Does blending fruits change their goodness?

Like making smoothies for example.

What do you mean by goodness? Nutritional value? Well, sort of, but it’s not the blending of fruits, but the *blending *of fruits.

Lemme s’plain.

Mixing two fruits together doesn’t change their nutritional stuff. All the vitamins and minerals and fibers and whatnot will still be there. But running fruits through a blender will expose more surface area to air. When that happens, things oxygenate faster, and some of the anti-oxidants will get “used up” faster. So if you make a smoothie in the morning and it sits around until lunchtime, the air exposure will slightly affect the nutritional value.

Of course a greater concern is that people often add sugar and other sweeteners (honey, maple syrup, sweetened yogurt etc.) to smoothies, and we don’t really need that extra sugar.

Another self-sabotage is juicing, or removing some of the pulp in your smoothie. That removes the fiber, which is not A Good Thing, healthwise. (Fiber isn’t a nutrient, exactly, but it is a “goodness”.)

But all in all, a smoothie is a good way to get fruits into you, and if you’re using whole fruits, don’t add sugar and drink it relatively soon after you make it, you’ll be doing well.

No matter what you’ve heard, you can add apples and oranges.

Ten points to the man in West Pennsylvania! :smiley:

Apples and Oranges: A Comparison

Getting back to the OP, one more thing to keep in mind is that liquid food is somewhat less filling; so you’ll end up drinking a smoothie which has three pieces of fruit in it instead of eating a single unpureed piece, and you end up consuming more calories because of it.

As part of a healthy, varied and balanced diet, it doesn’t matter one way or another- you could probably even skip the smoothie and drink a milkshake and you’ll still be fine nutrient-wise overall.

But if you are planning on smoothies for your entire fruit-intake, it might be smarter to come up with a variety of ways of enjoying fruit rather than relying on one. It’s important to make eating healthy a part of your entire lifestyle, not something you do in spurts or fads. I think everyone has gone through a “I’ll make a smoothie every day and get lots of fruit!”, but few people stick with it longer than a couple weeks. It takes real changes at every meal to make a diet healthier.

I try to start the day with a shake that is about half soy milk/half water, half or a whole banana, a handful of strawberries, a handful of blueberries or blackberries or rasberries.
During the day I usually eat two to three citrus fruits. Usually two oranges and about every second day a large grapfruit.