Increasing The Power of Assimilation, Conserving Digestive Power – Blended Foods

Cornerstones for living a long life and healing illness include:

Ø      Maximizing the ratio of Nutrients to Calories

Ø      Maximizing the Input of Energy and Nutrition, Minimizing Output

Ø      Conserving as much energy as possible for things other than digestion

  Along with broths, super-foods, cultured foods, the Protein Shake, Ultimate Tonic, freshly-squeezed veggie juices, blended foods is one easy way to meet these goals.

An important dietary goal is to aim for getting more energy, life force and nutrients from our foods than the energy and nutrients we expend in order to digest them. In other words, more nutrition in versus less nutrition lost. Deposits rather than withdrawals. Nutrients rather than anti-nutrients. Net gains rather than gross losses.

Every diet engineered for good nutrition aims to do this, but they often completely neglect the other side of the equation, which is that which we absorb.

We are more than what we eat, we are what we can absorb.

A small, sedentary person who can’t afford to eat a lot of calories must make each calorie count. It’s impossible to meet even the recommended levels of essential nutrients if you’re keeping to a thousand-kcalorie a day diet made up of foods with low quality foods with only 50% or less of your total nutrient needs.

Chronic eating of empty calories leads to obesity, degenerative diseases and an early death after a miserable old age.

Another important consideration is that digestion takes a ton of energy, and the by-products of digestion are always toxic no matter how smart we eat. We can eat the most wholesome, nutritious meal in the world, give up our slice of cake, and there will still be toxic by-products of digestion that the body must exit. Exiting these acids takes work, requires nutrients, calories, enzymes, water. This takes nutrients and energy away from other work, like maintaining youth or killing off viruses and cancers.

Many vitamins, minerals and enzymes help in both building tissues and digesting food.

If they’re all busy digesting food, which must happen unless the adrenals shut digestion down due to stress, only the leftover enzymes, vits and mins will be able to fight the good fight for healthy tissues. So if we eat cheap, dead foods, we’re actually worse off than if we had chosen to fast. We’ve made a withdrawal rather than a deposit of nutrients, a huge deposit of toxins and eventually fat if we exceeded our metabolic needs.

People talk all the time about conserving water used to steam veggies, that boiling them leaches out nutrients that get washed away if you’re not making soup. This is just a very tiny loss when compared to leaving our veggies whole and unblended.

Blending foods increases the bio-availability of the nutrients by 5 times over.

How many times have you seen undigested corn, carrots, nuts, in your stools? We never chew enough, and my saying ‘you should chew more’ isn’t going to change that, especially if you’ve had teeth pulled.

Use a blender, a grater, a food processor, a juicer, or a soup mill, and start breaking your foods down before you even eat them.

To conserve digestive power, really maximize input so that the input of nutrients totally outweighs the output of nutrients, you not only have to choose nutritional foods for much of the time, you also have to ensure that the goodness in these foods is properly absorbed. They don’t do you much good if they don’t’ make it into your bloodstream.

But what about oxidation, you might ask? Ah, a good point. Things exposed to the air start going wonky. I could give you the more scientific version of oxidation but I haven’t yet found an interesting metaphor for it. The trick with pre-masticating your veggies is to stop as soon as the whirlpool (or tornado) effect happens. If they’re fine and liquid enough to swirl, stop and use up as quickly as possible. Don’t store them, be sure to eat them right away.

I find that many of the complicated rules for the Specific Carbohydrate Diet become unnecessary when roughage is blended. Most of the difficulties involved in digesting raw foods are eliminated, although large amounts of raw salads are still not highly recommended during illness involving the immune system, liver or spleen. Eating warm, blended meals and porridges is a wonderful cure for IBS, Crohn’s, Colitis, and vastly supports any self-healing, recovery and even bodybuilding efforts. 

But what about blood sugar? Some people are advised to eat meals that are absorbed slowly. They can still eat blended foods, but they should blend the faster digesting foods such as veggies with slower to digest foods like nuts, legumes, and oils. And blended foods doesn’t mean simple, refined carbs, so hypoglycemics should do fine with blended meals.

Blended foods are:

Ø      Extremely Decadent

You can add a bit of cottage cheese or goat cheese for a wonderful spread texture. Use on crackers, or jicima sliced as a cracker, stuffed celery, or just eat off the spoon.

Ø      Extremely Comforting

You can keep them soupy, add pungent spices and heat for a Vata-Kapha appropriate soup that’s better than Campbell’s Tomato.

Ø      Extremely Versatile

Can be cooked or raw, blended prior to or after cooking. Can be any flavor – sweet or savory, pungent, hot, sour, or a curry blend, vegetarian, vegan or Nourishing Traditions, Cleansing Stage, Maintenance Stage, Rebuilding Stage. They can be fixed so that they are appropriate for any Dosha. 

Ø      You don’t have to know how to cook!

You just have to have a good blender or food processor, know how to taste and be brave enough to keep adding things and experimenting with combinations until things taste right.

Ø      No slaving over a hot stove on hot days!

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