Smoothies: what is the best way to make them and how to use them correctly so that they bring the most benefits
Fruit or vegetable cocktails with the addition of nuts, greens, kefir or milk, better known as smoothies, have long been popular among adherents of proper nutrition and a healthy lifestyle. But there are subtleties in the preparation and consumption of these cocktails that not everyone knows about. It's time to fix this.
Can a glass of vegetable/fruit smoothie be an alternative to a full breakfast or a solid food snack? Alas, no, says Yulia Arkhipova, an expert on the MOS SMI portal in the field of cooking.
If you drink a smoothie with orange or apple on an empty stomach, you can seriously harm your stomach, because such a cocktail contains a lot of fruit acids, which also increase the acidity of the stomach. And this will certainly cause heartburn and even pain.
In addition, there is a nuance: since smoothies are not eaten but drunk, the feeling of satiety after drinking it does not come immediately, it quickly passes, and in an hour or two you will want to eat again. But when we eat solid food, chewing it well, the signal of satiety already goes to the brain, and satiety lasts longer.
Therefore, it is advisable to drink smoothies as a tasty and fiber-rich addition to breakfast or a snack, and not as a replacement for them. If you want to drink a serving of fruit smoothie, it is better to eat these same fruits in their normal form or make a salad with yogurt dressing.
Many women include smoothies in their menu because they hope that they will help them lose weight. And this is not always right: the abundance of sugar in fruit variations only increases weight, and smoothie additives such as cream, avocado and banana are very high in calories in themselves and can increase the calorie content of the finished cocktail.
Therefore, it is better to prepare low-calorie smoothies on the basis of one percent kefir or not the fattest yogurt, adding mainly vegetables - carrots, beets, cucumbers. This option will really help to reduce the number on the scales a little.
As for milk as a liquid base for making smoothies, it is better not to take it if you intend to make a cocktail from fruits. Melon, bananas, apples, oranges and other fruits do not go well with milk: the acids in them cause milk protein to quickly curdle, and such a tandem also provokes fermentation and bloating in the stomach.
If you like milk-based smoothies, replace cow's milk with coconut or other plant milk. Green tea or regular water will be a good and stomach-friendly base.
Want to make your usual fruit or vegetable smoothie healthier? No problem: every time you make a smoothie, add a decent portion of fresh greens to all the ingredients.
Cilantro, celery, spinach, dill, parsley, mint, arugula - any type of greenery that you love and are ready to eat every day will come in handy.
Even in chopped form, greens will additionally supply the body with fiber, vitamins D, K, A, PP, useful essential oils and minerals. To get the benefits for sure, add at least a full glass of fresh and juicy green leaves to all the ingredients calculated for a smoothie serving.
And don't forget that it is permissible to freeze the smoothie ingredients for future use and form mixtures from them for new portions of the nutritious cocktail, but it is not advisable to prepare the smoothie itself in large quantities for future use.
Chopped vegetables and fruits lose their beneficial substances faster, and the very next day, after drinking a glass of kefir smoothie with cucumbers and carrots/bananas and raspberries, you will receive far fewer vitamins than you could.
And storing it in the refrigerator can change the taste of the finished product, and you will no longer enjoy drinking it. Therefore, you need to drink the smoothie immediately after you pour it into a glass from the blender.
We previously wrote about the unhealthy delicacies of the past .
