Are Green Drinks Healthy?

I get asked all of the time are my green drinks healthy? This is becoming one of the more frustrating questions that I get asked in the office.

People falsely believe that these drinks are healthy. The theory sounds great, run a bunch of the things that we do not eat enough of through a juicer and is supposed to be healthy for us.

A concentrated version of the things we do not want to eat and we do not have to actually chew or work to eat our food. Plus, it fits perfectly into a little cup that you can take with you.

All this sounds great for our modern fast moving lives. Sadly, there are several problems with these highly concentrated drinks.

First, there are way too many ingredients in these drinks. They tend to concentrate the vitamins and minerals from the fruits and vegetables.

This concentration leads to a problem, you will usually have to juice or blend significantly more than you would ever sit down and eat in order to feel like you have eaten anything. Because of this you do get a ton of great vitamins and minerals, you will still need to digest and assimilated them in your intestine.

In my opinion when you consume more than you would ever sit down and eat, which is what you do when you juice or blend fruit and vegetables. This is a form of gluttony and puts way too much of a strain on your digestive process. This tends to overwhelm your digestive pathways and you end up not getting as much out of all of those great fruits and vegetables.

Secondly, when you juice you are removing all of the fiber. This allows the sugars from the juice to enter the blood significantly faster especially when compared to if the fiber was still present.

When you couple these two facts you will end up consuming more juice, that is just concentrated carbohydrate/sugars, then you would usually eat at one sitting. Then you have removed the fiber that slows the sugars absorption, is filling, and increases satiety (feeling of fullness) all of this leads to a recipe for a blood sugar roller coaster and potential hyper or hypoglycemic symptoms.

Also, you need to forget about the green or fruit based drinks you can buy in the store. There is a dirty little secret in those. The juice companies can take all the fruit that isn't fit or good looking enough to sell to you in the stores. In fact, they might even be starting to go bad or rot. Juice those into barrels; they can then measure the sugar content of all those barrels of juice.

Once they find the one with the highest concentration of sugar. They can legally add sugar to all the other barrels to match the highest one and still legally say no sugar added. This is part of the reason that 10 ounces of apple juice can have more calories and almost as many grams of sugar as a 10-ounce can of Coca-Cola.

So, do yourself and your blood sugar a favor. Skip the green drinks from the store. If you feel like you need some form of a blended serving of vegetables then make sure you choose a mix low glycemic vegetables and never blend more than you would actually sit down and eat in one serving.