Green Foods-Helps Your Body

Green Foods-Helps Your Body

Green Food

Vegetables are your brain’s best friend. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it, especially when we’re talking about the nonstarchy varieties including spinach and romaine lettuce, and the cruciferous veggies cabbage, kale, mustard greens, arugula, and bok choy. These dark leafy greens are low in sugar and packed with vitamins, minerals, and other phytonutrients that the brain desperately needs to function properly.

One of the nutrients that dark leafy greens are full of is the vitamin folate. In fact, the word folate comes from the Latin word for “foliage,” making it pretty easy to remember how to get more of it: eat leaves! Known mostly for its ability to prevent neural tube birth defects, folate is an essential ingredient in your body’s methylation cycle. This cycle occurs on a constant basis throughout the body and is critical for both detoxification and getting your genes to do their proper jobs. 

Green Food

Another important nutrient found in greens is magnesium. Magnesium is known as a “macromineral,” because we need to get a relatively large amount of it from our food for optimal health and performance (other macrominerals include sodium, potassium, and calcium). Nearly three hundred enzymes rely on magnesium, making

it pretty popular around the body.

These enzymes are tasked with helping you generate energy and repairing damaged DNA, which is the underlying cause of cancer and aging, and even plays a role in Alzheimer’s disease. Sadly, magnesium consumption is inadequate for 50 percent of the population. But lucky for us, anything green is usually a good source of magnesium, as this mineral is found at the center of the chlorophyll molecule (which gives plants their green pigmentation). Perhaps this is why a recent study has shown that people who ate just two servings of dark leafy greens a day had brains that looked eleven years younger on scans! 

Green Food

Dark leafy greens also provide an undeniable benefit to us by way of the fiber that they contain. In chapter 7 you learned all about the gut microbiome and its collective ability to produce short-chain fatty acids like butyrate—a powerful inflammation inhibitor. The number one way to feed these microbes (and in turn extract butyrate for ourselves) is to increase vegetable consumption, which ensures a diverse and ample pipeline of fermentable, prebiotic fibers for our microbe friends. Leafy greens even contain a newly discovered sulfur-bound sugar molecule called sulfoquinovose (try to say that three times fast) that directly feeds healthy gut bacteria. 

Overall, consumption of vegetables—and dark leafy greens in particular—benefits both brain and body, and is even inversely related to dementia risk and various biomarkers for aging. 

Green Food

How to use: Eat one huge “fatty salad” daily, which is a salad filled with organic dark leafy greens like kale, arugula,

romaine lettuce, or spinach, and doused with extra-virgin olive oil. Avoid nutrient-poor varieties like iceberg lettuce, which is essentially just water and fiber. There will be more “fatty salad” options in the recipe section