Smoothie is a blended beverage made primary from fresh fruit.
In addition to fruit many of them are made also with honey, maple syrup, green leafy vegetables, crushed ice, peanut butter or super foods like AFA algae, spirulina, chlorella, maca powder, poppy seed, goji berries, black seed (nigella sativa) and etc, adding extra nutritional value to it. Smoothies began to gain in popularity with the invention and use of blenders. There are countless versions and recipes of smoothies and everyone can choose to make them according to their own taste and preference.
In the last decade, green smoothies became very popular among health-conscious people. Thanks to Victoria Boutenko, a raw food practitioner, green smoothies gain popularity across the world. Victoria Boutenko is an author of 12 Steps to Raw Foods, Green Smoothie Revolution, Raw Family Signature Dishes and Green for Life. Her most powerful contribution is the development of green smoothies, which have revolutionized “health food”. In her search for perfect human diet, she decided to look to an animal genetically close to human beings and she found out that chimpanzees share an estimated 99.4% of their genes with humans. She, also, became interested in these animals because of their extremely strong natural immunity to AIDS, Hepatitis C, cancer, and other fatal human illnesses. In her research Victoria discovered that the wild chimpanzee diet is mainly consisted of fruit and green leafy vegetables and only small portion of pith, bark, seeds and insects unlike the diet of humans. Then, she recognized how many greens human were supposed to consume daily. At first she decided to blend dark leafy greens in a high-speed blender. But because of their unpalatable taste and smell she couldn’t drink the mixture which ended as compost. After several days of experimenting, she came across a book about chimpanzees in which it was mentioned that sometimes chimpanzees would take a fruit, role it in a green leaf, and eat it as a sandwich. At first, she thought that was a poor food combining according to human research but decided to give it a try. She blended several leaves of kale with bananas and water and when she tasted the mixture this time it was perfectly delicious with great smell. That discovery marked the beginning of her own green smoothie revolution. She later came to conclusion that greens were erroneously placed in the wrong category as vegetables because green leaves don’t have starch and vegetables like carrot, broccoli, beets, zucchini, daikon etc. contain a lot of starch and make bad combination with fruit .According to her recommendation green smoothies are made with approximately 60% organic fresh fruit and 40% green leaves such as spinach, chard, kale, endive, lettuce etc.
Green smoothies have many health benefits and their nutritional value mostly depends on the included fruits and greens, but all green leaves are rich source of chlorophyll which is well- known for its health benefits such as improving the digestion and assimilation, promoting formation of hemoglobin and red blood cells, alkalizing the body, detoxifying, to name just a few. Also, they are rich in fiber and that makes them a complete meal, unlike juices. Green smoothies are easy to make and digest and are a great way to include more greens in your diet.
Today, thanks to Victoria and her research, millions people all over the world are drinking green smoothies and enjoying its countless benefits. They are easy to incorporate in anyone’s diet even for those with busy lifestyles. Green smoothies are consumed in every season of the year and they offer refreshment, hydration and enjoyment especially in hot summer days.
