So I’ve been using a standard $20 blender for years to make my daily breakfast smoothie. It gets it kind of smooth, with visible bits of the fruit and plants still present in the resulting smoothie.
However, I’m considering splurging for a $400 Vitamix, which pulverizes food beyond recognition.
The Vitamix certainty produces smoothies with better consistency than I would ever be able to achieve with my cheap blender, but I’m wondering if anyone can tell me which machine produces the healthiest smoothies.
My thinking is: maybe the old cheap blender is actually better, because it mimics most naturally the texture of prepared food (like, maybe our bodies weren’t designed to process food chopped so finely that we need a machine to produce it). Plus, maybe those plant bits are good because they of the form the fiber is in, slowing the rate of sugar absorption.
On the other hand, maybe the Vitamix increases the bio-availability of nutrients and when you think about it, fiber is fiber, so even if you can’t see the plant bits, they are still present.
The biggest difference might be the amount of sugar that your body can absorb. Is this difference negligible? Am I over thinking this?
Nutrient wise, they’re about the same if you put the same things in it. Now, it’s possible to put things into the Vitamix that you can’t put into a regular blender - unpeeled apples, whole citrus fruits, veggies with the peels, celery with the strings - so to the extent that you may be able to retain peels and things with more nutrients than you can put into a blender, maybe they’ll be a skosh “healthier,” but it’s really just a skosh. Almost no one who is already drinking smoothies is going to be deficient in the extra vitamins and fiber you’d get. Plus, you do quickly learn that actually, it’s better to peel the citrus anyhow, because the pith is bitter, and sometimes, somehow, the apple seeds stay whole, so you end up deseeding the apple anyhow. It’s a learning curve.
Don’t get me wrong, I love my Vitamix, but it’s not truly any healthier than a regular blender. It does make smoothies smoother, and it’s fun to use to make cheese sauce and hot veggie soup (the friction of the blades will heat water to boiling in about 5 minutes), and it’s fun to make soft serve ice cream (you freeze cream in ice cube trays first). I like that I don’t have to worry about crushing ice cubes frying my motor. I like making peanut butter (homemade peanut butter from honey roasted peanuts is amazing, and probably a sin.) I like making very large batches of margaritas for parties. I like grinding herbs and flax seed and such in the dry container. I like making lotions in it (which I can also do with a regular blender, but the Vitamix does emulsify better, and I’ve never had a lotion break in it.)
Overabundance of food, a situation that does not seem in danger of going away.
In other words, we can afford to use less than optimal ways of grinding up food. Not that chewing is all that inefficient.
And, anyways, why would you want to make it more efficient if you are wanting to eat healthily? That means you spend less calories digesting it. And most people don’t have a problem with using too many calories.