A little more on Greens

You may or may not know how many of us felt about greens as a child. I for one, hated them & I still observe many parents to-day struggling to get their child to eat even a morsel of any kind of vegetable! What's going on? Those born in this era are fortunate enough to maybe have  Mum make green Smoothies & Green Juices, & incorporate veggies into all kinds of deliciously Raw & lightly cooked recipes. Sixty plus years ago I had to wade through a plate of over boiled spinach, beans or peas, totally killed off, grey in colour & without even a wiff of sauce or butter! Yuck! We didn't have the variety of greens seen readily in supermarkets & fruit stalls these days; even the packets of Mesclun lettuce are an example of this, offering such a variety of different & interesting lettuces all in one spoonful.

We still tend to like certain greens more than others even when making creative dishes. It is so easy to throw a handful of English Spinach into every shake, smoothie or juice rather than explore incorporating other options.This can lead to the possibility that you might be overdoing it by focusing so much on just one or a few types of greens. Your good intentions can lead you to be out of balance nutritionally with too much of some nutrients or acids, and too little of others. The solution then is to always aim for a variety of foods in your diet, including your greens.

Spinach in particular tends to be one green that many people overdo. This is because it’s tasty, readily available, familiar and very mild so it’s a great addition to juices, smoothies and salads.

The problem with this, along with the fact that it only provides a certain profile of nutrients, is that even though spinach is a wonderfully healthy food, it is high in oxalic acid, which in large quantities can imbalance the body. 

This falls in line with the overall idea that we wouldn’t overeat on one particular food, ignoring all the other options available to us. This is why eating seasonally is important and this alone can mitigate a lot of the risks of overdoing one particular type of food.

When it comes to greens, we have a huge abundance of delicious greens available to us to keep in rotation, so we are always getting a variety of different nutrients. They all have their own unique flavor and you can play around with them in salads, cooked veggie meals, juices, smoothies, soups, in wraps, in dips or any other way you would like to enjoy them.

                                                                                                                                                                                                Here’s just some of them for you to explore:  Cabbage, Mesclun, Romaine, Oak, Butter & Cos Lettuce, Swiss Chard, Spinach, Kale, Collards, Endive, Bok Choy, Broccoli, Dandelion, Mustard Greens, Herbs like Parsley, Coriander/ Cilantro, Dill, Thyme, Rosemary etc Watercress & Arugula.

And there are many more, this is just a start. As you can see, there are plenty to choose from!

Aim to have at least 4-5 different greens each week and rotate them where possible so you’re not eating the same greens more than 2-3 times a week. This will help ensure you maximize all the nutritional benefits that greens have to offer and help you avoid deficiencies as well as oxalic acid toxicity.