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Comment by hack_edu | Hacker News Reader

You know, a smoothie can have just about anything in it. Its not hard to make a tasty, ridiculously healthy smoothie. And your claim that blending takes the work out of it for your body couldn't be further from the truth. Blending with a real blender separates nutrients enough for your body to better absorb them.

Even your typical smoothie (bananas, yogurt, and strawberries) contains numerous nutritional benefits; add some of your favorite brown rice, some kale, celery, and honey (you won't taste the difference). You have a healthful and delicious smoothie full of antioxidants, fiber, vitamins, vegetable AND dairy protein, and complex carbs.

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Even if you put brown rice in a smoothie, if you blend it enough to break the husk of the rice, it changes from a low GI carb to a high GI carb because your body can absorb the sugar much quicker.

Breaking fruits down into juice definitely changes the GI index of the carb. Check out the difference between eating a whole apple and drinking apple juice. Apple juice is almost like pure sugar, where the fiber in the whole apple causes your body to digest it much slower.

Don't you chew your food? Isn't blending just like a uniform pre-chew?

I don't quite buy this. You're still getting all the fiber in a smoothie, it's just pre-chewed. By the time I swallow a chunk of apple, it's pretty well juiced. The only difference is that actual juice has the solids removed.

It is essential to understand GI not as the contents of an ingredient, but how your blood sugar reacts to you ingesting it. If it is pre-chewed, your body will have an easier time consuming it, and your blood sugar levels will change in a different way then if it is not pre-chewed.

My non-expert undestandung is that glycemic index does refer to the total simple sugar content or food by volume. Glycemic load, aka glycemic load index, is a more recent metric that measures the rate of absorption into the blood stream. This is the largest factor causing large blod sugar shifts, which can lead to fat conversion and lack of concentration.

It is true that the amount of nutrients in a smoothie is unchanged relative to the whole counterparts. However, I'm willing to bet that the blood glucose response curve of a smoothie is significantly sharper than the whole fruit alternatives due to the ease of digestion.

The peaks in blood glucose are what's really bad for you, and especially bad for me. Therefore, I look out for them and stay the hell away.

Smoothies were one of our model foods in medical school for what's wrong with the American diet.

Why is that?

Blast, I just picked 30 cups of blueberries to freeze for smoothies. Is it really so bad?

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