Lindsay Lohan was spotted swilling it, and soon everyone and their damned Chihuahua was talking about that strange, stinky tea called kombucha. But before you could say ‘fermented mucous blob’, the potion was pulled from the shelves of every Whole Foods and health food stores across the nation. Which means those of us who depend on it can no longer find our fix! What’s a jonesing little monkey to do?! Well, we’re taking it back prohibition-style: we’re cooking up our own ‘bathtub brew’.
Why?
Kombucha can be traced to the far east, as far back as 2,000 years ago. The fizzy fermented drink is all raw and claims bragging rights on a whole slew of healthful properties, including improved digestion, increased metabolism, regulated hunger/blood sugar, body detoxification, and immune system strength. The cordial itself contains active enzymes, probiotics, amino acids, and energizing B-vitamins. A little goes a long way, and a daily dose will leave you feeling great.
How?
Oh, Miss Lohan, what have you done? The feds got frazzled over alcohol content and now the stuff’s on lockdown. BUT, if you can get your hands on just one bottle then you’re in good shape, because you can turn it into an everlasting supply. Really, it’s very simple.
My uncle and I were talking the other day, he’s not a raw foodist by any means but he’s a health NUT and he owns a supplement company. He drinks green smoothies, makes everything fresh, eats only organic meat, goes on radical cleanses and so on as we do from time to time about health and food.
Our topic on this particular day was COFFEE! Yes, coffee, which I indulge in from time to time. The reason I brought up coffee was because I had read something that REALLY freaked me out. I mean, deep down I know that coffee is far from a healthy beverage. It’s a Fake-Out and a stimulant and bad for the kidneys and nervous system to some degree, it stimulates the bowls, and so on and so forth. Then you hear on the news sometimes that small amounts are actually “healthy for us”! Come on! I don’t believe that {although I listen in hopes that I hear something new and interesting as to why I should drink that espresso}. I mean, MAYBE the good {it’s a great pick-me-up when you are tired} outways the BAD sometimes and won’t really HARM us in a permanent way. Now that I can see!
But again, as with most things, we are always looking for an excuse to drink it or eat it! Right? We like to justify it. I mean come on, there are WORSE things, right?
Back to my story: the blurb I had just read that day was out of Sarma and Matthew’s Raw Food Real World. I had received the book as a gift about 5 years ago when it first came out and hadn’t really read much of it. Of course one of the first pages I turned to was the page on COFFEE and how bad it is for us.
I will say it again, Not Just The Best F@ckin Fruit In A Jar, not by a mile. Olives, in my opinion maybe the greatest fruit of all-time. Olives have been described in biblical and other historic texts and are often associated with good health, goodwill, happiness, and peace. In Greece you could actually be put to death for harming an olive tree, while over in Rome is was considered a highly “sexual” fruit, and used as an aphrodisiac. Romans would eat them by the hundreds in single sittings, and were also the first civilization credited for the perfection of olive oil by using a stone press. The more you study olives and their history the more you begin to see how amazing they truly are. I am not talking about your black olives in a can either, I mean REAL, big juicy ripe olives that are fresh and magical.
Most of you know from reading my stuff that I am a big fan of eliminating toxins and getting the toxic mucus out of your system. With olives you seriously hit the jackpot in accomplishing this. Olives have a greater ability than oranges to dissolve toxic mucus in the system, and that’s saying a lot, because oranges are actually great for that. According to Ragnar Berg’s table which lists different foods ability to bind with acids it shows olives having the highest propensity to do so, actually THREE TIMES GREATER than oranges. The higher a foods acid-binding ability, the better it is at dissolving toxic mucus and removing cooked food residues from the body. It turns out that the olive comes it at a rating of 30.56, with figs coming in at 27.81. There were no other foods on the list that even topped a score of 20. Oranges came in at 9.61 and it is considered one of the very best toxic mucus dissolvers. Olives are pretty powerful little fruits!
We’ve all heard the meat is murder argument, and chances are if it hasn’t inspired you to become a fourth level vegan yet it probably never will. There is another argument for vegetarianism that may have a bigger impact on peoples choice in cuisine. Cutting down, or completely stopping on eating meat can reduce your carbon footprint more than giving up your car.
There are many factors that contribute to global warming. The biggest are waste production, electricity and transport. Next on the list is food production. We all try to turn our lights off and walk when we can, but have you ever considered how your diet is effecting the planet, let alone your hair?
A Study in New Scientist magazine reported that the production of one kilogram of beef produced as much greenhouse gasses as three hours of driving. The greenhouse gas emission of animals was calculated by considering the production and transportation of grain, as well as the methane emissions from animals. Continue Reading / See Additional Photos
Hello world, my name is V Blak and I am a sickly looking vegan (was). I know how sad, poor Monkie.
Let me start with a memory, years ago, I was in New York City working with my friend Jay. My first day in town, he rushes me up to meet his new girl. She was transitioning to a raw food diet and exploring the whole vegan thing. She even had Jay embracing it. Big big change in lifestyle for him. He was so new to it, he really had no clue what being a vegan was. He would say things like, no red meat right, I can’t have steaks anymore? Yeah, Jay that’s it. You got it.
Anyways, back to the introduction. He introduced me, acting all excited, going on about how cool it was, that I had already been a vegan for years. His thinking was that she would be inspired or something. She wasn’t. She turned to me and said, oh yeah I can tell he is a vegan and she didn’t mean it in a good way. She meant yeah, he sticks out like a sore thumb. Pale, thin, gauntly, sunken in, walking skeleton, you know the type. The worst part is that she was dead on right. I was no vegan role model. I was looking pretty bad. Even worse, I wasn’t even concerned. I didn’t think anything was wrong with the way I looked. I didn’t even take in what she was saying. My mind just said, well that is her problem. I look fine, I am just a thin person, she just doesn’t understand.
The reality was, I was too busy working, trying to make a difference, trying to understand the world I was living in, trying to understand myself. Fighting through depression, fighting to just stay. I never stopped and thought about my health or what I looked like. And here is the thing, I was skinny for a long long time, but it wasn’t because I became a vegan, Vegans don’t have to be skinny and most are not. That is just a stereotype. I was skinny because I gave up on myself. I didn’t care about me. I had no balance in my life. I never ate. I would drink espresso, suppressing my appetite, so I could work longer hours, stay up more days. When I did eat, it would be something simple like a salad. A very very light near zero calorie salad. Very little fats or proteins. Worst of all, I sat in my chair day after day and completely gave up on working out. For me even the thought of working out turned my stomach. I would think, oh how boring, what a dull ill thing to do. I hated it. So, I just didn’t do it, ever. The last time I was physically active (until recently) was back in my early 20′s. So, think about it, a good 15 years just blew by as my body withered away. Amazing what we will do to ourselves.
To the dude with the double-shot, extra-dry, vanilla soy cappuccino (V Blak and you other Bad Monkies!), your long-winded order doesn’t even stand a chance — in terms of taste (or lack of pretention, for that matter — to top my delicious, healthy Hempuccino.
Rich, creamy, and boasting a long list of nutritious attributes (including Omega-3), the Hempuccino is made by using steamed Living Harvest Hempmilk as a non-dairy “milk” choice, and combining it with espresso. Coffee shops are quickly catching on to using the hemp milk as an innovative new way to produce impressively frothy and full-flavored drinks and steamers that make an exceptional morning mug.
Especially in the indigenous coffee culture of Portland, OR, marrying steamed hemp milk with ol’ cuppa joe is all the latest buzz. The city — whose vibe infers that a progressive stance on health and environment might just be as important as a really good cup of coffee — is also home to popular hemp food company Living Harvest, who thinks you can indeed have both. To prove it, they’ve been spending plenty of energy as of late promoting their award-winning Hempmilk in the independent coffee shops that line Portland’s streets. Once aware of the new option, many latte lovers and conventional coffee gurus alike have wasted no time in making the switch.
Beach weather is finally here and the best way to cool down is to strip down. But what about your stomach? Just as you reach for that bikini (or speedos) that has been stuffed in the back of your drawer, you may find yourself unnerved by a panicked assessment of your neglected core muscles. Yet the thought of doing hundreds of boring and painful crunches is probably even more dreadful.
Good news! You don’t have to do any crunches or sit-ups to get beautiful sleek abs and a strong healthy core. There are many exercises that engage the core indirectly and are effective and fun. One of my favorites is the plank pose in yoga. There are many variations of the plank. To increase the intensity and target the abdominal muscles, try this modified plank exercise with a leg lift on a stability ball: Continue Reading / See Additional Photos
How many skinny bitches does it take to make a bestseller?
With a steady following (and the help of celebrity photo-endorsers like Victoria Beckham and Jessica Alba), Skinny Bitch has become a runaway sensation. After less than two years in print, a whopping 600,000 copies exist worldwide and translation rights have been procured for seven different languages. Yes, there are wannabe skinny bitches everywhere.
I am sitting here a whole day after I started this post and I am wondering what just happened. I started my day off, thinking about you guys honestly, I was thinking, okay I need to share my “G” lifestyle daily from this point on. Get out in front of the camera, you can do it, I keep telling myself. I am working up to it, believe me. So, I said to myself what can I share today… hmmm, I know, how about my addiction or dare I say love for espresso. I know, I know, it’s killing my alkaline ph balance or something like that. I hear you Brendan and Tim. You guys make me look bad, being all in shape and perfect fit “G” super guys. I know, I am going to stop soon or at least reduce how much I take in per month. More green juicing I promise. But for now, I am still drinking organic espresso, which our friends at Peet’s Coffee sent over to us. They are like freaking pushers… right (jj) It’s sooooo good, I promise you. One shot and you just want to drop to your knees. They have a complete green organic coffee roasting place here in California I believe. Anyways, they sent over so much espresso, I just can’t help myself but to dig in and brew it up. I know bad monkie.
Back to my story. I am out here in the desert and it is so hot, 116 degrees if you can believe that. I have a new place, which I will show you in another post and I haven’t turned on the air once and believe it or not I am fine. All the windows and doors are open in the front and back of the house and the air is flowing through and keeping it very… hawaii caribbean like. But with that said, you still need something cool to sip on, so my cool morning drink of choice is the iced espresso with a twist of flavors. I have been making it almost every day along with a few other frozen alcohol based drinks, which I will also get into in some future post. I know TIM / BRENDAN / RORY, I hear you.. Bad Monkie!
I get a lot of emails from readers asking various diet and health questions. Some are from people who are already in “the know” and are familiar with healthier ways of eating. Others are from people who eat shit full-time and are inspired to overhaul their diets. Surprisingly, though, it’s the former group of people who seem to be the most confused when it comes to milk.
We can all agree that pasteurized milk sucks and has no place in our diet. (If this is news to you, park your ass in a bookstore and read chapter five of Skinny Bitch.) But for some people, the waters get muddy on the issue of raw milk. Yes, pasteurization destroys beneficial vitamins and enzymes, makes milk harder to digest, and even creates free radicals. Raw milk is clearly a better choice. And if you’re a baby cow, you should insist on drinking your milk raw. But if you’re a human and you’re old enough to read this, you shouldn’t be drinking milk, period.
Mother Nature knew what she was doing. She created all mammals with the ability to nurse their young. And that’s what all mammals do. And when their offspring reaches a certain age, they’re weaned off milk and they eat solid food. Not one goes back for milk after that last serving! Not one. You certainly don’t go kicking down your mom’s door for breast milk, do you? So why in the hell would you think you need the milk of a cow or goat any other animal now, as an adult? Why would you think it’s good for you?
G / Video Okay I have been in search of a spicy raw cashew cheese recipe all day and just came across this video on making a cashew cheese by DeliciousRevolution, First time seeing her.
G / Style Beat the Heat With DIY Ice-Cube Bling You Can Make in 5 Minutes
G / Food how to roast an avocado and what to do with it when you do [5 ingredients]
G / Food Cashew Ricotta Cheese (No Tofu Needed, No Milk Needed) It’s light. It’s fluffy. It’s creamy. It’s ricotta cheese.
G / Style Sustainable fashion at its best. One garment, 20 ways to wear. Check out ecovogue 365′s Butterfli.
G / Food Botanical Recipe: Dill, Grated Cabbage, Red Radish & Sweet Pea Salad
G / Design It’s amazing how easy it is to now go completely leather free, with amazing leather like fabrics by Joseph Noble. They make a range of fabrics with feel better than leather and last longer
G / Food The Ultimate Sausage and Pepper Pizza – RAW It’s Rawfully Tempting!
G / Food Chocolate Fruit and Almond Bark – D E C A D E N T and H E A L T H Y! Sooo Rawfully Tempting!
G / Food The edible cups are made entirely out of agar agar (a gelatin substitute).
Photographer: Sayward Rebhal
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