Elite nutrition | Shakes vs Juicing 

 blending vs juicing

This weather has been unreal so with my downtime waiting for the more humane weather to return i’ve been doing some serious looking into nutrition and the new “juicing” crazy in particular.

Now don’t get me wrong managing to get natural vegetable and fruit juices on demand would be great but unfortunately things dont go down that easily. 

those cheaper $100-150 juicers you can pick up at a walmart or Canadian tire do fine with fruits but when we start getting into the dark leaffy vegetables you would really want to focus on juicing (spinach , parley, kale, chard etc” you wont have much luck as the leaves essentially turn into a pulp extracting very little to nothing for all you effort.

Still its the middle of winter and the health conscious types are going to make it happen one way or another so they settle on buying the pre-bottled type – which cool but i saw one downtown for $12 dollars (lemon, agave and cayenne pepper.. lol you make that less than 2 dollars!!!)

Or  going to stores ala booster juice.. now i have nothing against the booster juice people and often hit our local one up for a double shot of wheat grass from time to time but I also see some of you guys bringing some tall smoothies back to the gym between classes or before.

little known facts

 

1-little known fact they use  high fructose corn syrup in many of those shakes “which is why they taste so damn good”

2- some of those drinks  total as much 600+ calories per serving!! that’s a LOT of Calories for a smoothie so far from you best choice for post workout nutrition.

 

so we got the problem all laid out.. what’s the fix?

Veering towards the blending side of things is what has worked best for me.

The first reason is its pretty hard to go wrong (especially with fruits as you get the fiber content as well so that slows spikes in blood sugar as a result of the fructose that may be in the drink.) 

Options wise, depending on your budget you cant take things a few different directions.

1- If you have the money to spare get a Vitamix. Simply put it is the best blender on earth.. 

VitamixSmoothie2_blog

I’m no scientist so don’t know the exact process but it liquefies everything put in it so more or less totally breaks down all the roughage you would get from a regular blender or extractor.

Leaving you with a totally smooth shake

2- the super popular nutribullet

NutriBullet-Pro-900-202

this little demon of device is selling faster than the George foreman grill did back in the 90’s

it cost less than 100 dollars and while not as powerfull as the Vitamix option is still get the job done to a decent level on most items.

Vitamix-blender

the difference is basically the vitamix breaks things down to a near liquid liquid level with very little pulp while the nutribullet leaves you with a full shake including some of the pulp but it is still very drinkable.

 

whatever direction you chose to take, follow this easy to follow info graphic and you cant go wrong

Smoothie-Builder-602x802