How to Make a Smoothie the Healthy Way

I'm going to show you how to make a smoothie that's made with the right ingredients... smoothies that are loaded with phytonutrients, vitamins, minerals and enzymes, and that come in a whole-food form that's easily digested and assimilated.

Smoothies made with a variety of high-antioxidant fruits and vegetables, especially when combined with antioxidant superfoods, are the most nutrient-dense meals you can make. They're also just about the quickest, too!

Because the possibilities with smoothies are endless, getting started can seem a little overwhelming. And if you don't know the best ingredients to use — and which to avoid — you could end up with a sugar-and-calorie-filled monster that may taste great, but it's not going to do much for your health!

The good news is that anyone can make a smoothie that's healthy and delicious — just use the six steps I'm going to describe below. You'll see just how easy and quick it is to make a smoothie that you're going to love!

The first thing you'll want to do is make sure you have a blender that's up for the job. You can find out what you'll need by reading my page on The Best Blenders for Smoothies

How to Make a Smoothie
1. Choosing a Starter

Most smoothie recipes call for some amount of liquid to allow the ingredients to move around inside the blender and make your smoothie the right thickness. I'll show you how to make a smoothie using the right ingredients for your starter — and reveal some ingredients to avoid.

Water or Ice

Using water as the liquid is a great way to make low-calorie smoothie recipes, and it's cheap, too! Just make sure you're using pure, filtered water. You can add ice to chill your smoothies and use it if you need to thin your smoothie down.

Fruit Juice

You can use any type of juice — orange, apple, grape, pineapple — whatever. Fruit juices should be used in moderation, however — they're high in fructose. Even though the fructose is natural, consuming it by drinking juice can give you too much at once. Fructose goes quickly to your liver, where it will be converted to fat, and will lead to weight gain faster than a high-fat diet will. If you have enough fiber, protein and fat in your smoothie, these things will slow down the absorption of the fructose.

The South Beach Diet website has good information on the glycemic (sugar) content of foods, which may help you in deciding which fruits you want to use in your healthy smoothies, especially if you want to watch your intake of fructose.

The Glycemic Index is also a good source of information on foods and how they affect blood glucose levels and overall health, weight loss, fitness and disease.

Avoid highly-processed juices — they're not the same as fresh-squeezed. Most of these fruit juices only contain a fraction of the nutrients they originally had. You can recognize these juices easily because the expiration date is weeks, even months away.

Here's an article on the processing of orange juice that describes the astonishing journey that many orange juices take on their way to your grocery store shelf.

Milk or Yogurt

Milk and yogurt are two very popular beverages that people use to make smoothies. However, I think that homogenized and pasteurized dairy products are not a healthy choice. I personally avoid dairy completely, except for an occasional nibble of raw cheese or some cream in my coffee. (We all need at least one vice, don't you think?) So, I generally recommend dairy substitutes like nut milks for healthy smoothies.

If you aren't aware of the arguments against cow's milk, Robert Cohen, author and anti-dairy activist, has accumulated more information on milk and dairy products than anyone else at his website notmilk.com. (Love that name!)

The Raw Milk Alternative There are some people who promote raw milk as a healthy alternative, on the premise that it's a completely different beverage than the pasteurized variety. This isn't realistic for most people, though, since it's illegal to sell raw milk in most parts of the USA. Dr. Mercola (mercola.com) is a strong advocate of raw milk. Here's an article that presents the case quite well: Why Raw Milk is Becoming More Popular

Soy Milk

Soy milk has become widely available in recent years, and soy foods have become a staple for many people who are trying to eliminate dairy from their diet. But soy also has its detractors. There's much disagreement about whether soy milk and other soy-based products can be considered healthy. I won't go into the arguments here, but, if you do use soy products, here are some things to watch out for.

Primarily, I recommend that you make sure that the product you use is made from organically-grown soybeans. Virtually all of the soybean crop in the United States is now genetically-modified. The U.S. also imports a great deal of soy from China, where regulations are much looser and the quality of the product cannot be guaranteed. Eden Foods is probably the most reliable brand for quality soy milk.

Soy milk is highly processed. If you're looking to eliminate processed food from your diet, using soy milk will not further your goal. Here's a link to more information on the downside of soy: Think Soy is Healthy?

An excellent examination of the soy controversy is the book "The Whole Soy Story: The Dark Side of America's Favorite Health Food" by Kaayla Daniel. You can find it at my Health & Longevity Bookstore

Nut Milks

Least objectionable, in my opinion, of all the packaged beverages you can use to make your healthy smoothies are dairy-substitutes such as rice milk, hemp milk, coconut milk and almond milk. They're similar to soy milks, and I'd still consider them processed foods, but without the above-mentioned drawbacks of soy.

Make your own smoothie starter! If you have one of the more powerful blenders such as the BlendTec or VitaMix, it's easy to make your own nut milk. I'd consider that the best option of all.

Here's my universal recipe for a healthy smoothie starter. This takes just a few minutes and it's ready!

Almond Milk Smoothie Starter

Combine the following in your blender:
• 12 oz of water
• 1/3 cup soaked, raw almonds
• 1 tbsp coconut oil
• stevia — sweeten to your taste

Blend until smooth and strain through a nylon-mesh nut bag to remove the almond meal.

You can use this as a substitute for milk for any healthy smoothie recipe — or drink it as is. It will only keep for a couple of days, but it's so quick to make, it hardly matters.

How to Make a Smoothie
2. Controlling the Texture
and Temperature of Your Smoothie

Tips on Blending Your Smoothies. You want to blend the ingredients of your smoothie until the contents have been liquefied and are circulating within the blender for at least 5 to 10 seconds. This can take up to 45 seconds, depending on the power of your motor and how full the jar is. Don't overload your blender container, or your ingredients won't be able to circulate freely.

If you're looking for a chilled smoothie, either add a few ice cubes while blending, or use frozen fruit instead of fresh. The colder the ingredients you use, the creamier your smoothie will be. Using frozen fruit also makes it easy to keep an ample supply of fruit on hand in your freezer, to use in making your smoothies.

If you want to thicken your smoothie, add more fruit or superfood powder; if your smoothie's too thick, add more liquid or ice cubes.

How to Make a Smoothie
3. Fruits and Veggies for Your Smoothie

Almost any combination of fruits or vegetables can be used for your smoothies, depending on the strength of your blender. It's best to keep the proportion of fruits to vegetables heavier on the vegetables to avoid increasing the sugar content of your smoothies too much.

Many smoothie recipes use fruits for most of the ingredients. These smoothies can be too high in sugar to be healthy when consumed frequently. Save the fruitier smoothies for occasional desserts.

Should You Use Fresh or Frozen Fruits in Your Smoothie Recipes? Either option will work fine, but frozen fruit does offer several advantages. Not only is frozen fruit cheaper, it has just as much, if not more, nutritional value than fresh. This is because frozen fruits are picked at their peak of freshness, then frozen immediately.

Fruit sold fresh in stores is picked way before it's ripe so it doesn't spoil before reaching the store shelves. Because they're picked early, they don't have the full nutritional value of fully-ripened fruit.

Buying Tips for Frozen Fruit. When buying frozen fruit, make sure that there is no added sugar or any other ingredients — just the fruit. Buying in bulk is almost always cheaper. Many warehouse stores such as Costco and Sam's Club have a great selection of frozen fruit in bulk resealable bags.

Smoothies are a great way of adding dark green vegetables to your diet. If you have one of the more powerful blenders, adding leafy green vegetables will increase the nutritional value of your smoothies tremendously. However, if you don't care for the taste, it may be difficult to mask it sufficiently for your liking.

If you're using tough greens like kale, collards, spinach or parsley, blend them into your liquid base first to break them down more thoroughly. This will give your smoothie a smoother consistency.

Superfood powders. An alternative to leafy green vegetables are powdered green superfoods such as chlorella, spirulina and cultivated field grasses that are freeze-dried into concentrated powders.

These green superfood powders have the antioxidant capacity of three or more servings of leafy green vegetables in just one tablespoon or less. Using these much smaller portions means that you can blend the taste in much easier.

Superfood powders often contain blends of thirty or more of the healthiest fruits and vegetables on earth. These blends can be formulated for a much better taste, and they have the added advantage of a long shelf life with no refrigeration, so you can always have them on hand.

How to Make a Smoothie
4. Sweeteners for Your Smoothie

Fresh or frozen fruits. Try making your smoothies without adding additional sugars. Your taste buds will slowly adjust to the more subtle and delicious flavors of the fruit. Ripe bananas, either fresh or frozen, will add a good amount of sweetness, as well as thickness, to your finished smoothies.

Dates and other dried fruits. These will add an abundance of nutrients, fiber, and the great concentrated flavor that dried fruits have. Use in moderation, though; they tend to raise the sugar content substantially.

Stevia. If you want to add some type of sweetener to your smoothie recipe, I recommend using stevia.

Stevia is an herbal extract that's 300 times as sweet as sugar. It comes in powder, liquid or tablet form and has no calories. Stevia also does not raise blood sugar levels and is safe for diabetics.

If you need a good source for stevia products, iHerb.com has over 70 to choose from! And at iHerb, you'll get $5 off your first purchase!

How to Make a Smoothie
5. Make Your Smoothie
into an Antioxidant Powerhouse!

To make your smoothie into a antioxidant and nutritional powerhouse, you'll want to add specific concentrated superfoods to your base recipe, whatever that is. Following is a list of ingredients that I personally use to supercharge the nutritional content of my smoothies.

Protein Additives
Protein powder made from hempseed, whey, brown rice, etc. or raw organic eggs, nature's highest-quality protein

Fiber Additives
Nutiva makes a great hemp protein powder that combines 11 grams of protein with 14 grams of fiber per serving.

Green Superfood Powders
Chlorella and Spirulina, often blended with wheat grass and other green superfoods. Just one tablespoon typically gives you as much nutritional value as 3 servings of spinach!

SuperFruit Juices and Concentrated Powders
Concentrated antioxidant superfruits such as acai, goji, mangosteen and noni can add a significant boost of antioxidants to your smoothie.

Healthy Fats
Coconut oil, flaxseed or hemp seed powders are all rich in healthy omega fats. A tablespoon of coconut oil will add a wonderful creamy richness to your smoothies.

Spices
Cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg are spices that have more antioxidants than almost any other food, ounce-for-ounce. They also add a nice flavor to many smoothie recipes.

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