I eat a lot of raw fruits and vegetables compared to the average modern man.

That wouldn't be saying much since the average modern man in America eats less than a cup or two of vegetables, which literally usually amounts to less than 10% of calories consumed as fruits and vegetables... but I actually do consume what seems to be large quantities.

Although... how do we really know what qualifies as a large quantity of vegetables or fruit?

I ate 4 pounds of Napa Cabbage the other day. That is "a lot", but it's only 320 calories. It seemed to have digested very easily.

Look at other primates. How much roughage do they eat? Not that this means we must follow their lead, but think about it. Why do we eat what we eat and not eat what we don't? Why do we eat the specific quantities we do?

Money and environment impact our decisions.

Even multi-millionaires are still often price sensitive. If berries cost $6 for a small container, many people will not buy a single container, let alone 5. But calorically, 5 containers could be a normal quantity to consume. But since it's "too expensive" people make a different choice.

How much greens should we eat? Well, how do we eat them? If people only eat greens in a salad, what does that say? Is it not healthy to eat greens plain? How much to eat? What drives us to eat greens? If greens aren't as exciting as some other food, and we normally simply eat according to what excites us... then perhaps we won't eat much greens. But let's say somehow we figured out that eating 2 pounds of greens is actually really healthy regardless of whether it's so exciting to eat? Maybe then we'd just sit through and eat it. Chew chew. Get on the chew chew train. Or what if we were restricted to eating what was physically available directly in our environment? What if much more of our day was focused on food and fitness? Could we perhaps spend much more time eating?

We in general don't eat tons of greens perhaps because they're "boring" or because they "cost too much" or because we don't know of a good source of greens that are at least not bad tasting. For me, a lot of greens are pretty decent tasting. I can eat lots of them. Eating a head or three of romaine is fine - especially if it's sweet. Celery can be amazing. Some greens require a bit of cooking to be more tasty to me... and then things open up for way more food possibilities. It tastes good. So I eat it and often in much larger portions than average people do. Partially because I prepare food myself AND because I like the taste AND because I do think that it would make sense that eating more would be more beneficial... to an extent.

I think with healthy eating, we're trying to gain nutrients. There are some nutrients and compounds that can become excessive, but who knows to what degree our body can benefit from MORE of certain things?

The entire paradigm of 2,000 ish calories is clearly way off. It doesn't even consider the idea of being more active as a general goal of life. If you only work with 2k calories... you CAN NOT DO THAT MUCH. Period.

So when we think of other nutrients, perhaps these are other things that really make an enormous difference. Maybe that extra calcium, magnesium, whatever that you would get from the greens... would ACTUALLY make a HUGE difference. If the mainstream medical "wisdom" is not pushing for upward caloric optimization, why should we expect anything helpful otherwise?

I don't mean to totally attack all of the medical community. I believe that in many cases they have some kind of narrative. For example, they think people need to lose weight, so they promote lower calorie intake. That makes sense... sort of. But for whatever reason they've been ineffective, and strangely there isn't a serious promotion of nutrient dense foods to support caloric reduction. If you want to get someone to decrease caloric intake, it would be good to eat foods that are full of necessary nutrients so that the person can get what they need!

The doctors do not tend to give actual legitimate dietary recommendations that line up with the principles they advocate for. There are known targets of nutrients such as magnesium, calcium, potassium, etc... but the dietary recommendations rarely actually meet these targets! So what's going on? We don't really know.

Personal experience is worth investigating. Why not see what happens when people(or you) have access to all the fruits and vegetables that could be desired?

It's at least clear to me that people would eat much more good fruit if it was available. This has been a simple contention for a long time that I have held - that fruit qualifies as FOOD. Fruit qualifies as good enough for a whole meal if consumed with sufficient quantity to meet caloric needs. That simple.

But greens are interesting since they rarely if ever will meet caloric needs. Why eat them? How much to eat? I think it's key to have some knowledge here. Also, what if the barrier to consumption is that it's "boring" to eat them or "too much effort"? Is that a barrier to be respected? Or is it a barrier to be hurdled over.

It is already completely "normal" to not exercise, stretch, or increase one's education... because it's "too hard" or whatever... but those are mostly excuses or results of confusion or ignorance. If people KNEW they'd get amazing results, they'd do more work to get the results. But we often don't know. We often don't have a vision of what's possible. We may be resistant to seeing what's real, and sometimes considering what's possible takes seeing what's real.

Anyhow, given that people are typically not really exercising or stretching meaningfully, and that might be us... how are we to judge our decisions in diet? Could it be that just like we're lazy about exercising or stretching... we might be lazy about eating?

Eating 3-4-5 pounds maybe even more of greens might be HUGELY beneficial to tons of people, but they don't do it because they don't realize it would be good for them and/or they just are unwilling to put in the work either way. "Too much chewing". But this need not be the case. Once a person sees direct improvements in digestion, skin, energy levels, body composition, relaxation etc... it may become an easy habit. It's not that hard to just chew and swallow food. In theory these are good things. I am not trying to make a case for greens being good no matter what and to just fill up non stop... but I do have a suspicion that we are massively under consuming them. I have eaten more than a pound of greens on a given day many hundreds of times and at least FEEL it was good for me. If I just look at a nutrient breakdown, it seems like a good thing. I see other primates eating tons and tons... maybe it's natural and normal for humans to really eat tons of greens too, but people aren't doing it because other food sources are more appealing - and people have not properly placed the role of getting more nutrients in their overall approach.

Practically speaking, I think we should all strive to have access to plenty of food. Having a garden with more greens than we can personally consume is simply a benefit to self and society. See what happens! See what happens when you have plenty of greens on hand throughout the day. Perhaps there're ideal times to consume them. Would be interesting to find out how much time other primates spend eating during the day, or to see habits of humans that live a more "down to earth" lifestyle with regards to food consumption. There must be some records somewhere of how many cabbages people would eat. It probably wasn't a tiny cup of coleslaw.

We could phrase the question as, how much of a specific food would be ideal to consume on a given day? Or, what is truly an excessive amount of a specific food and why? At what point is harm going to occur from eating raw lettuce? Do we have a natural system to indicate that we are no longer benefiting from consumption of the food? I think we do. I also think that most people are not reaching that point. They are more likely "bored" or not feeling the energy required to chew the food is worth "it"... but too few of them realize what "it" is, and furthermore, if someone has such a low surplus (or deficit) of energy that chewing more food is seen as an excessive cost... they probably need to eat more! Therefor, neither boredom nor physical energy cost of chewing seem like the actual signals of excess consumption. Rather, I think we're looking for something like a change in how the food tastes while chewing it. I experienced something like this where I had been eating so much parsley that it began tasting "soapy"and I stopped. I also experienced this with coconut and perhaps with carrots. I'm not certain, but I think things like that may be the more likely indicators. Again, we can consider that some other primates eat truly massive amounts of greens. Why do they do that? Greens have tons of nutrients. There's carbs, protein, fat, vitamins, minerals... What's wrong with them? Should we be afraid?