When you blend fruits and vegetables the whole food gets used leaving none to waste. Blending food is also a quick and easy way to create a ‘super smoothie’ containing all your essential nutrients and vitamins for the day. Let look at the five top benefits of blending food.
More green vegetables
The vast majority of people and not only runners could improve their diet by eating more fresh green vegetables. Not only are packed with nutritional benefits but they are also very low in calories. For example, spinach and kale have less than 35 calories per handful.
Many green vegetables, such as kale, spinach and broccoli can be eaten in their natural raw state (after rinsing of course). You can cook them to make them more palatable, but you lose some of the diet benefits of eating raw foods. This is were blending comes in. If you try blending the vegetables like of kale and spinach with some fruit you will not only get the nutritional benefit, but it will also taste great.
Quick Nutrition
Time is a valuable asset, especially for runners who are trying to fit in the morning run before heading to work. As a result, nutrition intake from food can suffer because planning and cooking highly nutritional food can take a lot of time. On the other hand, a smoothie or blended soup in the morning takes only minutes to create. You can easily get 3 or 4 servings of vegetables and their associated diet benefits first thing in the morning or before lunch.
Vitamins from Food
They body is very good at extracting nutrition directly from foods. This efficiency increases, even more, when the foods are blended; cell walls are broken, releasing nutrition that might have passed through the body untouched.
Blending your food has the health benefit of avoiding the nutrient destroying process of cooking. Cooked food is fine but at the very least a certain amount of fresh food should make it in your daily diet for maximum diet benefits.
Increased Fibre
The benefits of increased fibre in your diet are well documented, with a diet high in fibre attributed to helping to prevent heart disease, cancer, diabetes, diverticular disease and kidney stones.
And by blending fruits and vegetables you have a quick and easy way to increase your intake of high fibre foods. Adequate fibre intake also helps the digestive system.
Preparation and clean up
You can prepare and chop fresh vegetables and fruits the night before you intend to blend them. Another option is to use frozen foods. With frozen fruit and vegetables little or no preparation will be needed and research has also indicated there may be additional diet benefits compared to fresh foods.
This could be due to the fact that when the fruit and vegetables are frozen they are at the peak of freshness and all nutrients are maintained. Whether you go for fresh or frozen, they are both easy and fast to prepare with minimal difference in nutrition benefits.
Cleaning up after blending food is easy if you do it straightaway, and can take as little as 20 seconds to rinse the blender and put it away again in the cupboard storage.