Blessings to everyone for the New Year. May the next century be filled with health, happiness and green smoothies!!! Prioritizing your health by adding more greens to your diet is the perfect New Years resolution. I thought we could start 2010 by contemplating the value of leafy greens and the idea that they should be a separate food group.  Please enjoy this article from Victoria Boutenko.

I wonder how greens got classified as vegetables? Why do we call many completely different food groups, vegetables, while they look different and contain different sets of nutrients? A produce manager from a local health food store complained to me that his customers often got confused when looking for a particular ingredient among 150+ pieces of produce all gathered under the single name: vegetables. This man had worked in the produce section for more then ten years. He suggested that the produce section be divided into several different smaller groups of plant foods with specific similarities, like roots (carrots, beets, daikon, etc.) flowers (broccoli, cauliflower, artichoke, etc.) and non-sweet fruit (cucumber, zucchini, squash, tomato, etc.). Combining foods with similar nutritional values would not only help shoppers to find necessary ingredients faster, but also would help them to become familiar with more plant foods and increase their variety of vegetarian food consumption.

Obviously, people have never considered plants to be important enough to be classified properly. Even at the regular supermarket one can see that other food departments have more detailed classifications. For example, the meat department is divided into poultry, fish, and meat, which in turn is subdivided into smaller sections, like veal, ground meats, bones, sub-products. Every item is carefully categorized, specifying which part of the carcass it is from. Cheeses have their own specification. Nobody would ever classify cheese and meat together in one group like “sandwich food”, because it would be inconvenient and unclear. Yet this kind of confusion and error continually occurs in the produce section at the present time. Some errors are quite serious, to such a degree that it could cause health problems. As an example of this, placing starchy roots in the same category with tomatoes and cucumbers could prompt customers to make improper food combining choices.

Another misconception occurs from placing greens and vegetables into the same category. Such inappropriate generalizations have lead researchers to the erroneous conclusion that greens are a poor source of protein. Contrary to this popular belief, greens are an excellent source of protein, (there is an article of the abundance of proteins in greens on this blog).

I propose that we separate greens from vegetables, now and forevermore. Greens have never received proper attention and have never been researched adequately because they have been incorrectly identified as vegetables. We don’t even have complete nutritional information about greens. For this book I had to collect bits and pieces of information from books and magazines from different countries and I still don’t have all the parts. I have not, for example, been able to find the nutritional content of carrot tops anywhere. Nevertheless, I have enough to draw some essential conclusions: greens are the only food group that match human nutritional needs most completely.

In my book Green For Life, I have used charts to illustrate that greens have an abundance of all the essential minerals and vitamins recommended by the USDA. Based on this data, I conclude that greens are the most essential food for humans.