Tag Archive for: smoothies

Should You Put Probiotics in Your Smoothie?

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Continuing with smoothies and shakes, another popular ingredient most people want to add are probiotics, either from yogurt or a supplement. Would there be any issue with adding probiotics to smoothies? No, as far as I could find. It’s the same idea as with the digestive enzymes: the probiotic will start to do its job, which is to ferment once it’s fed. Starches, prebiotics like inulin and dextrin, and fructooligosaccharides (FOS) are the preferential foods for the microbes.

Adding fruit or vegetables to the smoothie would be adding some FOS as well as some naturally occurring fibers. Again, just like the digestive enzymes, the shake would have to be left out a long time for any reasonable fermentation to occur. One more thing: while the probiotics would have fluids and food, the one thing they would not have in a smoothie is heat. Probiotics are not likely to start fermentation when they’re closer to refrigerator temperature than internal body temperature.

And one more thing. Would putting the probiotics in a blender at high speed damage the bacteria? The answer appears to be no based on comments from scientists who do research on bacteria. Imagine slicing a mosquito with a chainsaw; the blender’s blades aren’t small enough to slice and dice the bacteria, and the heat the blades generate isn’t enough to damage a significant amount of probiotics.

The one thing that will destroy probiotics is heat over 165 degrees, so don’t put them in soup or hot drinks. More to come.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

What Do You Want to Know?

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I’m back from a weekend in Louisville where I talked to many, many people about their nutrition questions. One of the great advantages of these trips is that I know which nutrition questions are most important to people right now. So let’s talk about shakes.

I prefer chewing my food. I’ve tried shakes and smoothies, and they just don’t do it for me, but it’s become a convenient and nutritious way of life for many of you. I’ve gotten a number of questions on what you should and maybe shouldn’t put into smoothies, so let’s cover several of them as well as other questions in the next few memos.

Let’s begin with digestive enzymes. The typical digestive enzyme supplement has several different enzymes to digest food. There are proteases to digest protein, lipases to digest fats, several enzymes that can break down different classes of carbohydrates, and many also have lactases to digest lactase, the milk sugar.

What would putting digestive enzymes in smoothies do? Some enzymes require stomach acids to activate. More than likely, other enzymes would start to breakdown the nutrients they’re designed to digest. Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily, unless you leave the smoothie to sit for hours—which is exactly what you probably wanted to avoid. It may change the flavor if it sits too long but otherwise, it should be fine.

More on Saturday. And if you have any questions about nutrition or supplements, let me know and if I think it applies to lots of other people, your question could star in an upcoming Memo!

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet