Getting Your Daily Vitamins from Smoothies

Everyone could use some help getting more vitamins and minerals. Smoothies are an easy way to get the essential nutrients you need on a daily basis. Few would argue against the health benefits of taking a daily multivitamin.

Our modern diet is brimming with processed, sugary food with relatively no nutritional value and sorely lacking in important vitamins and minerals. When we do eat vitamin-rich natural foods such as meat, fruits, and vegetables, the nutritional value is called into question by overcooking which has been said to cook out many of the vital nutrients.

You can get these nutrients from eating whole, raw food, but sometimes that can be a real challenge.

You will be hard-pressed to find anyone who would be willing to eat multiple cups of broccoli, spinach, or bananas for breakfast to equal (or exceed) the daily recommended values.

There is an easier way to get lots of nutritious fruits and vegetables -- even the unappealing ones -- in your diet: blending them together as a smoothie.

When you use a blender to mix the fruits and vegetables together, you end up with less total volume of food and it's in an easy-to-consume drinkable form with no wasted vitamins and minerals.

Even unappetizing food can be added to smoothies for easy consumption.

Normally, you probably wouldn't ever consider adding vegetables such as spinach, turnip greens, and broccoli to your smoothie, but as long as you add some great-tasting fruit, like bananas or strawberries as well, you probably won't even taste them.

Smoothies can be consumed at any time of the day. Some people like drinking them as a breakfast shake, others use them as a pre- or post-workout shake -- a time when your body desperately needs easily digestible nutrients.

Drinking blended smoothies has a very positive benefit over juicing fruits and vegetables directly.

When you juice fruits and vegetables, you end up with the juice (the fructose -- a sugar) without any of the fiber in the pulp. The fiber is what slows the absorption of sugar. When you drink the sugar without the fiber your body will have experience a sugar high as the easily absorbed sugar immediately rushes into your bloodstream. The large amount of sugar will produce a large insulin response -- which, over time, can increase your insulin resistance -- and as the insulin works to transport the sugar out of your bloodstream your hunger will return.

If your diet could use a little sprucing up -- especially if you don't eat a lot of raw fruits and vegetables by themselves -- smoothies are an incredibly easy way to get the vitamins and minerals you need on a regular basis.