Green Smoothie Magic - 132+ Delicious Green Smoothie Recipes That Trim And Slim (6 page)

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.

There is no juicing in this book. When I am making a smoothie, I really don’t want to clean 2 machines. I love juicing but I don’t want to clean the juicer because a recipe calls for ½ a cup of carrot juice.

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.
  

If you’re looking to put on muscle bulk then exercise and a good wholesome diet are your friends! Some of the best building blocks are not surprisingly, going to be found within the pages of this book AND when you use sound judgment in your food choices. Movement towards a high proportion of uncooked, organic (if possible) plant-based foods is one of the best health decisions you will ever make for you and your family.

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.