Should You Be Drinking Vegetable Juice Or Vegetable Smoothies?

If you want to increase the ammount of healthy vegetables you get into your diet, should you make vegetable juices or smoothies?

Some people say that juices spike blood sugar, while other people say that smoothies fill you up with too much fiber.

What’s the actuall truth?

Here’s a quick breakdown that will help you decide what is best for your particular goals.

Losing Weight?

If you are trying to lose weight, then you are best served making vegetable smoothies. This is because vegetable smoothies contain all of the fiber that the vegetables have. You take the kale or spinach, or apples or whatever else you want, and blend it up into a easy to drink smoothie.

This fiber is excellent at lots of things, including lowering blood pressure, but for the sake of this conversation, it’s also super good at helping you lose weight. The more fiber you get the more full you will feel, and you won’t have the desire to eat a ton of junk food. This concept can be extended to fruit juices, not just vegetable juices. A berry smoothie with bananas, pineapple, and maybe some yogurt can fill you up and give you tons of healthy nutrients.

Therapeutic Benefit From Vitamins?

If you’re looking for a therapeutic benefit and want a huge amount of antioxidants, then you should consider juices. Fiber is healthy in your diet, but the highest amount of antioxidants are going to be found in the juice, not the fiber. So if you are looking to get a maximum number of antioxidants then its best to add juices into your diet. For instance, a high amount of chlorophyll can be found in dark leafy green vegetables. But it s not located in the fiber.

So a glass of spinach or kale juice is going to have way more antioxidants than a green smoothie. The only thing to be careful about is that you don’t want to drink too much vegetable juice (especially spinach and kale) because of oxalic acid. So you wouldn’t want to drink several glasses of green juice a day.

One a day would be a good measurement. But you should also want to add fiber, so I would not recommend completely canceling out green smoothies. If you are looking to maximize your antioxidant intake, then juicing leafy greens such as kale and spinach is a great idea. You might also want to juice wheatgrass. I would suggest getting a juicer capable of handling apples, and hard vegetable such as carrots as well as leafy greens. Here’s a bunch of information on the best juicer for leafy greens.

Berries: Not Something You Can Juice

Berries are one of the most powerful and healthy foods you can get. However, they are not something you can juice. The texture of a berry is very soft and gentle and so it’s best to blend it up.

The fiber in berries is also really healthy, so you wouldn’t want to waste it by juicing the berries. You would waste a lot of money by juicing berries because juicers, even the best designed juicers, are not going to extract all of the juice. You would have to take the pulp and press it. It is better to just take the berries and blend them up in a blender.

I personally like to make a protein smoothie using play whey protein, blueberies, and almond milk.

Lowering Blood Pressure: Blended Smoothies

As was mentioned earlier, the fiber in vegetables is perfect for lowering blood pressure. A smoothie made with vegetables or fruit is the way to go. It gives your body all of the healthy fiber that will assist in lowering your blood pressure. You can even add some oats to the smoothie to boost the fiber content.