Having not even met you, let me say this: you don't eat enough vegetables. Yeah, sure you eat loads of salads -- if you call a handful of watery lettuce dipped in oil a "salad" -- but according to the health professionals, you need three to twelve cups of broccoli and spinach a day just to be "average!" Those damned smug holistic nutritionists! Do you think even they eat that much? Do you think they spend half their day holding their nose and quaffing down carefully measured cuploads of soggy broccoli? And no, a tofu burger doesn't count as vegetables. And yes, I too hate even thinking about satisfying my hunger at the diner with a side order of sautéed spinach when everyone else is having cheese fries.

Don't think that slamming one of these $3 green juices at the deli is going to satisfy that measuring cup-crazed nutritionist in the back of your mind. And here's something else: raw fresh vegetables and fresh fruit don't mix. Eat them at the same time and you are asking for trouble… gastric, gaseous trouble. I remember temping at this ad agency about ten years ago; it was lunch time and I was about to eat my random assemblage from the Chinese salad bar deli next door: fresh strawberries, big vegetarian sushi roll, and fresh, raw broccoli. A visiting hippie chick friend of mine, the sort who has read Diet for a New America all the way through, gave me a look of concern as she and my co-worker went out to lunch. When they came back she took one look at my pale, agonized, bloated face and told me she had been worried about my mixing all through her lunch, and that I should never mix raw fruit and vegetables in the same meal.

She was a hippie nutritionist chick, and she knew.

So there's your problems. If you want to eat all the vegetables you are supposed to, you need outside help. You need health food store hippy kind of help.

Of course the favorite among hardcore health food store fanatics is fresh wheatgrass juice, but that stuff tastes nasty and it's expensive, and you feel funny forking over two or three dollars for this tiny cup of foamy green water, unless watching health food employees murder innocent glowing green blades of grass in a grinder is your idea of holistic. At any rate, maybe you don't want to have to do that every day… so do what I did, invest with the good folks at Green Vibrance.

I got turned on to these guys by my super genius 17-year-old friend Heidi, who once gave me a packet of their single-serving-size powder in exchange for loaning her the DVD of Todd Browning's FREAKS (1933). The end result? She's a total FREAK now, and I've been slowly turning into the incredible Hulk (sans big muscles and lackluster CGI animation) feeling good and groovy with the magic vibrance, mon.

Now this stuff doesn't taste that great, but that just means it's good for you. Indeed, how else would you know? So if you want the stuff with some artificial lemon-lime flavor, then maybe you're just not ready for the superfood challenge. Maybe you need to go back to your Odwalla green algae bar and chew awhile. But when you're ready to get serious, when you are ready to drop the pretenses, I'd strongly recommend giving the Vibrance web site a visit. All this green food powder stuff is expensive though, so make sure you're ready for that sort of commitment. I invested in a big 60 serving "Family Size" and I've been slowly healing my withered wallet ever since. My body though feels… better? Who can tell, with all the stress of the holidays? I'll let you know more towards the 30th serving. At least I can feel less guilty when I pass on the spinach option next time I'm perusing a menu.

If you want to surf around for other green drink options on the web, there are plenty others, but I haven't tried them, and no cool 17-year old genius chick turned me onto them. In the interest of fairness, there's Energy First's Greenergy, which boasts it contains "Echinacea" and tastes better than "other green drinks" such as, one presumes, Green Vibrance, which they say may have a "grassy aftertaste." Well, that may be true, but one can always hold their nose like they did when they were five and had to eat broccoli, can't they? I know I can, and proud of it I am, too. Based on the site layout and name, this one is much less hippy-esque and more like the local GNC store, catering to energy-slamming gym rats.

For those who are neither counter-cultural nor fitness addicts, those who want the patriarchal medical establishment to sanction their green stuff, there's something called New Greens which is "formulated by Dr. Chad Larson" and they have a picture of him. He looks pretty healthy, with a smile white enough to blind Erik Estrada. But I'll stick with Green Vibrance, and not because I'm a shill, but because they've been around since 1992 and my friend Heidi recommended them, and frankly, I'll stick with the holistic health hippies over the dinosaur-esque old white man-sanctified medical community any day.

I don't know, maybe the Dr. Chad is right. Who can tell. The amount of different alfalfa grasses and algae in these things blows my mind. How can you know for sure? Maybe if you hired a team of non-biased professionals to stand around and make a big deal out of "absorbability in the gastric lining" and so forth, you might get a straight answer as to which of these is the best, but overall I bet they all have their good and bad points, so you pays your money and you takes your choice, as my old carny friend Zippy used to say. The information presented is bewildering and possibly misleading as you tread the slippery slope of internet health food sites.

But if you're like me, you love to internet shop, so traipse by Alkalive™ Green which has four times the power of ordinary green food products. Four times the power! Wow, But that means, you just take a quarter of the usual amount of the other stuff for the same effect, and it costs four times as much anyway, so what the heck is the difference. If you are a real American, won't you prefer to have MORE? That's how you know you are eating something! I don't mean five cups of actual broccoli, but at least a decent spoonful of grassy tasting powder to know you are alive.

Hell, I know where you can order Ten Pounds of wheat grass powder for a hundred and nine bucks. That's a little extreme for me, I can imagine getting pretty sick of wheatgrass powder by the year 3000 or whenever that stuff would run out, and being like 110 and still healthy thanks to all that wheatgrass juice and thrilled it's gone so I can finally die.

So there's your options, o reader who does not eat "enough" vegetables. Continue to delude yourself that it's humanly possible to eat the eight to twenty trillion cups of seaweed those smug little nutrition experts advise or go for the expensive "yayo verde" -- the magic green powder that makes all your troubles disappear.

Man, if only they'd make powdered water, so you could get your 7-8 glasses of water a day in just one spoonful. Man, I'd be all over that. Damn, I just googled it, and Stephen Wright apparently beat me to that one. He's a damned vegetable eater, too, you can tell by that long hair. Freakin' hippies have all the answers.