From the Editor…

I use smoothies as a simple and quick way to get food ingredients that are important to me, but sometimes challenging to manage through the day. As I list the ingredients, you can search our archives and look at my article Insomnia and Mental Health: A Personal Experience, it contains links to the websites I used to support my choice of ingredients.

As much as I can tell, the only downside to smoothies, after you manage either to flavour them to your liking, or get used to the taste, is that they can pulverize the fruits and vegetables too small to be good sources of dietary fibre. Dietary fibre in larger pieces can make it to end-stage digestion where it can stimulate natural GLP-1 inhibitors and supress hunger. It can also get past the digestion process to be used as prebiotics in the colon for making valuable short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. In other words, I still need to eat vegetables, especially cruciferous vegetables. I use plant-based products. All measures are approximate. Makes about 20 ounces.

• 8 ounces of milk (I typically use soy)
• 7 ounces of orange juice
• 1 scoop of protein powder (I use Lean Fit at 30g protein per scoop)
• 2 tbsp of ground flaxseeds
• ½ tsp of minced turmeric
• ½ tsp of minced ginger
• ¾ cereal bowl of mixed berries (blackberry, blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, cranberry)
• ¼ cup of pomegranate arils
• Black pepper (pepper greatly enhances bioavailability of turmeric)
• 1 cereal bowl of broccoli (I sometimes use kale or spinach)
• ½ tsp of Ceylon cinnamon
• ¼ tsp of Amla powder

Blend to preference – I don't blend very long, I don't mind the fibre pieces.

I believe it's Dr. Michael Greger who cautions against drinking smoothies too quickly, so I drink mine over about two or three hours. I often take it to the gym in my protein shake container.

Life is busy – smoothies are an easy way to get good ingredients and compounds like flavonoids and polyphenols into your diet.

A final thought…I have a friend who reminds me that red wine has resveratrol, which is supposedly also very healthy. She thinks the smoothie would taste better. I haven't tried it, but when it comes to red wine, she knows what she's talking about. Might be worth a try.

Just a thought.