QUESTION: “Does the large amount of fruit found in green smoothies cause a problem for those fighting Candida?”

VICTORIA: In my experience I’ve noticed that those who are drinking green smoothies are having fewer complaints about Candida. I know several people who have been very sick with Candida. One of them is Elizabeth who I quote in my book ‘Green For Life.’ I have a whole testimony from her. She had a very bad case of Candida and she was completely healed from it. Another is my friend Irene from Denver who had a very terrible case of Candida and now she doesn’t have it. She said she can eat any fruits and it doesn’t bother her. What she cannot eat is any fats. She says as soon as she begins to eat any fats like olive oil, nuts or avocados, her Candida comes back.

I understand that Candida results from very low immunity, and what else can improve immunity more than good nutrition? I believe that most of us have nutritional deficiencies. It doesn’t matter where we live. This is the result of our process of civilization. In my book ’12 Steps to Raw Foods’ (and I want to emphasize that it is quite different from the previous book ‘Raw Family’, about 90% different) I describe my anthropological and historical research that humans have been eating lots of greens and predominately raw food all through history. They did occasionally eat meats, but they were eating raw foods predominately, they were not eating a lot, they ate no processed food and they constantly consumed greens.

It is only 180 years ago that they started to eat predominately cooked foods. How did that happen? It started first with the English chemist John Walker, who invented the process of refining sugar. It was just in the beginning of the 19^th Century and then a Swiss miller invented the metal grinders for his mill and he started to produce white flour, pasta, and macaroni, things that could be stored indefinitely and then boiled in the middle of the winter. According to historical research, people were very hungry and starving, and often in the wintertime whole families would die from not having enough food, so they were really concerned with having enough food. During the summers they were collecting, gathering and putting their food into storage, which was just a hole in the ground of they were very poor. They were putting their dried berries, dried fruits, apples, grains, rice, fish, and dried mushrooms, whatever they could find. In the wintertime, they weren’t even eating everyday. Very often they were happy if they were eating every other day, like one meal a day, one meal every other day. They were not eating for pleasure. They were eating just for survival. There was always a shortage of food, there was no refrigeration, there were rodents, there was mold, sometime the food storage would be flooded from rain and the whole family would starve. Imagine when this Swiss miller invented the metal grinder and started to make white pasta that could be easily stored, people could have this backup supply of food all through the winter, so they embraced it.

Finally, Napoleon the Great wanted to conquer the world and he announced a competition where he wanted somebody to come up with a method so that his soldiers could have enough food during the long hikes across other countries. It was really a big challenge because there were thousands of hungry young men. A Swiss chef came up with the process of canning at the beginning of the 19^th Century, in the year of 1812. The first can took six hours to can and it could last for almost a year, but then it was really embraced by Napoleon, the government, by the people and the merchants. Within a few years, the process of canning was reduced from six hours to thirty minutes. Women were especially happy for that because they were enslaved in smoky kitchens cleaning greasy pots and pans, and cleaning up ashes. It was a lot of heavy labor but now they could open preserves with a can opener, eat white bread and boil pasta. And of course, white sugar. Before white sugar, there were no sweet – just honey, raisins, and dried apples – that was as sweet as it could get! Suddenly there was unlimited sweetness, and people at that time thought it was good for them. They were giving unlimited sugar to children.

This all started 180 years ago. People no longer had to dig cellars and collect food all summer long, but they didn’t understand that their food became a lot less nutritious. It became denser in calories so they could survive, but it was less nutritious. People started to become malnourished. As a result, four diseases began to form and became very widespread – it was Scurvy, Rickets, Beriberi and Pellagra. In the United States in 1910, 10,000 Americans died from Pellagra alone. Pellagra is a multi-vitamin deficiency. In history we find very few descriptions of cancer cases – just here and there among rich people. In the last century, cancer cases increased. In 1900, 64 of every 100,000 people in the United States died of cancer. It became so widespread. In the next 100 years, this number tripled. As you probably know, in 2006 in the United States alone, over half a million people died of cancer. That’s huge. What happened was malnourished mothers gave birth to malnourished children and these children were never introduced to greens. It was unfashionable, unpopular and shameful to eat dandelions, plantain or clover like a rabbit when you could open preserves and eat confections. It was like you weren’t going hand-in-hand with the revolution of “progress.” Women were even “liberated” from nursing children because infant formula was created, and was believed to be better. For seven or eight generations, we have been severely malnourished. I believe we are malnourished today because we continue to eat predominately processed foods. Very few people predominately eat raw food with an emphasis on greens. Greens are the prime food for all creatures and the source of nutrition. Nutrition comes from the microorganisms in the soil, of which we have less and less. That is why we have low immunity, Candida, and parasites. We cannot fight these things with chemicals because we will eventually die from chemicals, not from parasites. We can strengthen our immune systems. That’s why when people begin to drink green smoothies and eat raw food, they conquer their Candida or parasites or any other condition.