It’s very trendy and popular these days to consume food in liquid form. Everyone’s in a rush, and juices and smoothies are a quick and convenient way to nourish your body – especially green smoothies. But is this really the answer to staying healthy in this fast paced lifestyle many people live?

There are a number of issues involved with liquefying your food:

1. Often there are too many different foods mixed into one. If you react to the mixture, how will you know which of the foods caused the problem? Drinking rather than eating your food doesn’t give your digestive system enough time to prepare for the food that’s coming. Interaction of food particles with your taste buds stimulates stomach acid and digestive enzymes to be released into your gut to aid digestion. Too much food entering your stomach at any one time will overload it, and being liquid doesn’t make it any easier.
2. Drinking rather than chewing your food will cause your jaw and facial muscles to atrophy and your teeth and gums to weaken. Facial muscles provide shape and tone to your face, and a nicely toned face is more attractive than a weak or gaunt face with no musculature. Chewing hard foods such as carrots or nuts stimulates circulation to your gums and teeth, keeping them healthy. Saliva washing around your mouth during the chewing process initiates carbohydrate digestion, and alkalinises your mouth, thus reducing tooth decay.
3. The amount of sugar in smoothies or juices can be through the roof. Yes even super ‘healthy’ smoothies made with heaps of fruit and vegetables. One product we found, a ‘Slimmer’s Delight’ from a juice bar contained 67 g of sugar in one serving. Sugar, upon digestion is broken down to glucose and fructose. Glucose is released into your bloodstream, resulting in a flood of insulin – a type of growth hormone – that causes glucose to be sent into your cells or converted to fat to get it out of your bloodstream as quickly as possible, as too much glucose in your blood is damaging to your tissues. Fructose, the other half of sugar, is metabolised in your liver, similar to alcohol. 30% of fructose is converted directly to fat. Excess fructose consumption can cause a disease called ‘non-alcoholic fatty liver disease’ from eating excess fruit, fruit juice, or sugar in any form. So even though your juice or smoothie may be 99% fat free, you will still gain body fat by the process of lipogenesis.
4. When people ‘get healthy’ and start drinking their green smoothies, they put all the vegetables into their blender that they think are healthy, and swallow then down in 10 or 20 seconds. Why? Because they don’t want to eat them? If you don’t want to eat something don’t, it may not be that good for you.

If you were to eat your food rather than drink it, your body’s intelligence will tell you when you’ve had enough. One or two florets of broccoli may be enough. A small bunch of spinach or silverbeet may be enough. But a whole broccoli or 100 g or more of spinach or silverbeet may be too much. How many carrots would you realistically eat in one sitting? One, maybe two, but probably no more.

Secondly, green vegetables such as spinach and silverbeet contain a substance called oxalic acid, which is toxic to your kidneys. Calcium oxalate crystals form kidney stones, and oxalic acid toxicity can cause kidney failure and death. Precipitation of oxalic acid can cause pain due to crystals forming in your joints. If you feel nauseous or ill after your green smoothie, it may not be a ‘detox reaction’; it may be that you are in fact ingesting toxins. Steaming or cooking green vegetables makes them more digestible and less toxic, and if you eat them slowly, your body will tell you when you’ve had enough.

5. Drinking your food can simply cause you to consume too many calories. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to get the signal that you have eaten, but if it only takes 20 seconds for you to drink your meal, you have time to spare to keep eating or drinking before your brain tells you to stop.

My suggestion would be to slow down. Stop rushing about and take time to prepare a meal – and yes it’s OK to eat vegetables for breakfast, raw or cooked. But chew them well and enjoy your food.