How I Eat a Day's Worth of Healthy Greens in 14 Minutes

Scientists are so annoying.

“Eat more leafy greens and you may slow how your brain ages,” they pester.

“Leafy greens contain high amounts of the nutrients you need to fight depression,” they badger.

“You should try to eat more leafy greens, man, because they’re really, really good for your eyes,” they hound.

Leafy greens may aid weight loss, lower your blood pressure, prevent cancer, help elderly women cross the street, and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

I get it, scientists. But there’s only so much salad a person can consume. There’s nothing crave-worthy about raw spinach. Uncooked Swiss chard is colorful, yes, but is about as appealing to eat as a houseplant.

And don’t try to tell me that green smoothies are amazing.

Anyone who says they love drinking green smoothies is either an alien (ever wonder why they’re green?) or, worse yet, a paid influencer for The American Green Smoothie Board or, even worse yet, both.

So what’s this salad-averse, green-smoothie-hating Men’s Health nutrition editor to do?

I break out the wok.

Paul Kita

I take a tub of hearty leafy greens (baby kale, spinach, chard), dump it into a wok coated with a glug or two of olive oil, turn the heat to high, and then stir the heck out of everything for five minutes.

What remains is a tangle of sauteed greens that are tender and delicious. I only ever dress them with a little salt and pepper, but you could do whatever the hell you wanted with them.

Paul Kita

You could add sour cream or cream cheese and make a really easy side dish for steak. You could dump the greens into eggs as you scramble them for a quick breakfast. You could add one or two thinly sliced garlic cloves if you want to walk around with an odor. Up to you.

The nutritional benefit of this method is huge.

How many servings of raw greens do you consume when you begrudgingly eat them in a salad? Maybe one? If we’re talking baby kale (baby) that amount offers roughly two grams of fiber.

But when you cook down raw greens you can eat way more. Men’s Health has always recommended two to four servings of leafy greens a day. I hit that easily when I “wok” my greens. I can eat an entire tub of baby kale and take in 3 1/2 servings in one sitting no sweat.

If you’re an alien or an influencer, I understand that you have ulterior motives to fulfill. But if you’re a regular person, I beg of you to back away from your green smoothies and give a good greens woking a try.

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