Why a Raw Soup is a Better than a Salad & How to Create Your Own Raw Soup Recipe

This is John Kohler with OKRAW.com. I have another exciting episode for you. I'm here in Las Vegas, Nevada and I'm outside Pure Health, a health food store that sells mostly supplements. They have a nice raw food section and many of the supplements they sell are different than the ones you find at most vitamin shops. Many of them are actually whole food supplements and I hope to come back here really soon to actually give you a store tour where I will bash on the crap and show you the stuff that might be good to buy. So Pure Health is the location of a talk that I've been giving entitled, "How To Use The Leftover Produce In Your Fridge". How often do you guys have like lettuce in your fridge going bad? or carrots going bad? or zucchini that's been in there for weeks and haven't been used.? Well in this video I'm going to show you guys a talk I gave here that showed how to make a raw food soup out of whatever you have left over in your fridge. In my opinion raw food soups are far more valuable and more nutrient dense than eating a raw food salad. So why don't we go ahead and go to that clip where you could see how I could teach you guys how you can make a raw food soup really easily. ----- Hello, thank you everybody for coming today and I hope this'll be really valuable to you. This is like a lot of what I've learned over the last 17 years and you're going to get the download on how to do it the best way possible. So the first thing is I'd like to ask everybody here who has heard my story before or heard me talk before? So a handful. How many people have seen my YouTube videos? Okay well not all that great. So I have over 1100 YouTube videos so if you like this talk I have one thousand nine hundred ninety nine talks just like this one, online, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Okay, so I do a lot of education that way so I do give some talks here and there and I enjoy meeting people and I really enjoy talking to people because I feel that the lifestyle and the way that I teach and what I do actually has saved my life! So to sum up my story without giving a whole talk on my story and get into it for like an hour and a half, basically what happened was back in college I had spinal meningitis and then I got hospitalized and the doctor told me I might not make it out alive. I'm sure many people here know people that have spinal meningitis and didn't make it and weren't so lucky. So I was lucky and I can thank raw foods for that. But I thank a higher power for what I can be thankful about is that I had spinal meningitis and when I was leaving the hospital I asked the doctors why I got it and they said I had what was called complement immune deficiency syndrome. Basically, in layman's terms (I asked the doctor: "What's that! I don't know these big medical terms.") he said, "Well, basically you have a compromised immune system based on defective genes. Bad genes take a weak immune system and you're more likely to get sick than other people." The night before I got spinal meningitis I was playing broomball at the ice rink with the fraternity brothers and, like, I was the only one that got sick. I don't know anyone else from college or the fraternity. Nobody had spinal meningitis but me. I was like, where did this come from? It's like, people can carry around a cold, like your husband or wife and maybe have a cold and they're sick but you don't get sick if you have a strong immune system. Unfortunately my immune system wasn't that strong at that point in time and the doctors blamed it on my immune system, nowhere else to blame it on. But what I did find out later is that, of course, you are what you eat and absorb and, you know, if you're eating like the wrong foods - maybe your genes are going to be fully expressed and they have a new term for that called Epigenetics. You could actually change how your genes show by what you're doing, you know, external factors like diet... So, after I got out of the hospital, I knew that I needed to do one thing because the doctors said, well hey, you made it through this bout of spinal meningitis. I wouldn't have a recurrence because it's gone but I could get it again in a different strain. There's many strains of the flu, there's many strains of spinal meningitis, there's many strains of all kinds of bugs out there. But I could be susceptible to some other disease later and not be so lucky. So at that point because I was in there and the doctor told me that I might not walk out of there, that's not a fun place to be, you know, in your 20s or any age. So I really had to think about, while I was in the hospital, like what was really important to me? You know, was having a million dollars - you know, like every kid who gets out of college - the American Dream, you know , having a lot of money and all this kind of stuff. Is that really important or what's really important? If money is not important cause even if I had a million dollars, I wrote this check to - Mr. Doctor One Million Dollars do not cash unless Joe walks out of here alive - it would have done me no good so luckily at a young age I discovered that my health was, in fact, my greatest wealth - and I know that's a saying that's often said but not taken to heart and I strive to take that to heart as much as possible because I did almost lose my life and, uh, I don't want to be in that situation again, feeling helpless and at the mercy of the doctors and the medical system. Obviously some of the things they do can be very helpful but some of the things may not and I want have the highest probability of staying alive and continuing the work I do and having fun. So that's really led me to knowing - led me to finding out what I need to do to have the strongest immune system possible because obviously the doctors weren't able to do it for me. So that led me on a journey from like, I started uh... actually out of the hospital I didn't know what I was going to do. So I saw a juice infomercial on TV - J. Kordich, the Juiceman and like one thing he said in his infomercial was like, um, you can start juicing and it builds your immune system. So that's all I need to hear, I bought the juicer, started juicing and I started feeling better. And one thing led to another, to make a long story short, I got onto colon cleansing, a little bit of colonics, cleansed out a lot, felt a lot better. The Juice Man, when I bought the juicer, came with 6 cassette tapes and one of the first cassette tapes said something like the one thing that prematurely ages you faster is cooked foods. Don't put cooked foods in your body. So when I hear that I thought man this guy's a freakin whack job. Later I got a cleansing book by Dr. Richard Anderson called Cleanse and Purify which talked about the Rise and Shine Cleanse. In the book he said that after you do this cleanse, afterwards you should chew raw foods. This was the second time I heard about it. The book was so enthralling and captivating and after I did the cleanse it gave me amazing results and I knew that I had to stick with raw, basically for the rest of my life. In the book he said you have to take Selium Bentonite and herbs and chlorophyll. This was instrumental in going raw. As a child I had asthma, allergies and eczema and another skin condition that hardened my skin. These are all autoimmune related diseases. The creams and treatments never seemed to stop the itching. The doctors told me that I would grow out of the eczema when I was a teenager because my hormones would kick in. I was so happy on my 13th birthday. I woke up ready to be a regular teenager with normal skin, maybe get a date. But nothing changed. So, fast forward, after I went on this cleanse for the first time, my skin cleared up 100%! I remember this because I was taking a shower and I noticed, "Holy sh** my skin is cleared up!" I started crying. I don't know if I was crying because I was so happy or scared that I'd have to eat these raw foods for the rest of my life because that's what they said in the book. If you cleanse out, you can't put this stuff that makes you toxic back into your body! (laughing) So that's when I made the commitment to go 100% raw. I haven't been able to maintain that. I've only been able to maintain a 99.999% success rate since 1995. So that's pretty good. I'm not perfect. I don't think anybody is. But I've been growing and learning as I go along. One of the other principles I like to talk about to people is CANI (Constant and Never Ending Improvement). What that simply means is, whatever you do today, try to do a little bit better tomorrow. Whether you're an accountant or a salesperson, just try to do better tomorrow. And if you do that over a whole year, it's that much better at the end of a year. So I try to do that in many areas of my life and especially with my raw foods because my goal is to have the strongest immune system as possible so I don't end up in the hospital again. Have a strong reason to do raw foods, whatever it is, whether you have a medical condition or want to lose weight or have more energy or stay alive longer. For me, it sticks me like a knife, if you eat a hamburger you might end up back in the hospital. So I think I choose carrots! I strive to do a little bit better every day. So 3 years ago or so, I was eating pretty clean and I eat a pretty good fresh fruit and vegetable diet. I thought, "How can I improve and better what I'm doing now than what I did before. I started growing my own foods which was a huge change. Even if you're eating fruits and vegetables the quality of what you're eating can make a huge difference. Whether you're going from conventional to organic or organic to the local organic farmers market or better yet, better yet: backyard grown organic! Two minutes before you eat it! And yes, you can grow year round even here in Vegas. So nowadays I strive to grow as much food as I can. I'm not 100% there yet but I'm doing more. I also teach about growing your own food whether you're raw or not. If you grow your own food you're going to eat a lot more raw. So I teach about gardens specifically on www.GrowingYourGreens.com and I have a dozen videos specifically tailored to growing in the Las Vegas area if you are interested in doing that. When I got into raw foods to begin with, there weren't raw food sections in the whole foods section. There was no such thing kale juice or ___ powder, no agave, no lacuma powder, no maca powder, no inca berries. There are a lot of products that have come out since I've gone raw. Now are these things a good or bad thing. Well, it depends on the item. A lot of things are meant to separate you from your money. When I first got into raw foods there were just fruits and vegetables , nuts and seeds. I probably did more with nuts and seeds than what was optimal but at least it kept me one the raw. And I've learned that our diets should be totally consisting of fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds. My ration of nuts and seeds is one handful and if I'm feeling generous, 2 handfuls. Nuts and seeds have a lot of nutrients and fat content but they jack up the percentage of fat you're eating. We have a fat phobia in America and, granted a lot of the fats people are eating are probably not the right fats. Just because a fat is a raw fat doesn't make it good if a big percentage of your diet is coming from fat. When you're doing that you are eating less of the other things that are important in your diet like lycopene rich tomatoes or beta carotene rich carrots or lutene rich leafy greens. 1. To sum it up, the best way to include more fruits and vegetables in your diet are: 1. Blending: Blending is very easy. You can put a bunch of stuff in a blender, blend it up and drink it up on your way to work or the airport, put it in a cup, take it to work. 2. Juicing: If I took 5 pounds of carrots and put it in the blender I would have 5 pounds of baby food and wouldn't necessarily want to eat. But if I put 5 pounds of carrots in the juicer I would have 4 cups of carrot juice which I would LOVE to drink (just so you know I'm a little bit thirsty). Also, you'd be getting all the nutrition out of the carrots. What the Juice Man said in his day was, "Your body is nothing more or less than a juice extractor." When you put something in your body and eat it, one side becomes liquid and one side becomes solid after we've taken everything we need out of it. And if our digestive system is not working optimally, we may not be getting everything we need out of the food, especially if we're not chewing well or as much as we should be. I heard we should chew each mouthful 200 times. My dad chews maybe 3-4 times. I chew 15-20 times and my dinner might take an hour or two to eat every night. Most people don't have that kind of time to eat. But it's important to me. I want to get the most out of it. So a juicer can take fiber because we can't digest the nutrition out of fiber like most animals can. 3. Eat them whole and chew them really good. How many people usually eat a salad usually for dinner every night? A good majority of people. Most people on a raw foods diet eat a salad for dinner every night because, what else do you eat if you only eat raw foods? You just eat salads. Well there are a lot of other things you can eat besides just salads and you'll kind of get to know my reasoning on this. So instead of just a salad, you can actually make a raw food soup. So why is a raw food soup better than a salad? Does anybody know? More nutrition! You're literally packing nutrition in a salad into a grater. You can grate 5 pounds of carrots into a grated carrot salad. How many of you can eat 5 pounds of grated carrots? (laughing) I couldn't! But I could juice the 5 pounds of carrots, have 4 cups of nutrient rich juice and use it as our soup base. So we can get more of the good stuff, of fruits and vegetables, especially if our immune systems are compromised. So that's why the raw soups are better because you get more of the good stuff. I thinkt he other night we put in 22 ounces of leafy greens along with carrots through the juicer and that was hte soup base. Plus they are better assimilated and digested because they're already broken down for us and we don't have to chew. And most people don't chew their food well. So, more volume and more broken down are some of the reasons why raw soup is better. The next thing I want to talk about is why a recipe you would make in your own home would be better than raw food chef's recipe. This is the contention I have about raw food chefs. There are a lot of raw food recipe books out there and a lot of people teaching recipes to people and in my opinion a lot of them aren't the healthiest. The first thing you have to ask is why someone gets into raw foods? Is it because they were a vegan and transferred into raw foods? Is it because they're a chef that transitioned from the normal world and think raw foods are cool and healthy? While most raw foods are, there are a lot of raw foods and ingredients used in raw food recipes that aren't so healthy. One of the people we entrust our health to besides the doctors, are the chefs! When we pick up a raw food cookbook we take for granted that the raw food recipe in the book that they're telling us to eat is good for us. And that we should be eating it because it's in the book! It's their recipe. But in my review of many raw food recipe books - and I own quite a few of them : 1. They're very high in fat. A lot of the recipes are nut based recipes instead of fruit and vegetables. That's what I talked about earlier. We want to eat fruit and vegetable based recipes, not nut based recipes. Nut based recipes are better than McDonalds but they're not as good as fruit and vegetable recipes and I'll argue with anybody at this point and I will win! It's impossible. (laughing) a. So they're nut based and high in fat especially if they start including things like extracted oils which are 100% fat. So that means a tablespoon of oil is 120 calories. That's a lot of calories. All these vegetables in front of you are probably not 120 calories. So if you're making an all oil vinegar dressing and you use one whole head of romaine and one Tbsp of olive oil with vinegar and pour that on now you have more calories coming from your dressing than your lettuce. And it shouldn't be that way in my opinion. So I like to use whole food sources of fat like macadamia nuts, brazil nuts , almonds, walnuts, pecans, avocados, coconuts. They have fat but they have other nutrients like phytochemicals, plant sterols that are different besides 100% fat. Many aw food chefs use oils in there. 2. Another thing that pops up in the raw food recipes is the salt. Even in the regular world they say don't eat too much salt. But because it's a Celtic sea salt and it has a trace of minerals it's supposed to be good for us, it's still 95% sodium with only a small amount of minerals. And it will still jack up your blood pressure if you get too much of it. We do need an adequate amount of sodium but the amount of sodium I'm seeing in raw food recipes oftentimes way too high in my opinion. So, once again, we are trusting these chefs who wrote these books because they're vegan and they turned raw to break into the raw foods chef world and they know how to do it. But people are not teaching the best stuff, way to live because they've been doing it that way for a long time. We're following followers that aren't doing it to be healthier because they're not healthy recipes. 3. The recipes that I teach are actually what I eat. Another thing that is interesting is that some of the chefs don't eat what they teach. I actually eat what I teach. I had 2 raw food soups the last 2 nights . This is it. Fruits and vegetables. It's all we really need. It would be far better to make your own recipes than to follow someone who doesn't know maybe the healthiest way to do it if that's our goal. Another thing that chefs do is they make things that taste good. I think I make things that taste amazing and are also healthy. My goal is to be as healthy as possible so I don't end up in the hospital again. If you want to follow other chefs, at least modify the recipes or substitute stuff so they don't contain as much fat and salt. But I want to teach people to make their own recipes so they aren't as dependent on recipe books. I want people to think for themselves. 4. Another problem with raw food recipes is they need certain ingredients. What if you're out of the ingredients. You gotta run to the store, buy these certain ingredients. What if the store is out of them. What if the chef is using some crazy ingredient like maca powder that nobody has. You can't do the recipe? Every recipe I make every day of the year is not based on a recipe book. It's what I have fresh in my garden and in my fridge. And this is how it should be. Whatever you have is what you gotta use to make something. You gotta figure it out and be creative. I have a system on how to make a raw soup with whatever you have available and I'm going to share that with you tonight. It's really simple. Before I get into that though, here in Vegas my garden isn't too big but I have about 12 raised beds. I do buy produce in Vegas and I mentioned in my marketing that I would share my favorite places. Some of my favorite places to shop are: 1. 99 only stores. I got 11 oz of organic spring mix for $1. In past trips I've gotten 16 oz for $1 but that's really rare. But 11 oz is about 40% of the time. They've had baby kale, power green mix, arugula, spinach. They have a better selection than Whole Foods for $1. But not all Dollar Stores have a produce section and sometimes they just don't get them in. There are 3 99 cent stores and I got to all of them. Sometimes it's not in the case and you have to look behind the display and look for boxes in the fridge and look for something organic and I'll ask the guy, hey I'll buy the whole case. I'll buy six 11 oz containers for $6. I've gotten organic oranges there. They won't be marked organic but if you look for the sticker on the orange that starts with a 9. If there's an influx of produce they just bag it up and sell it. I've gotten organic apples and pears but that's rare. The greens are pretty consistent. 2. Sunflower Market, now called Sprouts. Go on a Wednesday which is double add day. You get this week's sale and next week's sale so you can shop less. 3. Vaughn's. They have an organic section. I find them the lowest price for organic celery for $1.69 a head. 4. Costco. Costco is my second place for spring mix and organic spinach if I can't get it at the other store. There it's like $3.79-$3.99 for 16 oz. Dollar store is a little cheaper but Costco might have more variety like baby kale and spring mix. They had organic baby kale this last trip. Baby kale is better for us to eat because they're more tender greens have more fibers and are more digestible. Costco regularly has 10 lb bags of organic carrots for $4.99. Last Tues they had organic strawberries. 2 lbs for $4.99. I've gotten organic apples for 80-90 cents a pound for a 10 lb bag. 5. Thursday Farmers Market at the sprinkler. Just don't go to the guys on the edge that bring the stuff from California. It's expensive and I encourage you to shop within local farmers. My favorite sellers are the Tomato Lady and Cowboy Trail Farm. They're real cool. We got a watermelon this big for $5. I juiced it today. It made 2 gallons of juice for $5. More nutritious than drinking water. 6. My favorite place to shop to save money in Vegas is my backyard. It's free! And at this time it's insane. (audience: "Can I get your address?" - laughter) I should teach you guys how to grow it yourself. REal simple. If I could do it you could do it. Next thing I'm going to teach you to create your own soup with whatever's in your fridge. And, can you name some things in your fridge you haven't used in awhile? Zucchini. Bell peppers. Mushrooms. Tomatoes. Corn. Okra. That's a fun one. We have ways to use all of them. The main, and most important, component of your raw food soup is your soup base. There's only a few options for a soup bases you could have. Super simple. 1. Pre-existing soup base. In regular cooking they might use water. I highly advise you guys to never use water in your raw food soups. Why? Because I'm eating for nutrient density and there's not a lot of nutrients in water, especially Vegas water if you're not filtering. In fact there's probably some anti nutrients in my opinion. 2. Coconut water. It's rich in electrolytes, you open it up and it's full of plant _____. That's the easiest soup base. 3. Something juiced: carrots at Costco, organic, super cheap, 49 cents a pound, juice them up in the juicer and you have a rich, delicious soup base carrots. If you have some extra bell peppers, juice up some bell peppers. They can be expensive but I had a boatload of bell peppers from my garden in California and I juiced them up and had 4 cups of bell pepper juice. That made some of the best soup I ever tasted. Bell peppers blend well too. 4. Tomatoes. They are excellent and blend well. Obviously the blender will give you a thicker consistency which is what you want to go for. With blending you will use less produce because you leave in the fiber. Juicing takes out the fiber. If I don't have as much I'll blend it to get more. I'll use okra and zucchini as a texture component inside the soup. That being said, I rarely eat mushrooms. I'll probably juice the zucchini as a base if I have a lot. Ginger, garlic and onions probably wouldn't make a good soup base. My general rule I use is that if I can't make a meal out of it, it probably shouldn't be used as a soup base or a main staple in your diet. The other night I actually used fresh lemon grass from my garden in the juicer. You can add a little garlic and onion. First step is the soup base. Four or five cups of soup base is usually right for me. You can have a soup base that's mostly liquid and a little bit of texture or a little soup base and a lot of texture. The next component is the fat component. Once I have the base I'll add in the fat like a handful or two of nuts. That will give you a nice rich texture. Avocado has a bunch of different nutrients. Brazil nuts have selenium. We add in a small amount of nuts because, in my opinion, we need fats, Flax seeds, chia, hemp (which has Omega 3) or coconut or olives or avocado. That will help you feel satiated. Today, for our soup base we're going to juice some carrots. We have the Omega ___ Juicer. I like this machine because you just dump the food in there and it's self beating and you don't have to push it in. Once again, our bodies are nothing more than a juice extractor. You can see the juice coming out this side and the pulp coming out this side. Some people have asked me what I do with the pulp and for me, the pulp goes in my compost bin. Some people like to use it as a carrot cake. Some people use it for raw food crackers. People think raw foods take so much time but if you have the right equipment you can do it quickly. If you gotta do something with your time why not do something to extend your time , improve your longevity? We have about 4 cups of carrot juice and it took a couple minutes. Let's put it in the blender. Now we're going to add our fat component, a coconut. We have a white coconut. Some people like the Thai coconut but today I like to use the white coconut because there are differences between them. This one is actually wrapped in plastic and dipped in fungicides and sulfites so I don't like to take the plastics off. But these ones, based on my research, are not dipped in anything. The water is sweeter there and it's not quite as sweet in here. The meat is a lot thicker in here so it's a lot fattier. So if I was using this as my fat component I would just use the meat and everything and blend it to make it nice and creamy. Because the meat is thicker it's a lot grittier and I don't like that. So what we're going to do is crack it (I already took the water out earlier). I have a special tool to get the meat out. I do sell the tools but I didn't bring them today. They are available online at www.YoungCoconuts.com. This is a white coconut but you'll also find ones that are brown. The white ones are younger than the brown ones. The brown ones are more mature, have thicker meat and half as much water. Sometimes the water is bad, depending on where you buy it. You always want to buy them at a place where they turn (sell) them a lot. If they're not turning them, they're just sitting there and going bad and you're not going to know when you pick them. I like to buy them at Mariana's, the Mexican market. They turn their coconut really fast because the population uses them. They're not usually the cheapest, though. I got these white ones here at Sunflower and they were pretty fresh though I saw some evidence of mold near the eyes. But they're fine. They were about $1.50. The other coconut you'll see are at the Thai markets. They're wrapped in plastic and they're round. I advise against getting those. I don't know the treatment on those and I've gotten a high percentage that are bad. Another thing you could get is coconut flakes in the store. But I recommend fresh ingredients if possible. For me, I'd get a bad reaction if I got those. Also, they're dry and don't have the full bodied, rich flavor of fresh. Even though they say they're not bleached I think they are because they're so white. I've taken my fresh coconut and dried in the dehydrator at 118 degrees and it never looks super all white. Also, I've bottled it up and left it in my cupboard and after 6 months it goes rancid. But the store bought stuff never goes rancid. We don't want to eat things that'll stay on the shelf forever. So today I'm using the coconut and it's a much more cost effective fat source than nuts because it's a lot more food for $1.50. Plus I got to drink the water. For me, the water is the main benefit and the meat is just something extra to use. So we basically have the carrot juice and the coconut and we blend it up. You can use it as the base but it's very chunky. So you could run it through a nut milk bag but I'm too lazy to use nut milk bags and they're a pain to clean so I'm going to use my favorite mixer and we're going to simply pour this mix through the machine and we're going to basically get a pulp and what is basically a coconut carrot milk. If, instead of carrot juice, I used water we'd have coconut milk. This is carrot coconut milk and this is our base tonight. Now we need a texture component and this is where you can get creative. One of the textures I like to use are sundried tomatoes. I can add chunks of sundried tomatoes or chopped up into the soup. It will rehydrate the tomatoes and give the soup a chunky texture. I also like to use sauerkraut. It adds zing and beneficial probiotics. And noodles! How many of you own one of these guys already - okay a handful. This is called a spiral slicer and what this allows you to do is take something like zucchini and make angel hair pasta - a thin noodle, or fettuccini - a thicker noodle. So you put the zucchini into place, put the lock on and turn it. You get long noodle-like strands. Before I got into raw I liked udon soup. It was like noodles with a whole bunch of stuff put into there. So now I can make udon soup with the noodle-like texture and I've got some fruits and vegetables like zucchini. The English Cucumber works well on this tool also because it doesn't have seeds but you can't use a standard cucumber. You can take a daikon radish and put it through the slicer. If you don't like the hot spiciness of the radish you can soak it in water overnight and it'll take some of the spiciness away. Then you have white, clear noodles that are similar to the Asian noodles that are white and clear. It's a substitute that's so healthy for you and probably a lot less expensive. I'm not going to spiralize the daikon tonight but I'm going to use another tool - a julienne slicer. It makes match-like strips. It's not like long noodles. I like to play with different textures because it makes a difference. You can julienne carrots and butternut squash. Once again, the more vegetables in your diet the better. Also, the more you break down the food with the equipment, the less you have to chew. Another texture component is a mango chopped up in small cubes and put into soups to make a sweet element. Last night I made a coconut curry soup. So these vegetables, while adding a small amount of flavor, don't add a lot of flavor. You can chop up peppers to add flavor. But the last thing I want to add is a flavor component. I don't add salt, which is very high in sodium. I like to add items that are salty but don't add a lot of sodium, like sauerkraut. You can get salt free sauerkraut. I like to use miso, but I use chickpea miso not soy. I'm not a fan of soy miso. I put a little bit of that into ours tonight. Sometimes you have to look around because it's not available everywhere. Once again, this is a fermented food. Actually, another really cool flavor component (I emailed my Mom today and she finally listened to me. I said, "Mom you need to get some natto. Natto is an amazing food. It's one soybean product that I love and consume frequently. Natto is fermented whole soybeans. Unfortunately, it's hard to find. Most natto is imported and they freeze them. When you freeze them they lose a lot of the beneficial nutrients. Luckily there's a brand in California that makes organic natto. Soy, as you know, is a big GMO crop. The benefit of natto is mostly Vitamin K2. You get a lot of vitamin K if you're eating leafy greens but not so much K2. A better source of K2 is the natto. Here, you can probably only get K2 in a capsule. I always recommend getting the real nutrition from the real source - the vegetable - but if you can't, then I recommend the supplement. That's why I recommend the health food store is because they have a lot of whole food supplements that are powdered up beets , for example. It's better if you eat real beets but if you're traveling you can take powdered beets and have instant beet juice. Natto is a unique flavor like nothing else. My mom was asking me how to eat natto and I told her to put it over her salad or over rice. The K2 in the natto makes the calcium go into your bones. Besides the miso and the sauerkraut, I would like to add the one food item that will drastically increase the trace mineral content to your diet. The USDA studied foods grown in the 1950s and compared them to food grown today and found significantly less nutrients and trace minerals in today's foods. Now what changed? In my opinion it's the farming practices and possibly the variety of foods grown today. The foods grown today are the foods that will ship well, store well and farmers wont' lose their money and profits in transport. In the 50s people consumed a lot more locally. The main thing is the soil depletion. Even organic farmers are, unfortunately, not doing the things needed to drastically increase the nutrients. Organic farming has practices that say what you can't do (like spraying) but they don't say what you SHOULD be doing, like using compost or adding trace mineral supplementation to soil. The one thing that you can use to get your trace minerals if you don't grow your own vegetables in nutrient-rich soil is sea vegetables. Many people, in my opinion, are deficient in trace minerals and the sea vegetables are the easiest way to get them back into your body. This item is literally called sea spaghetti. If you miss spaghetti this stuff is crazy. You just soak it and it's like little noodles and they literally become like spaghetti. A lot of people don't like them because they taste fishy but these, to me, have virtually no fishy taste. They are kind of expensive but I like them a lot and use them. Another item is dulse (or red) seaweed. It's my favorite and it doesn't have a fishy flavor. You can also eat kelp which is fishy. I met a guy at the Mother Earth Festival in Pennsylvania recently and he actually gave me seaweed supplements in a bottle. There are Asian food markets where you can get brown seaweed. Then you have your standard nori. If you have nori sheets you can tear them up and put it into your soup. One of the things I like to do is take nori sheets and cut them into strips, like noodles. A less expensive option than nori is to get laver, which is what comes out of the ocean before it's made into nori sheets. It's significantly less expensive and you can just take some of it and put it into your soup. The one we're going to use today is Wakame seaweed. It reminds me of chow fun noodles which are like Chow Mein noodles but are not cut up. They're long strips. You don't need a lot, this stuff really expands. We're just going to let this soak in some purified water. It's a flavor and texture component and ramps up the trace minerals. Other flavor components you can use are fresh components like ginger, lemongrass, basil, parsley. The easiest thing to grow in Vegas are herbs. They don't need much water or care. My sage grew like crazy. Rosemary did really well. Basil is the easiest thing to grow in Vegas. My basil plants are this tall - it's insane. Stevia is also really easy. Curry powder, Cajun seasoning, Italian seasoning, all different kinds of seasonings to make the stuff taste good are great. Now we're going to use the young Thai coconut. I use this special coconut noodle tool and go around. These noodles are the bomb. You can imagine the texture of young coconut meat. These are crazy good. Once again, having the right tools makes the difference. I'm a kitchen gadget freak. The best source is UBRAW.com out in Mesquite. This actually looks like udon noodles. The other side of this tool is a cutter to get the coconut out, but it's not the best tool for this. This past summer, I went out to California and harvested my own sea vegetables. I did a video on how to do it. Then you can dehydrate your own and have enough for a year. In California it's legal to harvest 10 lbs a day so you can go to Northern California wine country for a week and harvest 70 lbs of sea vegetables. I think only raw foodies would do that. (laughter) Look at how much that expanded. Isn't it amazing? It started out as almost nothing. Back to our soup base, we put in the miso but didn't blend it up yet. Another thing I like to do is add peppers. Instead of juicing peppers I just blend them into the mixture. On the hot peppers, what I like to do so they're not as hot, is take out the seeds and white pithy part. First, we need to drain the water out of the noodles. I consider them like chow fun noodles because they're soft and, to me, they don't have a flavor. They're just kind of chewy. Now we're going to add all our components to our soup bowl. We have the wakame, the zucchini noodles, coconut noodles, butternut squash matchsticks, the daikon matchsticks and we got our soup. But we're not done yet. Let's stir it all up. Last thing I like to add to make it beautiful are marigolds from my garden. Marigolds add color to make it look nice but more importantly, to me, I like to eat functionally and marigolds add lutene and zeaxanthin. If you go in a supplement store you might find something made out of marigold flowers. We'll sprinkle it on and it looks pretty. It's a different taste and most people are not used to it so I only use a little. So the steps to have a raw soup: 1. A soup base: Coconut water with miso and zucchini 2. Fat component: nuts, seeds, avocado, young coconut meat, coconut milk, olives 3. Texture: fruits, vegetables, sliced, diced, noodles or matchsticks 4. Flavor: miso, sauerkraut, nutrient dense trace mineral seaweeds, fresh or dried herbs, spices, sun dried tomatoes or dried vegetables Does everybody feel that they could make that real easy? It's more fun and way healthier than a salad and really easy to make. The last thing I'd like to mention is a raw food recipe book I made about 5 years ago that has 30 of my recipes. I still eat most of these recipes. They're very simple. One example is a curry mango dressing. It's 2 mangos, 1/2 cup of almonds and a teaspoon of curry powder. YOu could also use something like that as a soup base. YOu could blend a bunch of mangos for your liquid and you'd have the fat component and your curry powder. It's available for $5. ----- So I hope you guys enjoyed that episode on how to make raw food soup with whatever you have leftover. Once again I want to encourage you guys to eat more fresh fruit and vegetables in your diet and a raw food soup is a way you could do just that. Once again, my name is John Kohler with OKRAW.com and we'll see you next time. And remember, keep eating your fruits and vegetables. They're the best.