You never make a green smoothie made entirely of free stuff growing in nature, unless you want to feel like one million bucks. This is why I drink a quart of green smoothie (or juice, but usually smoothie) every single day of my life. Because they’re literally the most important thing I do, to feel good, slow aging, and swerve our collapsing health care system. (I am 55 and have not needed a doctor since the one who delivered my youngest child, about to turn 22.)
Try growing moringa in Florida. I grow it in zone 9. I eat the leaves in salads and it's a beautiful tree. Moringa has Anticancer properties and probably more benefits.
Robyn - I don't know about others, but when I mentioned calories to you, it's not because of some lame obsession with macros (you have NO idea how aligned we are about most things nutrition) ...
I was speaking simply from the perspective of satiety. People get HANGRY when they don't get enough fuel (aka calories) to think and perform. That was the basis of my calories comment.
At 88 pounds (plus or minus 2) since 1976, I've always eaten more food than almost all of my housemates, my boyfriends, etc. It's always a topic of conversation ...
While I have no doubt that people can train their bodies to do all kinds of things, from calorie restriction to fat adaptation to no fruit (incomprehensible) I currently cannot conceive of restricting calories by choice (yes, I recognize we may not always have the choice). I do, however, eat almost exclusively whole, unprocessed intact plants (nothing ground to a flour, definitely no oil -- the ultimate empty calories right up their with table sugar.) And rarely anything processed with more than a kitchen knife.
So smoothies haven't been my jam. But I bow to your brilliance on this topic and am listening <3
Hey, Robyn -- I love this so much! And, I recently came across a fascinating perspective I had never heard about how much blending affects the microbiome, versus eating foods whole and intact.
I transcribed a portion of this discussion, in a "SIBO and Leaky Gut" presentation by Michael Greger (link at bottom).
The issue extends not just to smoothies/beverages but also to things like nut butters and hummus ...
(If anyone reading this doesn't eat grains, don't let the initial part of this transcript stop you from reading to the end. The later part about what happens to our STOOL and GUT BACTERIA with blending is quite unexpectedly eye-opening!
NOTE: You can skip to the paragraph that begins with >>> for the bottom line.
____________________
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
QUESTION: If I put [a bowl of cooked grain porridge] in the food processor to make it smoother, does that take away the nutritional benefits?
Ah okay, so the whole point of groats is intact grains. So when you think whole grains, you think, "Oh! Whole-wheat bread. Whole-wheat bagels. Whole-wheat spaghetti. Those are not intact grains. They're whole -- meaning they haven't had the fiber stripped from them ...
So wait a second -- if whole-wheat flour has all the fiber of whole-wheat berries, you know, the wheat berries, then why does it matter if we flour it or not? Why does it matter if we take oat groats and chop them up into into pieces and make steel-cut oats? And why does it matter if we take oat groats and flatten them out into rolled oats? It's the same -- it's literally the same thing! In fact, why not go instant oats, which is basically like powder and precooked tiny little flakes of oats. It's all has exact same nutritional profile. So what's the problem?
The problem is missing the structure. Why does that matter? Because your good gut bacteria eat starch. But we absorb starch in our small intestine when we -- you know, if you eat whole-wheat flour, all the starch is out there exposed, which is not how it's supposed to be in nature. It's out there exposed, and it gets absorbed.
And so yeah, the fiber makes it down to our good gut flora, but all that starch is lost, for our microbiome. Whereas when we eat food the way nature intended, there are bits. So when you eat nuts, as opposed to nut butter, for example, when you eat nuts, no matter how well you chew, you get these little few millimeter particles that are not broken down. And you have all this nutrition wrapped up.
So that's why it's, for example, it's why nuts are less fattening than nut butters. The exact same amount! Because you actually poop out some of the bac -- because it's all trapped in these little particles. Well, when we eat oat groats, or steel-cut oats, which are smaller but still better than something like oatmeal -- yeah, you chew all you want. You chew your [groats] all you want, you're still going to get little little bits and particles that go down and aren't digested, and packed in all this starch. And then it makes it down to our colon, and then the colon can't -- then the bacteria eat the fiber, release that starch, and then they have this bounty.
>>> And so there's this great video I love on nutritionfacts.org where they have people eat the same exact foods bought in two different forms. So they had people eat, like chickpeas or hummus, and they had people -- I forget exactly what they used -- but one was kind of in porridge form and one was in their whole intact form. And what happened is they like doubled their stool output! The exact same amount of food!
Wait a second: Why do they get twice as much stool when you eat the whole intact foods? it's because most of stool -- literally more than 50% -- is pure bacteria! It's not undigested food. Pure bacteria! And so you just doubled the amount of bacteria you make. You get like this bacteria factory! So many trillions that you actually -- you actually doubled the weight of your stool. Because all of a sudden, when you chew chickpeas as opposed to hummus, they've got all those little bits down there. All that extra starch in the colon, all that super happy bacteria, all that short-chain fatty acids, all that health that comes with it.
And so you should not put your groats in a in a food processor. That's the whole point of eating groats is that undigested bits end up in your colon to then be digested by our good bacteria Hopefully that made some sense.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
_________________________
You can find the full video here (again, the above clip begins at 46:45):
Try growing moringa in Florida. I grow it in zone 9. I eat the leaves in salads and it's a beautiful tree. Moringa has Anticancer properties and probably more benefits.
Robyn - I don't know about others, but when I mentioned calories to you, it's not because of some lame obsession with macros (you have NO idea how aligned we are about most things nutrition) ...
I was speaking simply from the perspective of satiety. People get HANGRY when they don't get enough fuel (aka calories) to think and perform. That was the basis of my calories comment.
At 88 pounds (plus or minus 2) since 1976, I've always eaten more food than almost all of my housemates, my boyfriends, etc. It's always a topic of conversation ...
While I have no doubt that people can train their bodies to do all kinds of things, from calorie restriction to fat adaptation to no fruit (incomprehensible) I currently cannot conceive of restricting calories by choice (yes, I recognize we may not always have the choice). I do, however, eat almost exclusively whole, unprocessed intact plants (nothing ground to a flour, definitely no oil -- the ultimate empty calories right up their with table sugar.) And rarely anything processed with more than a kitchen knife.
So smoothies haven't been my jam. But I bow to your brilliance on this topic and am listening <3
Hey, Robyn -- I love this so much! And, I recently came across a fascinating perspective I had never heard about how much blending affects the microbiome, versus eating foods whole and intact.
I transcribed a portion of this discussion, in a "SIBO and Leaky Gut" presentation by Michael Greger (link at bottom).
The issue extends not just to smoothies/beverages but also to things like nut butters and hummus ...
(If anyone reading this doesn't eat grains, don't let the initial part of this transcript stop you from reading to the end. The later part about what happens to our STOOL and GUT BACTERIA with blending is quite unexpectedly eye-opening!
NOTE: You can skip to the paragraph that begins with >>> for the bottom line.
____________________
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
QUESTION: If I put [a bowl of cooked grain porridge] in the food processor to make it smoother, does that take away the nutritional benefits?
Ah okay, so the whole point of groats is intact grains. So when you think whole grains, you think, "Oh! Whole-wheat bread. Whole-wheat bagels. Whole-wheat spaghetti. Those are not intact grains. They're whole -- meaning they haven't had the fiber stripped from them ...
So wait a second -- if whole-wheat flour has all the fiber of whole-wheat berries, you know, the wheat berries, then why does it matter if we flour it or not? Why does it matter if we take oat groats and chop them up into into pieces and make steel-cut oats? And why does it matter if we take oat groats and flatten them out into rolled oats? It's the same -- it's literally the same thing! In fact, why not go instant oats, which is basically like powder and precooked tiny little flakes of oats. It's all has exact same nutritional profile. So what's the problem?
The problem is missing the structure. Why does that matter? Because your good gut bacteria eat starch. But we absorb starch in our small intestine when we -- you know, if you eat whole-wheat flour, all the starch is out there exposed, which is not how it's supposed to be in nature. It's out there exposed, and it gets absorbed.
And so yeah, the fiber makes it down to our good gut flora, but all that starch is lost, for our microbiome. Whereas when we eat food the way nature intended, there are bits. So when you eat nuts, as opposed to nut butter, for example, when you eat nuts, no matter how well you chew, you get these little few millimeter particles that are not broken down. And you have all this nutrition wrapped up.
So that's why it's, for example, it's why nuts are less fattening than nut butters. The exact same amount! Because you actually poop out some of the bac -- because it's all trapped in these little particles. Well, when we eat oat groats, or steel-cut oats, which are smaller but still better than something like oatmeal -- yeah, you chew all you want. You chew your [groats] all you want, you're still going to get little little bits and particles that go down and aren't digested, and packed in all this starch. And then it makes it down to our colon, and then the colon can't -- then the bacteria eat the fiber, release that starch, and then they have this bounty.
>>> And so there's this great video I love on nutritionfacts.org where they have people eat the same exact foods bought in two different forms. So they had people eat, like chickpeas or hummus, and they had people -- I forget exactly what they used -- but one was kind of in porridge form and one was in their whole intact form. And what happened is they like doubled their stool output! The exact same amount of food!
Wait a second: Why do they get twice as much stool when you eat the whole intact foods? it's because most of stool -- literally more than 50% -- is pure bacteria! It's not undigested food. Pure bacteria! And so you just doubled the amount of bacteria you make. You get like this bacteria factory! So many trillions that you actually -- you actually doubled the weight of your stool. Because all of a sudden, when you chew chickpeas as opposed to hummus, they've got all those little bits down there. All that extra starch in the colon, all that super happy bacteria, all that short-chain fatty acids, all that health that comes with it.
And so you should not put your groats in a in a food processor. That's the whole point of eating groats is that undigested bits end up in your colon to then be digested by our good bacteria Hopefully that made some sense.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
_________________________
You can find the full video here (again, the above clip begins at 46:45):
https://nutritionfacts.org/webinar/sibo-and-leaky-gut-what-the-science-says/