But mum, I dont want to eat my vegetables

[Simon C]

Mum: \"Simon, remember you have to eat your vegetables today, so you can grow up big and strong\"

Simon(as a little kid): \"But mum, I don\'t want to eat my vegetables! No vegetables!\"

Mum: \"Why not, vegetables are good, for you, you need all the good vitamins they provide\"

Simon: \"But vegetables taste like shit!\"

Mum: \"Gosh! don\'t say that word Simon, eat your vegetables!!\"

Simon: \"I don\'t want to eat my vegetables, I WANT BIOTEST SUPERFOOD! Just one 5 gram serving is equal to TWELVE SERVINGS OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLES! Isn\'t it amazing mum?\"

Mum: \"Why yes is is Simon! is certainly is!BIOTEST SUPERFOOD! for the win!\"

EDIT: damn those slashes!

[Cynic]

Yeah, Biotest is trying to compete with Greens+.

Admittedly, I don't eat enough veggies, but I do eat about 5-6cps of leafy greens a day.

[Alcoholiday]

oh boy.

[Frank.S]

meh, suckers will actually buy this stuff.. I mean, who would want to eat fruit and veggies anyways. Im strating to think the # of supplements taken is inversly related to how good a person looks..

[Lost Dog]

Does it have the fiber of all those fruits and vegetables? I'm not sure. It's all freeze dried and powdered, so I guess it's there, but I couldn't find the nutrition label.

I guess if you're one of those people, like little \\Simon\\ was, that won't eat his veggies, then go for it.

I have to rely on the physical bulk of my veggies to stay full so I'll have to stick with the more traditional route of solid food.

Some people still buy Greens+. This seems better, I guess.

[Alcoholiday]

arbitrage wrote:
How many calories per serving, and what is the nutritional breakdown?

It's negligible.

Keep in mind that each invididual fruit or vegetable varies slightly in its nutritional breakdown. One orange might be more nutritious than the next.

That's just the way it is when you're dealing with nature.

As such, we can't exactly state the exact nutritional breakdown. After all, oranges, watermelons, blueberries, etc, don't come with labels affixed.

Similarly, the calories are neglibie. This is almost pure nutrients (fiber, antioxidants, minerals, assorted phytochemicals) and as such, doesn't have a calorie value worth paying attention to.

sounds like BS to me. even with stuff where the nutrition could be skewed, they still give an estimation on the nutrition label.

[Alcoholiday]

wasn't greens+ developed by JB?

In addition to recommending many Genuine Health supplements to his clients, Dr. Berardi has played an instrumental role developing nutritional strategies featuring greens+ for Olympic athletes, including Canada’s National Cross Country Team.

doesn't t-nation sell JB's protein?

John Berardi, TC, and I promise that you won't be disappointed. In fact, we guarantee you won't. If Biotest Surge doesn't meet or even beat your expectations, no biggie, you can get all your money back. How's that for confidence in the post-workout formula!?

this seems kind of crappy of t-nation to market a product that they call better than a product of one of their business partners? Whadda say TC?

This product was, in a way, inspired by Greens+

We saw how inadequate that product was and decided to do it the RIGHT way:

No allergy producing grasses
No Testosterone lowering herbs
No 1970's technology

Nothing but highly nutritious, organically grown fruits and vegetables!

[Lost Dog]

I dare you to go remind CT that, since he's counting the carbs in his sugar-free gum, that he'd better count these, too. Wouldn't want to get fat.

[Alcoholiday]

Originally Posted by Lost Dog

I dare you to go remind CT that, since he's counting the carbs in his sugar-free gum, that he'd better count these, too. Wouldn't want to get fat.

plus, these might have something dangerous like tomatoes or mushrooms in them.

[Lost Dog]

Originally Posted by Alcoholiday

wasn't greens+ developed by JB?

No. Berardi was hired as a consultant by the company that produces Greens+.

Originally Posted by Alcoholiday

doesn't t-nation sell JB's protein?

Surge was developed by JB/Science Link and Biotest as a Biotest product.

Originally Posted by Alcoholiday

this seems kind of crappy of t-nation to market a product that they call better than a product of one of their business partners?

There was a debate/discussion between TC and Berardi over Greens+ and the forthcoming Biotest "superfood" product.

Berardi made it clear that he was only a consultant, years ago, on Greens+. He didn't seem concerned and maintained that he has nothing to gain or lose from this. He said he'd use whichever product was better for himself and his clients.

[ParanoidAndroid]

wow.

You gotta love how Biotest thinks greens+ is great, until they come up with a competing product. At that point, greens+ is obviously shit.

But hey, there's a sucker born every minute, right? If they can get people to buy it, good for them.

It's going to be interesting to see the nutrition articles from now on: "Veggies and Fruits are bad. You need SUPERFOOD!!!11111 for maximum results."

[Simon C]

I smell a modification of the velocity diet coming soon, now the diet will utterly fail if you do not use Biotests Extreme Superfood!!!111111 AND Biotests amazing protein mix, and OMG SURGE WORKOUT FUEL!!!!1111one$#@.

[He-man]

I ordered some, so I must be one of those "suckers" you are referring too. I'm one to try something once, not 3 bottles at a time. I'll give it a go for a month and see what I think, its not the cheapest, but neither is anything these days.

I haven't tried Greens +, but did try Garden of Life Perfect food and thought it did make a small difference. In that time I had great workouts, progressed efficiently, and found it for a good price on ebay. Is this shit gonna change my life, probably not, but I love fruits, they are like desserts to me, but rarely eat more veggies than salads and broccoli so I'll give it a shot. I would love to eat more veggies, but my preparation skills are limited I admit. This seems convenient post-workout for recovery reasons, not necessarily to replace a multi-vitamin.

I enjoy the biotest site and the supplements they make. My staples are EAS or Body fortress protein, supermarket fish oil, cheapest creatine and multivitamin I can find, and the occasional pick me up for a workout.

[Lisa~]

Any time we get into a discussion of how hard it is to eat enough veggies, I always think of JB's Appetite for Construction diatribe on eating veggies. I posted it before, but I love it so I'll post it again for your reading pleasure!

Shit! I Coulda’ Had a V-8!

Q: I don’t eat vegetables much at all. Would drinking something like V8 juice make up for this dietary shortcoming? Or is veggie juice as bad as fruit juice?

A: Recently, I graded 120+ dietary analyses for a Sports Nutrition class that I help teach. The students were told to write down what they ate for three representative days of the week, plug this intake into a computer program on campus (ESHA, if you’re interested), and hand in the computer generated analysis of nutrients (well as some questions designed to assess their ability to understand what that amazing little box had just printed out for them). Well imagine my surprise as I began to read over what they had turned in. On the whole, these 4th year Kinesiology and/or Nutrition students certainly weren’t practicing what we had been preaching!

Many of the females had total energy intakes under l200kcal. The males weren’t doing much better as they averaged in the 1400kcal range. In addition, most had a woefully low protein intake, just barely reaching a minimum 1 g/kg or less than 0.5g/lb. When turning to fat intake, the fat ratios weren’t good either. Most had at least half of their dietary fat intake coming from saturates while their ratios of omega 6’s to omega 3’s were something like 20:1. Now these aren’t students that have no idea about what good nutrition is. These are students that, in one semester, will be graduating with Bachelor’s degrees in health related fields. And their diets are right up there with those of the average North American, diets that will lead to premature aging, heart disease, cancer, type II diabetes, and Syndrome X.

Interestingly, although these diets were pretty poor on average, the thing that struck me as most amazing was the fact that their fruit and vegetable intake was pathetically low. Therefore, the foods that could most help combat the damage that their diets were doing to them were the very foods suspiciously absent from their intake.

I’ll be honest; it’s always amazed me to hear that so many North Americans simply don’t eat many (if any) vegetables and fruits. The closest thing they get to fruit is the warm filling in a McDonalds apple pie and to a vegetable is the tomato sauce on their pizza. But since they’re doing so many other things nutritionally wrong, it stands to reason that they would also screw this up too.

However, when I get emails from hundreds of weight lifters who don’t eat their vegetables, my head gets sore from banging it against the wall. These guys and girls abuse ephedrine and caffeine in order to increase their energy but they will skip taking their vegetables, foods that contain all the nutritional factors necessary to make your own energy!

Meatheads, what’s a madda wicha? Vegetables are at the base of my nutritional pyramid. They are the foundation of a good healthy diet. You eat anything with a glaze on it but you won’t eat some vegetables – fresh or otherwise. Shame on ya.

Shaming aside, lets talk about why you should eat your vegetables. You know what? Scratch that thought. If you don’t know that vegetables provide antioxidants, vitamins, minerals, fiber, and the more recently touted phytonutrients, I think that you’ve probably stopped eating all foods a long time ago and you’re now brain dead, or, as some might say, a vegetable yourself. Of course we all know that veggies provide these important nutrients.

So why aren’t we eating them? Convenience, right? Or some bad childhood experiences with not being allowed dessert until you ate all your brussel sprouts. Well, if it’s the latter one I have three words for you:

1.Get

2. Over

3. It

If it’s a matter of convenience then lets talk about how to make vegetables more convenient.

First you’ve got vegetable juices. Buy V8, keep it your fridge, and drink a couple of servings per day in addition to your normal fluid intake. V8 contains tomato juice from concentrate (water, tomato concentrate) vegetable juices from concentrate (carrots, celery, beetroot, parsley, lettuce, watercress, spinach), salt and spices. While the processing of these veggies means that you get fewer of the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants that you might get by eating whole veggies, along with removing a lot of the fiber, if you’re not eating any veggies, getting some vegetable juice into you is a good start.

A better alternative though, is to make your own vegetable juices. That’s right bodybuilders, I’m encouraging you to start juicin’. No, not that kind of juicin’. I’m talking about following the lead of that 120-year-old guy on TV and blending up your vegetables into a thick veggie juice with the Mix Master 2000 or whatever it’s called.

This way you can be sure what’s going into your veggie shake. Also, you can be sure that all the nutritional goodness is in there. Simply get a food processor, add all the veggies you can think of to your blend, process them down to a pulp, add some salt, pepper, and various other spices to taste, and drink away.

Finally, and this idea may be a bit too revolutionary for most of you, you could just eat some damn vegetables! You know, go to the grocery store, buy some bags of frozen veggies as well as some fresh veggies and then, when it comes time to eat a meal you could microwave some of those frozen veggies for about 3 minutes or you could simply take some carrots, stalks of celery, broccoli florets or whatever you like and put them in your mouth. Before you go ahead and do this, however, there’s one important instruction that I don’t want you to forget. Chew before swallowing. This is definitely the preferred route of vegetable administration.

I want to share with you a little story about how I discovered the amazing effects of a high vegetable diet. Last December I was suffering from a whole host of over use injuries. Since I was also getting ready to travel, en route to visiting family and friends, I decided to take a month off from weight lifting. Since I can’t ever stay out of the gym for that long, I decided to simply do 15 or 20-minutes of high intensity interval work (running or cycling) each day in order to give me some stress relief and some metabolic expenditure.

Since I wasn’t lifting and my energy demands were about to take a nose dive, I decided that I should taper my diet down so that I didn’t get fat like the Christmas goose my mom was preparing around this time. To make it simple, I decided to eat 5-6 times per day. Each meal consisted of about 10-12 oz of animal protein (I consumed no protein powders this month), some good fats (from fish, flax, and olive oil) and loads of fruit, veggies, and beans (i.e. big salads with all kinds of fresh fruit, veggies, and beans thrown into a huge bowl as well as frozen veggies in a bowl on the side).

Well, as the month progressed, obviously the overuse injuries began to heal. Now, of course, that was probably due to the time off from lifting. However, the interesting thing was that I just began to feel ...healthier. I’m not exactly sure how to describe what feeling healthier means but there were several things that were different. My GI health had improved dramatically (I wont get any more graphic than that). My energy levels had increased. My skin had gotten better. And I was actually getting leaner.

Now, some of you might be thinking it’s the lack of grains in the diet, or the extra fats, or the time off from the gym, or whatever. But the interesting thing is that I’ve followed low grain diets before and I never felt this good. And I’ve always taken in lots of good fats. And I’ve had breaks off from the gym. So I know that it wasn’t these factors. No, for me the only variable that had changed was that I was now eating 4 or 5 times my usual intake of fruits and vegetables.

To verify this fact, I as my brother to simply add tons of fruits and vegetables (mostly vegetables) to his diet without changing anything else. And he had the same experience — a general perception of increased health.

Behold the power of the fruits and vegetables!

[Lost Dog]

Originally Posted by He-man

I ordered some, so I must be one of those "suckers" you are referring too. I'm one to try something once, not 3 bottles at a time. I'll give it a go for a month and see what I think, its not the cheapest, but neither is anything these days.

I haven't tried Greens +, but did try Garden of Life Perfect food and thought it did make a small difference. In that time I had great workouts, progressed efficiently, and found it for a good price on ebay. Is this shit gonna change my life, probably not, but I love fruits, they are like desserts to me, but rarely eat more veggies than salads and broccoli so I'll give it a shot. I would love to eat more veggies, but my preparation skills are limited I admit. This seems convenient post-workout for recovery reasons, not necessarily to replace a multi-vitamin.

That seems like a pretty healthy way to look at it. And, to me, this product does seem "better" than the other greens supps out there.

Just remember that the food "replacement" value is somewhat vague. In one statement, all the value of the fruits and veggies are left intact, as only water is sucked out. In another statement, almost all of the carbs are sucked out with the liquid. I'm sure the truth of both is somewhere in between. I'm not a scientist, so someone will have to tell me how to selectively suck stuff out...

I think you get a lot of "stuff" from the ingredients that initially went in, but it's not the same as eating veggies and fruits.

The bad news; there's still a limited number of things in there. The good; we no longer have to mail order wild yams from the jungles of south america!

I enjoy the biotest site and the supplements they make. My staples are EAS or Body fortress protein, supermarket fish oil, cheapest creatine and multivitamin I can find, and the occasional pick me up for a workout.

I like the place, too. But, it's like an internet version of an infomercial. Sometimes you get sucked in! Plus, now it's got that reality show, too. One stop shopping.

If you're going to buy supps anyway, many of theirs are a decent value (creatine, t-shirts, whey*). And, if you want zma, tribulus or resveratrol, they seem cheaper than other places.

* the trifecta of a basic muscle building supplementation strategy. Whey, because most people don't eat enough protein around workout time. Creatine will help you get in one more good rep. And, a red and black t-shirt will remind you that you need to put in EFFORT when you lift.