soup diet today tonight

this is john kohler with okraw.com. i haveanother exciting episode for you. i'm here in las vegas, nevada and i'm outside purehealth, a health food store that sells mostly supplements. they have a nice raw food sectionand many of the supplements they sell are different than the ones you find at most vitaminshops. many of them are actually whole food supplements and i hope to come back here reallysoon to actually give you a store tour where i will bash on the crap and show you the stuffthat might be good to buy. so pure health is the location of a talk thati've been giving entitled, "how to use the leftover produce in your fridge". how oftendo you guys have like lettuce in your fridge going bad? or carrots going bad? or zucchinithat's been in there for weeks and haven't

been used.? well in this video i'm going toshow you guys a talk i gave here that showed how to make a raw food soup out of whateveryou have left over in your fridge. in my opinion raw food soups are far more valuable and morenutrient dense than eating a raw food salad. so why don't we go ahead and go to that clipwhere you could see how i could teach you guys how you can make a raw food soup reallyeasily. -----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 getthe download on how to do it the best way possible. so the first thing is i'd like toask 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 over1100 youtube videos so if you like this talk i have one thousand nine hundred ninety ninetalks 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 andi enjoy meeting people and i really enjoy talking to people because i feel that thelifestyle and the way that i teach and what i do actually has saved my life! so to sumup my story without giving a whole talk on my story and get into it for like an hourand a half, basically what happened was back in college i had spinal meningitis and theni got hospitalized and the doctor told me

i might not make it out alive. i'm sure manypeople here know people that have spinal meningitis and didn't make it and weren't so lucky. soi was lucky and i can thank raw foods for that. but i thank a higher power for whati can be thankful about is that i had spinal meningitis and when i was leaving the hospitali asked the doctors why i got it and they said i had what was called complement immunedeficiency syndrome. basically, in layman's terms (i asked the doctor: "what's that! idon't know these big medical terms.") he said, "well, basically you have a compromised immunesystem based on defective genes. bad genes take a weak immune system and you're morelikely to get sick than other people." the night before i got spinal meningitis iwas playing broomball at the ice rink with

the fraternity brothers and, like, i was theonly one that got sick. i don't know anyone else from college or the fraternity. nobodyhad spinal meningitis but me. i was like, where did this come from? it's like, peoplecan carry around a cold, like your husband or wife and maybe have a cold and they'resick but you don't get sick if you have a strong immune system. unfortunately my immunesystem wasn't that strong at that point in time and the doctors blamed it on my immunesystem, nowhere else to blame it on. but what i did find out later is that, of course, youare what you eat and absorb and, you know, if you're eating like the wrong foods - maybeyour 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 factorslike diet... so, after i got out of the hospital, i knewthat i needed to do one thing because the doctors said, well hey, you made it throughthis bout of spinal meningitis. i wouldn't have a recurrence because it's gone but icould get it again in a different strain. there's many strains of the flu, there's manystrains of spinal meningitis, there's many strains of all kinds of bugs out there. buti could be susceptible to some other disease later and not be so lucky. so at that pointbecause i was in there and the doctor told me that i might not walk out of there, that'snot 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 havinga 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 orwhat's really important? if money is not important cause even if i had a million dollars, i wrotethis 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 healthwas, in fact, my greatest wealth - and i know that's a saying that's often said but nottaken to heart and i strive to take that to heart as much as possible because i did almostlose my life and, uh, i don't want to be in that situation again, feeling helpless andat the mercy of the doctors and the medical

system. obviously some of the things theydo can be very helpful but some of the things may not and i want have the highest probabilityof staying alive and continuing the work i do and having fun. so that's really led meto knowing - led me to finding out what i need to do to have the strongest immune systempossible because obviously the doctors weren't able to do it for me. so that led me on ajourney from like, i started uh... actually out of the hospital i didn't know what i wasgoing to do. so i saw a juice infomercial on tv - j. kordich, the juiceman and likeone thing he said in his infomercial was like, um, you can start juicing and it builds yourimmune system. so that's all i need to hear, i bought the juicer, started juicing and istarted feeling better. and one thing led

to another, to make a long story short, igot 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 firstcassette tapes said something like the one thing that prematurely ages you faster iscooked foods. don't put cooked foods in your body. so when i hear that i thought man thisguy's a freakin whack job. later i got a cleansing book by dr. richard anderson called cleanseand purify which talked about the rise and shine cleanse. in the book he said that afteryou do this cleanse, afterwards you should chew raw foods. this was the second time iheard about it. the book was so enthralling and captivating and after i did the cleanseit gave me amazing results and i knew that

i had to stick with raw, basically for therest 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 eczemaand 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 thati would grow out of the eczema when i was a teenager because my hormones would kickin. i was so happy on my 13th birthday. i woke up ready to be a regular teenager withnormal 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 clearedup!" i started crying. i don't know if i was crying because i was so happy or scared thati'd have to eat these raw foods for the rest of my life because that's what they said inthe book. if you cleanse out, you can't put this stuff that makes you toxic back intoyour body! (laughing) so that's when i made the commitment to go100% 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 anybodyis. but i've been growing and learning as i go along. one of the other principles ilike to talk about to people is cani (constant and never ending improvement). what that simplymeans is, whatever you do today, try to do

a little bit better tomorrow. whether you'rean accountant or a salesperson, just try to do better tomorrow. and if you do that overa whole year, it's that much better at the end of a year. so i try to do that in manyareas of my life and especially with my raw foods because my goal is to have the strongestimmune system as possible so i don't end up in the hospital again. have a strong reasonto do raw foods, whatever it is, whether you have a medical condition or want to lose weightor have more energy or stay alive longer. for me, it sticks me like a knife, if youeat 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 prettyclean and i eat a pretty good fresh fruit

and vegetable diet. i thought, "how can iimprove and better what i'm doing now than what i did before. i started growing my ownfoods which was a huge change. even if you're eating fruits and vegetables the quality ofwhat you're eating can make a huge difference. whether you're going from conventional toorganic or organic to the local organic farmers market or better yet, better yet: backyardgrown organic! two minutes before you eat it! and yes, you can grow year round evenhere in vegas. so nowadays i strive to grow as much food as i can. i'm not 100% thereyet but i'm doing more. i also teach about growing your own food whether you're raw ornot. if you grow your own food you're going to eat a lot more raw. so i teach about gardensspecifically on www.growingyourgreens.com

and i have a dozen videos specifically tailoredto growing in the las vegas area if you are interested in doing that. when i got intoraw 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 macapowder, no inca berries. there are a lot of products that have come out since i've goneraw. now are these things a good or bad thing. well, it depends on the item. a lot of thingsare meant to separate you from your money. when i first got into raw foods there werejust fruits and vegetables , nuts and seeds. i probably did more with nuts and seeds thanwhat was optimal but at least it kept me one the raw. and i've learned that our diets shouldbe totally consisting of fruits and vegetables

and nuts and seeds. my ration of nuts andseeds is one handful and if i'm feeling generous, 2 handfuls. nuts and seeds have a lot of nutrientsand fat content but they jack up the percentage of fat you're eating. we have a fat phobiain america and, granted a lot of the fats people are eating are probably not the rightfats. just because a fat is a raw fat doesn't make it good if a big percentage of your dietis coming from fat. when you're doing that you are eating less of the other things thatare important in your diet like lycopene rich tomatoes or beta carotene rich carrots orlutene rich leafy greens. 1. to sum it up, the best way to include morefruits and vegetables in your diet are: 1. blending: blending is very easy. you canput a bunch of stuff in a blender, blend it

up and drink it up on your way to work orthe airport, put it in a cup, take it to work. 2. juicing: if i took 5 pounds of carrotsand put it in the blender i would have 5 pounds of baby food and wouldn't necessarily wantto eat. but if i put 5 pounds of carrots in the juicer i would have 4 cups of carrot juicewhich i would love to drink (just so you know i'm a little bit thirsty). also, you'd begetting all the nutrition out of the carrots. what the juice man said in his day was, "yourbody is nothing more or less than a juice extractor." when you put something in yourbody and eat it, one side becomes liquid and one side becomes solid after we've taken everythingwe need out of it. and if our digestive system is not working optimally, we may not be gettingeverything we need out of the food, especially

if we're not chewing well or as much as weshould be. i heard we should chew each mouthful 200 times. my dad chews maybe 3-4 times. ichew 15-20 times and my dinner might take an hour or two to eat every night. most peopledon't have that kind of time to eat. but it's important to me. i want to get the most outof it. so a juicer can take fiber because we can't digest the nutrition out of fiberlike 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 ofpeople. most people on a raw foods diet eat a salad for dinner every night because, whatelse do you eat if you only eat raw foods? you just eat salads. well there are a lotof other things you can eat besides just salads

and you'll kind of get to know my reasoningon 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'reliterally packing nutrition in a salad into a grater. you can grate 5 pounds of carrotsinto 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 juiceand 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 becauseyou get more of the good stuff. i thinkt he other night we put in 22 ounces of leafy greensalong with carrots through the juicer and

that was hte soup base. plus they are betterassimilated 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 someof the reasons why raw soup is better. the next thing i want to talk about is whya recipe you would make in your own home would be better than raw food chef's recipe. thisis the contention i have about raw food chefs. there are a lot of raw food recipe books outthere and a lot of people teaching recipes to people and in my opinion a lot of themaren'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 chefthat transitioned from the normal world and

think raw foods are cool and healthy? whilemost raw foods are, there are a lot of raw foods and ingredients used in raw food recipesthat 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 rawfood recipe in the book that they're telling us to eat is good for us. and that we shouldbe eating it because it's in the book! it's their recipe. but in my review of many rawfood 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 fruitand vegetables. that's what i talked about earlier. we want to eat fruit and vegetablebased recipes, not nut based recipes. nut

based recipes are better than mcdonalds butthey're not as good as fruit and vegetable recipes and i'll argue with anybody at thispoint and i will win! it's impossible. (laughing) a. so they're nut based and high in fat especiallyif they start including things like extracted oils which are 100% fat. so that means a tablespoonof oil is 120 calories. that's a lot of calories. all these vegetables in front of you are probablynot 120 calories. so if you're making an all oil vinegar dressing and you use one wholehead of romaine and one tbsp of olive oil with vinegar and pour that on now you havemore calories coming from your dressing than your lettuce. and it shouldn't be that wayin my opinion. so i like to use whole food sources of fat like macadamia nuts, brazilnuts , almonds, walnuts, pecans, avocados,

coconuts. they have fat but they have othernutrients like phytochemicals, plant sterols that are different besides 100% fat. manyaw food chefs use oils in there. 2. another thing that pops up in the raw foodrecipes is the salt. even in the regular world they say don't eat too much salt. but becauseit'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 yourblood pressure if you get too much of it. we do need an adequate amount of sodium butthe 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 veganand 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 itthat way for a long time. we're following followers that aren't doing it to be healthierbecause they're not healthy recipes. 3. the recipes that i teach are actually whati eat. another thing that is interesting is that some of the chefs don't eat what theyteach. i actually eat what i teach. i had 2 raw food soups the last 2 nights . thisis it. fruits and vegetables. it's all we really need. it would be far better to makeyour own recipes than to follow someone who doesn't know maybe the healthiest way to doit 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 healthyas 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 andsalt. but i want to teach people to make their own recipes so they aren't as dependent onrecipe books. i want people to think for themselves. 4. another problem with raw food recipes isthey need certain ingredients. what if you're out of the ingredients. you gotta run to thestore, buy these certain ingredients. what if the store is out of them. what if the chefis 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 ihave fresh in my garden and in my fridge.

and this is how it should be. whatever youhave is what you gotta use to make something. you gotta figure it out and be creative. ihave a system on how to make a raw soup with whatever you have available and i'm goingto 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 12raised beds. i do buy produce in vegas and i mentioned in my marketing that i would sharemy 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 gotten16 oz for $1 but that's really rare. but 11 oz is about 40% of the time. they've had babykale, 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 getthem in. there are 3 99 cent stores and i got to all of them. sometimes it's not inthe case and you have to look behind the display and look for boxes in the fridge and lookfor something organic and i'll ask the guy, hey i'll buy the whole case. i'll buy six11 oz containers for $6. i've gotten organic oranges there. they won't be marked organicbut if you look for the sticker on the orange that starts with a 9. if there's an influxof produce they just bag it up and sell it. i've gotten organic apples and pears but that'srare. the greens are pretty consistent. 2. sunflower market, now called sprouts. goon a wednesday which is double add day. you

get this week's sale and next week's saleso 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 itat the other store. there it's like $3.79-$3.99 for 16 oz. dollar store is a little cheaperbut costco might have more variety like baby kale and spring mix. they had organic babykale this last trip. baby kale is better for us to eat because they're more tender greenshave more fibers and are more digestible. costco regularly has 10 lb bags of organiccarrots for $4.99. last tues they had organic strawberries. 2 lbs for $4.99. i've gottenorganic 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 thatbring 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 gota 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 moneyin vegas is my backyard. it's free! and at this time it's insane. (audience: "can i getyour 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 createyour own soup with whatever's in your fridge.

and, can you name some things in your fridgeyou 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, componentof your raw food soup is your soup base. there's only a few options for a soup bases you couldhave. super simple. 1. pre-existing soup base. in regular cookingthey 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 nutrientsin 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 themup in the juicer and you have a rich, delicious soup base carrots. if you have some extrabell peppers, juice up some bell peppers. they can be expensive but i had a boatloadof bell peppers from my garden in california and i juiced them up and had 4 cups of bellpepper 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 youa thicker consistency which is what you want to go for. with blending you will use lessproduce because you leave in the fiber. juicing takes out the fiber. if i don't have as muchi'll blend it to get more.

i'll use okra and zucchini as a texture componentinside the soup. that being said, i rarely eat mushrooms. i'll probably juice the zucchinias a base if i have a lot. ginger, garlic and onions probably wouldn't make a good soupbase. my general rule i use is that if i can't make a meal out of it, it probably shouldn'tbe used as a soup base or a main staple in your diet. the other night i actually usedfresh 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 soupbase and a lot of texture. the next component is the fat component. oncei have the base i'll add in the fat like a

handful or two of nuts. that will give youa 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 andyou 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 peoplehave asked me what i do with the pulp and for me, the pulp goes in my compost bin. somepeople 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 doit quickly. if you gotta do something with your time why not do something to extend yourtime , improve your longevity? we have about 4 cups of carrot juice and ittook 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 touse the white coconut because there are differences between them. this one is actually wrappedin 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 sweeterthere and it's not quite as sweet in here.

the meat is a lot thicker in here so it'sa lot fattier. so if i was using this as my fat component i would just use the meat andeverything and blend it to make it nice and creamy. because the meat is thicker it's alot grittier and i don't like that. so what we're going to do is crack it (i already tookthe water out earlier). i have a special tool to get the meat out. i do sell the tools buti 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 youngerthan the brown ones. the brown ones are more mature, have thicker meat and half as muchwater. sometimes the water is bad, depending on where you buy it. you always want to buythem at a place where they turn (sell) them

a lot. if they're not turning them, they'rejust sitting there and going bad and you're not going to know when you pick them. i liketo buy them at mariana's, the mexican market. they turn their coconut really fast becausethe 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 evidenceof mold near the eyes. but they're fine. they were about $1.50. the other coconut you'llsee are at the thai markets. they're wrapped in plastic and they're round. i advise againstgetting those. i don't know the treatment on those and i've gotten a high percentagethat are bad. another thing you could get is coconut flakesin the store. but i recommend fresh ingredients

if possible. for me, i'd get a bad reactionif 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 lookssuper all white. also, i've bottled it up and left it in my cupboard and after 6 monthsit goes rancid. but the store bought stuff never goes rancid. we don't want to eat thingsthat'll stay on the shelf forever. so today i'm using the coconut and it's amuch more cost effective fat source than nuts because it's a lot more food for $1.50. plusi got to drink the water. for me, the water is the main benefit and the meat is just somethingextra 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 bagbut i'm too lazy to use nut milk bags and they're a pain to clean so i'm going to usemy favorite mixer and we're going to simply pour this mix through the machine and we'regoing to basically get a pulp and what is basically a coconut carrot milk. if, insteadof carrot juice, i used water we'd have coconut milk. this is carrot coconut milk and thisis our base tonight. now we need a texture component and this iswhere you can get creative. one of the textures i like to use are sundried tomatoes. i canadd chunks of sundried tomatoes or chopped up into the soup. it will rehydrate the tomatoesand give the soup a chunky texture. i also

like to use sauerkraut. it adds zing and beneficialprobiotics. 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 zucchiniand make angel hair pasta - a thin noodle, or fettuccini - a thicker noodle. so you putthe 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 stuffput into there. so now i can make udon soup with the noodle-like texture and i've gotsome fruits and vegetables like zucchini. the english cucumber works well on this toolalso because it doesn't have seeds but you can't use a standard cucumber. you can takea daikon radish and put it through the slicer.

if you don't like the hot spiciness of theradish 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 whiteand 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 julienneslicer. it makes match-like strips. it's not like long noodles. i like to play with differenttextures 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 downthe 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 makea 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'tadd a lot of sodium, like sauerkraut. you can get salt free sauerkraut. i like to usemiso, but i use chickpea miso not soy. i'm not a fan of soy miso. i put a little bitof that into ours tonight. sometimes you have to look around because it's not availableeverywhere. once again, this is a fermented food. actually, another really cool flavorcomponent (i emailed my mom today and she

finally listened to me. i said, "mom you needto get some natto. natto is an amazing food. it's one soybean product that i love and consumefrequently. natto is fermented whole soybeans. unfortunately, it's hard to find. most nattois imported and they freeze them. when you freeze them they lose a lot of the beneficialnutrients. 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 vitamink 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 nutritionfrom 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 supplementsthat are powdered up beets , for example. it's better if you eat real beets but if you'retraveling 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 andi told her to put it over her salad or over rice. the k2 in the natto makes the calciumgo into your bones. besides the miso and the sauerkraut, i wouldlike to add the one food item that will drastically increase the trace mineral content to yourdiet. the usda studied foods grown in the 1950s and compared them to food grown todayand found significantly less nutrients and trace minerals in today's foods. now whatchanged? 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' losetheir money and profits in transport. in the 50s people consumed a lot more locally. themain thing is the soil depletion. even organic farmers are, unfortunately, not doing thethings needed to drastically increase the nutrients. organic farming has practices thatsay what you can't do (like spraying) but they don't say what you should be doing, likeusing compost or adding trace mineral supplementation to soil. the one thing that you can use toget your trace minerals if you don't grow your own vegetables in nutrient-rich soilis sea vegetables. many people, in my opinion, are deficient in trace minerals and the seavegetables 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 virtuallyno 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 pennsylvaniarecently and he actually gave me seaweed supplements in a bottle. there are asian food marketswhere you can get brown seaweed. then you have your standard nori. if you have norisheets you can tear them up and put it into

your soup. one of the things i like to dois take nori sheets and cut them into strips, like noodles. a less expensive option thannori is to get laver, which is what comes out of the ocean before it's made into norisheets. it's significantly less expensive and you can just take some of it and put itinto your soup. the one we're going to use today is wakameseaweed. it reminds me of chow fun noodles which are like chow mein noodles but are notcut up. they're long strips. you don't need a lot, this stuff really expands. we're justgoing to let this soak in some purified water. it's a flavor and texture component and rampsup 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 needmuch water or care. my sage grew like crazy. rosemary did really well. basil is the easiestthing to grow in vegas. my basil plants are this tall - it's insane. stevia is also reallyeasy. curry powder, cajun seasoning, italian seasoning,all different kinds of seasonings to make the stuff taste good are great. now we'regoing 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 arecrazy good. once again, having the right tools makes the difference. i'm a kitchen gadgetfreak. 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 besttool for this. this past summer, i went out to californiaand harvested my own sea vegetables. i did a video on how to do it. then you can dehydrateyour own and have enough for a year. in california it's legal to harvest 10 lbs a day so youcan 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 misobut didn't blend it up yet. another thing i like to do is add peppers. instead of juicingpeppers i just blend them into the mixture. on the hot peppers, what i like to do so they'renot 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 noodlesbecause 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, thezucchini noodles, coconut noodles, butternut squash matchsticks, the daikon matchsticksand we got our soup. but we're not done yet. let's stir it all up. last thing i like toadd to make it beautiful are marigolds from my garden. marigolds add color to make itlook nice but more importantly, to me, i like to eat functionally and marigolds add luteneand zeaxanthin. if you go in a supplement store you might find something made out ofmarigold flowers. we'll sprinkle it on and

it looks pretty. it's a different taste andmost 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 andzucchini 2. fat component: nuts, seeds, avocado, youngcoconut meat, coconut milk, olives 3. texture: fruits, vegetables, sliced, diced,noodles or matchsticks 4. flavor: miso, sauerkraut, nutrient densetrace mineral seaweeds, fresh or dried herbs, spices, sun dried tomatoes or dried vegetablesdoes everybody feel that they could make that real easy? it's more fun and way healthierthan a salad and really easy to make. the last thing i'd like to mention is a rawfood recipe book i made about 5 years ago

that has 30 of my recipes. i still eat mostof these recipes. they're very simple. one example is a curry mango dressing. it's 2mangos, 1/2 cup of almonds and a teaspoon of curry powder. you could alsouse something like that as a soup base. you could blend a bunch of mangos for your liquidand you'd have the fat component and your curry powder. it's available for $5.----- so i hope you guys enjoyed that episode onhow to make raw food soup with whatever you have leftover. once again i want to encourage you guys to eat more fresh fruitand vegetables in your diet and a raw food soup is a way you could do just that. onceagain, my name is john kohler with okraw.com

and we'll see

soup diet today tonight,you next time. and remember, keep eating your fruits and vegetables. they're the best.