Can Smoothies Damage Your Health?

Smoothies can be delicious and nutritious, but how healthy and nutritious your beverage is can depend on how it is made. Today it seems you can walk into any restaurant, cafe, or fast food franchise and have the option of ordering a fruit smoothie. It’s the right choice towards a healthy diet to select a smoothie over a chocolate milkshake, but unless you read the calories and make a choice based on that, you could be drinking a beverage with the same amount of calories. Not only should you be considering what ingredients are in your smoothie, but if you should be eating raw fruit instead.

Puree vs. Fresh Ingredients

Health experts warn to certain possible health problems caused by smoothies. It may be no secret to you the best way to consume fruit is when they are still raw because all of the most important nutritious value and fiber is still intact. When you remove the skin or process the fruit, you lose some of the healthy benefits of when you eat it raw. By drinking processed and pureed smoothies, people are just drinking the remaining sugars found in fruit and not getting the beneficial fiber they need for a healthy diet. Not only is raw fruit better than pureed fruit for the healthy fiber and nutritious value, but the fruit smoothies offered at businesses often include excess artificial sugar and flavor to make it taste so delicious, but extremely unhealthy and high in calories.

Chewing vs. Sipping

Even if you drink a smoothie that is made from scratch with all natural and healthy ingredients, the fact that you are drinking and not chewing the fruit is very significant and how beneficial the fruit is to your health. According to the article and in a 2009 journal of Appetite, the physical eating of food including sends signals to the brain that the person has eaten enough and they are full and satisfied compared to drinking a smoothie.

Making a Smoothie the Healthy Way

So what makes the perfect healthy smoothie if a smoothie from the juice bar isn’t the healthiest and it’s better to chew than sip your fruit? Instead of having a fruit juice based smoothie, it’s suggested that you use vegetable juice as a base for making your homemade smoothie, nothing extreme necessary. Including a bit of chopped up carrots, broccoli, spinach, or kale can make your beverage healthier than it was before.

Simple ingredients such as low-fat yogurt, 100% fruit juice, frozen fruit, and other natural ingredients such flaxseed, or tea such as kombucha and green tea as the liquid base or in place of juice in your drink.

According to Web MD, not all smoothies from juice bars and fast food restaurants will be terribly unhealthy. Just be smart about what you select by reading the menu closely and making a healthy choice based on that.

Why You Should Not Try a Fruitarian Diet

Just because eating fruit and drinking homemade and certain restaurant smoothies are good for your health, does not mean they should make up your entire diet. Fruitarian diet is the latest health fad that consists of eating, you guessed it, fruit. Not just that, but choosing to be a fruitarian means deciding to eat fruit that has fallen naturally, avoiding destroying anything else that is part of the plant as much as possible. This does not just include fruit, but seeds and nuts as well. However, too much of anything is not a good thing. A healthy diet needs a good balance of carbohydrate, healthy fats, vegetables and fruits.

As these examples show, not everything is as healthy as it may look. Whenever you select a fruit to eat or make a smoothie at home, consider what you are eating, how much of it, and what the ingredients are included. A healthy diet can help you avoid chronic health problems and save money on your private health cover and other medical costs.

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