Who would have thought that a juice made with sprouted mung beans, apples, celery, lime, and ginger, actually tastes good? We've found that it makes an exceptional drink that imparts a lively spring to our step. The ingredients for this recipe would also make a great salad. Simply chop and slice everything as shown in the photo, and squeeze fresh lime juice on top.

Mung beans are so easy to sprout—usually in 3-4 days a new supply is ready to go. Ann Wigmore writes in The Hippocrates Diet that mung beans are a complete protein, as are alfalfa sprouts and sprouted wheat. Plus, they keep on growing, so as they get used up for juice, they continue to get bigger and replace some of what's been used.

In bulk, mung beans are very inexpensive, especially when you figure that one cup of dry mung beans will make up to several quarts of sprouts! (We have read that the long white mung bean sprouts found in stores are treated with chemicals, so we prefer to grow them ourselves.)

Ingredients (Serves 2):
1 cup pure water
2 cups sprouted mung beans
1 cup celery, sliced
1 apple, cored and sliced
1 inch ginger root (grated finely if making the salad)
1 lime, or 1 lemon, peeled and sliced

Directions
Begin by sprouting the mung beans. Place 1 cup dry beans in a one quart jar, and cover with pure water with sprouting lid.
Soak for 8-10 hours. Drain liquid, and rinse a couple of times. Drain again, and continue to sprout.
Repeat process each day, rinsing and draining in the morning and in the evening.
Tails will appear after about a day, and will be ready when they are 1/4 to 1/2 inch long. (When they get too long the sprouts can loose their sweetness.) At this point, refrigerate, continuing to rinse and drain daily.
Put all ingredients into Vitamix with one cup pure water. Blend on highest speed for about 30 seconds. Strain through nutmilk bag, or a strainer.
Drink immediately.
If using a juicer: Put all ingredients through the juicer. Add water, and drink.

I had an epiphany this summer from reading two books: The Hippocrates Diet and Health Program, by Ann Wigmore, and The Vegetarian Guide to Diet and Salad, by Dr. Norman W. Walker. Both authors share their viewpoints on how much raw juicy food is actually needed to become truly well. I thought Rex and I were getting plenty of nutrients (we are) yet wondered why my healing had not yet reached completion—which suggested that I needed something more.

This brings up a fundamental question: just how much nutrition is enough? The answer to this, for me, is that I need to keep increasing the amount of available nutrition until all symptoms are gone—utterly and completely. And the best way to do this is through juices and sprouts. They are the most potent and condensed food sources.

In raw foods, such as fruits and vegetables, there are enzymes to digest what is eaten. Sprouts are even a notch higher on the bio-availability scale, and are considered a "living food" packed with extra enzymes (and more) to ensure that the plant will reach maturity. And sprouts couldn't be fresher, because they're still growing when they're eaten.

As we mentioned in last week's Healing Feast, juice (loaded with enzymes and nutrients) is like getting an instant infusion of energy because juice basically skips the digestion process. We've read that the process of digesting food can sometimes take up to 80 % of the energy that the food actually gives us. This leaves only 20 % left to carry on all the other bodily functions! So drinking juice can be a very good thing!

In Ann's book she outlines a diet for someone visiting the Hippocrates Health Institute. Part of the daily intake would be six cups of sprouts! These could be juiced, blended, or put into salads. In addition to sprouts, 1-2 glasses of green juice, 1-3 ounces of wheat grass juice, fermented foods, seed cheese, fresh fruit, and two big salads are also included. That's a lot of nutrition! Have we been eating this much every day? No. So we're making changes, and reaping the rewards.

Dr. Norman W. Walker, who had seventy years of experience with human nutrition, drank large amounts of fresh juice daily. Somehow I thought a person would eventually become so nutritionally saturated with juice that it wouldn't be necessary to make it every day. That perception seems to have been a misconception.

Between these two geniuses, Ann and Norman, a revised road map for amazing health is emerging for us. It's simply this: juice and sprouts. We've been combining these two awesome ingredients into one drink, and the results have surprised us with how good we feel.

We've started a mung bean sprout production line so that there's enough to have 3-4 quarts growing at a time. New batches are started every four days or so. We haven't yet gotten to the full amount of consuming six cups of sprouts a day for each of us—that would be 12 cups of sprouts to make sure are available every day! Yet with the other sprouts we are eating regularly, we are getting about 3 cups each a day, and we're feeling the difference. The mung beans are taking us to a new level.

So in asking, how much is enough?, each person will come to recognize their own nutritional needs by the state of their health. Using one's intuition, seeing how the body responds to changes in the diet, will aid in seeking and finding solutions until vibrant health bubbles up like a natural spring. Nutrition and assimilation lie at the core of health and well being. This we keep learning again and again.