful gesture. Healing energy is conveyed through laying on of hands, Reiki, touch therapy, massage, or simple human contact. Energy can come in the form of inspiration, prayer, meditation, and exercise, as well as from time spent alone, in nature, and with family and friends.
Energy is vital. Energy is power. Along with oxygen and water, we need energy to survive and thrive. No matter how much we already have, we can always use more. We need large amounts of energy to get through our hectic schedules and deal with the demands of modern life; sadly, many of us don't have nearly enough of this precious resource to do much more at the end of the day than flop on the sofa in front of the television, exhausted. No zip left over to spend time playing with our children, walking our hyperactive, tail-wagging dogs, or even engaging in meaningful conversation with significant others. Energy is an elusive, mysterious force that courses through our being. We know when we have it, and we know when it's flagging.
To put it simply, energy is heat being released from food (our fuel) via the digestive system, which breaks it all down into liquid nutrients that are assimilated into the bloodstream and transported to where they are needed, healing our bodies when we're ill or giving us energy when we're well. The colon, kidneys, skin, and lungs all excrete the waste products (solids, liquids, and vapors) not needed by the body.
Digestion is a complicated process and can require a significant amount of energy, depending on what's consumed. If you typically eat foods that take a long time to digest, such as large slabs of meat, burgers and fries, cheesy lasagna, or an Italian sub, then your body has to use a fair portion of your energy stores to tackle the task at hand, leaving you with minimal energy to do the things you want or need to accomplish. Think of how little energy you have post–Thanksgiving dinner or after Grandma's Christmas feast. More than likely, a snooze fest sounds more appealing than a jog around the neighborhood or an afternoon of mountain biking!
As an alternative to a diet filled with heavy, animal-based foods and difficult-to-digest combinations, focus on eating lighter plant foods and drinking raw plant-based beverages that are easy to digest. These meals will leave your body with plenty of leftover energy to do the things you enjoy most in life. Regular consumption of lighter, though highly nutritious, plant-derived fare, will also boost the efficiency of your immune system, preventing illnesses from taking hold and allowing you to heal faster if you do become sick or are injured in an accident.
Get the Most Out of Your Food
To have energy and zest for living, you need maximum nutrition from your food. A simple statement, but so powerful and true. The body relies on the things that you eat to maintain the health of all its cells, from brain cells to the protein-rich keratin-containing cells that make up and harden your hair, skin, and nails. Every single day, the food that you consume and assimilate initiates the performance of one of two possible tasks: it either builds up or constructs and improves your condition, also known as anabolism, or leads to a breaking down of your being, known as catabolism. Along with adequate sleep, sunshine, water, and regular exercise — all essentials to maintaining wellness and comfortable longevity — what you eat ranks right up there in importance. Healthful food ensures that your body has the nutrients to build physical and mental health and strength. If you provide your cells with the perfect balance of nutrients, neither too much nor too little, then these building blocks will actually rejuvenate your being from the inside out, making you look and feel younger than your years.
Eat Green, Local, and Organic
A daily diet filled with the right foods can help us feel and look our best. That's an undeniable fact. What we choose to eat also has a huge impact on the health of our planet. Increasing our consumption of organic raw foods decreases the production and use of toxic chemicals and their contamination of our natural environment (air, water, and soil). Unprocessed raw foods require less packaging, and they haven't been refined and diluted with nutritionless fillers, chemical flavors, colors, and empty calories. Greater consumption of organic foods increases demand, resulting in the planting of more organic farms, which, in the long term, contributes to a greener planet. Eating green is a win-win proposition — better health for the planet and for us, too.
To keep the level of toxins in my body to an absolute minimum, I shop for organic food whenever it is available at good quality and price, thus reducing the risk of health problems associated with the consumption of pesticides, herbicides, and genetically modified foods (GMOs) — those foods that have been artificially altered by science to increase crop yields and resistance to pests. GMOs, or Frankenfoods, as they are commonly called, are far from healthful or natural, and I feel it is wise to avoid them. I don't care to be a lab rat in a long-term agricultural science experiment that, some 30 years from now, may be discovered to have gone terribly wrong.
Organic fruits and vegetables do not have to be peeled, which is noteworthy, as many vital nutrients lie just below the skin: cucumbers and apples are good examples. I grow many of my own leafy greens and vegetables, and some berries during the summer and fall, so my source for those is my own backyard garden. I'm blessed to live in a rural area where farmers' markets abound, so if I don't grow it, I can purchase good stuff nearby. Fresh and organic is truly the way to go if it's available to you and fits your budget. And shopping local — straight from the source — contributes money to the community.
Juicing versus Blending: The Pros and Cons
I wrote this book to help you enjoy your journey toward revitalized health and well-being in a delicious way. To accomplish that goal, some health enthusiasts would recommend that you add freshly extracted fruit and vegetable juices to your diet, extolling their mighty, fiber-free, "instant nutrition" virtues. On the flipside, other health seekers (myself included) have discovered the bounteous benefits of making raw, whole-food, fiber-rich, blended beverages part of their dietary intake. Both forms of food processing, juicing and blending, make the nutrients in fruits, vegetables, greens, nuts, and seeds more readily available and absorbable by the bloodstream, but that's where the similarity ends. Let's discover the differences between juicing and blending — then you can decide for yourself which method of nutrient intake is best for your needs.
An important term to understand when discussing food and nutrition is bioavailability. It is a word borrowed from the field of pharmacology and refers to the amount of a particular drug the body actually absorbs into the bloodstream, not just the amount taken. With respect to food, bioavailability refers to the nutrients your digestive system will be able to extract in a form that can be absorbed and assimilated into the bloodstream, ready for the body to use as needed to build, maintain, and repair tissue. Both juicing and blending optimize the bioavailability of the nutrients you consume, but do it in different ways.
Juicing
The absence of fiber in fresh raw fruit or vegetable juice allows easy assimilation of concentrated nutrients straight into the bloodstream with little digestion required, conserving the body's digestive energy. This is the main pro-juice argument. Juices contain zero fiber — zilch — so their nutrients are absorbed rapidly, high in the digestive tract. With juices, no chewing is necessary and little or no digestive energy is required as there is nothing to break down. The main advantage of consuming juices over blended beverages is that if one is suffering from a very weak constitution or major nutritional deficiencies, bypassing the intestines (due to the absence of fiber), helps the body rest its digestive energies and heal. Some people don't tolerate fiber very well, especially those who have had surgical procedures such as a colostomy or gastric bypass, so juices are a good choice for them.
The cons: Juices tend to be a concentrated source of carbohydrates, especially if the juice is derived from 100 percent fruit. To avoid a possible "sugar high," it is advisable to dilute all juices by 50 percent with purified water so that the pancreas is not overly stimulated to excrete excess insulin into the bloodstream in order to process all that sugar. The dilution of juices is especially advisable for children, pre-diabetics, diabetics, and the elderly.
Juicing also takes considerable time. Depending on the type of juicer you use — a masticating juicer is slow but extracts more juice from the produce and ejects drier pulp residue; a centrifugal juicer is quicker, but leaves wetter pulp — it can take up to 20 minutes or more to make juice, and then you have to clean the machine! This is the bane of all juice advocates and the reason many people stop juicing altogether.
Also, juices don't fill you up. They provide quick energy, but within an hour or so, you're hungry again.
Blending
Unlike fruit and vegetable juices, my whole-food recipes for smoothies, shakes, and frappes are a bit heavier, containing all of their fiber, carbohydrates, fat, and protein. They give you sustained, strength-building, fortifying energy for hours to come, and they satisfy on three levels: they're nutritionally dense and they satiate both appetite and taste buds.
This book primarily contains recipes that are made with a high-powered blender, or as some call them, nutrient-extractors. These devices do blend and purée foods like a standard kitchen blender. But, due to a more powerful motor, they have the advantage of being able to release the hidden nutrition inside the foods by further breaking down or rupturing the cell walls, including those of the tough seeds, skins, nuts, fibrous pulp, and stems. (A juicer would discard these parts as pulp waste.) The nutrients are in their most absorbable state, making the process of digesting and utilizing the resultant super nutrient-rich, fiber-rich drink nearly effortless for your body.
A big advantage to drinking blended beverages is the ingestion of valuable fiber, both soluble and insoluble. Insoluble fiber, obtained from such sources as nuts, seeds, fruit and vegetable peels, and fibrous pulp, passes through the digestive tract undigested and is the roughage that keeps you regular or helps prevent constipation. It is often said that insoluble fiber functions as an intestinal broom, sweeping the intestines clean of debris. Soluble fiber, found in foods such as flax and chia seeds, oats, and apples, also passes through the digestive tract undigested, but it forms a gel in water, adding bulk and moisture to stools, keeping them soft. It also attaches itself to LDL cholesterol (low-density lipoproteins, considered the "bad" cholesterol), removing it from the body via the intestines.
Most people don't even come close to consuming the 25 to 30 grams of recommended daily fiber intake. The fiber prolongs stomach-emptying time and slows the absorption of nutrients and sugars, maintaining a steady level of both energy and blood sugar, a boon to those who need sustained energy, are dieting, or are pre-diabetic and diabetic. Blended beverages are also wonderful for those who have irritable bowel syndrome or ulcers; they are soothing to the digestive tract, providing whole food and fibrous nourishment, minus the irritation of large pieces of potentially irritating fiber.
Another advantage to making blended beverages over juicing: time savings! You can blend a smoothie, frappe, or shake in minutes, and cleanup is a snap.
The water and fiber from fresh, whole fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and leafy greens detoxifies us in a healthy, comfortable way from the inside out by showering and sweeping our intestines clean. Just one raw blended smoothie, frappe, or shake per day will significantly recharge your system, reboot your energy level, and leave you feeling satisfied for several hours.
Age-Defying Antioxidants: What's the Hype?
For years, the media has been warning us about the dangers of free radicals and the benefits of antioxidants, but do you actually know what these terms mean? Free radicals are those pesky molecules with unpaired electrons in their outer shell that accelerate the aging process by damaging cells. The majority occur naturally in the body and are produced as a byproduct of normal cellular activity, and some are also generated by physical and psychological stress.
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Excerpted from "Raw Energy in a Glass"
by .
Copyright © 2014 Stephanie Tourles.
Excerpted by permission of Storey Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrefacePart One: The Basics
- Liquid Is Vital to Life
- What Exactly Is Raw, Live Food?
- Superfood Dictionary: Ingredients, Equipment & Raw Beverage Prep Techniques
4. Nut & Seed Milks
5. Green Smoothies
6. Longevity Elixirs: Smoothies, Shakes, and Slushies for Delicious Rejuvenation
7. Vegan Yogurt Drinks: Digestive Health in a Glass
8. Protein-Powered Smoothies & Shakes
9. Blended Salads
10. Thick & Frosty Shakes
11. Raw Shots
12. Fruity, Frothy & Frosty Frappes
13. Mocktails
Resources
Recommended Reading
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Artful combinations of common fare with superfoods and beautiful photos inspire health and pleasure with every sip!"