Making your own juices and smoothies at home can be a really fun way to add great vitamins and other nutrients to your diet. However, a lot of people don’t realize that if you only use fruit in your concoctions, you are not getting the full benefits. While most people enjoy the sweet flavor of fruity smoothies and juices, these can actually be quite high in sugar if you are consuming a lot of them. You are also missing out on the fiber and important nutrients that can be found in green vegetables, which can also be made into delicious smoothies.
Here we look at why you definitely should be adding more vegetables into the ingredients you use for your homemade smoothies.
Increase the Nutritional Advantages of Your Smoothies
If you use smoothies as snacks or meal replacements, then you need to be ensuring that you are getting the best possible nutritional profile by varying the ingredients as much as you can. Different colored fruits and vegetables contain different vitamins and things like polyphenols, which are important for your digestive system. You can also consider things like curly kale, which adds a lot more iron to your smoothies. If you stick to just the same few fruits that you most enjoy the taste of then, you will not be getting all of the great nutritional advantages to making your own smoothies. You can certainly use your favorite every time to add flavor, but try varying some of the other ingredients used as a base and you will find you can enjoy experimenting with different textures and tastes as well as getting the advantages of a wide spectrum of nutrients.
Reduce the Amount of Fruit Sugars in Your Healthy Drinks
It is well known that fruits are healthy and good for you, but a lot of people underestimate how much sugar they contain. If you are trying to lose weight, your healthy smoothies may have a lot more calories than you think, and you may be consuming a lot of sugar if your smoothies are nothing but fruit. Again, consider using fruit just to add flavor and using green vegetables as the main ingredient.
Using more vegetables may require a bit more effort from your juicer, so check out this article about the advantages of best blenders for green smoothies.
Great for Your Microbiome
More and more research is showing that the microbiome is really important, not just to your digestive health but to all of the processes in your body. Healthy gut bacteria has been linked to everything from good mental health to being able to maintain a healthy weight more easily, and so you definitely want to be trying to promote a healthy microbiome by consuming a wide range of different fruit and vegetables. As you can see, if you are relying on berries and other fruits when you make smoothies or juices, you are missing out on a lot of the health benefits of juicing. You should always be adding vegetables into the mix with every blend you make, and you should also be looking to use a wide range of vegetables throughout the week to keep the nutritional profile varied.
Milo Senalle
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