I just bought a super awesome blendtec blender and therefore of course have been blending everything it sight. Having a real hard time figuring out how to bolus for blended fruit / veggie drinks and smoothies. Frankly I’m pretty much just wild guessing it and the results have been pretty subpar so far… I have a recipe book that has carb counts for certain blended drinks, but the carb counts seem not to reflect my bolus needs at all.
I would welcome any tricks, lessons learned, recipes w/ real world carb counts etc that any of you have had success with. Thanks!
The only thing that’s becoming obvious thus far is that substantially increased prebolus time may be beneficial if using injected bolus… As compared to just eating whole fruits and vegetables. Will update any further breakthroughs.
Needing to increase prebolus time makes a lot of sense when I stop and think about it: when one blenderizes the living daylights out of a food, the food particles are in much smaller pieces than they would be if one simply chewed the food. I could be wrong, but I suspect that the smaller the food particles, the quicker they are digested, and the quicker the carbs are absorbed.
Please let us know if a significantly longer prebolus time does the trick or if it takes a higher-than-indicated (from the total carbs minus fiber) bolus amount. I’m very curious. Happy blending!
Q: What’s green and red and goes up and down and round and round?
A: A frog in a blender. (If I’m not mistaken, frogs are relatively low-carb, aren’t they?)
My question is why blend your food? When I eat an apple, the carb uptake is slowed by the fiber in the apple. Blending it turns it into a glycemic hand grenade. I have juice when I’m low. For everyday eating, give me solid fruit, complex carbs and tasty protein.
I think there are two reasons that blending or juicing is advocated. The first is a claim that fruits and vegetables contain all kinds of nutrients which are needed at supernormal quantities (i.e. more than you get with a normal diet). Juicing is one way to consume 2 pounds of spinach in a sitting. These arguments really don’t sway me, all the nutrients that have been identified that cause serious health problems are all in a normal diet and the vast majority of us take vitamins anyway. There are claims that there must be micronutrients that we don’t know about which we need, but I find this unsupported by evidence and really an argument about “woo” or magic.
The second reason for blending things is that blenders like the Vitamix and Ninja are expensive and highly profitable. There is a powerful and effective marketing machine behind these products. So I think the second reason that we hear is a veiled message that we should blend “cause they say so,” but what is really means is that we should blend so they can make money.
ps. Make no mistake, I have a normal blender and a stick blender and I use my blenders, particularly my stick blender, all the time. Just not to juice my veggies or fruit (not that I eat fruit).
Hi, I just happen to have a bag of mixed fruit in my freezer. 17 carbs/ cup. I am not a food blended person. Much rather eat he whole fruit. To me I have issues with the texture of blended drinks. I love vegetables too. I hope you figure it out ,but for me just don’t like them. Nancy
My question was not a general query, but a specific question about Sam19’s reason for blending. I’ve heard from people (when they find out I’m diabetic), “oh, you should juice.”
And my response is, “why?” I’ve got most of my teeth and juicing foods doesn’t help me achieve better control-quite the opposite.
Just trying something new… My wife’s 15 year old $20 blender that we hardly never used crapped out on us so I got busy researching what a really good one was, I found videos online of them blending golf clubs, ipads, tape measures and hockey pucks etc to piles of dust with this one so I just felt I had to have one and give it a chance;). It’s no stroke of dietary genius I think I’ve had or anything like that… Just experimenting around.
I don’t consider juicing and blending to be the same thing, in juicing only the liquid is extracted and all fiber, pulp, etc is discarded. In blending the entire fruit is consumed.
I’ve found that adding as few carbs as possible + some sort of fat is the most helpful in smoothie success. I try to add just one serving of fruit, low carb liquid such as cashew milk, greens, and then a fat such as avocado, peanut butter, or full fat yogurt. The fat gives it a smoother texture and I find it helpful with the blood sugar and fullness factor. Avocado and peanut butter seem to help me the most. Even with the fat, though, it was still a bit of a guessing game at first.
