The wonderful thing about modern science is that it can break everything down into little component parts, which is great when it comes to your quest for understanding ... but there is a hidden catch that has influenced our thinking when it comes to nutrition.
Marketing Works - Unfortunately
Unfortunately where modern science lets us down in MANY cases, especially when it comes to new marketing trends, is to ignore the synergy of ingredients that occur in wholefoods. Food manufacturers are oh so busy showing us the fat, carbohydrate, protein and antioxidant components of their new fandangled package of highly processed food.
Meanwhile the miracles of wholefood alchemy are sitting on the shelves and in the fields, in the markets and in our gardens.
And guess what? NONE of those little beauties have a label on them.
Your mind becomes convinced with the ‘legitimacy’ of the typed ingredients and breakdown of all those wonderful (and possibly chemically derived) nutrients. Then your mind gets busy ‘making the case’ to support you buying the packaged stuff instead of the fresh, unprocessed and frankly comparatively unsexy or unenticing natural unprocessed fare.
Science is great for ‘deconstructing things’. What YOU need to do is to take that information and then assess and integrate things that are WHOLE now that you have that greater understanding.
On the one hand it’s important for you to know that your greens are:
alkaline (a major focus of raw foods and eating the green stuff!)
- full of protein and amino acid building blocks!
- low in carbs (carbohydrates)
- high in fiber
- high in vitamins and minerals
- high in those colors such as chlorophyll and carotenoids giving them their green and yellow, orange and red pigments
- rich in essential fatty acids essential for energy production (includes your omega 3 and 6 fatty acids)
- and high in those antioxidants we’re so keen on including ... because marketing giants use modern nutritionism and science to promote bits of their food.**
And on the other hand it’s important to know that the synergy of eating whole fresh foods cannot be equaled by any processed food that claims to have all the above ingredients.
Putting It All Back Together
There is no science that explains the magic of wholefoods and the way that even undiscovered or un-researched elements of food nutrients work together to create, maintain or sustain your body in health.
In other words, breaking foods down to understand what’s in them is only part of the picture. The real miracles are in the consuming of the whole unchanged food itself. You have to piece the puzzle back together.
Have You Heard Not To Do This?
I actually do not count calories. I tried that many years ago when I was overweight. For most people it simply means that you are focusing on the wrong thing. Also, to count calories presumes that every body had the same ability to burn energy in the same way from the same food sources or doing the same activities.
This is simply not true. Your rate of metabolism is surely different to mine. The efficiency of your body is going to depend on the way you’ve treated it up until now, not just what you choose to feed it from now.
I have learned that it is not the calories that matters, it is far more important to eat fresh, lots of raw, well-chosen produce, mostly fruit and vegetables, with sources of the nutrients that every human being needs. A vegan is going to have to make different choices to an omnivore.
Remember that bioavailability of the nutrients you ingest is what you’re actually looking for. In other words, how much of the good stuff is getting IN to your system to be used to your benefit. That equation will change with your health, your state of stress, your activity levels and wellbeing.
Nutritional tables are only a guide or line in the sand. They are not something you can live by. After all they belong to the world of modern nutritionism which is driven by big business. As I implied just above, the nutritional table on a green smoothie may be similar to a boxed processed food. Does this make them equal? Does this make the nutrients as good out of the box? I think not.
So I have deliberately left out nutritional tables. You have to take responsibility. Eat varied greens, a variety of nuts, seeds, good fats and oils and so on, with a wide variety of colors and nutrients. Make what you do natural and driven by your experience, knowledge and intuition.
You can’t live by the numbers on a table and it’s impossible to calculate the quantities across your meals. So take the sensible route.
You may be wise to get your blood tested and see where you may need to boost some levels. You can do that short term with supplements but now that you’re a green smoothie drinker you will be able to add in more of the right ‘stuff’ into your smoothies because you know that nutrients taken from good sources IN your food makes them more bioavailable.
Stop Doing SAD And Take Control
S.A.D. is an acronym referring to the Standard American Diet. It’s a great pity that the rest of the world has trends that are similar. In fact with the proliferation of big multinational companies many developing nations are now developing the same disease states and conditions as we have already in the western world, en masse.
They call this an obesity epidemic and other crises to take the focus away from the root cause. It all starts with how we choose to nourish ourselves. What you feed you and your family REALLY MATTERS.
Unfortunately many processed unhealthy fat and sugar-laden foods are seductively inexpensive and become delicious to the eater. Oh, and rather amazingly, many of these seductive and nutritionally void foods are very, very cheap.
Two wonderful expressions come to mind:
- · Garbage in, garbage out
- · You are what you eat.
Just about every important disease state and condition that inflicts the human race finds its roots in poor nutrition. Even the FDA has published this finding on more than one occasion. Here is one quote from their website: “There is more evidence than ever that dietary choices have major impacts on population health.”
You not only need to feed yourself well, there are essential activity (exercise) and sun exposure levels. This would be a very long posts indeed if we started to go down that path.
If you eat animal products then I won’t say it’s the wrong thing to do. However I do believe that minimizing the amount of flesh and dairy products will greatly benefit you.
I strongly believe that incorporating at least 60% raw fruit and vegetables into your diet is essential for you to have the building blocks for vibrant health. Ideally I would recommend upwards of 80% raw food. (But that’s just me!) Still working with or towards those figures, still allows you to have those taste-cravings satisfied. I totally acknowledge that your choice is free.
This article is based on vegan recipes. Often you will have the choice to add in a nut or seed milk. Sometimes that will be as simple as adding a handful of nuts to your smoothie for an initial blend with water before you add the other ingredients.
If you have a really good blender you will be able to blend all ingredients once and be done with it. You’ll learn more about blenders and blending later in the article.
You’ll create creamy and smooth tasting smoothies in this way. You’ll also be adding some other sources of fats, vitamins and minerals that will round out your own nutrition profile.
If you love dairy and if you believe it’s essential for your health then you could consider adding in dairy milk instead of water, nut or seed milks. However I would strongly urge you to research the calcium leaching properties of all animal products.
While it is commonly promoted by certain groups that drinking dairy milk will add calcium to your body, the evidence seems to indicate the exact opposite. These are from reputable clinical studies. So please, do your homework first. Play it safe and avoid cow’s milk products in your smoothies.
Each page will have many references to clinical studies and papers by scientists. So it’s really worth a look. There are plenty of other websites. Whether or not any website has 100% trustworthy information I cannot say. They can be quite strongly worded and have information that you could be surprised and shocked by.
Do your own research. Try ‘milk myths’ as a search term. This is definitely an important subject. If nothing else doing this research will help you question what you’re being told by readily available regurgitated (pardon the cow pun) information.
Fortify Your Body
Your food has the most incredible ability to fortify your body against many, many conditions. If you’ve ever met anyone with a heart condition such as high cholesterol or high blood pressure or diabetes then you’d probably be aware that one thing that they must take control of is their diet.
If you are diabetic then I encourage you to take a nutritional approach and look at incorporating raw food as your main focus. Please do your research. There is wonderful evidence out there that people with heart conditions, thyroid conditions, diabetes, even multiple sclerosis have had miraculous recoveries, reversals and improvements of different levels by eating more raw food (and some ‘go completely raw’).
While my article is not about the raw food phenomenon, (which incidentally I put great faith in as well as a move away from the modern day profit-based pharma-culture) just know that Green Smoothie Magic has over 132 recipes that will arm you with tools for creating or regaining your birth right: Vibrant life-giving health.
Alkali-Forming Foods
It’s not just me that says this. The more raw food and the more greens the better off you are. One of the reasons is that you create a more alkaline environment in your body. In 1931 Dr Warburg won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that cancer and disease live in acidic environments (that can also be devoid of oxygen).
His research kicked off a wealth of research and results. Much of this points to the fact that disease states thrive in acidic conditions. Further it appears that one should eat foods that will create a more alkaline environment. Good food (mostly organic and raw) with plenty of green leafy vegetables, a complement of fruit, good quality sea salt and some exercise are keys to your health.
But I Can Eat A Salad!
The amazing thing that green smoothies do is to power-pack enormous amounts of the nutrients and goodness of those incredible greens into an easy to drink and easy to digest format.
I LOVE salad. At dinner times we have somewhere between 1 and 5 different raw salads. The easiest way to make the salad the main focus of your eating life is to make great ones.
Smoothies allow you to have these highly nutritious greens in your ‘diet’ in far greater quantities than most people would eat at one sitting. Of course, if you would generally eat that amount at one sitting then that’s still wonderful. Making green leafy vegetables palatable for just about anyone is where smoothies really come into their own.
Let me put it this way: It is a veritable chore convincing my daughter to eat one tiny broccoli floret. Now I can give her a smoothie that has 2 handfuls of broccoli and she enjoys it. Yippee.
It’s a win-win situation. She gets the benefits of a more balanced ‘diet’ with a truly magnificently nutritious vegetable and the whole family feels great about that.
Get More Out Of Your Greens
You have a choice. You can juice your fruit and vegetables and you can blend them. There are reasons to do both. I really love the feeling of a good juice. I often create a beet, carrot, ginger, kale juice with a squeeze of lemon. It’s refreshing and delicious.
You get a ton of nutrients immediately available with juicing. However, what juices miss out on providing is a good amount of soluble and insoluble dietary fiber. Fiber is one of the keys to a well-functioning digestive and excretion system.
When you blend your fruit and vegetables (such as when you create your smoothie magic) you want to have the nutrients, the fiber and all the goodness you can extract so it’s available pronto. Breaking down the cell walls in your greens by blending is the key to extracting the most you can. When the cell walls are pulverized the nutrients are more readily available to your body.
When it comes to greens I don’t think there’s a more accessible nutritionally packed easily ingestible food on the entire planet.
There’s Protein In Them There Greens!
Just about every vegetarian or vegan I know has been asked at one time or another a very curious (and sometimes silly and infuriating) question: “Where do you get your protein?”
A not so silly answer is to point people in a couple of directions. One is to let them know that at a human’s most important growth period, as babies, that breast milk can solely sustain a child for months and months and it only has 1.1% protein, and only 6% of the calories from this milk are provided by that protein.
The other great fact is that the largest animals on the planet (apart from whales) including elephants, hippos, rhinos, gorillas and long lean strong giraffes are all vegetarian or herbivores. That’s an impressive (and incomplete) list.
Protein is important for growth and if you’re a child they’re more important than for an adult. They are important for repair too. Be careful not to include too much protein. Those diets that are low carbs and high protein overwhelm the system in many ways, especially the kidneys.
Go for balance in your food choices. You don’t need to do anything fancy. Eat a variety of your protein sources and, if you’re eating them regularly you’ll get the full complement of essential amino acids.
Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are essential to our growth and good health and I talk about them in the next section.
Protein Digestion, Preserving Nutrients, Raw And Cooked ...
Essentially you want to consume foods that collectively will provide the full array of amino acids. You will find your amino acids in foods that are not made entirely of protein (they also have fats and carbohydrates). Keep in mind that there really are only a handful of 100% protein foods. They are all processed to some degree and include egg whites, boiled shrimp, non-fat cottage cheese and fat-free turkey breast.
Eggs, which have no carbs, are only pure protein if you don’t eat the yolk. Fish is low in carbohydrate but not devoid of them. It’s clear that none of these foods can form the mainstay of a healthy diet. And incidentally, none of them will make it into any of your green smoothies!
All nutritious foods have a complex profile of ingredients. It’s we as humans who try to categorize them so they can fit into boxes. You’ll be dismissing and including foods on your smoothie inclusion list based on nutritional value and their ability to blend well.
Many foods that are considered ‘carbohydrates’ have significant proportions of protein in them. Take raw spinach. Thanks to Popeye most people will know that spinach has a high amount of protein. According to www.nutritiondata.self.com it has 56% carbs and 30% protein. Broccoli has 64% carbs and 26% protein.
Chia seeds are regarded as a high source of protein (36% carbs, 53% fats and 11% protein) and more importantly they are a source of all the essential amino acids (complete protein).
While we’re on that point, there are definitely certain foods that lend themselves to smoothie-ing and others that don’t. I recommend you don’t let dogmatic food combining principles based solely on numbers or calorie counting get in the way of logic and a nutritious smoothie.
Don’t Overthink Your Nutrition
I’d like you to simplify your approach to your decision-making when it comes to food. Go for a variety of high nutrient foods. Don’t bamboozle yourself with percentages of what’s in them. How could you possibly keep track? And how can we as humble humans understand the complexity of their interactions beyond scientific data (which in itself is just an interpretation)?
Concern yourself with acquiring the best quality food, organic or pesticide-free if you can manage it and eat a range or complement of different things. If you’re vegan and vegetarian know enough about where to get all your essential amino acids, your essential fatty acids in the right proportions across your diets, your iron and your vitamin B12. That’s just common sense and about your healthy survival.
And, no matter who you are, drink at least 2 liters of water every day and consume good quality sea salt.
Keeping Your Proteins Available For Use
High protein foods such as meat and eggs may not be as useful as you would like because they are normally cooked. There is a ton of information about proteins freely available online. Raw food ‘experts’ say that raw protein is the best because uncooked protein is of a higher quality. They suggest that cooking destroys upwards of 50% of the protein contained within food by denaturing the proteins.
Other sources say that in order to digest protein it needs to be denatured to make amino acids bioavailable. It really is hard to wade through the information and misinformation and decide which is which.
Try this on for size and practicality. Denaturing is going to happen anyway. In actual fact, it’s the viability of amino acids that you want to preserve. Certain cooking processes do destroy certain amino acids, particularly with high heat and burning (such as barbecues).
So what do we do with this information?
You do know one thing for sure, you do preserve more nutrients such as vitamins and enzymes when the temperatures are lower. My personal recommendation (without being dogmatic!) is to reduce the overall proportion of cooked food. Eat more raw food and make your way towards consuming eventually at least 80% raw food if you can help it! Green smoothies will shift the balance for you.
The (Scientific And Practical) Skinny On Proteins
Getting a little scientific here, it’s important to know that:
- There are 20 amino acids that make up proteins
- Nine (9) of these are called essential amino acids (certain others are essential in certain circumstances)
- The body cannot manufacture essential amino acids so you need to find them in your diet
- You need a diet that has the building blocks of your proteins across all your food choices and across your meals
- You can find the right proportion of amino acids by eating well over time. It is a myth that you have to eat ‘complete proteins’ (proteins that have the essential amino acids in specific proportions) at EVERY meal. This is no longer considered critical. You DO need to eat well and ingest the building blocks over the course of a day or 2 or 3!
- Varying your foods; fruit, vegetables and greens and choosing your foods wisely will give you plenty of protein, even if you never eat any animal flesh.
How Much Of My Smoothie Should Be Green?
Somewhere at some time somebody made an arbitrary comment. They decided that the definition of a green smoothie is 40% greens, 50% fruit and 10% fat. I have also read it should be 60% fruit, 40% green leafy vegetables. Nowhere ANYWHERE can I ever find whether this is by volume or mass. And it cannot account for the fact that fats are in greens and fruit. So do you add extra fat?
For example certain green smoothie aficionados say 40% green leafy vegetables but then may only pop in 2 cups of leaves which weigh a small proportion of the smoothie. You’d have to put a HUGE volume of chickweed into a smoothie to reach that 40% and you’d need a much smaller amount if you were using, say, the heavier green, bok choy.
Well, I don’t know about you, but that ‘definition’ is pretty unclear (and perhaps even a little misleading). Some greens are feather light. Others are dense.
Optimize Your Greens
Here’s why it is probably better to think about optimizing your greens intake. I can tell you quite definitively that when you make a green smoothie you are not going to be placing a cupful of fruit and then its weight in greens to go along with it. One cup of fruit can weigh hundreds of grams.
For the purposes of testing the so-called formula for green smoothies (and to have a little fun) I did some experimenting of my own. I weighed the pineapple and papaya in my smoothie and it was about 500 grams. The leaves I put in (2 whole packed cups) weighed around 150 grams.
In that smoothie, the percentage was about 77% fruit, 23% greens. If I had used bok choy it would have been in the vicinity of 350-400 grams. So the proportions of fruit would be 55-59% and the greens would be 45-41%. (That’s closer.)
In another smoothie, fruit weighing 340g along with 2 cups of chickweed at 120g makes the proportion of fruits very high at 74% fruit with only 26% greens.
The bottom line is this: The proportion is going to depend on your ingredients. Pure and simple.
In my opinion, it strains credibility to claim definitive proportions. A heavy fruit will shift the balance away from the 40% of greens. The salad type leaves are very light in mass. So instead I have consistently added at least 2 (well-packed) cups of greens to every smoothie.
Let’s just put all that to bed and say: “We get it”. Cram a lot of greens into a smoothie and if you balance that with other well-chosen ingredients you’re sure to get a highly nutritious drink. Job’s done. The percentages are just an indication that you need greens. By the way, if, in the beginning, you can’t do that in a smoothie, then eat a few salads.
Ingredient Quantities In This Blog
My aim is to make these recipes easy to make. I have read many recipes over the decades that suggest using a bunch of this or that. A bunch? Sorry, that does NOT compute. Sometimes bunches of say, basil are just a couple of stems with a few dozen leaves. While at other times a bunch is a veritable bounty of literally hundreds of the fresh green fragrant herb.
Or what about when you read something like ‘a small pineapple’? I live in pineapple country. I can find pineapples that would yield less than 1 cup and other ones that you could get over 2 cups out of and both of which you COULD consider small. So ...
Instead of telling you a bunch of basil, you’re more likely to be told a quantity. You’ll see ‘1/2 cup basil’ or ‘1 cup of pineapple’.
Handfuls, Bunches Or Cups?
You won’t be told to throw in a ¼ ‘bunch’ of basil. There is the very occasional handful (of nuts or mint). Smoothie-ing is not an exact science because the produce you buy is variable. However it is easy to measure a cupful of greens or fruit.
In this Blog you’ll find that I have included a simple and as accurately-reproducible guide to measuring ingredient quantities as I could manage.
While fruit sizes can change, where it matters I have quantified it for you.
Which Vegetables Are Starchy?
I agree with many other smoothie greats (!) that starchy vegetables should be avoided in smoothies. If you need proof of that, then try to imagine a potato smoothie. Hahaha
There are degrees however. Some will tell you not to put in beets (beetroot) or carrots because they are too high in carbs or even starchy. They say it’s because it needs to sit within the guidelines of a combination diet.
So to make it easy, how about I give you a quick guide on starchy and non-starchy veggies (at least the ones that are sometimes in contention!)?
Starchy Vegetables To Be Avoided In A Green Smoothie
Don’t put these in your smoothie:
- Corn, squash and pumpkin, potatoes and sweet potatoes, peas and parsnips.
You will see that in this Blog that I often love to use the leaves of the sweet potato. They are very mild and blend well. They’re also high in iron. :)
Non-Starchy Vegetables
There are plenty of non-starchy vegetables. Let me AVOID making this a long list, because frankly, common sense tells you that you’ll want to avoid putting eggplant or mushrooms in your smoothies!
Instead I have listed the vegetables that go very well in green smoothies for their nutritional profile and the way they complement the other ingredients. Some of these vegetables will have a tiny amount of starch in them.
Nature really does things in a way that does not necessarily ‘comply’ with man-made rules. Trust me, these vegetables work really well in a green smoothie! (I should know – I tested every single one of them!)
- Carrots, beets, broccoli, celery, onion, tomato and peppers and cucumbers (those last three are technically fruits) and of course just about all your ‘green leafies’.
I’ve made sure that the recipes in this Blog reflect the best way to give a good blend and flavor.
