What No One Tells You About Green Smoothies

Green smoothies have been one of the biggest health trends of the 21st century for no good reason. They're actually a scam. For the last 20 years, I've worked on longevity and anti aging and extending my lifespan. And I've been a vegan. I've been a raw vegan. I have had more green smoothies than you, most likely. I've learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work. And what doesn't work is green smoothies. The vast majority of them are really bad for you. I found it out the hard way when I went hardcore into the plant based lifestyle. I drank a green smoothie every single day. I blended, I sprouted, I put spinach, chard, kale, radishes, and a lot of other things in and I'd squeeze it and I juice it in my champion juicer. And you know what I did? In addition to giving myself an autoimmune condition, Hashimoto's gets much worse from a compound called oxalate that's present in these drinks. I also shattered three teeth and had to go to the dentist for emergency things where I'd miss meetings because my bones were getting soft. And this happens because those green smoothies that you think are good for you are full of plant defense compounds that steal minerals from from your body. And not just calcium, a lot of the other minerals you need as well. So even though there might be minerals present in something like spinach, the fact that there's another thing that sucks minerals out of you and stops you from using the minerals, that's a big problem. So if you don't want to feel crappy all the time, you don't want kidney stones. 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants, not by meat and beer. Well, you might want to think about this twice. Kale wasn't even a popular food before about 2014. It was a decoration. And the largest buyer of kale in the entire US was Pizza Hut. And it wasn't to feed it to you or put it on some sort of weird pizza. It was to put around the salad bar to make it pretty. So when you eat kale, it's the same as eating the floral arrangement on your table instead of the actual food. And there was a kale psyop led by a kale marketing association in order to convince people that you should eat this. And to this very day, health influencers will say you should have a green smoothie because it's good for you. But they don't understand why. That's because greens at least the majority of them are loaded with a plant toxin called oxalate. And oxalate enters your body and it finds calcium, which is in your blood and other tissues, and then they bind together to form razor sharp, tiny calcium crystals. And these are shown in studies to be directly toxic to your mitochondria. They can form on the lining of your nerves, they form in your muscles, they form in your kidneys. They're a primary cause of interstitial cystitis in women. In fact, when I was a raw vegan, I had so many oxalates in my diet that I had to pee 25 times a day. And I went to the pee doctor, and they put a camera in the pee hole. That was one of the most traumatizing experiences of my life. And I blame kale, and so should you. So if you have to pee all the time, back off on the green smoothies, and you might see that that's the problem. These calcium oxalate crystals can also form in your brain. And people with thyroid conditions, about 80% of them have oxalate crystals in their thyroid. So you might be suppressing your metabolism. You're definitely getting soft bones, and you're getting problems with your teeth, and you wake up with sore joints, and your back hurts, and anywhere you've ever been injured hurts. That's because oxalate gets attracted to places where you're inflamed. So if you wake up in the morning feeling like a truck hit, you blame the smoothie, because that's probably what did it. We know from research that the human body can handle about 200 milligrams of oxalate, which you get from anything that's a whole food, that's a seed or a nut, and most of the green vegetables and some fruits. And this is an important number because a green smoothie can have one gram, five times more what your body can handle. Plus, you're probably eating some other things, like almonds and sweet potatoes that increase your load even more. Even more, even worse. The beginning fatal dose is 5 grams. So your big green smoothie has 20% of the beginning fatal dose of oxalate. There are thousands of studies about oxalate, all from before 1950, when all this knowledge was present, and then it just went away. And today you may be making the same mistake that I did, which is eating tons of foods that you think are healthy because they're plants, not knowing about this kind of toxin that your great grandparents knew about. Humans at one point may have had a bacteria in our gut called Oxalobacter. And this type of bacteria can break down oxalates. We don't have that in our guts anymore because of antibiotics, pesticides, et cetera. But even humans who do have it can only break down a little bit more. You have to be a duck or a goose in order to really be able to break these things down. So here's what you ought to do. Instead of drinking a green smoothie, you could drink water with lemon juice and electrolytes, or sea salt or salt from a mine. It turns out that lemon juice will break down the oxalate that's been in your body for a long time. It can take a couple of years to fully work through all of the oxalate that you've absorbed, thinking you were eating healthy foods. You could also make a green smoothie if you just have to, and you want to spend a lot of money to get very little nutrition. Cucumbers are safe, arugula is safe. But what's the point? You could just put the cucumber and arugula in a nice salad and eat that and get more of the fiber. You could also eat lettuce. Lettuce is safe. But the vast majority of those weird, bitter, gross greens, they're weird and bitter and gross for a reason. Or you could get way more of the polyphenols that are good for you by having a cup of coffee instead of a green smoothie. You'll thank me all day long. So there you have it. Quit the green smoothies if you want to live longer. Save a ton of money, and on a per calorie basis, you can eat a grass fed ribeye. And it's cheaper than a green smoothie. Think about that.