Get On The Green Smoothie Bandwagon! Part One

The first time I heard about green smoothies, I had just begun a year-long experiment with raw food veganism. (You can read about why the experiment had to end when you sign up for “The Crunchy Coach News” and receive the free report noted in the subscription box. ) The concept sounded wonderful. Blend greens with fruit and be able to absorb more of the minerals in the greens while being able to avoid their bitter flavor.

Soon after, green smoothies became our staple weekday breakfast. My Vita-Mix, which had been used only sporadically over the past eight or so years, became a fixture on the kitchen counter. And so the Great Green Smoothie Experiment began.

My generic recipe was water; cashews, almonds, and/or sunflower seeds; bananas and dates; and then enough greens to stuff with rest of the blender container with. Like the dutiful health nut-turned-green smoothie freak that I was, I began to load up on all kinds of greens at the health food store. Soon, my refrigerator was full of kale, romaine lettuce, Swiss chard, and spinach.

Not too long after, I began to wonder who’s big idea it was to drink green smoothies. I know you don’t want TMI, so let’s just say that my digestive system needed about a week to get used to the raw greens and the fiber that came with them.

But then I ran into another problem. The raw vegan gurus were telling me I should eat between one and two pounds of greens per day if I was to get all the nutrition I needed (they didn’t want to bother dealing with the fact that I could much more easily get the nutrition from clean animal products, or by steaming and buttering the greens; not gonna go there right now, as that’s a subject for an entire book another post).

Have you ever tried to eat a pound of kale at once? Raw? In a smoothie with fruit? Unless you make it with at least five large bananas, it is bitter. And I wasn’t about to use that much sweet fruit, since I knew what the sugar content did to my system (can you say, “Crash and burn”?).

But wanting to do the “right thing”, I persisted for a while. My sweet husband tolerated the disgusting experiments, but I knew something had to give when he started adding agave nectar to his green smoothies. I relented and started making our smoothies separately, his with less greens and mine with–blech!–more.

In addition, I began having a second green smoothie for my afternoon snack. I had to, to get all the required greens in. I wasn’t taking any supplements, and was determined not to become deficient in any minerals (get the free report and find out how well that worked). One day, not too far into the Experiment, I made an afternoon smoothie with Swiss chard.

Although it was only about three hundred calories, and I finished it around four p.m., I could not eat dinner that night. Shortly after drinking the smoothie, I’d begun to feel as if I were coming down with the flu. By dinnertime, I was downright nauseated. I didn’t start to feel hungry again until around eight o’clock that evening.

A few days later, I had my second afternoon Swiss chard smoothie. Same thing. I got online and did some research. Long story short, I determined that my body did not like the quantity of oxalic acid in those particular greens. I had a similar but less dramatic reaction when I drank a smoothie with collard greens.

Swiss chard was out, and collard greens were out (don’t worry–I didn’t even think about trying a smoothies with mustard greens!). I’d learned that spinach is the best green for taste in a smoothie (it actually increases the sweetness), carrot top greens were second best, then buckwheat or sunflower greens (which I grew myself) were  the third tastiest green smoothie choices.

“But, Coach, do green smoothies really taste good? Really?”

Absolutely! As long as you match the right amount of the right kind of greens with the right kind of fruit. To find out some of the best flavor combinations, as well as how the much-proclaimed sprout fares in a smoothie, make sure you tune in next week’s Tasty Tuesday post.

Tagged as: green smoothie, green smoothies, green smoothy, raw food diet