Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cylinder | Hacker News Reader

I love fruits and vegetables so the only real limiting reagent for me is having enough of them in the fridge. My thoughts:

If you live in a seasonal climate, try to eat in tune with the seasons.

Subscribe to a farmers co-op or some sort of delivery of a weekly box of whatever produce is being harvested now at a nearby farm. This is when I've had the best success eating lots of vegetables. Especially good value are "ugly" produce boxes of "reject" vegetables that won't make it to supermarkets due to insignificant cosmetic marks. Not a complete solution, as you may end up with too many of a vegetable you don't like / need. Less thinking and decision making is better, and I know I'm getting the fresh stuff, and I will be determined to just use whatever I have since I paid for it.

If you have good cooking skills, and maintain "momentum" in cooking often, you will be able to just open your fridge and figure out what to cook based on what you have and how you feel. I find this better and more enjoyable than trying to plan out meals in advance. I find fresh vegetables inspiring. Moreso outside of winter of course.

Blendtec or Vitamix grade blender: you can throw pretty much anything in these and it will blend with minimal water added. Allows you to consume a huge amount of vegetables and fruits.

Soups: soups are so easy to make. Chop whatever you have, add a bit of chicken broth, water, turmeric, chicken drumsticks (optional), salt, pepper and whatever else you want. Usually you'll at least want carrots, celery, ginger, onion and mushroom. Bring to a boil then leave on low for a couple of hours.

>the only real limiting reagent for me is having enough of them in the fridge

Most vegetables freeze well, and frozen vegetables are often more nutritious than fresh because they're picked in peak condition instead of early for extra shelf life. They're usually cheaper than fresh too. With the exception of vegetables like onions that don't need refrigerating I mostly eat frozen vegetables.

+1 ... Depending on what you're wanting, and where you live. Also, when cooking just for yourself, the mixed veggies allow you to make just enough, instead of having to break down and cut up have a dozen different veggies, and have way too much leftovers.

> Blendtec or Vitamix grade blender: you can throw pretty much anything in these and it will blend with minimal water added. Allows you to consume a huge amount of vegetables and fruits.

As soon as you blend it you can only count it as one of your five a day. And you should limit yourself to less than 150 ml of blended fruit per day.

Care to elaborate the reasoning behind this? I am curious why this is so.

It's very easy to drink fruit. It's much harder to eat it. If you're drinking blended fruit you can consume fantastic amounts of sugar. And even if you limit it to a small blended drink you're making the sugar more available.

http://www.nhs.uk/Livewell/5ADAY/Pages/Portionsizes.aspx

You could make moonshine. After you distill out the ethanol from fermenting your fruit juice, what you've got left-over in the original flask is de-sweetened juice. :)

I think that applies much more to juices, not smoothies.

And the reasoning in the article you cited doesn't really make sense to me. If you keep the pulp and fiber in a smoothie without adding juices or sugar, how is that different from eating whole fruit?

The article says that blending fruit "releases the sugars", which makes no sense. How is that different from chewing? Wouldn't chewing also remove sugars?

Blending is much more thorough chopping than chewing, even if you're really thoroughly chewing.

> If you keep the pulp and fiber in a smoothie without adding juices or sugar, how is that different from eating whole fruit?

It's much much easier to drink 6 oranges that have been blended than it is to eat six oranges.

I guess (after Googling around) that it has to do with time of consumption and the breaking of cell walls.

This mainly applies to fruit, if I'm reading things correctly. If you puree kale and cucumbers, there shouldn't be much downside to drinking that as long as you don't add anything - there's little sugar in those vegetables as it is, so overconsumption won't be that awful for you.

Fair enough... but every smoothie recipe I've seen adds a lot of carbs to the mix either via direct sugars and/or high-sugar fruits/juices.

I think this is the most reasonable explanation.

Glycemic load seems to be the key. Otherwise, nothing wrong with eating vs blending.

I suspect that the amount of processing that's done to make a smoothie is significantly more than compared to mastication that it affects how the food is further processed by the digestive system. Similarly, I think baby food is pureed not only because babies lack teeth, but because it's easier to digest.

Biggest change to our household diet came when we switched to shopping at farmers markets. Our green uptake went up by a huge margin.

I live in a tropical area, and especially love that I can buy tons of leafy Asian greens and beans at the farmers markets for a couple of dollars each, that none of our local supermarkets even carry in their fruit & veg section.

+1 for "reject" fruit and vegetables. We would go to farmer's markets and ask for "seconds", which they usually have in abundance. It's much cheaper, perfectly good and most of the times more ripe/ready to be eaten now, hence very tasty.

> Bring to a boil then leave on low for a couple of hours.

Alternatively, since you mention this above, one can use a Blendtec or Vitamix grade blender to friction-heat the liquid. Apparently this is more energy efficient than microwaving for instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11399036 . Obviously this won't work for soups where one desires very coarse pieces of vegetables; nonetheless I often find the above useful.

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