I'M SO SICK OF SMOOTHIES

     Don't get me wrong, I will very occasionally whip up a smoothie for breakfast or a snack, but can we please end the hype about smoothies?! Smoothies are tasty and fine as an occasional food item, but they are not an essential aspect of a healthy diet. Come winter, I'd take a nice warm bowl of soup over an icy cold smoothie full of tropical fruit any day. Not to mention the overdosing people are doing on raw leafy greens chock full of oxalic acid, which when eaten in large amounts can actually cause more harm than good.
     As a holistic nutritional consultant people sometimes assume a few things about me and they include:

1) That I'm a smoothie fanatic
2) That I'm a vegetarian
3) That I'm a juicing fiend
4) That I prefer raw foods
5) That I think butter and saturated fats are bad
6) That I recommend avoiding dairy

     It's no wonder - take a peek through the latest selection of "healthy" cookbooks - and you will find these sorts of messages plastered on every page. You will be very hard pressed to find a decent selection of recipes that contain meat or animal proteins because plant-based diets are all the rage right now. To be honest, I am getting quite frustrated by it all. These best selling books have a common themed story about how the author abused their bodies their whole lives and ate crappy food and became really sick, and ever since they started eating ________ (fill in the blank) they are no longer sick, and so this is the diet they are sharing with everyone. There is an inherent problem being presented here - these diets are probably useful if you suffer from a similar ailment as the author did, but if  you don't then you are unnecessarily following a very restricted diet. Don't get me wrong, there are some good elements and messages contained within some of these publications, but as a whole I'm getting tired of being told I have to stop eating everything but vegetables and seeds in order to be healthy.
     I don't know about you, but I've never been really sick, at least not to the point where I've had to make seriously drastic changes to my diet in order to heal. In some cases, yes people do need to alter their diets significantly, at least temporarily, in order for their bodies to heal. And yes, our modern overly processed and low quality diets do require serious modification as a whole, but my take on nutrition isn't so much on what we eat, rather it's focusing on the quality of what we eat, and how we prepare our food. I was fortunate to have been raised in a family that ate healthy, home cooked meals, and my interest in healthy living and eating these days is to maintain my good health.
     So, here is what you can expect from me:
* Delicious recipes that are designed for omnivores/adaptavores - yes I like plants, but in no way shape or form am I exclusively "plant-based".
* A tendency to emphasize the importance of eating food that is local, organic, seasonal, and natural.
* Encouragement to include animal proteins in your diet from ethically raised, organic and pastured animals.
* An interest in the revival of traditional foods/diets/methods of food preparation.
* A desire to see people loving what they eat! Eating is meant to be pleasurable - it is a celebration of life, and I'd like us to start treating it that way. Feeling deprived when you eat is unhealthy. I am especially fond of encouraging people to eat the way their families and ancestors have been eating for generations.
* And finally, breakfast suggestions that you can sit down and enjoy with a knife and fork (or at least a spoon) and chew for goodness sake. We may have plenty of time to eat pureed foods (i.e. smoothies) when we are very old and have no teeth.