Quote:
Originally Posted by skuba girl
Hello All,Sounds horrible...but if it works???
Smoothies can be a great way to get in fruits and vegetables (and even to disguise the flavors of ones you don't like plain, to get nutrients you might not otherwise get), but as a miracle cure for every ailment under the sun, I feel pretty confident in saying, no it almost certainly doesn't work like that.
I'm not saying that recipes can't have medicinal properties, even somewhat dramatic ones. Whenever I have a very bad cold, I make a liquid concoction of hot peppers mixed with liquid to break up the congestion. Sometimes that's soup with hot peppers, and sometimes it's cayenne lemonade (I read about cayenne lemonade in a magazine. In the magazine article, they recommended microwaving it, but I'm not a big fan of hot beverages. It worked just fine, cold).
I love that food can be used medicinally, but I hate that misleading miracle claims are attached, making a recipe seem like a magic potion that must be followed explicity, and ideally the concoction must taste or at least sound disgusting in order to "work."
Remember there's no magic to combine these smoothie ingredients together. Eating them seperately would have the same (if any) effect. You could eat them all seperately to get the same benefits. Personally, if I wanted to get the nutrition of the ingredients, I would rather make a soup out of all the ingredients except the apples, and eat the apples seperately.
Also eating this "every day" makes no sense nutritionally. It makes more sense to eat a very wide variety of fruits and vegetables. If you do need to blend vegetables with fruits in a smoothie, it still would make more sense to vary the vegetables you use, than to use the same 6 or 7 ingredients every day.
Basic nutrition isn't rocket science. A basic "nutrition for dummies" type book, or a basic college nutrition text book, can help you recognize the "too good to be true" claims on food and food products (especially recipes) pretty easily.
As to smoothies, as long as you look at them as recipes and not medicines, or miracle cures, they can make convenient and nutritious meals/snacks, but I wouldn't recommend using the same ingredients every day. Vary the fruits and vegetables. A good rule of thumb (if you don't want to get too deeply into the subject) is to use as wide a variety of colors, textures, and flavors - yellow, light-green, deep/dark green, red, blue-purple, white, orange. Leafy, crunchy, crisp, watery, mild, sweet, pungent, bitter, cabbage-y...
I've made variations of the Dr. Oz Smoothie featured in the Women's World magazine (minus the fish oil capsule. I do take a fish oils supplement, but I swallow it like any other pill rather than emtying fish oil into my fruit smoothie).
I like smoothies as convenient breakfasts (and if low-enough in calorie as an occasional snack), but medical claims need to be judged with suspicion.